Re: measuring time

About a month or so ago there was a good thread on how a subterrainian race 
might measure periods of time in absence of celestial events.

I rather like the way different sorts of measures are interdependent in 
metric; how mass is related to volume is related to length, etc. You could 
do something similar for time; not in the sense of 1 meter being the length 
that light travels in one three-hundred thousandth of a second, but 
something possibly pre-technological.

Like:
1) The day is divided into n "fohon", which is how much time it takes for a 
1 "girun"-long candle (grade A tallow, diameter 1/8 girun) to burn down.
2) For a desert culture: A fohon is the amount of time it would take an 
exposed body to lose 1 lopan (= 1 cubic girun) in sweat.
3) For an arctic, A fohon is the amount of time it takes one lopan of water 
to freeze at 0 degrees woa'an. Or maybe for one lopan of ice to melt.
4) For a maritime climate, a fohon is the approximate amount of time just 
after high tide for the water to fall 1 girun. (Or maybe the day's fohons 
are different lengths depending on the time of day. Fohons are short when 
the tide rises/falls quickly and long when slow.)

So if a fohon is about an hour, you can get minutes or seconds by 
calculating the same for centiguhun or millilopan or whatever. It won't be 
especially accurate, but I don't think you have pre-scientific cultures 
tending to slice things down to the second, much, anyway. "You're a minute 
and a half late for the harvest, McTighe; we're gonna have to dock you three 
cabbages."

On 6/16/05, # 1 <salut_vous_autre@...> wrote:

> 
> For the moment, I'm not making it as if it were for a scientifically
> advanced people so I'd like to know those non-arbitary basis. I really 
> can't
> think of something that is regular in duration in nature
> 
> >If you have units of length, I suppose you could define a pendulum,
> >and make the period of that your unit. Or define an hour-glass or
> >water-clock of particular dimensions. Usually you'd have the unit
> >first and make a clock to count it, though, not the other way around.
> >
> 
> Yeah that's what I did for lenght so, if I could, I would do it for time 
> too
> 
> But that's true I could use a hour-glass
> 
> But until now, I thought that subdivisions of a day were too hard to 
> create
> for a people without technology but if they use a stick in the ground, 
> watch
> the shadow, and divide the circle in equal parts
> 
-- 
Patrick Littell
PHIL205: MWF 2:00-3:00, M 6:00-9:00
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