Microcentury (2020) | Hacker News Reader

Microcentury (2020)

susam.in

83 pointssusam41 comments

> Running overtime is the one unforgivable error a lecturer can make.

This is tangential to the content of the article, but ... I'm continually astonished by the number of speakers who seem to be comfortable (largely at conferences) running over time cutting into their question time, the time of the next speaker, or even worse, lunch! Presumably it's not just me and Rota who feel this way, but it seems like there must be a large contingent of people who are very easygoing about it and quite happy to overrun or listen to overrunning speakers. I would be interested to know the thoughts of other HN readers.

In almost all the talks I have physically attended, running overtime I observed is closely correlated to how visibly the audience start showing signs of tiredness no matter what the topic is.

I feel like it is not about 52.x minutes, it is more about expectations. If the talk is 20 minutes the audience expects it to be over by 20 minutes.

Speakers like to listen to themselves. As a lecturer, I am aware and bring this to each class:

https://www.amazon.com/-/es/Temporizador-temporizador-magnét...

Be aware that following this link to a nice electronic timer may change your global Amazon language preference to Spanish.

crap how do I fix this

edit: ok closing and reopening amazon did the trick :)

At most conferences, the people speaking are not professional speakers, and as such I don’t mind them running over.

In my experience, it’s hard to time a talk correctly, even with multiple run throughs ahead of time. Standing up in front of a big crowd, even if I’ve got a stop watch running I can end up going far too quick, or far too slowly, and end up with tunnel vision where I fail to identify and correct the mistake.

Are _some_ of the speakers doing it intentionally? Probably. Did some just fail to prepare? Almost certainly. But things come up, and in the most charitable case, they just stood in front of a bunch of people and communicated something they thought was important. I applaud them for that, and move on.

Correctly timing a talk is one thing. Blowing past time limits as if they don't exist is another one altogether.

So true! I always rehearse my talks several times with the stopwatch on my phone sitting on a nearby desk, but I feel like that’s not an obvious thing to people who are getting started and don’t have theatre or public speaking experience.

It’s a lot like that (probably misattributed) Hemingway quote “If I had more time I would’ve written a shorter letter.”

I've always thought that conference talks should have the traffic light system that you get a Toastmasters.

IIRC it's green while you've still got plenty of time, orange when you're within x minutes of the scheduled end, and red once you're at the scheduled end.

I've found (from Toastmasters) that a nice bright light at the back of the hall is much easier to respond to than a clock or something counting down

If your talk is the last one before lunch, wrapping up a little early, say 10 minutes, is almost mandatory. You're not going to have the attention of hungry people if you take those last few minutes to talk anyway. Just my 2¢ from in-person conference experiences.

When it's time to go to the next talk, I abruptly stand up and walk out, even if I'm sitting at the front. It's not like the organizers aren't furiously flagging the speaker or anything.

If you're going to be so pedantic, why are you discounting Julian/Georgian switch, and Leap seconds, and not even mentioning the different ways of measuring a year, the precession of the equinoxes, etc.

1 Sideral Century would be about 3155815000 seconds at the current time, so 1 microcentury would be 3155.815 seconds, or 52m 35.81s

1 Tropical Century would be about 3155692545 seconds, or 52m 35.69s

1 Anomalistic Century would be about 3155843255 seconds, or 52m 35.84s

I agree. My rule of thumb for this situation ("how long is a year") is just 365.2425 days, which is an accurate enough statistical expectation for the most part, and doesn't depend on any information about which year is being discussed.

(Why 365.2425? It's 365 + 1/4 - 1/100 + 1/400, corresponding to how often leap years are supposed to occur.)

Edit: useful derived numbers:

- A month is 365.2425/12 = 30.436875 days, which in my head I have stored rounded off to 30.44 days.

- A month with no holidays contains 30.44*5/7 = 21.74 weekdays. (Though I'm actually not sure about this being true in practise – I know there are some weird phase synchronisations between the weekly, monthly, and yearly cycles that I haven't explored fully.)

What’s with the fractions at the end? I get the 1/4, but not sure about the 1/100 and 1/400. It seems like to with the century year only being leap if mod 400, but I don’t understand the 100 part.

If it's divisible by 100 but not 400 it's not a leap year.

Leap years occur every 4 years, except we skip one every 100 years, HOWEVER we skip that skip every 400 years.

2000 was the perfect example: /4 so leap year? well /100 so no leap year? well also /400 so no no = yes leap year.

Basically that one time in our lives we could have witnessed the /100 exception, it actually wasn't, so business (= leap year) as usual.

I wonder what we will use in 400 years - I think it's possible that this kind of skip is the last one we had... Maybe.

Don't fix what ain't broke. the year 2000 was the second skipped skip after 1600. If the Gregorian calendar could make it through those four centuries, with the increasing rate of political and social upheaval, it's not going to change much now. We've got almost 3 more millennia before we've lost a full day compared to the tropical year.

