On Wed, 6 Aug 2003, Philip Hart wrote: #On Wed, 6 Aug 2003, Alexx S Kay wrote: # #> ... #> Hours have 60 minutes (FH 256). Hours and minutes are apparently #> identical to their Terran counterparts, and were presumably established by #> the original Terran colonists (see below). # #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. I think they're about equal. I can't prove it, but my argument is at http://world.std.com/~mam/Cracks-and-Shards/time.html#clock and quoted below. Brust commented on it to the effect of, IIRC, "congratulations on unraveling the games I play with time and numbers". >>> I think the Dragaeran minute and hour are about the same as ours. First of all, they feel right in terms of the time things take, and I don't think Brust would deliberately confuse us with these terms without a good reason, which I don't see. Note that four meals a day seems standard [TPG205,433,FHYAxxx]. Second, the year seems to be about the same length: Noish-pa is 70, "which is a very impressive age" for an Easterner [Yen206]; and remember that most Easterners in the Empire live in poverty, which shortens lifespan. And the Dragaeran year (see below) has 17*17*30 = 8670 hours, while our Terran year has about 365*24=8760 hours, a difference of just over 1 percent. Brust has Dragaera so carefully and consistently laid out that I wouldn't be surprised if he chose the 30-hour day specifically to make the hours and the 172-day years both come out about equal to ours, so he could use them without confusing his readers. Otherwise, why not use the ubiquitous mystical number and give the day 17 or 34 hours? It's easy for Brust to bring out the difference between the Dragaeran week and ours: just make the Eastern week the same as ours, seven days, and have Vlad remark on it [Yen18]. But the lengths of the day and year are the same on both sides of the mountains, and how would Vlad know about our world at all to express the contrast? -- Mark A. Mandel http://world.std.com/~mam/Cracks-and-Shards/ a Steven Brust Dragaera fan website