The Climate of Middle-Earth 163
sciencehabit writes "One does not simply model the climate of Mordor; unless, of course, you are the University of Bristol's Dan Lunt, who has created a climate simulation of J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Using supercomputers and a model originally developed by the U.K. Met Office, his study compares Middle-earth's climate with those of our (modern) and the dinosaur's (Late Cretaceous) worlds. The Middle-earth model reveals that the Shire — home to the Hobbits — would enjoy weather much like England's East Midlands, with an average temperature of 7C and about 61 cm of rainfall each year. An epic journey to Mount Doom, however, would see a shift in climate, with the subtropical Mordor region being more like Los Angeles or western Texas."
The full academic paper is available in English, Elvish, and Dwarfish.
Wait.... (Score:3)
I thought Texas was Mordor?
Re:Wait.... (Score:5, Funny)
and they have a cave troll (Score:2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAyh23l1mx4 [youtube.com]
That's the first time I've ever seen... (Score:3)
...the word "jobs" typoed "orcs." [battleswarmblog.com]
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Or as we refer to them here in Texas, whorcs.
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The eye is in D.C. but the hole at the other end is here [state.tx.us]
Orcish translation? (Score:4, Funny)
We need this translated into Orcish, too, so the professional global warming denialists can properly read and respond to it.
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Don't forget Trollish...... :)
Re:Orcish translation? (Score:5, Insightful)
No need. Orcs mostly speak the common tongue or else their own tribal dialect. The Black Speech -- as devised by the Dark Lord in elvish runes -- was a failed attempt to linguistically distinguish his followers from those of the Alliance. It didn't take among the Orcs, but strangely the East End London accent did.
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Well, there's "take", and there's "take". By the end of the Third Age, many of the tribal dialects were in fact heavily corrupted and debased versions of Black Speech, but they were not intelligible to each other, nor to a speaker of pure Black Speech.
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Wrong.
And it's actually the Dark Lady:
http://www.gewoon-nieuws.nl/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/angela-merkel3.jpg [gewoon-nieuws.nl]
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Oh come on, every knows Orcs an global warming denialists don't read!
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No, it is not. (And stop getting your scientific news from your political media.) We are currently in the cool part of the El Nino - La Nina cycle, but every cycle is hotter than the one before.
Look at a graph of the temperatures (link below) over a long enough time, and you'll see a regular rise and fall with a period on the order of a decade or longer, the El Nino cycle. We are on the "falling" part of that cycle now, but disturbingly, it's not falling as usual so much as it is just leveling off a bit.
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Oh, well, we call it Winter and knows what? It happens every 6 months. and actually only half of the globe is affected :(
Yeah, but... (Score:2, Funny)
with an average temperature of 7C
(Insert hick accent) Yeah, but what's that in degrees?
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(Insert physics hick accent) That's 280 kelvins, and don't let me ever hear you spewing that "dee-grees" nonsense in my house again!
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As in OED definition 1a,b [oed.com], in the sense of a "step" on a scale --- each "degree" is one of 100 steps on the (somewhat arbitrarily chosen) scale between the freezing and boiling points of water (at standard pressure).
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Because "degrees" is used with every unit used to measure temperature, as in degrees Celsius, degrees Fahrenheit, degrees Kelvin, degrees Reumur.
Usually you won't write it, but 'say' it while reading, or you even ommit the unit.
In europe no one says / writes degrees Celsius, or says the temperature is 35 celsius, you only say: it is 35 degrees.
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Unlike the degree Fahrenheit and degree Celsius, the kelvin is not referred to or typeset as a degree.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelvin [wikipedia.org]
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Wikipedia does not count :)
Ofc every one I know 'says' degree to kelvin, too.
However strictly speaking as a physicist, you ommit the degree part and only use the unit, just like in feet vs. meter.
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As I see it we have a "discrepancy" of used language versus what a physician would say.
In the "used" language, most people (well, can only talk about germany) like to add the "degrees" and then mention the unit (Fahrenheit etc.)
Or only use degrees and assume the "assumable" unit. Or they simply use the unit, if they are in a situation where this is relevant. I mean, in germany they say: temperature tomorrow is 12 degrees average. (implying 12 'degrees' celsius)
But in a physics experiment they would say it i
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This in an article that amounts to a nerdgasm over academics spending their efforts to model the climate of a fairy tale.
