Special Leap Day Edition of "Some Weird Things About Time"
Feb 29, 2016 19:13

In working on my diary app Remembary, I discovered all sorts of weird things about how we work with dates and time. Time zones, leap year, different calendars around the world - even the weird calendar adjustments in the 16th and 18th centuries, since I used some historical diaries as test material.

I ended up getting rather obsessed with these calendar issues, and did a lot of research. Not only were these fascinating on their own, I also noticed many similarities between them and the world of software and technology. Both are about finding useful abstractions behind complicated concepts and trying to adapt them for regular use in the general culture.

I decided to share my fascination and turned it into a talk at PodCamp Halifax back in 2013. Then last year I decided to get into more conference speaking, so I reorganized and streamlined the talk to something much more polished. In May 2015 I presented "Four Weird Things About Time" at Detroit's self.conference, where it seemed to go over pretty well, even though there were a few technical hiccups with the AV system.

Leap Year comes up several times in the talk, and since today is Leap Day 2016, I thought I would share an abridged version of the talk: instead of 4 weird things, it's only 2 - and instead of me standing in front of you, you get my voice over the slides. Hopefully you'll find this interesting and entertaining. Come for the Game of Thrones references, stay for the fascinating real historical stories of love and empires - and Easter and leap year.

And don't miss the off-by-one error from 50 BCE!

And of course drop me a line if you're interested in hearing the full talk or even having me give it at an event.

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Jul 27, 2015 11:22