“How long is an hour?” Declan asks. He already knows the answer.
It’s a trick question. An hour used to be sixty minutes on the sundial–or sixty minutes, plus or minus a smidge of an Olympic fraction of a microsecond that over time changed the calendars of history.
Today, I that’s not the case.
Twelve hours in Minecraft time is ten minutes. A Minecraft day is 2o minutes, which means an hour is 1/12th of 2o minutes or about a minute and two-thirds.
In sports, an hour is much longer once you account for TV time outs and penalties.
In download time an hour’s seconds or minutes. That’s not what it says, though. “Download time: 4 hours.” They give you the worst-case scenario just in case I’m using public internet or at school even though things always download quicker than that.
An hour when I’m hungry is an eternity. An hour when I’m waiting for important news, five centuries at least.
Now that I’m big there’s always something to do, so time passes quickly. On those days, an hour is five minutes, or five seconds even.
So, I don’t know how long an hour is.
“Which hour?” I ask.
“Mom, you know… the one that’s sixty minutes.”
Nicely done, kid. Looks like you had the answer all along.
Photo credit: Wikipedia Commons
