U+33B1 SQUARE NS

U+33B1 was added to Unicode in version 1.1 (1993). It belongs to the block CJK Compatibility in the Basic Multilingual Plane.

This character is a Other Symbol and is commonly used, that is, in no specific script.

The glyph is a Square composition of the glyphs . It has a Wide East Asian Width. In bidirectional context it acts as Left To Right and is not mirrored. In text U+33B1 behaves as Ideographic regarding line breaks. It has type Other for sentence and Other for word breaks. The Grapheme Cluster Break is Any.

The Wikipedia has the following information about this codepoint:

A nanosecond (ns) is an SI unit of time equal to one billionth of a second (10⁻⁹ or ¹/_{1,000,000,000} s). One nanosecond is to one second as one second is to 31.71 years.

The word nanosecond is formed by the prefix nano and the unit second. Its symbol is ns.

A nanosecond is equal to 1000 picoseconds or ¹⁄₁₀₀₀ microsecond. Because the next SI unit is 1000 times larger, times of 10⁻⁸ and 10⁻⁷ seconds are typically expressed as tens or hundreds of nanoseconds.

Times of this magnitude are commonly encountered in telecommunications, pulsed lasers and some areas of electronics.

Light travels approximately 29.98 centimeters in 1 nanosecond. This is equivalent to 11.8 inches, leading to some to refer to a nanosecond as a light-foot. The earliest use of the term is by George Gamow. Another early reference commonly given is to Admiral Grace Hopper, who used to give out pieces of wire about a foot long to illustrate the eventual problem of building very high speed computers. If it takes light a nanosecond to go a foot (in a vacuum, slower in copper), then a computer built with parts connected by half this distance, 15 centimetres (5.9 in) of wire, would take at least a nanosecond to send data to a part and get a response. The solution, developed in Hopper's lifetime, was first the integrated circuit and later the multi-core processor.

"Once she presented a piece of wire about a foot long, and explained that it represented a nanosecond, since it was the maximum distance electricity could travel in wire in one-billionth of a second. She often contrasted this nanosecond with a microsecond - a coil of wire nearly a thousand feet long - as she encouraged programmers not to waste even a microsecond."

Light travels ~29.979 cm in one nanosecond, meaning that, technically, a light-foot is ~1.0167 nanoseconds.