Facebook announces that it has invented a new unit of time

A ‘Flick’ is 1/705,600,000 of a second and designed to help sync video frame rates.

Facebook launched a new product today: Flicks, a new unit of time. Yes, that’s right. A unit of time, like seconds or minutes or hours. After all, why limit asserting your corporate dominance to social connections, the consumption of the news cycle, and advertising on the internet, when you can define the very flow of time itself?

According the the GitHub page documenting Flicks, a Flick is “the smallest time unit which is LARGER than a nanosecond,” defined as 1/705,600,000 of a second. (For comparison, a nanosecond is 1/1,000,000,000 of a second, making a Flick roughly 1.41723356 nanoseconds long.)

Now, you may be sitting there wondering what was wrong with regular seconds that Facebook had to go and invent its own unit, especially since the second is one of the few units that is universal across SI and imperial units. The name itself is a portmanteau of the phase “frame-tick,” which is also why you might want to use them. Flicks are designed to help measure individual frame duration for video frame rates. So whether your video is 24hz, 25hz, 30hz, 48hz, 50hz, 60hz, 90hz, 100hz, or 120hz, you’ll be able to use Flicks to ensure that everything is in sync while still using whole integers (instead of decimals).

 

Programmers already use built in tools in C++ to manage these sorts of exact frame syncing, especially when it comes to designing visual effects in CGI, but the most exact timing possible in C++ is nanoseconds, which doesn’t divide evenly into most frame rates. The idea to create a new unit of time to solve this problem dates back to last year, when developer Christopher Horvath posted about it on Facebook.

Its invention gives programmers a way to measure the time between video frames without needing to use fractions. The name flick derives from “frame-tick”.

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RAHUL CHANANA
RAHUL CHANANA

UX /UI designer who loves clean, simple & unique design. i also enjoy crafting brand identities, icons, & ilustration work.

An Graduate Student of Information Technology, Guru Jambheshwar University of Science & Technology, Hisar. Love to discover new things about tech and loves to design.
Expertise in Graphic Designing with photoshop CS6 and CC. Also a little bit command over GIMP and CorelDRAW. I also have a knowledge of C, C++, Core Java, HTML5, CSS3, Bootstrap4, JavaScript and PHP. In free time i love to play cricket ,watch web series and love to travel.

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