[HN Gopher] Microcentury (2020)
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Microcentury (2020)
Author : susam
Score : 75 points
Date : 2021-11-03 11:36 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (susam.in)
(TXT) w3m dump (susam.in)
| bellyfullofbac wrote:
| To critique the writing, the section on why Wiktionary is wrong
| is so tediously verbose. It could've been shortened to say "This
| is based on a century (100 years) of 365 days each, without leap
| years.". All the numbers of millions of seconds, etc, is just so
| useless and repetitive .
| Joker_vD wrote:
| So the author saw the Wikipedia definition of "a time period of a
| millionth of a century, equal to 52 minutes and 34 seconds", made
| a more precise calculation and got 52 minutes 35.7 instead.
| Almost 2 seconds of a difference! About 0.6%0 in relative terms!
| That Wikipedia thing is unacceptably sloppy, isn't it?
| javajosh wrote:
| Pedantry is its own reward.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| That Wikipedia thing is perfectly fine. It merely assumes we
| abolish leap years within the next few decades.
| abeppu wrote:
| > After fifty minutes (one microcentury as von Neumann used to
| say) everybody's attention will turn elsewhere even if we are
| trying to prove the Riemann hypothesis.
|
| I hear lots of people remark that the way we use tech has
| shortened our attention spans. Most often I hear this about
| reading, and ability to stay with a text. Has our ability to stay
| with a lecture also decreased over the decades, or is
| watching/listening to a speaker easier on our attention system
| somehow? Is a guideline from von Neumann still good, or are we
| now mostly twitchy and checking our phones at 30 min?
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Attention spans depend heavily on the environment. They're
| something you _do_ (a habit thing) more than something you
| _have_. (Many people are incapable of paying attention for an
| extended period of time, but this is more of an upper bound to
| the attention span; their actual attention span in a given
| situation could easily be less, just like the rest of us.)
| datameta wrote:
| How much focused attention one will tend to give a prolonged
| activity that doesn't normally involve their input, feedback,
| or control (on top of the fact that learning is
| evolutionarily not an easy thing to do) is certainly relative
| to the activities one would alternatively have available to
| them. That is to say, before we had the ability to read about
| anything, talk to anyone, or play any game at any time or
| location I imagine it was somewhat easier to not feel the
| need to distract ourselves. I think it comes down to
| regulating our dopamine system's objective function to not
| require frequent consistent reward and allow ourselves the
| delayed gratification of something like learning from a
| lecture.
|
| I believe that is one of the reasons learning by doing is
| highly effective and essentially unavoidable if one is to
| truly understand something. This applies to purely
| theoretical disciplines as well, in the form of practicing
| calculation and thinking about the implications.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _How much focused attention one will tend to give a
| prolonged activity that doesn 't normally involve their
| input, feedback, or control (on top of the fact that
| learning is evolutionarily not an easy thing to do) is
| certainly relative to the activities one would
| alternatively have available to them._
|
| This is true. My thesis is that "alternatively" is relative
| to the context.
|
| But we can science this! This is the kind of thing that
| anyone with access to people can discover the answer to;
| it's not even fraught with ethical hazards! You just need
| to be really, really, really, really boring.
| eCa wrote:
| Since the OP is the definition of pedantry, I'm annoyed by the
| author not taking a stand regarding if a century year (*00)
| starts or ends a century.
|
| Since there is no year 0[1] in the calendar used, it can only end
| a century.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_zero
| wodenokoto wrote:
| I sincerely hope the author also took their time to update
| wiktionary.
| iso1631 wrote:
| It would be the obvious thing to do rather than waffle on like
| an 8th grader
| codeflo wrote:
| While this is nice, I don't like the idea that lecture times
| should vary depending on the century I find myself in. Clearly,
| we need to take the average, which is 52 minutes and 35.6952
| seconds if I calculated correctly.
| milesward wrote:
| That's a lot of hand-wringing for 1.7 seconds.