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The point is, telling us the 'average' temperature does little to describe the actual temperature. Thats like saying the average temperature on the moon is only -23 degrees Celsius. Sure, the
"Elvish" (Score:5, Insightful)
... that's not even badly transliterated. Without even looking at it closely, you can tell the entire text lacks vowel diacritics. They probably selected the text and changed the font, which works about as well with Tengwar as it would with Arabic or Hebrew.
Re:"Elvish" (Score:5, Insightful)
(And if this kind of griping sounds overly nerdy, keep in mind they're the ones who decided to model the climate of Middle-Earth. :P )
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That's it exactly. Cut-and-paste into Emacs and it's in English. And no, I have not installed mod-auto-elvish-translate.
emacs doesn't translate it but vi does (Score:2, Funny)
So there.
Commence battle
Re:"Elvish" (Score:4, Interesting)
OT, but I couldn't resist :-)
Actually, non Arabic natives could gain from doing precisely that. The cursive nature of the writing, coupled with the amount of characters that are only differentiated by the number of dots they have, make it a relatively hard language to learn to read. The multiple forms each letter take depending on its position in the word don't help either. In fact, some elementary schools in Israel teach spoken Arabic by using Hebrew letters, not bothering with trying to teach reading or writing.
As someone who went through the motion of pretending to try to learn literary Arabic in school, I actually don't think that's a bad idea. Get some vocabulary and grammar going, and only then dump trying to decipher the text on students. After all, that's also the order in which native Arabic speakers do it.
As for Hebrew, there are some madmen who tried something very similar. See, for example, http://www.stav.org.il/karmeli/ [stav.org.il]. Needless to say, it did not gain any significant traction.
Shachar
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As someone who went through the motion of pretending to try to learn literary Arabic in school, I actually don't think that's a bad idea. Get some vocabulary and grammar going, and only then dump trying to decipher the text on students. After all, that's also the order in which native Arabic speakers do it.
Do native speakers of any language do it any other way?
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I remember reading somewhere, and I do not remember where, that a study found out that Arabic was the language most difficult to read/write from all the languages that use consonants as a writing basis (i.e. - not Chinese). I vaguely remember that they connected this to the cursive nature of the writing, but as this is all from memory (and a while ago), I cannot tell you how.
Shachar
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Came here to post the same thing. Also, Dwarvish is a secret language, and even if Radagast knew it he wouldn't publish a paper in it (nor would anyone writing on paper in whatever language use the Cirth, since the Tengwar were designed for that.)
According to the mode of Beleriand (Score:2)
you can tell the entire text lacks vowel diacritics
So did the writing reform that came out of Beleriand, where vowels were promoted from tehtar (points) to full letters. Remember Durin's gate on the west side of Moria [tolkiengateway.net], noted for the weak default password that Narvi set and Celebrimbor leaked? The inscription on that was written with vowels as letters.
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Elvish really suffers from a lack of sufficient definition. Quenya is close to having enough material in it, and people have done some writing in it, but even there, you'd have to make up large swaths to fill in the blanks to be able to fully use it as a language. Sindarin is worse, and there's nothing more than snippets of anything else.
Klingon, on the other hand, has been sufficiently defined that people can and have used it as an actual lanaguage.
Mordor weather is like Los Angeles?? (Score:2)
Do they even know what LA weather is like? It's about 300 days of sunshine here. On the other hand, Mordor is a barren wasteland, riddled with fire and ash and dust, the very air you breathe is a poisonous fume.... from all that volcanic discharge from Mount Doom.
Re:Mordor weather is like Los Angeles?? (Score:5, Funny)
"Mordor is a barren wasteland, riddled with fire and ash and dust, the very air you breathe is a poisonous fume"
So how's that different from LA?
Re:Mordor weather is like Los Angeles?? (Score:4, Funny)
Re: So how's that different from LA? (Score:5, Funny)
Mordor has a much better public transit system.
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sounds more like New Delhi. The only place I know (there might well be others) that uses "smoke" to describe local weather phenomena.
Re: Mordor weather is like Los Angeles?? (Score:2, Funny)
Not with ten thousand men could you model this... it is folly.
