Facebook Has Invented a Completely New Unit of Time
Facebook has invented a new unit of time: The 'flick', equivalent to precisely one 705,600,000th of a second – larger than a nanosecond, and smaller than a microsecond.
It's short for 'frame tick', hinting at its cinematic origins, writes original inventor Christopher Horvath on GitHub.
As for why Facebook needs a new unit of time, it goes back to the social network's Oculus VR subsidiary and its larger bet on virtual reality. And for Horvath, formerly of the cinematic world at firms like Pixar, Weta Digital, and Industrial Light & Magic, it seems to have been something of a passion project.
