You Are Old

I've had that familiar itch lately. That feeling of, "My God, how long has it been? A month? A year? Longer? Too long." So tonight I did it.

I found some interesting data, and I graphed it.



This is a breakdown, in five year increments, of the age of the world's population. It's from the International Data Base. Sorry about that little yellow box in the upper left-hand corner...screen captures aren't what they used to be.

If you are 28, I have some exciting news for you: You're older than over half of the world! I know, you can't deduce this exactly from the chart, but it's in the database (or data base, as the case may be). To all my friends turning 25 now, you are older than merely 44.8% of the world. In a little over a week, however, my grandmother will turn 80 and be officially older than 98.5% of the world's population. Yowza. And those small children aren't so small...compared to the world! Five-year-olds are older than about a tenth of the world.

I think this stuff is fascinating. BTW, world life expectancy is 66.2 years...but that's including infant mortality. Oh, and it's the world. It's a pretty diverse place. If you live in the good ol' US of A you can (at birth) expect to live 78.1 years. If you're a newborn in Liberia...you don't want to know.