Re:Mordor weather is like Los Angeles?? (Score:4, Informative)
The Plains of Gorgoroth that Frodo and Sam struggled across fits that description, yes. But Nurn, around the Sea of Nurnen in the southeast was quite fertile (though not pleasant--no place in Morder was pleasant) and raised abundant crops. After all, Sauron's armies had to be fed somehow.
Re: Mordor weather is like Los Angeles?? (Score:2)
Well, the rate of earthquakes has doubled this last decade,focused at the Nevada border, where some think that a Mount Doom is about to break loose (well, aecaldera super-volcano, anyway.). There's another such location at volcano national Park in northern CA.
Yes but... (Score:5, Funny)
...what are we going to do about Middle-Earth warming?!?
Re:Yes but... (Score:4, Funny)
But go not to the Elves for counsel, for they shall say both solar and oil.
Does whatever a Saru can (Score:2)
seek the council of Saruman.
Saruman, Saruman, does whatever a Saru can, but how will that be enough?
Mordor... (Score:2)
East TX (think Houston) would be more appropriate, as it is truly a subtropical climate. West Texas is semi arid.
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Well, Texas *does* have more Trolls than anywhere else, if Patent Litigation is any indicator.
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Egads, that was supposed to be...
Well, East Texas *does* have more Trolls than anywhere else, if Patent Litigation is any indicator.
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Yeah, if you look at a climate map [wikimedia.org], West Texas, as you said, is clearly arid or semiarid, depending on exactly where we're talking about. East Texas is classified as subtropical, but, then again, so is almost all of the southeastern US, and I'd imagine that a place like the backwoods of the deep South is hardly what most people have in their head when they think of what "subtropical" looks like, despite the fact that it actually is.
But Houston is a great example. Houston is essentially a massive marsh that
Amazing. (Score:3)
This story broke my nerdometer.
fishing (Score:4, Insightful)
Fishing for an Ig Nobel Prize perhaps, good luck!
Not Elvish and Dwarfish (Score:3, Informative)
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... as were nearly all examples of tengwar and dwarf-runes we have from Tolkien's own hand.
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A lot of Tolkien's tengwar writing was English, but it was actual English writing, where the ‘t’ tengwa stood for the ‘t’ sound and the ‘a’ tehta stood for the ‘a’ sound.
But even a glancing look* at TFA shows that they just selected the text and changed the font. If it had been transliterated English, that would have gotten them some points in my book, but this...
* There are no tehta (vowel diacritics) anywhere, nor any full-mode vowel characters; that should
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And it's not even using them properly. You can transliterate English into Tengwar script pretty well (though you have to decide whether to go with phonetic or English spelling), but whatever happened to this text makes it just a bunch of random letters that can't be pronounced.
These guys have broken the Fifth Rule (Score:2)
They have taken themselves far too seriously.
"No university would employ me today" (Score:2)
Just a few stores below in my feed, I see this
Physicist Peter Higgs: "I wouldn't be productive enough for today's academic system" [theguardian.com]
I'm not against screwing around with the lab computer on off hours and make it model "Middle Earth"...that's a fun idea...no, I'm mortified that this became an official research project and was published.
It proves what Peter Higgs was saying in the most weirdly fun yet depressing way....
Re:"No university would employ me today" (Score:4, Insightful)
Proves? You mean, disproves. This publication isn't in a peer-reviewed journal; it's not contributing to the author's official publication count. Instead, it's an example of a researcher being able to follow his own interests, and do personally-motivated stuff with no short-term payoff in "publish-or-perish" terms; in other words, exactly what Higgs is worried researchers today aren't able to do. This one isolated counter-example doesn't prove that Higgs' concerns aren't valid, but it certainly does not support them.
By Radagast the Brown (Score:2)
yeah you got me there...this looks like what I was advocating
you can tell I'm a bit disgruntled about the whole experience of working in academia....this is actually good news!
Subtropical? (Score:2)
with the subtropical Mordor region being more like Los Angeles or western Texas.
I do believe that anyone that bothered to read the books would know that Mordor was arid, volcanic in climate, hardly subtropical. L.A. is temperate bordering on semi-arid, and West Texas is certainly semi-arid to arid, a bit more like Mordor minus the volcanoes, fishers and orcs. (And, did I forget to mention the giant spider, spawn of Ungoliant at the back door?) That Mordor? Texas ain't anything like that Mordor. But, then again there is evil that lives there. Hmmmm....
