Rick Measham schreef:
 In his question, he assumes that each period (night/day) should be
 evenly divided into 12 parts. However this stinks to me! Surely in
 the middle of winter, the hour before sunrise shouldn't be a heap
 longer than the hour after? Surely the lengths of hours should slowly
 decrease towards noon and then increase again towards midnight. I
> figured this is a sine wave.

At 9:39 PM +0200 19/6/03, Eugene van der Pijll wrote:
That would perhaps be nicer for us computer-owning people, but that
wasn't how it was implemented in ancient times. It is really much easier
to have only two different hour lengths per day. You only need two
different clepsydras that way.

Sorry, I should have said that I wasn't interested in the historical context for this, only in the mathmatics behind it. I realised that historically they wouldn't have done what I was suggesting, but as you say, for us computer owning people it would be nice.


Sorry for the confusion

Cheers!
Rick
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