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Unix Time and a Modest Proposal
31–40 of 43 posts
Re: Unix Time and a Modest Proposal
#32The ratio is around 365.2422. Calling it 365 is too crude. Julius Caesar said we should call it 365 1/4, and that was good enough for a while. This is blowing my mind that thousands of years ago they were able to measure the orbits to this level of accuracy.
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Re: Unix Time and a Modest Proposal
#33If we’re changing unix time we should probably do something about the year 2038 problem. It’ll not be nearly as fun as new years in 2000.
Debian developers, glibc developers and many others have been working on this for the past few years. It's more or less solved for most free software applications.
Re: Unix Time and a Modest Proposal
#34The ratio is around 365.2422. Calling it 365 is too crude. Julius Caesar said we should call it 365 1/4, and that was good enough for a while. This is blowing my mind that thousands of years ago they were able to measure the orbits to this level of accuracy.
Keeping a calendar is fairly simple (requires knowing writing). Observing which day the solstice is on is also fairly simple (requires a sundial: the shortest/longest shadow at noon are the solstices. If you're in the tropics just observe when the sun passes directly overhead instead). Observing that the solstice moves by a day every 4 years isn't too hard by analyzing those observations.
The tricky part seems like it would be that one needs precision quite a bit better than one day. So either the measurement can be done over the course of many years or the time of the solstice needs to be determined to excellent precision.
Re: Unix Time and a Modest Proposal
#35The ratio is around 365.2422. Calling it 365 is too crude. Julius Caesar said we should call it 365 1/4, and that was good enough for a while. This is blowing my mind that thousands of years ago they were able to measure the orbits to this level of accuracy.
Not a big deal, if you have some time and real estate. Assume that you know about noons and solstices, and can catch either by watching a shadow of a post. During a summer solstice, position two posts along the line of the rays / shadow; the longer the better. Watch the sun hit the same line during a winter solstice. Along the way, notice when, relative to the exact solstice moment, is the noon. Sometimes you'll miss…
Averaging the observations over several years was the insight I was missing. Was trying to understand how to use contemporary timekeeping devices to that kind of resolution in a single cycle.
Re: Unix Time and a Modest Proposal
#36The ratio is around 365.2422. Calling it 365 is too crude. Julius Caesar said we should call it 365 1/4, and that was good enough for a while. This is blowing my mind that thousands of years ago they were able to measure the orbits to this level of accuracy.
Internet "influencers" really have us convinced that humans were barbaric apes until a century or two ago and then suddenly invented the modern world. What about all the achievements before then? Could we not have used math and science a few thousand years ago? Nope, it was all aliens of course.
> were barbaric apes
(Looks at the news) Sadly, still pretty much are.
There’s a huge contrast between how much human intelligence had achieved scientifically and culturally, and how humanity (at large, on a global scale) behaves itself.
Re: Unix Time and a Modest Proposal
#37If we’re changing unix time we should probably do something about the year 2038 problem. It’ll not be nearly as fun as new years in 2000.
Debian developers, glibc developers and many others have been working on this for the past few years. It's more or less solved for most free software applications. https://lwn.net/Articles/938149/
Doesn't also count plenty of legacy servers out there that are on the MBA style of IT: Don't fix what's not broken and deny, delay, defend but for the IT department.
DOS, Win9x, and NT broadly speaking should be relatively fine though depending on how Y2K was fixed.
Re: Unix Time and a Modest Proposal
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Keeping a calendar is fairly simple (requires knowing writing). Observing which day the solstice is on is also fairly simple (requires a sundial: the shortest/longest shadow at noon are the solstices. If you're in the tropics just observe when the sun passes directly overhead instead). Observing that the solstice moves by a day every 4 years isn't too hard by analyzing those observations.
The tricky part seems like it would be that one needs precision quite a bit better than one day. So either the measurement can be done over the course of many years or the time of the solstice needs to be determined to excellent precision.
It requires someone to at some point remember that "Hey when I was a kid 20 years ago the solstice was on December 22 but now it's on December 17, what happened?" and then go looking at historical records to generate a trend line with a slope of 0.25 days / year. The measurement doesn't have to be at one point.
Re: Unix Time and a Modest Proposal
#39if we mobilized a whole-of-society effort to build millions of rocket engines and fired them year round, it'd only take a few hundred years to get this done
There lies the rub. All it takes is a rumor that these rocket engines are secretly being used for to kill support for the project.
Re: Unix Time and a Modest Proposal
#40The ratio is around 365.2422. Calling it 365 is too crude. Julius Caesar said we should call it 365 1/4, and that was good enough for a while. This is blowing my mind that thousands of years ago they were able to measure the orbits to this level of accuracy.
That's blowing your mind because the currently implicitly or mindlessly acknowledged understanding by the majority of people is that today is the peak of human's evolution. Majority thinks that they inherently and collectively know everything better in relation to what our ancestors knew, especially compared to those thousands of years ago. But how do you really know. Because they had no iPhones and cars? Development…
Kids these days.