[Seth-Trips] Unix time at 987654321, Wednesday, April 18

[Seth David Schoen]

For those of you who follow such things, you have a once-in-a-lifetime
opportunity this week to celebrate the Unix time reaching 987654321!

bash-2.03$ date -d 'April 18, 2001 21:25:21 PDT'
Wed Apr 18 21:25:21 PDT 2001
bash-2.03$ date -d 'April 18, 2001 21:25:21 PDT' +%s
987654321

Some people have suggested having a party at Zeitgeist, the bar in the
Mission were TNIPNAZ/TNICNAZ gatherings and the like take place.  I
would rather have a party someplace else, if I'm organizing it, though
I'll definitely go to things at Zeitgeist.

The Unix time is the internal representation all Unix systems use to
tell them what day and time it is; it's measured in seconds since
midnight GMT (now UTC) January 1, 1970.  Whenever a Unix system stores
or manipulates a time value internally, it's using this particular
count.

A lot of people use the Unix time for various purposes (I wrote a
script a week or two ago which makes use of it) and sometimes people
notice when the number reaches interesting values.  For example, I got
an e-mail message when the Unix time hit 800000000 (in 1995) telling
me to celebrate this milestone.  But the really big deal may be the
upcoming 1000000000 mark -- "one billion seconds of Unix!" -- this
fall (in September), which has been anticipated for _years_.

Tracking and using Unix time also trains you to think in terms of
seconds -- for example, I often have use for the fact that an hour is
3600 seconds and a day is 86400 seconds.  It turns out that a
calendar year (non-leap year) is the somewhat more forgettable
31536000 seconds, although the "billion seconds is about 31 years"
(the square root of 10 is about 3.162) is not so hard.  In fact,
there is a famous quotation about this situation:

   How many seconds are there in a year? If I tell you there are
   3.155x10^7, you won't even try to remember it.  On the other hand,
   who could forget that, to within half a percent, pi seconds is a
   nanocentury?

   (Tom Duff, Bell Labs)

(That is, 3.155 seconds is the billionth part of a century, not
counting leap years.)

If you'd like to celebrate the 987654321 seconds of Unix mark with me,
please let me know!

If you have a Unix machine, you can watch the seconds tick by with

watch -n 1 "date +%s | figlet -f big"

(You'll need figlet, too.)

-- 
Seth David Schoen <schoen at loyalty.org>  | And do not say, I will study when I
Temp.  http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/  | have leisure; for perhaps you will
down:  http://www.loyalty.org/   (CAF)  | not have leisure.  -- Pirke Avot 2:5