Re-reading Accelerando recently. Throughout the book they dispense with years, months, days, hours and minutes and instead measure longer timespans in Mega and Giga seconds. Personally I find such big numbers hard to deal with, so I converted them to familiar units. What blew me away is the scale of the difference between the two numbers. A Megasecond is only around 11.5 days, but a Gigasecond is more than 31 years, 9 months and 9 days!
When I realised this I was 31 years and about 7.5 months, and since then I thought the day for me was yesterday. (I even noted so on twitter. And Facebook. The shame.) However today I was challenged on it. Since I could not find the program I wrote previously I whipped up a new one. Here it is:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use DateTime;
my $date = DateTime->new( time_zone => 'floating', @ARGV )
or die "Could not get date from input!";
printf "If your birth date is: %s\n", $date;
for (qw/ 1e6 1e9 /) {
my $date2 = $date->clone->add( seconds => $_ );
printf " .. your birth date plus $_ seconds is: %s\n", $date2;
}
printf " .. and you are now %d seconds old\n", (DateTime->now->epoch - $date->epoch);
I then texted mom to find out exactly when on the day I was born and after a quick response could call the script with the following arguments:
./1e9.pl year 1978 month 4 day 24 hour 12 minute 35
The output produced is:
If your birth date is: 1978-04-24T12:35:00 .. your birth date plus 1e6 seconds is: 1978-05-06T02:21:40 .. your birth date plus 1e9 seconds is: 2009-12-31T14:21:40 .. and you are now 1000012821 seconds old
So, it turned out that I either misremembered or miscalculated before: today is actually the day when I turned 1,000,000,000 seconds old. Happy 1e9 seconds day to me!
