Sundial with "multitudinous faces"?

Jerry Friedman · 12 May 2011, 20:00 · from 2011-May.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: jerry_friedman at yahoo.com (Jerry Friedman)
Date: Thu, 12 May 2011 13:00:05 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: (urth) Sundial with "multitudinous faces"?
In-Reply-To: <4DCC1FEC.9090904 at gmail.com>
References: <BANLkTi=Av8hgtqywSRrR2u2RK1besHpTBg at mail.gmail.com>
	<4DCB99B5.9090009 at io.com>
	<A4F1B6DA-7F73-4378-A889-3518B09A8DCA at butcherbaker.org>
	<BANLkTimfpzXR86OM+rS70VXQVF6V3dKGYw at mail.gmail.com>
	<BANLkTimFOJ2tbs42r+AdaU_DGq5ow4G2AQ at mail.gmail.com>
	<426F9A20-11AC-4493-AE69-5D8162933F6A at butcherbaker.org>
	<BANLkTikE9n4fvYpwQ6Zj2v7JVB+_bYza6A at mail.gmail.com>
	<BANLkTina2hR=CT=MhAAiayaEq853NG5YvQ at mail.gmail.com>
	<4DCC1FEC.9090904 at gmail.com>
Message-ID: <881344.47809.qm at web114712.mail.gq1.yahoo.com>

> From: James Wynn 
Gwern: > >> It occurred to me that the sundials probably date back to Urth's
> >> interstellar empire if not earlier. Maybe they tell times on different
> >> *worlds*.
Dan'l: > > I don't see how you could do that - a sundial is limited to a 24-hour
> > cycle (during about half of which it isn't showing anything).
> 
> I would think you could. Any regular tick-tock could analogize a time using a 
>different synch. It would be incredibly complex though since a day somewhere 
>else would be represented by more or less than a single cycle of the sun.

It would have to be magic.? Sundials don't have a regular tick-tock.

> However, doesn't Relativity eliminate the meaning of synchronous time for 
>locations separated by many lightyears?

There's no problem if they're not moving at relativistic speeds with respect to 
each other (contrary to occasional double-talk that Poul Anderson permitted 
himself).

So maybe not different worlds, but different whorls.? If a generation starship's 
day is the same length as Urth's, it's no problem.? Having a different face 
instead of a different scale of hours is showing off, but obviously people have 
done that.? (Thanks to all who?linked to?the interesting photos.)

> I'm not an expert on this but it seems I read something that implied that. For 
>example, traveling in a worm-hole (such the ones in the Stargate franchise) is 
>actually Time-travel as well.

If you can get from one place to another faster than light, as with a wormhole, 
then you *can* use that to travel faster than light.

Jerry Friedman

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net