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In most cases, the base unit is seconds or years. Prefixes are not usually used with a base unit of years. Therefore, it is said "a million years" instead of "a megayear". Clock time and calendar time have duodecimal or sexagesimal orders of magnitude rather than decimal, e.g., a year is 12 months, and a minute is 60 seconds.
A microsecond is equal to 1000 nanoseconds or 1 ⁄ 1,000 of a millisecond. Because the next SI prefix is 1000 times larger, measurements of 10 −5 and 10 −4 seconds are typically expressed as tens or hundreds of microseconds.
A unit of 10 milliseconds may be called a centisecond, and one of 100 milliseconds a decisecond, but these names are rarely used. [3] To help compare orders of magnitude of different times, this page lists times between 10 −3 seconds and 10 0 seconds (1 millisecond and one second). See also times of other orders of magnitude.
Used to measure the time between alternating power cycles. Also a casual term for a short period of time. centisecond: 10 −2 s: One hundredth of a second. decisecond: 10 −1 s: One tenth of a second. second: 1 s: SI base unit for time. decasecond: 10 s: Ten seconds (one sixth of a minute) minute: 60 s: hectosecond: 100 s: milliday: 1/1000 d ...
The commission rejected the seconds-pendulum definition of the metre the following year because the second of time was an arbitrary period equal to 1/86,400 day, rather than a decimal fraction of a natural unit. Instead, the metre would be defined as a decimal fraction of the length of the Paris Meridian between the equator and the North Pole.
It is also the standard single-unit time representation in many programming languages, most notably C, and part of UNIX/POSIX standards used by Linux, Mac OS X, etc.; to convert fractional days to fractional seconds, multiply the number by 86400. Fractional seconds are represented as milliseconds (ms), microseconds (μs) or nanoseconds (ns ...
Whether you're prepping a mirepoix, making a crunchy salad, or adding a garnish to your favorite Bloody Mary, knowing the difference between a stalk and a rib will make your cooking more precise.
SI prefixes are frequently combined with the word second to denote subdivisions of the second: milliseconds (thousandths), microseconds (millionths), nanoseconds (billionths), and sometimes smaller units of a second. Multiples of seconds are usually counted in hours and minutes.