On Wed, 6 Aug 2003, Philip Hart wrote: > > >On Wed, 6 Aug 2003, David Silberstein wrote: > >> On Wed, 6 Aug 2003, Philip Hart wrote: >> > >> 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, Perhaps we are at that... >is that it's likely that the Dragaeran colonists either maintained When you say "Dragaeran colonists", do you mean the Easterners or the Dragaerans themselves? The Easterners lost their tech, and the Dragaerans were experimental subjects and thus not likely to retain tech from the original colonists anyway. >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. Well, exactly. With that, I entirely agree. > 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? > You seemed to be implying that the tribal Dragaerans had metronomes, which is unlikely given their tech level. Post-Orb Dragaerans would not need metronomes becasue they would have the Orb for time-keeping. :-) But OK, metronomes themselves might well exist *somewhere*. >> 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 don't see why "petroleum" would be a mistranslation since it just means "rock-oil" in Latin. Also, it turns out that the process of petroleum refining goes back several centuries (in our universe, I mean); I think I read somewhere that the alchemists of the Muslim Golden Age figured it out. At any rate, it requires a lower tech level than one might think. Huge refineries for large-scale gasoline production are a modern invention, of course. > >> >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. Well, when you put it that way, I would have to agree with you. The second itself is an invention of a more modern ability to finely divide time. But once you *can* divide time finely and regularly using mechanisms (gears, pendulums, springs, etc), it is then at some point possible to use an arrangement of those mechanisms to track time however you want, including hours of varying length. It may take some time to develop the mechanisms, of course (going from "generally correct clocks" to "accurate clocks" to "accurate clocks that also work at sea" (and so on) took several lifetimes in our history). > 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. > Modern Dragaerans care; I was referring to preindustrial cultures (those lacking fine engineering) in general (although starting to care about finer gradations of time helps propel such engineering research that then develops it). And of course, the Orb is a digital computer as far as timekeeping is concerned, and so could track such variation, if that is in fact how they wished to go about things (not that I have any certainty about whether they do or not).