May 2
I got up at my usual time and got right into my flight gear. The nice lady on the radio said that she'd missed me and I told her I'd been sick but I was better now, and I got permission to fly. I reminded myself that I was going to see if I could come and visit her someday. Probably the easiest way to do it would be to ask Mister Salvatore to arrange it; she was always talking to other airplanes and that was a lot of responsibility that I shouldn't interrupt.
It was kind of chilly and overcast outside, and it smelled like it had rained not that long ago. Looking up at the clouds I figured that it would rain some more during the day, but probably not too much.
That was the kind of rain most ponies liked the least, and we'd learned in weather management classes how to avoid it. It was basically when you had just a little too much moisture to stay up, but not enough to sustain a good rain. Or sometimes you had different temperatures in the sky and the rain would fall but not make it all the way to the ground. Humans called that virga, and because they had uncontrolled weather with some really really high clouds it was a lot more common on Earth. We didn't really have a name for it, because it was usually a screw-up.
I wasn't going to let it dampen my spirits, though. I darted around right at the base of the cloud and listened for airplanes. I didn't know how thick the clouds were so I didn't want to try and fly through them.
I landed a bit later than I had intended to and I certainly didn't have time to send a computer letter to Mister Salvatore, so I just wrote a note to myself and put it on my desk so that I would see it and remember later. Then I got in the shower and it was kind of lonely, but it made me smile when I remembered how both Aquamarine and Cayenne had struggled getting over the edge of the bathtub while I could fly right over. And maybe in a couple of hours when Cayenne got up she would be soaping herself in the shower with her loofah and thinking how nice it was that she could just move it wherever she wanted with her telekinesis rather than have to struggle to get everything.
While I was preening, I plucked out some more stray feathers and put them on my desk so that they'd dry off before I went and added them to my collection. I'd lost a couple of primaries, which were big enough I could make a wall-sized dreamcatcher if I wanted to.
Everyone was happy to see me back at breakfast and in a good mood. I told them all about my weekend and how great Gusty had been in the play and that they were going to go an extra week because it was so good and then they were going to perform in Stratford and Joe asked me which one and I didn't know that there was more than one.
He said that there was one in Ontario that was pretty close and probably the one she was thinking of, or there was the original Stratford in England, and I said I would ask her next time I wrote her.
Professor Sir Doctor Banerjee reminded us about Poincaré sections, and explained how that simplified orbits by reducing one dimension and I'm glad that he reminded us because I hadn't been paying good enough attention on Friday when he first went over it. And he reminded us that we could only count piercings from one direction in that plane; the other ones didn't count.
He explained autonomous systems and non-autonomous systems, and explained how the state space of a non-autonomous system was on a cylinder, and rolled up the paper to show us how time zero and time 2π were the same thing, and it would repeat like that.
Then he gave another example of an electrical circuit, and I got completely lost because everyone in class understands exactly how electricity works, except for me. I don't understand how you can make little copper paths for it to follow without it jumping to other places, but that's how it works on Earth.
At lunch I decided that maybe I could educate myself some on electricity because Sean must know all about it because he knows about computers and everything inside works on electricity. But it turned out that as smart as he was he didn't know all that much about what kept the electricity on the right path; he just knew what it did when it got where it was going. Still, that was useful because he explained how logic gates worked and then used his pocket telephone to show me how a computer made out of dominos (not the pizza) could add numbers together.
Professor Amy taught us about social stratification. She said that privilege doesn't just mean that which is obvious, but all the unspoken rules which are what the social stratification causes.
She said that in egalitarian societies, everyone is born with an equal chance, and that most hunting and gather societies are like that. That was what pegasus societies are like; everypony is equal and it's what you accomplish that matters, not who your mother is.
In rank societies, there is a difference in prestige, which was based on how close you were to an important person. It occurred to me that was what unicorns like to do: they based their social status on how close they were to an important unicorn, which is why it was so important to them to keep track of all their ancestors, and that was a silly system because it could change arbitrarily. If Gusty wound up becoming an important actress, than all of a sudden her sisters would have more rank than they had had before, even though they hadn't done anything.
Imagine if we had such a silly system: my sister would suddenly be more important because I was the only pegasus with a pilot's license.
And there were a whole lot of other types of social standing, and they could vary from one place to another. One of the dumbest that humans liked to use was color, which was silly because they were all different colors and not even as colorful as ponies, and I couldn't see how it could make any difference at all what color they were.
Even the unicorns had more sense than that.
