Thursday, October 17, 2013

Valued overseas visitors,

Advice for your NZ tourism Experience: #8

When arranging meetings or bookings, be clear whether you are measuring time in New Zealand minutes or international chronocurrency.
The NZ minute was tied to the Imperial scale until a well-intentioned move to the metric system in 1967. It was subsequently devalued and revalued according to the whims of politicians, and was fixed at the 80-minute hour for most of the 1980s.

That became unsustainable in 1992. Since then the NZ minute has been freely convertible with the exchange rate determined by the currency market. For a while 90 NZ minutes was the equivalent of only about half-an-hour in UK Time Sterling, but it has strengthened and at the current exchange rate it's more like 45 UK minutes.

In an unexpected side-effect of tampering with the laws of physics, all the silly-buggers with chronology has caused the speed of light to slow down dramatically, to the extent that inter-city trains reach sufficient speed to experience relativistic distortion.
Only Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction is available by train. Due to the backwardness of rural NZ, the effects are not updated to include Penrose-Terrell Rotation. To experience the full panoply of relativistic Penrose distortions you must travel by intra-city rapid transit.

Belatedly UPDATED with Bonus Relativistic Effects.

4 comments:

ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© said...

Overseas visitor pelts aren't worth much, these days.
~

Substance McGravitas said...

It is awfully handy to have those minutes around before last call, but if you're drunk you can spill them on the floor and people will be time-slipping all over the place.

Big Bad Bald Bastard said...

Now, now, we all know that this is all due to a Riddled time machine mishap. Own up, old chum!

mikey said...

With a bit of a mind flip
You're into a time slip
And nothing...Will ever be the same

You're spaced out a sensation
Like you're under sedation
Let's do the Time Warp again...