On Wed, 6 Aug 2003, David Silberstein wrote: > 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.] Aside - since it's less work for the receiver to delete a double email than for the sender edit the cc/to (under pine, anyway), I don't care about receiving extras, but will honor your request - do others care? > My point is that such cultures don't divide time down to the minute > (let alone the second). The point of my argument, and perhaps we're arguing past each other, is that it's likely that the Dragaeran colonists either maintained the Terran second/minute/hour and instituted a lunar system, or they changed the time units, and from a scientific perspective the second is sacred. Obviously the former system wouldn't work after the loss of technology, and in fact isn't present by the Paarfiad, so I doubt one Dragaeran minute equals one Terran minute. And see below re seconds. > >I wonder about Dragaeran music - perhaps they found some old metronomes... > > Metronomes are 19th-century inventions. I suspect the Vladiad is meant to occur post-19th century. Pre-Jenoine texts survived, why not simple metronomes? > sciences either. They at least have *some* chemistry (petroleum > refining), but we don't know how recent a development that is. I think "petroleum" is a mistranslation. > >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. By technical I meant to exclude Rome etc. By varying I meant hour_i = n seconds but m for i=j. Dragaerans can measure and in fact care about fine gradations of time - the greymist bomb can be maintained for 8 seconds, and presumably other spells have tight parameters.