Most geeks are familiar with the common types of computer timestamp – and the common types of human ones.<\/p>\n
The rest of this post has absolutely no point at all. But it’s funny.<\/p>\n
Wouldn’t it make more sense to do timestamps as seconds since the big bang? Yes, it’s true, it’d be a much larger feild, but it would represent all possible useful dates. Of course, since we don’t know precisely when the big bang occured (to the nearest millisecond) it might make figuring out what time it is now<\/em> somewhat difficult…<\/p>\n Then, of course, someone is going to come along and say they want to be able to refer to times *before the big bang*, to which I will suggest using a negative integer. Then they will point out that it’s possible that the universe loops such that before the big bang IS after the big bang – and\/or, there’s another big bang before that, and another after us, stretching infinately in both directions..<\/p>\n This problem comes up in other areas. One starts looking for absolutes, and a few jump out – absolute zero, for example. (Funny, they never talk about absolute one – is there a hottest possible temp?). What’s below absolute zero? What’s negative one Kelvin? The physics people sometimes tell us there’s no such animal, but I’m not so convinced. Yes, all the little subatomic particles may be at rest at zero K – but perhaps -1 K is where they do really, really interesting things? Or perhaps you just fall to a lower energy metastate, and the process repeats.<\/p>\n Feel free to criticize -n- correct my physics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Most geeks are familiar with the common types of computer timestamp – and the common types of human ones. The rest of this post has absolutely no point at all. But it’s funny. Wouldn’t it make more sense to do timestamps as seconds since the big bang? Yes, it’s true, it’d be a much larger […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1908"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1908"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1908\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1908"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1908"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1908"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}