Re: Technical question: The units of a timeline

David Friedman wrote: 
In article <MPG.1df663d07dffde72989b46@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
 Joann Zimmerman <jzimm@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


In article <87veybnv8l.fsf@xxxxxxxxxxx>, elf@xxxxxxxxxxx says...

What are the individual, atomic units of a timeline called?  It's not
"scene" as I sometimes have two (or more) scenes happening at the same
time.  The best of I've come up with is "moment", but for some reason
that doesn't feel right.

Any better suggestions?

"Moment" seems fine, as does "instant" or (duh) "time". I may see it as a "spot" or even "slot", if I'm feeling visual. If you're trying to synchronize/note simultaneity between two different scene streams, then I'd probably use "tick" as denoting an absolute, independent of any given plot/story line.

Um, just how clean is your cat?


Event? 

In AI literature (temporal reasoning) there are two basic approaches
to reasoning about time: one uses "events" and the other "intervals".

An instantaneous action is an event, whereas something with duration
(a continuous process) occurs during an interval.

Of course, these can be combined, so that for example, a catnap might
occur during an interval, and be bounded by a start event (falling
asleep) and an end event (waking). And then you can get hierarchical,
and regard the "falling asleep" as a process, which occupies a
short interval. (Bounded by "starting to fall asleep" and "actually
being asleep" events.)

It can all get very mathematical (and usually does :-)).

If you take "event" as fundamental, then you might regard the "moment"
when it occurs as being a whole day (e.g. a city was sacked on the
fourth day after the full moon). And an event can contain other events
(e.g. "the walls were breached" is an event that occured during the
event "the city was sacked".)

If you allow events to occur inside other events, you might wonder how
they differ from intervals. The short answer is that the mathematical
axiomatisation is different :-). In particular, in many/most
formulations events can't overlap.

However, I tend to favour the interval approach, although "interval" is
a slightly unfortunate choice of word from the writing POV: how
natural is it to say "during the interval in which I was waiting for the
kettle to boil, the phone rang"?

Jonathan

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