How to Think About Time

This article does a great job highlighting how complicated the basic matter of time is while programming. For non-programmers it is an interesting read to go deeper on why this is much more complex than one may think. For programmers this document is a culmination of best practices developed to avoid bugs in time based logic in software. The differentiation between "physical time" and "civil time" is an interesting one.

Civil time is the patchwork of made-up human concepts such as “months”, “common era”, “leap days”, “weekend”, “cold November rain”, and so on.

Civil time is very important. It makes communication easier, and enables us to organize our daily lives in a reasonable way. And no one is going to bake you any special cake or sing you any excruciatingly bland song off-key while you exhale rapidly onto flaming wax if we don’t have civil time.

Civil time always requires a calendar system.

Fun stuff.