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Doubtful (Score:2)
I find it very hard to believe that Tolkien created such a perfect world that its climates would naturally be just as he described.
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Models work from assumptions. The assumptions you put into them don't have to be plausible; a model simply spits out the consequences of the initial conditions you choose. Thus you could start a simulation of the Earth which started with the tropical seas being frozen and the polar seas being at 38 C. Those initial conditions are impossible, but the computer program will faithfully spit out *some* kind of result.
New Zealand (Score:5, Funny)
Fantasy climate models: only ones that are valid (Score:2)
Finally, climate models find a world where their accuracy doesn't constitute a risk; a world where their results aren't partial lies or won't be used for political or financial gain.
Just keep them out of reality, thanks.
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Which part makes this science?/quote. The part where they model the climate of the late Cretaceous period?
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And, who exactly funds "science" like this.
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FTFA: "The model simulations were carried out on the supercomputers of the Advanced Centre for Research Computing at the University of Bristol. They were not funded in any way, and were set up in the author’s spare time."
Re:Science (Score:5, Insightful)
Why yes, I suspect they were done "on the supercomputer's spare time." That's what "nice -n 20" is for. Most university compute clusters aren't running at 100% capacity 100% of the time --- there are gaps between intense clusters of jobs queued up by researchers. Without strong proof otherwise, I'd highly doubt that any other researchers had their schedules set behind waiting for Middle Earth simulations.
As for the electricity cost --- sure, someone may have spent a few tens of dollars there. For a result with high visibility and outreach potential, encouraging public attention to (and potential future participation in, via motivated youngsters) science. If you're so miserly that you don't think such expense is worthwhile, even just for putting a smile on many people's faces, then please fuck off; you're a miserable burden to humanity that would rather see everyone's life gray and miserable than dare spending 0.00000001% of tax money on anything you don't personally want.
Re:Science (Score:5, Insightful)
You're technically correct that "nice" isn't the command you use for specifying batch job priorities on a multi-node system (I also don't know what the specific setup of the University of Bristol's computational resources is). Nonetheless, there's typically some equivalent in the batch job submission system (and/or automatically enforced by per-user or per-group policies) for specifying job priority --- how many nodes to run at once, and what priority they are given against competing requests. Unless you have evidence otherwise, I'd consider it highly unlikely that Dr. Lunt's simulations were run in "use every single node the system has, while blocking all other requests" mode --- much more likely, they would have been trickled in to otherwise unused nodes, with negligible impact on anyone else's "real" research.
So, yes, these results were "funded" by the university --- at such minuscule levels compared to formal funding of personnel and resources that they will never appear above rounding errors. It was "funded" in the same sense that lights left on to illuminate campus walkways at night may provide benefit to pedestrians not at the moment engaged strictly in official university business.
Re: Science (Score:5, Insightful)
As a member of the non-Ferrari-owning social class, I don't lose any sleep worrying that a non-multimillionaire might be permitted to have a little fun in life. For my own more meagre possessions, I'm perfectly happy to lend them out to friends and acquaintances while not in use; accepting a little uncompensated wear and tear on my books or electronics is a negligible price to pay for helping other people out, and living in a community of decent human beings (rather than being a spiteful multimillionaire incensed that a peon valet should enjoy more than misery).
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I suspect it was ran on phase 2. There is usually quite a bit of spare time on it.... except a week before some coursework deadlines when everyone uses it D:
At least, that was the case 2 years ago before I graduated.
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Every researcher I have met has had 30 to 49 % of grant money tagged by the university they were at for overhead such as electricity, janitors, light bulbs, and computing centers.
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Actually, that's not true. Even assuming that the CPU does not do voltage scaling, freqency scaling or other power management, a CPU under heavy load can use 150% or more of the power of the same CPU at idle. And since the higher energy use causes it to run hotter, you pay for that twice as you also have to pay for the A/C to keep it cool as well.
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It's in the UK, the extra heat would be welcome.
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I often wonder why supercomputer clusters aren't geographically distributed so the nodes can be used as space heaters. It seems such a waste putting them all together in the same room...
