Jimmie Veal  ·  Singularity

Where the lines
start to blur.

There is a precise mathematical structure underneath the things we experience as purely emotional. Time. Mortality. The feeling that life is accelerating. The weight of what we haven't said yet.

This is a project about finding where the measurements go — and what lives at the intersection.

Explore the first idea → Who is Jimmie Veal

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Chapter one

Why time feels like
it's running out.

In 1897, French philosopher Paul Janet observed something that nobody had quite put into words: we don't experience time in equal units. We experience it proportionally. A year at age five represents a fifth of everything you've ever known. A year at fifty is one fiftieth. Same 365 days. Completely different weight.

This is Janet's Law — and the mathematics of it are more unsettling than most people expect.

"While on my quest for knowledge, I forgot to live."

— Jimmie Veal

When you plot subjective time on a logarithmic scale — the mathematical expression of Janet's Law — a curve appears. It rises steeply through childhood, then flattens. And at the halfway point of that curve, the calendar says something that stops most people cold:

You were in second grade.

By the time you finished elementary school, you had already lived through half of your subjectively felt life. Everything since has been the second half — compressed into fewer and fewer felt moments per calendar year.

The tools below let you see exactly where you stand on that curve. Built on the research of Janet, Laura Carstensen (Stanford's Socioemotional Selectivity Theory), and David Eagleman's work on time perception — made personal with your own numbers.
Right now
—
seconds since midnight
—
of this year elapsed
—
day of the year

The science this is built on

Janet's Law (1897)
Paul Janet's proportional time hypothesis — each year feels shorter because it represents a smaller fraction of total lived experience.
Socioemotional Selectivity Theory
Laura Carstensen, Stanford. As perceived time horizon shrinks, priorities shift toward meaning, presence, and depth over breadth.
Temporal Self-Appraisal
David Eagleman's research on how novelty, attention, and emotional intensity warp subjective time — and how to use that.
Life in Weeks
Tim Urban's visualization framework — a human lifespan rendered as a finite grid of weeks. The foundation of the dot tool.

Interactive tools

See your own
numbers.

Three tools. Each one takes a concept that lives in the abstract and makes it personal. Open any of them in your browser — no app, no account, no installation required. Each is a self-contained file you can save and share.
01  ·  The Weight of Time
Your Life in Felt Time
Enter your age and life expectancy. See your weeks as a dot grid, your felt percentage on the logarithmic curve, and — new — enter your gut expectancy to see how your inner clock differs from the statistical model.
Open tool
02  ·  Memento Mori
The Ticking Clock
A real-time display of your life draining away — in seconds, heartbeats, breaths, full moons remaining, winters left. Watch the progress bars move. It does its work quietly.
Open tool
03  ·  Janet's Law
The Proportional Year
A calendar where each month is sized by how long it actually feels — not by the Gregorian grid. Compare your current age to any other. Watch January shrink as the decades pass.
Open tool

The idea underneath all of it

There is a point where precision and resonance become the same thing.

The engineer calls it a singularity — the place where the equation breaks down because something infinite is happening. The artist calls it the moment the work becomes true. This project lives at that intersection.

About this project

About

The engineer who
forgot to live.

Jimmie Veal is a civil and aerospace engineer, mechanical designer, and maker of things that are difficult to explain otherwise.

He has spent most of his life at the intersection of precision and feeling — designing structures that have to work exactly right, while carrying ideas too large for any single format to hold.

He began making short animated films a few years ago as a tool for explaining things that words alone couldn't carry. The films led to songs. The songs led to this.

The time perception project began the way most things worth doing begin — with a feeling he couldn't quite articulate, a phenomenon he'd noticed for years but never had the mathematics for. The logarithmic curve gave him the mathematics. Janet's Law gave it a name. The interactive tools gave it a shape other people could hold.

He lives in the American South. He has a son. He has a pacemaker. He has things left to say.

Civil &
Aerospace
Engineering background
100+
Short films made
One
Idea running through all of it

"One is the compass,
the other's the flame.
Searching for a beauty
with a heavenly name."

— from "Intersection" by Jimmie Veal