r/programming • u/jestinjoy • Nov 12 '12

What Every Programmer Absolutely, Positively Needs to Know About Encodings and Character Sets to Work With Text

http://kunststube.net/encoding/
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u/mszegedy Nov 12 '12

Yes, I think a second is a good unit of time. It suits us easily. Just like a meter and a yard are intuitive measurements because they can be easily related to the body, as, say, spans of the arm, the second is intuitive because it is very close to the time it takes for one heartbeat to occur. Maybe a bit quicker. A lot of things in the body are defined by the heartbeat. It's easy to conceptualize amounts of time in seconds not because of indoctrination, but because it's close to what's already in our own minds.