We had Italian food for dinner again but this time they had two different trays of ravioli, which is a little pasta sandwich. One had meat in it and one which didn't, which is the one I picked. And they also had all sorts of sauce and I tried some of the ravioli without it but it was too dry so I got some and decided I'd just be careful to keep it out of my muzzle.
Of course it was one thing to think that and another to actually do it but at least I entertained Christine, who would helpfully point out spots and then laugh when I licked them off.
Then Sean said he was kind of jealous of my tongue, and Christine went and got a cherry and plucked the stem off of it and worked it around in her mouth for a moment and stuck it back out and it had a knot in it. So I got a cherry and tried it for myself but I couldn't do it and she said it wasn't just how long your tongue was but how well you used it and both Peggy and I agreed with her.
I spent some of the evening reading the rest of Samuel, then I went over to Aric's early but he wasn't there, and I couldn't send a telegram to him because I had left my telephone back at my dorm room. So I let myself in with the key because I knew he wouldn't mind and I went up to his bedroom and found a book on his bookshelf which was called Letters from the Earth which made me think that Mister Twain didn't have a lot of use for God's rules.
I wonder if God got mad at him because of it?
I read until my eyelids got heavy and Aric still wasn't there so I stretched out on his bed and closed my eyes and hoped that he would be there in the morning.
Squee, worldbuilding! I wonder if electricity really works completely differently in Equestria, or if she just hasn't ever seen electricity other than lightning.
I like how this passage manages to combine a Take That, Humanity with Hypocritical Humor.
how the fuck
if you know what I mean
I'm waiting for one or two of The Other Stories I'm following to show the humans so proud of their technology offering to put widescreen displays and computers in the Hoofer Dam installation and then discover the ponies have lossless Wireless power transmission. How else could you send power to the weather Factory in Cloudsdale? I'd like to imagine that there's a room with crystals for each subscriber and then power is sent through some sort of quantum entanglement like process.
Considering that the weather factory is in the clouds, I'm guessing that if they use electricity they have their own generator.
As to Mark Twain, he wrote some pretty harsh anti war stuff the last 15 years of his life. He was a curmudgeon.
The difference between a computer made with dominos and a computer made with Domino's is that the second one can only calculate that you're a cheap git with no taste in pizza.
7351207 The reason that electricity stays on its path is that it current flows down the path of least resistance. Unless you create a large enough electric field between one point of your circuit and an outside point (which will cause the air or insulator around your circuit to ionise) there will be no other path. Such a field is generally impossible in low voltage logic devices like computers, but in high voltage distribution networks and, more importantly, lightning, such electric fields can exist, especially if the high voltage system is poorly designed. Given that Silver is only familiar with lightning, she expects arcing, which is why she has trouble understanding its behavior at low voltages.
Like in His Dark Materials when industry in the other world is based around generating power by rubbing amber together, perhaps ponies have a good understanding of electricity and it's properties, but on the surface there are differences in it's behavior due to how it's generated, stored and utilized.
Fundamentally, I'm sure ponies have a symmetrical equivalent to Maxwell's Equations, but Silver never thought about it at that level of detail.
From the mouth of ponies.
That is good.
But more importantly, remeber to give a big hug to her grumpy collegue!
So close... oh so close!
She has been on earth long enough to pick up that kind of allusion on the spot!
I'm not sure whether I should be glad or concerned...
Ah, the wonders of physics. I wonder what Silver would think if someone showed her a double-slit experiment.
Y'know, I've always thought that women would be more interested in finding guys who could do that than guys would finding women who could, but it's always shown as very much the reverse.
Silver better practicing though. Just sayin'...
7351437
If you know what i mean.
Marry me!
First, I find it kind of funny how Silver winds up knocking racism when some of her opinions on her fellow tribes read pretty racist all the time. It's a nice touch to her character.
That said, I kind of whish alien cultures didn't always come to the same decisions and opinions modern society has. Like, I'd love one where a pony learns about concentration camps, and their first thought is "Wow! Imagine how efficiently we could spread harmony with these!"
never heard of it. Probably the whole grew up in a desert thing.
it's the voltage. She's probably used to lightning (millions of volts) I can't even think of anything manmade that uses anything close to that, plus we tend to coat the wires with insulators.
If you wanted to do anything with this, I could give you a hand. I'm not an EE but I know more than the average person (and more than most mechanical engineers).
7351700
Cayenne, is that you?
a whole lot
Feel like that's one too many in's.
