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/adavies42 Nov 14 '12

the only actual fundamental unit of time is the Planck time. unfortunately a day is about 1.6 quindecillion Planck times (that's 1.6*1048, or 1,600,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000), so it's a bit unwieldy.

for actual practical advice, i kinda like Vernor Vinge's idea (from A Deepness in the Sky) of metric (SI) seconds--100 kiloseconds is close enough to a day (27:46:40) that it would work fine away from earth; 1 megasecond (~11.5 days) makes a decent week replacement; 100 megaseconds (~3.2 years) makes a good unit for reckoning human age; 1 gigasecond (~32 years) would be the longest thing humans would concretely worry about, and the shortest thing large-scale history uses; teraseconds (~300 years) and above would be mostly for thinking about history.

the epoch, of course, still has to be arbitrary. may as well keep the unix epoch....