1. Leap year every 4 years (+1/4)

2. But not if it's divisible by 100 (-1/100)

3. Unless it's divisible by 400 (+1/400)

One sidereal period of the earth is 365.25 days; 100 of them is 36525 days. One millionth of that amount is 0.036525 days. Since a day is defined to be (24hr * 60min/hr) 1440 minutes long, the number of minutes in a microcentry is 0.036525 * 1440 = 52.596 minutes. The .596min still needs conversion to seconds (.596 min * 60 s/min), 35.76s.

A microcentury is 52 min 35.76 sec long. However I wasn't keeping track of significant digits very carefully (it varied between 5 and 6) so I'd take the "6" with a grain of salt pending further analysis.

Since the OP is the definition of pedantry, I’m annoyed by the author not taking a stand regarding if a century year (*00) starts or ends a century.

Since there is no year 0[1] in the calendar used, it can only end a century.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_zero

I usually don't like it when people sidestep the content of a link, to go on some tangent about its typography or aesthetics. But DAMN. This is a gorgeous looking blog, for using only default fonts and minimal CSS.

Apparently he wrote his own static site builder in Common Lisp, but it's SO minimal that the content itself is still written in raw HTML. It feels silly, but this just takes me back to happier days... pre-WordPress and pre-social media... and makes me wonder why we lost our way. I dearly miss the feeling of making sites like this (but uglier!) back in the 1990's. Applause.

While this is nice, I don’t like the idea that lecture times should vary depending on the century I find myself in. Clearly, we need to take the average, which is 52 minutes and 35.6952 seconds if I calculated correctly.

> After fifty minutes (one microcentury as von Neumann used to say) everybody's attention will turn elsewhere even if we are trying to prove the Riemann hypothesis.

I hear lots of people remark that the way we use tech has shortened our attention spans. Most often I hear this about reading, and ability to stay with a text. Has our ability to stay with a lecture also decreased over the decades, or is watching/listening to a speaker easier on our attention system somehow? Is a guideline from von Neumann still good, or are we now mostly twitchy and checking our phones at 30 min?

Attention spans depend heavily on the environment. They're something you do (a habit thing) more than something you have. (Many people are incapable of paying attention for an extended period of time, but this is more of an upper bound to the attention span; their actual attention span in a given situation could easily be less, just like the rest of us.)

How much focused attention one will tend to give a prolonged activity that doesn't normally involve their input, feedback, or control (on top of the fact that learning is evolutionarily not an easy thing to do) is certainly relative to the activities one would alternatively have available to them. That is to say, before we had the ability to read about anything, talk to anyone, or play any game at any time or location I imagine it was somewhat easier to not feel the need to distract ourselves. I think it comes down to regulating our dopamine system's objective function to not require frequent consistent reward and allow ourselves the delayed gratification of something like learning from a lecture.

I believe that is one of the reasons learning by doing is highly effective and essentially unavoidable if one is to truly understand something. This applies to purely theoretical disciplines as well, in the form of practicing calculation and thinking about the implications.

> How much focused attention one will tend to give a prolonged activity that doesn't normally involve their input, feedback, or control (on top of the fact that learning is evolutionarily not an easy thing to do) is certainly relative to the activities one would alternatively have available to them.

This is true. My thesis is that “alternatively” is relative to the context.

But we can science this! This is the kind of thing that anyone with access to people can discover the answer to; it's not even fraught with ethical hazards! You just need to be really, really, really, really boring.

Relevant : 10/20/30 rule for Powerpoint presentation. Which says to take only 20 minutes for your presentation.

https://www.pier8group.com/the-10-20-30-rule-of-powerpoint/

On youtube I find any video over 8 minutes as boringly long. Needs skipped in the mid.

So the author saw the Wikipedia definition of "a time period of a millionth of a century, equal to 52 minutes and 34 seconds", made a more precise calculation and got 52 minutes 35.7 instead. Almost 2 seconds of a difference! About 0.6‰ in relative terms! That Wikipedia thing is unacceptably sloppy, isn't it?

Pedantry is its own reward.

That Wikipedia thing is perfectly fine. It merely assumes we abolish leap years within the next few decades.

Microlifetime = (average lifespan)/ 10e6

In the west microlifetime is about 42 min.

Lectures typically last longer than microlifetime.

I've seen the same idea phrased as 'a nanocentury is approximately pi seconds'.

That's due to Tom Duff. It's definitely not "the same idea" though.

I sincerely hope the author also took their time to update wiktionary.

It would be the obvious thing to do rather than waffle on like an 8th grader

> In other words, a century has either 3 155 673 600 seconds or 3 155 760 000 seconds.

Obviously microcentury should be 3155695200 seconds

Von Neumann as wise as always!

Based on the article, a microcentury doesn't even last an hour.

That's a lot of hand-wringing for 1.7 seconds.

To critique the writing, the section on why Wiktionary is wrong is so tediously verbose. It could've been shortened to say "This is based on a century (100 years) of 365 days each, without leap years.". All the numbers of millions of seconds, etc, is just so useless and repetitive .

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