One:Extended Unified Timeline

The Extended Unified Timeline is one of several attempts to establish a reliable correspondence between the several thousand existing methods of recording temporal distance between events. Like all such timelines, the EUT is ultimately unsuccessful, but has gained widespread use in academic circles due to its relative comprehensiveness.

History

The original Unified Timeline was developed by an international consortium of chronological theorists at the Fifth/Eight Annual Nairobi Conference and essentially ignored for the next two decades. The "Extended" version, which resembles the original only in format and a number of Key Dates, was the life's work of Professor Jean La Lime, a colleague and mentor of the author. La Lime's untimely death is the cause of the Timeline's several minor lacunae.

Use

The EUT is a complex instrument, the proper use of which depends on physical and dimensional location, mental state, and available quantity of both scrap paper and oxygen. Physically, it resembles a massive book, with most of its pages unfolding into large, easily-torn panels. The user, seeking to establish the chronological correspondence between (for example) the Arlington Address and the Long Afternoon, cross-tabulates each against its geographic position and the most ontologically relevant Key Date to determine the correct match-table to use. This table is memorized, copied longhand, and then burned. Re-executing this procedure recursively will eventually provide a useful estimate of the precise temporal distance between the original inputs.