[Varyon]

Originally Posted by johndallman

"Local time" is a slippery concept. Time zone boundaries are a human invention. Does the effect follow them, or does it work by the position of the sun?

Didn't really think about it for that blurb, but I'd say position of the sun, but with strictly defined bands that work out to be roughly comparable to the timezones we use. That is, you can cross from an area where the band sets things at 4:00 into one where it is 5:00 by traveling east, and you aren't considered to have passed through 4:44 at any point in-between.

Originally Posted by Mysterious Dark Lord v3.2

Hmmm ...

A rich dude's medical busness would be large airplanes that circle the Earth in under 24 hours, thus making the sickly and/or elderly passengers practically immortal.

(And fighter-plane rental services all along the flight route for the radical Distributist market.)

Because of the way the barriers between timezones work, you don't even need fast airplanes - find where the divide occurs, and build your clinic in the middle. Starting at 4:00 (on the eastern side), wheel your patients from the western side of the building to the eastern, wait until 6:00 (on the eastern side), then wheel them back over. They'll eventually be so old their bodies will go completely comatose (if their brains aren't already essentially mush), but they'll never actually die unless you fail to send them east soon enough.

Originally Posted by malloyd

And if it's Japanese, why does it use western hours and not traditional koku? Japan didn't adopt hours until the end of the 19th century.

I assumed traditional Japanese time wouldn't quite have the sort of divisions that lead themselves to a time like 4:44, and after reading some about it, I'm glad I went where I did. Seriously, hours lasted longer or shorter depending on the season and if you were measuring daytime or nighttime. And which 4 o'clock would I use - Snake, in the middle of the day, or Pig, in the middle of the night?