Facebook invents a new unit of time called Flicks

Not content with just feeding you awkward revelations you wish your family had kept to themselves, Facebook now wants to toy with your time. Literally.

The company this week announced a new unit of time, because seconds, minutes and hours are just way too cumbersome.

Seriously though.

Dubbed the flick, it’s only slightly larger than a nanosecond, but is even more useful for those vested in video. And we all know video is the new cryptocurrency.

“We’ve launched Flicks, a unit of time, slightly larger than a nanosecond that exactly subdivides media frame rates and sampling frequencies,” the company’s Open Source account tweeted.

We’ve launched Flicks, a unit of time, slightly larger than a nanosecond that exactly subdivides media frame rates and sampling frequencies. https://t.co/w9SDBznXRE

— Facebook Open Source (@fbOpenSource) January 22, 2018

Flicks allows those in the video industry to adequately divide frames at certain frequencies into whole numbers, or integers.

“When working creating visual effects for film, television, and other media, it is common to run simulations or other time-integrating processes which subdivide a single frame of time into a fixed, integer number of subdivisions,” Facebook explains on the GitHub page.

“It is handy to be able to accumulate these subdivisions to create exact 1-frame and 1-second intervals, for a variety of reasons.”

Nanoseconds, although the smallest unit of time, couldn’t quite achieve this, because maths. But the flick can.

Don’t worry, Facebook as a whole will still use seconds, minutes and hours to structure your day, but you may just want to switch to its new only-useful-for-videographer method of calculating time for fun.

Have a look at the GitHub project page for more information.

Feature image: Facebook