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Phillip Cunio's Commentary:
The Long Minute
4-6-2004 A long
minute, as all who study rocket science and other fantastically
esoteric and arcane subjects (like me) know, is actually a
defined unit of time. It is neither a really long pause between
words, the instant between your worst faux pas ever and the
beginning of your exile from polite society, nor what a three-hours'
date with Einstein's old girlfriend from that joke feels like.
A long minute is, of course, actually just a conveniently-defined way to get around some basic measurement problems, stemming in part from the fact that technology has advanced far, but not so far that we know everything about everything, especially when we can neither really go to everywhere nor just drop anything onto a scale. Also, it really only applies to one small item, which is part of a subset of items which were all created to deal, in conveniently easy fashion (unless it's on the test), with the aforementioned problem. Also, a long minute is not the duration of a fairy tale, nor is it really irrelevant to things of the real world, as I found out the other day. And a long minute is also not the amount of time that one item will occasionally stay posted on The Snod's front page. We do have lives outside of the mystical Internet, and some of us use these lives for good, while others, like D'Man, don't really seem to have much use at all. So what exactly is a long minute? About 806.1 seconds. |