8 Comments

You do realise this is just asking the data visualisation community to do something with this data. As it is easier interpreting one's own age to the relative accomplishments of others with charts and graphs.

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I'm down for that (I say now, before my spirit is crushed by said visualization)

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It's a load off my mind to know that I still have 291 days to become Emperor of France before anyone can accuse me of underperforming.

btw Anne Boleyn was married to Henry VIII, not Henry VIIII (we've only had eight Henrys [Henries?] so far).

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Plenty of time, I've got faith

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I have to ask... how did compiling the data for this list make you feel?

At first I was like: crap, I’m getting old. But then I was like: dang, some people only did their best work in their sixties. So who knows? Maybe the best is yet to be...

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Fine? The motivation wasn't really to rank myself against a bunch of accomplished (or famous for other reasons) people and be like, "oh my god I'm so old," but more to see how old people who have fixed ages in my head actually were. Al Michaels, for example, is permanently in his early sixties to me. Same for Stephen King. And Costanza definitely isn't in his twenties. So it was more about finding those mismatches than anything.

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von Neumann could have an entire blog post to himself with these milestones.

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Same for Marie Curie

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