[Nottingham] [OT, Humour] Two timely gems...

[James of the family Moore]

whoa, that sent me dizzy... I use the Julian Date calendar, which is
simply the number of 23.934~hour periods elapsed since 12:00UT
(Greenwich Noon) Monday January 1, 4713 BC on the Julian Proleptic
Calendar. Right now it is JD2455322+/-0.3 (dead on as at 14:01UT
today). I love this system because the only thing it relies on is the
rotation of the Earth relative to a fixed point in space, which
repeats every 23 hours, 56 minutes, 4.091 seconds. I even have a
quartz clock set to Sidereal Time and possessive of a decimal time
face as opposed the classic canonical. This makes an interesting
conversation piece, as to why my clock has only ten marks on it and
why it gains four minutes a day...

On 5/5/10, Martin <martin at ml1.co.uk> wrote:
> Folks,
>
> Just a little giggle or two from Google whilst musing that there "must
> be a better way" and...
>
> So in PostgreSQL, how do you easily convert a time interval into a
> fractional hours value?
>
> There's the brute force way of adding up:
> ( days * 24 + hours + minutes / 60 + seconds / 3600 ... )
>
> Or...
>
>
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/952493/how-do-i-convert-an-interval-into-a-number-of-hours-with-postgres
>
> ####
> Probably the easiest way is:
>
> SELECT EXTRACT(epoch FROM my_interval)/3600
> ####
>
> Which is spot on!
>
>
> The giggles are:
>
> ####
> Extract epoch? Oh my, that wouldn't have crossed my mind in a million years
> ####
>
> :-)
>
>
> There's also the fun with:
>
> http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.2/static/functions-datetime.html
>
> ####
> 9.9.1. EXTRACT, date_part
>
> EXTRACT(field FROM source)
>
> ...valid field names:
>
> century
>
>     The century
>
>     SELECT EXTRACT(CENTURY FROM TIMESTAMP '2000-12-16 12:21:13');
>     Result: 20
>     SELECT EXTRACT(CENTURY FROM TIMESTAMP '2001-02-16 20:38:40');
>     Result: 21
>
>     The first century starts at 0001-01-01 00:00:00 AD, although they
> did not know it at the time. This definition applies to all Gregorian
> calendar countries. There is no century number 0, you go from -1 to 1.
> If you disagree with this, please write your complaint to: Pope,
> Cathedral Saint-Peter of Roma, Vatican.
>
>     PostgreSQL releases before 8.0 did not follow the conventional
> numbering of centuries, but just returned the year field divided by 100.
> ####
>
>
> ... And then there is:
>
> $ cal 9 1752
>    September 1752
>  S  M Tu  W Th  F  S
>        1  2 14 15 16
> 17 18 19 20 21 22 23
> 24 25 26 27 28 29 30
>
>
> Quite a headache!
>
>
> Is that why computer Geeks use the epoch instead?!
>
> Must be time for a beer!!
>
> Cheers,
> Martin
>
> --
> ----------------
> Martin Lomas
> martin at ml1.co.uk
> ----------------
>
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