Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - How Many Days Old Are You?

It's Saturday Night - 

time for more Genealogy Fun! 

Your mission, should you decide to accept it (cue the Mission Impossible! music) is to:

1)  Do you know how many days you have lived?  How many hours?  How many minutes?  How many seconds?  

2)  For this challenge - do some calculating.  Figure out how many days you've lived, how many hours, how many minutes, how many seconds (you can round off to account for the time you were born on your birth date - do you know it?).   Tell us your birth date, birth time (if you know it), and then calculate your time alive up until your birth time today.

NOTE:  If math befuddles you, use the Age Calculator at http://www-users.med.cornell.edu/~spon/picu/calc/agecalc.htm

3)  What does all of this mean to you?  Think about that marvelous "machine" inside your chest beating in rhythm.  Share your thoughts!  

4)  Share with us your results in a blog post of your own, in a comment to this blog post, or in a comment on Facebook or Google+.  

Here's mine:

1)  I was 70 years old on Wednesday, 23 October.  My birth time, according to my birth certificate, was 4:58 PM.  Hmm, was there Daylight time in October 1943?  (WolframAlpha said Daylight Savings Time was not observed in California in October 1943!).

2)  I calculated my age (as of 5:58 PDT today) by multiplying 70 times 365 (=25550) and adding 18 for calendar leap days (1944 to 2012) (=25568) plus 3 more days since 23 October 2013 = 25,571.  

24 hours a day gives 613,704 hours.

60 minutes per hour gives 36,822,240 minutes.

60 seconds per minute gives 2,209,334,400 seconds.  Over 2.2 billion seconds.  Wow.

3)  Some thoughts:

*  2.2 billion seconds is almost 2.2 billion beats of my heart - all on rhythm (thank God!) and without stopping.  However, there are now ways to keep it beating if you get treatment, or to a hospital, in time!  

*  That's more than 25,571 wakeups (more because I love to take naps in my recliner!) - my brain went to sleep, regularized my breathing, stuff kept happening (digestion, healing, dreams), and then came to life after sleeping for minutes or hours.  

*  Of those 613,704 hours, I was awake for about 400,000 of them.  What have I thought about?  How many hours have I read books, newspapers, reports, papers, web pages?  

*  How many hours did I work and earn a salary in my life?  I figure 8 hours a day for 5 days a week for 50 weeks a year for about 38 years = 9,500 days, and about 76,000 hours, and about 4.56 million minutes.  I wonder how many minutes I goofed off or daydreamed?  

*  How many hours have I worked on my genealogy research, reading, writing, presenting, meetings, etc.?  I started in 1988, and worked on my genealogy perhaps 2 hours a day on average, until 2002, when I retired from working for a salary (I went to the local FHC nearly every Saturday during that time for 4-6 hours).  Since then, I've devoted an average of 7 to 8 hours a day to genealogy work.  I calculate about 40,000 hours devoted to genealogy efforts.

*  I wonder about longevity and mortality.  A lot.  My father died at 71, my mother at 82.  My grandparents died at 66, 80, 85 and 79.  That average is 77.  WolframAlpha says the average life expectancy (50% chance of attaining it) for a male aged 70 in the USA is 84 years old.  There is a 2.4% chance I'll live to be 100 years old.  That's if i'm "average!"  

4)  I just did - above!!  Can you tell that I'm a numbers type of person?  :)

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Copyright (c) 2013, Randall J. Seaver