On 2019-12-14 17:56, Steve Summit wrote:
Vernor Vinge has a wonderful set of SF novels ("A Deepness in the Sky", etc.), set in the far future, in which they measure time in kiloseconds, megaseconds, etc. There's also this marvelous passage concerning legacy software:
Via a million million circuitous threads of inheritance, many of the oldest programs still ran in the bowels of the Qeng Ho system. Take the Traders' method of timekeeping. The frame corrections were incredibly complex -- and down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted time from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth's moon. But if you looked at it still more closely... the starting instant was actually about fifteen million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind's first computer operating systems.
Should not make assumptions about other cultures, as they may be upset. Now, would more likely have been 1.5 billion seconds later: $ TZ=UTC date -d 2019-01-03\ 02:26 +%s # Chang'e 4 landing 1546482360 -- Take care. Thanks, Brian Inglis, Calgary, Alberta, Canada This email may be disturbing to some readers as it contains too much technical detail. Reader discretion is advised.