Unix Time and a Modest Proposal
johndcook.com
Unix Time and a Modest Proposal
1–10 of 43 posts
Re: Unix Time and a Modest Proposal
#2This is an excellent idea! It would probably make the most sense to perform these adjustments on April 1.
Re: Unix Time and a Modest Proposal
#3 The 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.
Re: Unix Time and a Modest Proposal
#4Wish I'd known about Swift's 'A Modest Proposal' first - I came expecting practical Unix time insights, but found an attempt at satire in need of both editing and purpose.
Re: Unix Time and a Modest Proposal
#5This is like an xkcd comic as a blog post
Re: Unix Time and a Modest Proposal
#6The title refers to a 1729 Jonathan Swift essay, "A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from Being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick"[1].
As with the subject article, Swift's work begins reasonably enough, and contains much great discussion before veering off wildly at the end.
Re: Unix Time and a Modest Proposal
#7Unix time should never have been a number of seconds.
It should be a structured of the iso datetime fields, like in "struct tm", see https://cplusplus.com/reference/ctime/tm/
Re: Unix Time and a Modest Proposal
#8we could fix timezones too, by rearranging the continents (and the civilizations within them) into a narrow longitudinal strip
Re: Unix Time and a Modest Proposal
#9Leap seconds are about keeping 12pm synchronized with solar noon, not the length of the year?
This makes no sense:
> … or not add leap seconds and allow the year to drift with respect to the day.
Re: Unix Time and a Modest Proposal
#10The simplest solution is to uplift a polite portion of the Earth's mass into an orbital habitation ring, and use a feedback controller to regulate the amounts being launched, to keep the rotational period stabilized (in accordance with conservation of angular momentum) at an integer ratio to the sidereal year.
And for the other challenge, to stabilize the variation of the the sidereal year (i.e. the gravities of Jupiter &c. pulling the orbit slightly faster or slower), we simply schedule the launches at either the fore- (morning) or aft- (evening) ends.
To anyone sympathetic to my ideology, please consider using "fore", "aft", "port", and "starboard" to refer to the morning, evening, day, and night quadrants of the clock.