Seconds

I am still reading A Deepness In The Sky by Vernor Vinge. I'm kind of slow, I read maybe a chapter a day, which I feel is about ten pages. It's a big book, and there's lots of chapters, so it's taking me a while.

Throughout the book Vern tells time by the number of seconds, be it hundred or a thousand or a million. I'm comfortable with numbers, so I can generally figure out the amount of time we are talking about. Unfortunately I never remember those values so every time I run into a time, if I care about the amount of time, I have to do those calculations again. I wanted a scale that had both our conventional times and Vern's base-10 devoted system. It would need to be a logarithmic scale in order to accommodate all of our values. So I went prowling the net - and found bupkis. I did find one suggestion on how it might be done in javascript and html, but that's a lot of work, and I've already got a stack of obscure stuff to wade through. So I just compiled a list to see what I'm dealing with.

Some useful approximations:

• One thousand seconds, a Ksec, is about a quarter of an hour.
• One hundred thousand seconds is a little more than a day, 
• a million seconds is like a week and a half, 
• two and half million makes a month
• 30 million makes a year
• 300 million makes a decade
• 3 billion makes a century
• 30 billion makes a millenium

P. S. The list at the top is an embedded Google spreadsheet. I'm not sure whether embedding a list from a spreadsheet is worthwhile. It's great if that spreadsheet is going to get updated. If that happens, the blog post will show the new stuff, but I don't think that's going to happen here. The problem with embedding the spreadsheet is having to manually adjust the height and width parameters to show all of the data and nothing else. As you can see, there is still some white space on the right side and the bottom. I probably went back and forth a dozen times between the html and Blogger's preview. Pain in the neck. The other way is to just take a screenshot and embed it as an image. That has its own set of hoops to jump through, but I am familiar with them.

P. P. S. Kind of funny that everyone uses the same time standard of seconds, minutes and hours. The second is kind of universal - it's a heartbeat. The minutes and hours part though, I wonder where it came from. I suspect it came from European clock makers during the Renaissance (Bayou, I'm looking at you), but who knows? Maybe they got it from Chinese clock makers a zillion years ago. Someone should investigate.

P. P. P. S. Editing a spreadsheet to get it to 'look' like you want takes me a lot of fiddling around, but Google does offer lots of options. I know how to find most of what I want, changes appear immediately, you don't have to go look at a 'preview', and it's useful for things besides lists.