How else to claim that you actually have central heating?
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And not even all the characters are there (I'm looking at the Cirth version). It's definitely not in Dwarfish, since Tolkien describes in some detail why the adjective form is dwarvish. This was also a secret language, and the dwarves wouldn't publish a paper in it (nor would Radagast, even if he knew it). The alphabet is the Cirth, designed for carved letters, and isn't unique to Dwarvish except for the fact that they carved a lot and there's a bunch of it in The Hobbit. (And, in the illustrations in that
Re:Science (Score:5, Funny)
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Science fiction is supposed to have science in it, some authors spend a lot of effort to model their fictional worlds climate etc.
Fantasy is not controlled by science, so yes it is pointless to model the climate of middle earth with a scientific model.
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Only if you rely on old genre stereotypes. A lot of "fantasy" worlds depict a highly advanced civilization that just happens to refer to things as magic rather than technology, right down to having "magic spells" that are effectively chemical formulas (or recipes) derived through scientific experimentation. On the flipside, plenty of SF universes ignore anything remotely resembling the laws of science and contain technology or weapons with near-magical properties that are clearly just made up.
In other word
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No. Science fiction is just what it says it is... fiction based upon science.
There are blurred lines (especially, for example with FTL travel). However, if you lump fantasy and sci-fi together, you're sticking Harry Potter with Hari Seldon. That does both a disservice.
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Dune?
the Dying Earth Saga ?
Re:Model fails to account for magic and Valar (Score:4, Insightful)
There's no escaping shades of reality in any SF/Fantasy I've ever read. Scratch at any of them, and huge problems are revealed.
McCaffrey's dragons are too powerful. Large size, flying, and fire breathing is pretty stock stuff for dragons. But her dragons are also telepathic, and so emo they each bond with a chosen human rider so closely they kill themselves if their rider dies, and they can teleport (mere flying just ain't good enough), and worst of all, time travel. I'm guessing she realized she'd gone too far, but couldn't make any acknowledgment. Instead, she tried to paper over the problems by introducing restrictions and limitations that unfortunately come across as too arbitrary.
An integral and needless law of Tolkien's world serves only to make things needlessly more special and their loss more tragic. It's this notion that great things can only be done once. Why can't Yavanna simply grow more trees to light the world? Why did she quit at 2 trees to start with? Why can't Feanor make more Silmarillions? No explanation is offered, we're simply told that's the way things are. There's enough real misery in the world, there's no need to invent reasons to be even more miserable. But some people, especially story tellers, do that to be more dramatic, more poignant. This desire for specialness also infects authors' thinking on copyright. Even apart from the obvious self-interested reasons, they're predisposed to like copyright, like the way it puts art on a pedestal.
Another problem with many fantasy stories is what I call the Godzilla or King Kong problem. Huge scary powerful solo monsters that no one expected certainly are dramatic. But improbable. Monster movies are inherently ridiculous because even if such a monster appeared, it would have no chance whatsoever of doing much damage before the massed might of millions of people brought it down. The Watcher in the Water at the west entrance to Moria would in all likelihood starve very quickly. One need only wait. If, somehow, the monster is magically sustained, there are all sorts of other things a crew of engineering sorts like dwarves could do to solve the problem it created. For one, could open another exit nearby, but out of its quite limited reach. Or, could probably set off a rock avalanche, crushing anything in the pool as well as displacing all the water with debris. Could also undermine the dam and drain the pool that way. Or perhaps a more low key approach might work, like dumping poison in the pool. To prevail against all the things a crew of determined engineers could try, the monster would need extraordinary abilities by the dozen. Even the Balrog should have a very difficult time prevailing against an entire nation of dwarves. The Balrog only ran them out of Moria. The sandworms of Dune are slightly more plausible, but still not a real problem for a civilization that can travel interplanetary space. Only Sauron went as far as setting up a rival empire, and thereby stood a real chance of prevailing.
Middle Earth follows many rules of nature. The land is for the most part geologically plausible and sound, with mountains in ranges, rivers rising in the mountains and flowing downhill to the oceans, and woods, marshes, grasslands, deserts and ice in places one might expect. Despite the prominent place of magic in the typical fantasy story, its impact is really quite limited. Gandalf used his brains as much or more than his wizardry. Since the land is familiar to so many readers, why not model its climate for fun?
