On Wed, 6 Aug 2003, Philip Hart wrote: >On Wed, 6 Aug 2003, David Silberstein wrote: > >> On Wed, 6 Aug 2003, Philip Hart wrote: > >> >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. > >Ok, well, this disputes an element of Alexx's Timeline (no pun >intended), which is perhaps more reliable than the Texts themselves - >I forget what position Cracks and Shards takes here. > Well, the timeline states that "Hours and minutes are apparently identical to their Terran counterparts, and were presumably established by the original Terran colonists (see below)." But without a specific canonical reference, I tend to doubt that. Heck, even *with* a canonical reference, I might well doubt that, given the fall in tech level. On the other hand... The National Institute of Standards states that: "Since 1967, the International System of Units (SI) has defined the second as the period equal to 9,192,631,770 cycles of the radiation which corresponds to the transition between two energy levels of the ground state of the Cesium-133 atom." So, *if* the Dragaerans found references to the Standard Second, they might easily have calibrated the Orb to use exactly that for the Orb Standard Second, assuming Cesium-133 exists on Dragaera. And why not? But that doesn't mean that the number of seconds per minute would necessarily match up to ours. The statement in the timeline that there are 60 minutes per hour, cited from FHYA 256, might well be an error on the part of Paarfi and/or Brust. Note references to a 24-hour day, later changed to a 30-hour day.