Happy Binaversary!

Do you ever feel your birthdays are coming around too often? That's because you are thinking linear, dude. Time to get with the logarithms.

Most people count their age in years, an archaic unit of time based on how often a certain lump of rock swings around a certain ball of gas. Those people are (no offense) idiots. As they get older, they scratch their heads, wondering why the years seem to be blurring together, going by faster and faster. It never occurs to them that maybe lumps of rock and balls of gas are not the ultimate authorities on human aging.

That's where binaversaries come in. Binaversaries are celebrations based on your age in byears. Byears, or binary years, scale with your age. When you are young, the byears pass quickly. But when you're older, the byears show mercy and slow down. For example when you're 32 years old, you've just turned 5 byears. This saves a lot on candles. Here's a conversion chart:

  age in years:     age in byears:  

This makes life a lot more systematic. Byear 0, we are born and start crawling around. Byear 1, we walk and talk. Byear 2, we go to kid school. Byear 3, we go to high school. Byear 4, we find a likely mate and settle down (possibly several times). Byear 5, we raise a family and work to retirement. Byear 6, we die. Done!

Binaversaries are celebrated at years 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, and (almost certainly not) 128. These are byears 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 respectively. You can celebrate fractional binaversaries each regular year if you really want to, but the math is a little fiddly, and you'll know in the back of your mind that they don't really "count".

Nice properties of binaversaries and byears?

• For people growing old together, their ages in byears quickly converge - matching the intuition that differences in ages matter less as you get older.
• The ages of infants younger than one year (before byear 0) are represented with exploding precision, which appropriately reflects their rate of development. For example, byear -1 corresponds to being six months old, byear -2 corresponds to being 3 months old, etc.
• If you are unlucky and die a byear or two earlier, the difference doesn't seem as drastic!

(leave a comment)