A project has been set up which monitors the astrometry tag on flickr and hashes photos to determine what in the sky is being looked at. Not only does it add annotations for notable objects to the photo, it will allow compilation of a growing set of located images. Apparently a rotation invariant hashing algorithm was used. This essentially means that the image is converted into a hash code, that will be the same no matter what rotation the image was taken in.

Neat stuff. Via slashdot.

From Wired:
“… at precisely 3:31:30 p.m. Pacific time on February 13, 2009, the 10-digit “epoch time” clock used by most Unix computers will display all ten decimal digits in sequence.”
1234567890 seconds since the epoch start.

If you have python installed you can see this by opening the idle shell (in start menu) and typing this:

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import time
int(time.time())  #will display seconds since epoch

Or you could have it print a message at the appropriate moment so you don’t miss it (if that’s important to you :) :

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def check_time(thetime):
   now = int(time.time())
   if now == thetime:
       print 50*'-'
       print 'time is',now,'!'
       print 50*'-'
 
while True:
   check_time(1234567890)