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Facebook invented a new time unit called the 'flick' and it's truly amazing
So what is a flick? A flick is one seven hundred and five million six hundred thousandth of a second — 1/705,600,000 if you prefer the digits, or 1.417233560090703e-9 if you prefer decimals. And why is that useful?
As a hint, here's a list of numbers into which 1/706,600,000 divides evenly: 8, 16, 22.05, 24, 25, 30, 32, 44.1, 48, 50, 60, 90, 100, 120. Notice a pattern? Even if you don't work in media production, some of those numbers probably look familiar. That's because they're all framerates or frequencies used in encoding or showing things like films and music. 24 frames per second, 120 hertz TVs, 44.1 KHz sample rate audio.
[...] Even the weird NTSC numbers in use due to certain technical constraints divide nicely. 23.976 (technically 24*(1,000/1,001)=23.976023976230 with the last 6 digits repeating) becomes exactly 29,429,400 flicks. It's the same for 29.97, 59.94, and any others like them. No more fractions or decimals needed whatsoever! How great is that?!
There is more detail and background information on GitHub.
Do you give a flick? How many flicks do you feel you have wasted on this article?
(Score: 3, Informative) by requerdanos on Wednesday January 24 2018, @07:41PM
of possible interest is that this "new unit" is not a unit that needs to be converted to/from, in the way that other units (miles ←→ kilometers, bytes ←→ libraries of congress) need conversion. Rather, it's designed as a subunit of many other already established and extant units, and thus self-converting by definition without rounding errors nor metric/imperial-style oopses.
No snowflakes seem to exist here, kind of like Key West, Florida, which has never in recorded history seen a temperature below freezing.