| StevePerkins wrote:
| I usually don't like it when people sidestep the content of a
| link, to go on some tangent about its typography or aesthetics.
| But DAMN. This is a gorgeous looking blog, for using only default
| fonts and minimal CSS.
|
| Apparently he wrote his own static site builder in Common Lisp,
| but it's SO minimal that the content itself is still written in
| raw HTML. It feels silly, but this just takes me back to happier
| days... pre-WordPress and pre-social media... and makes me wonder
| why we lost our way. I dearly miss the feeling of making sites
| like this (but uglier!) back in the 1990's. Applause.
| javajosh wrote:
| One sidereal period of the earth is 365.25 days; 100 of them is
| 36525 days. One millionth of that amount is 0.036525 days. Since
| a day is defined to be (24hr * 60min/hr) 1440 minutes long, the
| number of minutes in a microcentry is 0.036525 * 1440 = 52.596
| minutes. The .596min still needs conversion to seconds (.596 min
| * 60 s/min), 35.76s.
|
| A microcentury is 52 min 35.76 sec long. However I wasn't keeping
| track of significant digits very carefully (it varied between 5
| and 6) so I'd take the "6" with a grain of salt pending further
| analysis.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Von Neumann as wise as always!
| tome wrote:
| > Running overtime is the one unforgivable error a lecturer can
| make.
|
| This is tangential to the content of the article, but ... I'm
| continually astonished by the number of speakers who seem to be
| comfortable (largely at conferences) running over time cutting
| into their question time, the time of the next speaker, or even
| worse, lunch! Presumably it's not just me and Rota who feel this
| way, but it seems like there must be a large contingent of people
| who are very easygoing about it and quite happy to overrun or
| listen to overrunning speakers. I would be interested to know the
| thoughts of other HN readers.
| FemmeAndroid wrote:
| At most conferences, the people speaking are not professional
| speakers, and as such I don't mind them running over.
|
| In my experience, it's hard to time a talk correctly, even with
| multiple run throughs ahead of time. Standing up in front of a
| big crowd, even if I've got a stop watch running I can end up
| going far too quick, or far too slowly, and end up with tunnel
| vision where I fail to identify and correct the mistake.
|
| Are _some_ of the speakers doing it intentionally? Probably.
| Did some just fail to prepare? Almost certainly. But things
| come up, and in the most charitable case, they just stood in
| front of a bunch of people and communicated something they
| thought was important. I applaud them for that, and move on.
| musingsole wrote:
| Correctly timing a talk is one thing. Blowing past time
| limits as if they don't exist is another one altogether.
| [deleted]
| Uehreka wrote:
| So true! I always rehearse my talks several times with the
| stopwatch on my phone sitting on a nearby desk, but I feel
| like that's not an obvious thing to people who are getting
| started and don't have theatre or public speaking experience.
|
| It's a lot like that (probably misattributed) Hemingway quote
| "If I had more time I would've written a shorter letter."
| tedmiston wrote:
| If your talk is the last one before lunch, wrapping up a little
| early, say 10 minutes, is almost mandatory. You're not going to
| have the attention of hungry people if you take those last few
| minutes to talk anyway. Just my 2C/ from in-person conference
| experiences.
| ketanmaheshwari wrote:
| In almost all the talks I have physically attended, running
| overtime I observed is closely correlated to how visibly the
| audience start showing signs of tiredness no matter what the
| topic is.
|
| I feel like it is not about 52.x minutes, it is more about
| expectations. If the talk is 20 minutes the audience expects it
| to be over by 20 minutes.
| pfortuny wrote:
| Speakers like to listen to themselves. As a lecturer, I am
| aware and bring this to each class:
|
| https://www.amazon.com/-/es/Temporizador-temporizador-magnet...
| mhalle wrote:
| Be aware that following this link to a nice electronic timer
| may change your global Amazon language preference to Spanish.