Sentences usually end in periods.
Bet Pinkie could do the tongue thing.
My cousin works at a museum. They have signed first editons of Twain. I hope that makes me an important unicorn.
"Racism is stupid. Even a unicorn could figure that out."
Oh Silver...
I have spent so much money on Taco Bell since I started reading this story, I hope you're happy.
7351232 If you can float a factory on clouds, you can float a power plant in Cloudsdale. I wonder, if they have wireless electrical transmission, why the heck no one has telegraphs or telephones. If they can easily send this power through the air, it's not exactly a huge leap to think "hey, if we turn it on and off in a pattern we can communicate."
7352416
...
Wow, I just saw a unicorn named Gusty in one of the IDW comics (specifically this; unfortunately it's proving really hard to find a good citation for the story since it looks like a Humble Bundle exclusive issue). Dark orange coat, pale orange mane, three yellow flowers as a cutie mark. She's standing next to Starsong, a G3 character, and they're both in Twilight's class in Celestia's School.
But I'm guessing that if the Gusty in this story is a canon character, she's more likely to be a white pony with a turquoise/pink mane and five leaves.
7351207
In my headcanon, it does. But, magic interferes with it, especially at lower voltages, so the ponies haven't really seen any use for it other than a lab curiosity. [Interestingly, there are a number of world-changing historical discoveries which were ignored for centuries because nobody could figure out the use of what they'd discovered.]
Well, as the saying goes, Silver Glow is good at pointing out the motes in humanity's eye while ignoring the beam in her own.
While it might be possible to tie a knot in a cherry stem inside your mouth, the way the trick is usually done is that you tie a knot in a second cherry stem and put it in your mouth, then later on stick the unknotted one in, switch them with your tongue, and show people the one with the knot.
7351232
Or alternately to discover that the only electricity the ponies have is lightning, and an attempt to run the computer on a bolt of lightning ends just like it would be expected to end.
7351254
I'm not all that familiar with Twain's later work. In the interest of full disclosure, I haven't actually read Letters from the Earth yet.
7351258
Although I will say that Domino's pizza is a lot better now than it used to be.
7351306
Yup. Low-voltage electricity is a very different animal from the high-voltage stuff. Most of the stuff I do with electricity on cars I do with no protective gear at all (usually 12VDC, so basically harmless), but for spark (up to 70,000 volts) and hybrid cars (300+ volts and huge amperage, too) we do use special tools or wear lineman's gloves.
7351312
My headcanon is that ambient magic provides some electric-like effects, and it can be 'harvested' with appropriate circuits for certain functions. So they do have an understanding of some electrical effects, but they're not the same as ours. If they built heavily shielded equipment, they could use electricity the same as we do.
7351385
7351415
That would melt his heart for sure.
One of these days she'll get it.
I'm not sure either. And think of this: exchange students are going to wind up introducing Earthisms or Equusisms into everyday speech.
7351437
Well, she's more likely to ascribe a motive to the photons, so rather than consider it a property, she'd just say that that was what they wanted to do. Actually, there's a good chance Cayenne has read about it. Imagine doing the double-slip experiment with a unicorn horn!
7351700
Imagine doing the double-slit experiment with Cayenne.
7351458
I think it's more about the implied willingness rather than the actual trick itself. Because the trick is easy; I can do it.
The delicious irony is that it would take a lot of practice for Silver Glow to do it (if she even could), but anyone else at the table could do it with no effort at all.
7351890
Me, or Christine?
7352054
There's a fine line when writing in a fandom about how far you can push the boundaries of the show* which themselves are often set inside human morality (especially a children's show). But that is an good point; there are lots of little moral choices that we might make as a matter of course that are totally foreign to Silver Glow, and vice-versa.
Silver Glow's personality (and, I think the ponies at large) are herding, prey creatures, so I think they're more likely to do their very best to fit into a 'herd' where they are, rather than try and remain steadfast in their own beliefs at the potential cost of being an outsider. That's my interpretation, anyway, which is why Silver Glow is likely to follow rules even if she thinks they're dumb, and will usually go along with what her friends tell her.
_________________________________________________________________
*before requiring an AU tag or turning off your readers, that is.
I'm not sure that concentration camps are a particularly good example, since I think that they imply forceful relocation (to put it mildly) and I can't think of a reason that the ponies would go for that. But would 'flight camp' necessarily be significantly different than 'church camp?' [Besides the specific lesson plans, of course.]
