That is all.
The time is now 1234567890.
Previous post: Canada fest
Next post: My favorite things Puerto Rican
Our Books
Modern Principles of Economics
Launching The Innovation Renaissance
The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will(Eventually) Feel Better
Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World
Discover Your Inner Economist
Good and Plenty: The Creative Successes of American Arts Funding
Judge and Jury: American Tort Law on Trial
Markets and Cultural Voices: Liberty vs. Power in the Lives of Mexican Amate Painters (Economics, Cognition, and Society)
The Voluntary City: Choice, Community, and Civil Society (Economics, Cognition, and Society)
Creative Destruction: How Globalization Is Changing the World's Cultures
Changing the Guard: Private Prisons and the Control of Crime
What Price Fame?
In Praise of Commercial Culture
Entrepreneurial Economics: Bright Ideas from the Dismal Science
Contact Us
What? Care to explain?
I can’t believe the world didn’t end!
Unix (POSIX, really) time is measured in seconds since the epoch (Jan 1, 1970). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_time
Of course, that is not counting leap seconds, of which there have been 24. So 1234567890 seconds after the epoch occurred 24 seconds before most of you nerds noticed.
(I feel almost as lonely as when I celebrated the new millenium on Dec 31, 2000.)
It doesn’t matter how many leap seconds there have been. 1234567890 seconds after 1/1/1970 is still 1234567890 seconds after 1/1/1970 (unix time does not count leap seconds).
Nemo and Imm highlight an often-neglected distinction between universal time, which counts the beats of an antomic clock, and solar (clock) time, which counts Earth sunrises. Cross-calibrating these time scales requires carefully tracking the Earth’s spin and wobble. The international scientific organization dedicated to this task has an amusing name: the Earth Rotation Service.
The last place I would have expected this. Lovely!
This raises the terrifying spectre of the Year 2038 problem.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem
You are correct. I knew that unix time always increased at 86400 seconds per day, but the wikipedia article makes the point that it does this by forgetting the first second on days with leap seconds, and then counting to 86400 as usual. Instead, UTC makes the day 86401 seconds long, but the effects are the same. International Atomic time counts 86400 seconds per day, but without resetting like unix time, so that’s the one to measure this type of thing.
It’s interesting that laziness, born out of the necessity of accommodating computer workarounds, leads us to more rational results.
Short explanation:
$ timeadd.sh `date +%T` `echo 1234567890 \`date +%s\` – p|dc` +
18:31:30
I celebrated this event in the lobby bar of the Westin hotel, where the Boskone SF convention was being held. We had about twenty people count the time up from ….75 to …90 and then cheer. It was great!
Comments on this entry are closed.