Facebook have had quite a rough ride of late. They face huge levels of criticism for spreading ‘fake news’ during the 2016 presidential election, and last week they announced they were essentially cutting off all interesting content from publishers and would instead be prioritising boring posts from friends and family – you can read all our thoughts about this here.
But now they’ve really taken a step too far: Facebook have announced they’ve created a new unit of time, called a ‘flick’.
According to the code-sharing site GitHub, one flick (derived from ‘frame-tick’) is equal to 1/705600000 second. Essentially, this unit of time is the smallest time unit which is larger than a nanosecond.
Don’t worry, we’re pretty confused as well.
Matt Hammond, lead research engineer at BBC Research and Development, explained that a ‘flick’ can be used to reduce errors such as stutters in graphics.
“When the numbers used are not integers, errors can gradually creep into computer calculations. These errors can build up over time, eventually causing inaccuracies that become noticeable,” he said.
And this isn’t the first time some wacky scientist has tried to redefine time. Watch company Swatch introduced ‘Internet Time’ in 1998 which divided the day into 1,000 ‘.beats’. It was designed to eliminate the need for different time zones but – predictably – it didn’t catch on.
At the risk of sounding like an old coot: what’s wrong the good old second, minute and hour? We can’t let tech companies change literally everything! Wake up sheeple!
(Image: Mohdammed Ali)
