More on age, oh boy!

OK, I love it when two worlds collide.

Age and iPod listing is today's collision.

Here's my theory: we all have a real age that is determined by subtracting our date of birth from today's date (something that you easily accomplish in Excel), but we also have what I want to call an "attempted" age. This is less easily calculated but there may be many ways to accomplish it.

For example, at what age do you dress? Adults that dress like teenagers or young adults who dress like "Wall Street Bankers" might be one way, sort of difficult to quantify.

My suggestion, based on the assumption that you select the music that is on your iPod, is to average the year that each song was written or recorded (it maybe more efficient to use a random sample of some percent of songs) and then subtract 17 from the average (that assumption is that 17 seems to be age at which our musical taste becomes fixed). This could be an estimate of your 'attempted' age birth year. By subtracting that date from today's date you could get your attempted age or the age at which you place yourself, at least in regard to your musical interests.

I've got to see if iTunes will generate a list of the songs' dates, BRB.

OK, so you can view the 'year' in your music list and you can sort by year. A quick review of the years seems to indicate that the iPod's year is the year it was recorded, I'll have to check that, too. Not all songs have a year listed, but I did notice that the earliest year listed (1970) was exactly 17 years from my birth year. I know that at least some of the undated songs come from before 1970, so I'll have to hunt down some of the missing data.