7352073
Which is funny, because it most commonly happens in the desert.
en.es-static.us/upl/2015/07/virga-new-mexico-6-2016-jay-chapman-lg-e1465408723193.jpg
I can't think of anything manmade that does, either.
I don't know if I'm going to have her wind up talking to an actual EE, although perhaps a chapter over the summer? If I do, I'll let you know!
7352595
Also I was looking for an appropriately funny response image but this was too cute to pass up.
derpicdn.net/img/2013/6/7/342097/full.png
7352628
I would say it does.
7352438
That's to make up for the other ones elsewhere that have had two?
All corrections made; thank you!
7352677
Technically, she's not wrong.
7352702
I should have bought stock in Taco Bell.
I think I've only eaten there once or maybe twice, and one time I thought I would have Taco Bell breakfast since I never have. Turned out that wasn't as good an idea as I'd thought it was.
Fun fact: Silver Glow's slight obsession with Taco Bell is an obscure reference to Demolition Man. ("...all restaurants are Taco Bell.")
7353418
In my headcanon they do have telegraphs; it's an inductive system that runs through the rails. We've also seen at least one telephone in canon (Manehattan, IIRC).
My explanation is that magic causes massive electrical interference, which is why they don't have telephone or electrical wires. They can use that for making a telegraph system wherever the rails run, though.
7353783
That's the one. Her cutie mark could be suns . . . or it could be stage lights.
I generally draw characters out of all the different generations, the main show, the comics, and even the toy line sometimes.
I'm extremely sceptical that someone could study computers and not know about electrical insulation. And failing that, "what keeps water in a pipe on the right path?"
Or was he simply getting tongue tied because a pretty mare was talking to him.
I'm also rather sceptical that this topic would have come and gone without the teacher pointing out that colour started as a proxi system for who your ancestors were, before turning into tribal in-group/out-group mentality, which she should be familiar with from Equestrian history. Or...
Wait, does Silver know that skin colour is an inheritable trait in humans? Cause that might blow her mind if she doesn't, given how that's completely not how things work back on Equestria.
7358159
He probably didn't know the specifics of what it takes for electricity to arc from one trace on a circuit board to another more than that it doesn't happen unless there's too much voltage. If Silver's only experience with electricity as we know it is lightning, that might not be a satisfactory answer to her.
Why would she need to cover the origins of racism based on skin color? She'd just mention it in passing; any college student at an American University is going to know what it is.
Odds are she doesn't. She's only ever met Peggy's parents, so she's got way too small a sample size to see that pattern.
7356998 this headcanon bothers me a little, partly because electrical charges in the brain and heart(!), partly because for most basic electrical stuff, there's really no way to interfere. A brushed dc motor is gonna behave the same when hooked up to a battery regardless of whether it is sitting in a faraday cage, or right in the focus of a microwave transmission dish, assuming the wattage on the dish isn't enough to melt the motor outright. Now, interference could potentially make the motor make odd noises in addition to its normal function, and perhaps the rf noise it makes would give some unicorns a headache, but....
Eh.
7359049
What I think is that they got to a point in their experimentation and started to have issues with interference and then just threw up their hooves and said 'well, what good is this technology if all it's going to do is spark?' I'm not totally ruling out the possibility that they have some stuff that runs on electricity or that they have given it up as a lost cause; rather that they currently haven't discovered any practical, large-scale uses for it.
By the same token, we've seen self-powered wagons several times, but given their rarity it's obvious that they're more of a curiosity than a practical development. Perhaps in time the ponies will find uses for both technologies, but for now they don't have widespread electrical usage.
7351207
It takes use of teeth and a dexterous tongue (easier if you have the genetic coding that allows for the longitudinal rolling of the tongue) and a lot of practice.
...erm, different what?
7357019
That's basically the principle behind the Octiric shunt, a power "source" used by pretty much every space-faring species I've invented over the years.
7361501 My idea for that? Controlled lightning spell. Mana in, current out. But where it really gets interesting is working out a way to reverse it, and your basic light spell. Photo thaumic panels and electrothaumic converters, for use where there's no ambient magic.
7357101
Thanks, Celestia.
Mark Twain's essay "Concerning The Jews"
10255722
I don’t think that he did. By today’s standards, I wouldn’ t think that that stance on its own is shocking, although at the time I’m sure it was scandalous in some quarters.
On the other side of the coin, the causal and overt racism in some (or most; I haven’t read all his works) of his stories is offensive to a modern reader, whereas at the time, that was just the way things were in society.