| Aicy wrote:
| crap how do I fix this
|
| edit: ok closing and reopening amazon did the trick :)
| crhutchins wrote:
| Based on the article, a microcentury doesn't even last an hour.
| nabla9 wrote:
| Microlifetime = (average lifespan)/ 10e6
|
| In the west microlifetime is about 42 min.
|
| Lectures typically last longer than microlifetime.
| iso1631 wrote:
| If you're going to be so pedantic, why are you discounting
| Julian/Georgian switch, and Leap seconds, and not even mentioning
| the different ways of measuring a year, the precession of the
| equinoxes, etc.
|
| 1 Sideral Century would be about 3155815000 seconds at the
| current time, so 1 microcentury would be 3155.815 seconds, or 52m
| 35.81s
|
| 1 Tropical Century would be about 3155692545 seconds, or 52m
| 35.69s
|
| 1 Anomalistic Century would be about 3155843255 seconds, or 52m
| 35.84s
| kqr wrote:
| I agree. My rule of thumb for this situation ("how long is a
| year") is just 365.2425 days, which is an accurate enough
| statistical expectation for the most part, and doesn't depend
| on any information about which year is being discussed.
|
| (Why 365.2425? It's 365 + 1/4 - 1/100 + 1/400, corresponding to
| how often leap years are supposed to occur.)
|
| Edit: useful derived numbers:
|
| - A month is 365.2425/12 = 30.436875 days, which in my head I
| have stored rounded off to 30.44 days.
|
| - A month with no holidays contains 30.44*5/7 = 21.74 weekdays.
| (Though I'm actually not sure about this being true in practise
| - I know there are some weird phase synchronisations between
| the weekly, monthly, and yearly cycles that I haven't explored
| fully.)
| prepend wrote:
| What's with the fractions at the end? I get the 1/4, but not
| sure about the 1/100 and 1/400. It seems like to with the
| century year only being leap if mod 400, but I don't
| understand the 100 part.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| If it's divisible by 100 but not 400 it's not a leap year.
| messe wrote:
| 1. Leap year every 4 years (+1/4)
|
| 2. But not if it's divisible by 100 (-1/100)
|
| 3. Unless it's divisible by 400 (+1/400)
| icoder wrote:
| Leap years occur every 4 years, except we skip one every
| 100 years, HOWEVER we skip that skip every 400 years.
|
| 2000 was the perfect example: /4 so leap year? well /100 so
| no leap year? well also /400 so no no = yes leap year.
|
| Basically that one time in our lives we could have
| witnessed the /100 exception, it actually wasn't, so
| business (= leap year) as usual.
| debesyla wrote:
| I wonder what we will use in 400 years - I think it's
| possible that this kind of skip is the last one we had...
| Maybe.
| modulusshift wrote:
| Don't fix what ain't broke. the year 2000 was the second
| skipped skip after 1600. If the Gregorian calendar could
| make it through _those_ four centuries, with the
| increasing rate of political and social upheaval, it 's
| not going to change much now. We've got almost 3 more
| millennia before we've lost a full day compared to the
| tropical year.
| OscarCunningham wrote:
| I've seen the same idea phrased as 'a nanocentury is
| approximately pi seconds'.
| hduncfj wrote:
| That's due to Tom Duff. It's definitely _not_ "the same idea"
| though.
| zokier wrote:
| > In other words, a century has either 3 155 673 600 seconds or 3
| 155 760 000 seconds.
|
| Obviously microcentury should be 3155695200 seconds
| habibur wrote:
| Relevant : 10/20/30 rule for Powerpoint presentation. Which says
| to take only 20 minutes for your presentation.
|
| https://www.pier8group.com/the-10-20-30-rule-of-powerpoint/
|
| On youtube I find any video over 8 minutes as boringly long.
| Needs skipped in the mid.
| [deleted]
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(page generated 2021-11-03 23:01 UTC)