On Wed, 6 Aug 2003, Philip Hart wrote: [Aside: Could you please edit your "To:" & "Cc:" such that your replies only go to the list (or to me, but not both, since I only need one copy)? Thanks.] > > >On Wed, 6 Aug 2003, David Silberstein wrote: > >> Pre-Orb, I doubt that the primitive Dragaeran tribes divided time that >> finely. > >If I remember my Roman history, they had a 9-hour day, where the hour >changed to accomodate the seasons, and they didn't account for hours at >night, else they would have had 18-hour days. As I recall from my Jewish studies, that's what the Talmudic scholars did as well (this was important to them because certain prayers needed to be said at certain times - dawn, afternoon & evening - before). My point is that such cultures don't divide time down to the minute (let alone the second). > They had I suppose hour-glasses but relied on clepsydrae or >water-clocks at some point. Also time-candles with different coloured wax, and sundials of course. >I wonder about Dragaeran music - perhaps they found some old metronomes... Metronomes are 19th-century inventions. >And of course they would have found old measuring sticks, which with >a little physics knowledge left over from the pre-Jenoine times would >have allowed them to measure time by dropping rocks. We haven't seen that Dragaeran culture has any knowledge of physics at all, although we can't be certain that they are ignorant of the sciences either. They at least have *some* chemistry (petroleum refining), but we don't know how recent a development that is. > >> BTW, I am not sure that the arrangement you describe would be >> *impossible* without computers. >> ... 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. >> At any rate, it doesn't necessarily require a digital computer. > >I assert that no technical preindustrial society would be able to >support a system with varying-length hours, Er, we just said how they support it: By not stressing over the length or the number of the minutes. All they cared about was dividing the *day* into hours, not subdividing furthur. > > not simply because of the difficulty of keeping time, but the horror >of accounting for time periods in contracts, between time zones, ... > Good grief. All they need to care about is the granularity of the day. And as someone else pointed out, time zones are a mostly modern invention (for fairly broad meanings of "modern"; certainly post-Roman, for example, although I may need to research that better), only applicible and possible with modern timekeeping and communications.