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<shootdown>the sand worms in "Dune" were not a problem at all, in fact they were essential to a large portion of the story; they were the whole point of the Spice plot: the worm *is* the Spice - as is specifically referred in the movie by the character Paul "Muad-Dib" Atreides.</shootdown>
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Re:Model fails to account for magic and Valar (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, C.S. Lewis had an interesting take on this. He obviously believed in miracles, but he thought of them as becoming "naturalized", in the way a foreigner becomes a naturalized citizen in his adoptive land, and is subsequently bound by the laws of that land. So when the *supernatural* occurs (e.g. drowning the northwest corner of the continent at the end of the First Age), the consequences should follow *naturally*.
I bring this point up with my fantasy writing friends. Just because your world *has* miraculous things in it doesn't mean *everything* should be a miracle. People should have common-sense responses to miraculous things. If wizards throw lightning bolts in battle, then the cavalry shouldn't charge in a tightly packed formation until they're right at the line of battle.
George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire conspicuously soft-pedals magic, but ironically a lot of the world of those stories fails the naturalization test. For example kind of society depicted is dependent upon consistently generating a massive agricultural surplus, something that's not compatible in my opinion with decade-long winters. But I gave up after only a million words into the stories, so maybe that's explained elsewhere.
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I bring this point up with my fantasy writing friends. Just because your world *has* miraculous things in it doesn't mean *everything* should be a miracle. People should have common-sense responses to miraculous things.
Today, as far as the layman's understanding goes, we *are* living in a world with magic. I hear "electricity", and have a vague idea of the relationship between electricity and magnetism (another magical force), but my understanding only goes so deep. However, I flip a switch, expecting light, and it magically appears. How is this different from the hero in a fantasy novel who uses his magic wand to light his way? Neither of us is filled with a sense of awe, because it's something we use every day. We just
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When I first learned of Clarke's axiom, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.", I was thinking about some far-off future, but I have come to realize that a lot of technology is, for many, advanced enough *today* that it might as well be magic.
I hope you're not thinking about electricity here... it's been understood to some degree by decently educated people for hundreds of years.
Just because I do not understand the exact fluid dynamics of liquids (no one does), does not m
Re: Model fails to account for magic and Valar (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, ask my four year old son. Even before he flips the switch, the nearby coal burning plant has a turbine in a wye configuration that puts out a grounded three phase current. Over at the telephone pole, a transformer transforms it down, and two phases come to the house. One of those phases is tied to the light switch. When he flips the switch, the power is then transmitted -- at about a tenth of the speed of light, though the electrons themselves flow at a couple hundred mph -- to the light bulb. This being a fluorescent bulb, the voltage is transformed back upward through cheap junk capacitors, to a voltage capable of triggering the fluorescing gas. The gas then fluoresces according to the blackbody equations, somewhat in the UV, but heavily in the visible spectrum. The light produced sets up a series of changing electric and magnetic fields that then transmit through the air at something like ninety-eight percent of the speed of light in vacuum, to be absorbed by an electron somewhere in his eyeball. That then triggers an enzymatic chemical reaction, whic triggers nerve impulses that are set by the previous signal, and reset by the sodium channel.
Of course he knows all that; everybody knows all that. Otherwise, they might think it was magic.
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Sense maybe not... but you wont deny that it's damn fun and it definitely has the Nerd factor.
I had a lot of fun calculating how much it would take for a group of well trained and dedicated professionals to bring the ring to Mordor and hurl it into Mount Doom. I thought on a group of woodsmen afoot: They would have needed 20-30 days or so. I can't bring back my figures right now (I posted in on facebook to my friends and I now found out that it's fucking impossible to get a post back from this crap site, so
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I wouldn't argue this was a waste of resources as one's weather models should be tested for reasonable results in 'alien' settings. The amount of information and research methods have come a long way. It's not meaningful to compare the environment
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7 degrees Celsius = 44.6 degrees Fahrenheit 61 centimeters of rain = 24.0157 inches
Thanks but people who know Fahrenheit and inches are generally well-educated enough to also know the common lesser measurement system (sort of like how most who speak Elvish also know the common tongue). No translation is necessary for us.
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Klingons are a fictional species.