Facebook 'Flicks' last slightly longer than a nanosecond
Facebook has just launched something new, and it's not a product you'll be able to buy or a feature we'll all be able to enjoy. It's a unit of time called " Flicks ," which is 1/705600000 of a second. That's slightly longer than a nanosecond, but still much too short to become a part of every day life. Flicks was never conceptualized to be a time unit you'll see on a watch anyway -- nobody will ever say "it's 859,900 flicks until midnight." It was created for films, video games and other types of visual media. Movies, for instance, run at 24 frames per second, which means each frame is .04166666667 seconds long. You can round up those numbers in many ways, like .04167 or 0.417 or 0.42, making things hard for the people working in visual effects and post-production -- the CGI artists and programmers who need to make sure everything is in sync. The idea behind Flicks is to simplify those numbers to keep everyone in the same page. 24 FPS...