Live Longer: Have More Birthdays

Satchel Paige asked, “How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you were?”

There are lots of quotes about aging. Age is an issue of mind over matter, they say — if you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter. Or, you’re only as old as you feel. But the following is my favorite quote about age:

Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young.

With each passing year, I learn more and more things. But I also learn more about how much I’ll never know.

The number of years on Earth is not an accurate measurement of a life. Many people fill their entire lives with trivial matters.

A graduate student saw a professor working on a proof of the Riemann hypothesis. On the professor’s desk were thousands of papers with various notes about the problem.

“My goodness,” said the student. “Have you been working on this problem your whole life?”

“Not yet,” said the professor.

And what is age, anyway? It’s just a number. For instance, Paul Erdös claimed to be two and a half billion years old.

“When I was a child, the Earth was said to be two billion years old,” he said. “Now scientists say it’s four and a half billion. So that makes me two and a half billion.”

Now in the computer age, it seems that no matter how much we know, machines may know more than we do.

A computer manufacturer unveils a new computer that supposedly knows everything.

A skeptical man asks, “How old is my father?”

The computer thinks, then says, “Your father is 57 years old.”

“See?” says the man. ”This is nonsense. My father has been dead for 20 years, and if he were alive, he’d be 71.”

“No,” replies the computer. “Your mother’s husband has been dead for 20 years. Your father is only 57, he’s currently fishing on Lake Michigan, and he just landed a three-pound trout.”

About these ads