On Wed, 6 Aug 2003, Philip Hart wrote: >I see no evidence for equating Dragaeran and Terran minutes and >hours. It seems unlikely to me that they could be equivalent. Of >course it's possible that the ratio of days is exactly 30/24, but >29/24 is as likely, as is (29.1)/24. But in either of the latter >cases, I would anticipate the minute being changed so that there >would be an even number of hours. As long as the second stayed the >same, I don't think the physicists would care. > >In John M. Ford's great _Growing Up Weightless_, which is set on the >moon, the lunar society uses 25 hour days with the final hour being >12.5 minutes long. Obviously such an arrangement isn't possible >without computers - so pre-Orb, there must have been some >accomodation in the non-exact case. > Pre-Orb, I doubt that the primitive Dragaeran tribes divided time that finely. BTW, I am not sure that the arrangement you describe would be *impossible* without computers. I read a book on clock & watchmaking, and given all of the weird things that mechanical watches have been made to do (track the phase of the moon, sidereal time, etc), I think a sufficiently clever engineer could make a mechanical clock/watch in which an alternate gearing system would be used once every X hours. Although perhaps that falls under your definition, since a clock is a primitive analog computer, in a sense. At any rate, it doesn't necessarily require a digital computer.