Today the xkcd: Y2K and 2038 comic was published and this reminded me of the recent very good technical blog post Time is an illusion, Unix time doubly so... from Jan Schaumann where he explains how time is handled on different operating systems including some historical background.
A famous scientist and adventurer once said: 'time is not linear but something like "Wibbly Wobbly Timey Wimey"'. He has since been proven more correct than he ever imagined.
As you well know, on Unix systems we measure time as the number of seconds since "the epoch": 00:00:00 UTC on January 1st, 1970. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
For starters, this definition is not based on something sensical such as, say, the objective frequency of vibration of a Cesium-133 atom, but on a convenient fraction of the time it takes a particular large rock to complete a full rotation around its own axis.
If you want to learning about any of this:
then click here and read this fine blog posting.
Happy reading and learning!
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Monday November 14 2022, @10:35AM (1 child)
We should create a conspiracy nuttery around these missing dates.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday November 15 2022, @05:51AM
Yeah, clearly the illuminati want us to believe those dates don't exist because they did something very evil at those dates, and if that evil action is leaked, nobody is going to believe it because it happened at dates that "don't exist". :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.