May 25
For once Meghan woke before me. I opened my eyes and she wasn't in bed, then I heard the toilet flush and the sink running, and she came back out of the bathroom and climbed back in bed with me.
Meghan put her arm around my barrel and gently pulled me against her, which I didn't mind at all, and ran her hand along my belly and kissed my ear and then I felt her kind of go limp and I was pretty sure she was asleep again.
I put my hoof over her hand and dozed back off until her telephone alarm woke both of use up, and she had to let go of me so that she could turn it off.
When she rolled back my way, I turned towards her and tucked my head under her chin and let her pet my back until the alarm went off a second time, then we both got up.
I'd gotten a nice flight in yesterday, so instead of flying again, I trotted around for a little bit. There was a nice little triangle of grass where Academy Street curved and it smelled really nice this morning, so I went and rolled around it for a little bit, which it turned out was kind of a mistake because someone must have cut the grass not that long ago. But I shook most of it out of my coat and went on (and I did smell pretty nice).
I got back to the dorm on time this morning, and when Peggy came in from the shower I told her that I needed more shampoo. She started to say Walgreen's would have some, but then said that we could go to Meijer tonight after dinner and get some.
I wound up using the last of it by the time I was done with my shower, so I tossed the empty bottle in the little blue bin on my way out of the room.
That reminded me that I needed another trip to the spa. My mane and tail could use a trim, so I would have to ask Meghan about getting an appointment.
I really needed to get my hooves filed, too. The cement sidewalks hadn't been kind to them, and I'd started to feel a little pain in my left hind pastern when I was trotting. I don't know why, but that hoof always seemed to grow a bit uneven. Plus my hoof walls were really chipped and cracked.
Professor Sir Doctor Banerjee said he was going to tell us how to compress fractals, which I thought was going to be squishing them down like I did with clouds, but it wasn't. Well, it sort of was, because we were finding how to get to the attractor, which could be thought of as the nucleus of a cloud.
He showed us how to figure it out on a piece of coral, where we'd find the points that mapped to other points, and once you had the three of them it was pretty easy, because it just left you with six equations to solve.
Then he explained the compression more, and said how since all the parts were the same you only needed a few numbers to describe it, which was what he'd been saying in the last class, too, but it was worth repeating.
It was kind of funny to watch some people finally understand. And I didn't see how it was such a hard concept—hadn't all the poems in my poetry class been written with only twenty-six letters, because that's what the human alphabet has.
So on my way to lunch, I flew over to an oak tree and looked at its leaves and how they came out of the branch and thought about how you might write that as a fractal equation. And it would be repeated leaf by leaf, branch by branch, and pretty soon you'd have a whole tree, but the math-tree wouldn't have a squirrel in it that was angry at me for being too near his nest.
I stuck my tongue out at him and then flew off to the dining hall.
I told everyone at lunch about Aquamarine coming to visit. Peggy already knew, of course, but nobody else did.
Sean said that he didn't think the campus was big enough for two ponies, and Christine punched him in the shoulder and said that she wouldn't mind if a whole herd of ponies showed up on campus. Then Joe said that he welcomed his new pony overlords, which was a very strange thing to say.
Then they all wanted to know what we were planning to do for the weekend, and I said that I wanted for Aquamarine to meet Brianna but otherwise I didn't have any plans. I thought she'd like playing euchre with us, too.
So then everyone had suggestions, like to go to the Kalamazoo Valley Museum downtown or the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, and Sean thought go-karts would be fun again, and also 'cause it was a holiday on Monday there would be a parade and that was something we should see.
I didn't mind suggestions, although I thought that maybe Aquamarine might be overwhelmed by it all. I kind of had gotten the sense that she wasn't fitting in as well as I was, 'cause as far as I knew she was only really friends with Jenny . . . but maybe I was wrong; maybe she just wasn't one for putting a lot of stuff in writing. Some ponies were like that. And she'd enjoyed the stuff we did on spring break.
I wonder if maybe it's harder to make friends when there are more people on campus?
Professor Amy said that today was our last regular class—that we'd spend three days next week in groups. That part made me kind of nervous, 'cause I hadn't been a good pony in the last group, since I'd been sick, and after the first day I'd only been able to participate on the computer, which wasn't the same as actually being there.
She said that we'd be in the same groups as before unless anyone thought that they couldn't work with the people they had earlier, and I was worried someone in my group was going to raise their hand and say that they didn't want to be in my group, but nobody did.
We talked about agriculture and specialization. That seemed kind of out of order after all the other stuff we'd talked about, but I trusted that Professor Amy knew what she was doing.
She explained the beginnings of agriculture, which was really interesting. I suppose earth ponies figured it out the same way, while we pegasuses were just flying around eating whatever we could find. And she explained how different cultures came up with different strategies, like how the Incas planted their crops at different levels since they lived in the mountains. Then she said that agriculture starts to bring about a gender gap, and that most societies chose males to be their warriors because males were more expendable. That was pretty logical; once a stallion gets you pregnant you don't need him anymore, and it was good that people had thought of that, too.
The drawback to moving to an agricultural society was that it also began to cause a wealth disparity, because there's only so much land, and you either have it or you don't. And that was also why people started to defend their land and make countries and stuff. If you were grazing and gathering, you'd go where the food was, but if you were growing it, the food was where you were, and you'd want to keep anybody else from stealing it.
Then she ended by saying that one of the drawbacks to modern agriculture was that there was a greater possibility of famine, because people were tied to the land, and if the crop didn't do well for whatever reason, than everybody might go hungry, and there was a greater risk of disease because there wasn't as much genetic diversity in seeds. She told us that the Irish Potato Famine had been caused by their staple crop becoming sick, and as a result a lot of people had starved, and those who could had moved away.
I was glad that people had managed to figure out how to avoid that problem. There had never been a lack of food at the dining hall, and the stores were stuffed full of food. No doubt going hungry was a distant memory to humans.
I met Peggy when she came back from her class, and we got in Cobalt and went to Meijer. We didn't have a whole lot of time, plus I still didn't feel all that comfortable in the store since there were so many people, but I did go through their fresh food area and admired all the different fruits and vegetables that they had sitting out. Then we got some beer and snack food for when Aquamarine was over, then went to the shampoo aisle and I got two bottles of Mane and Tail shampoo. I also saw some really cute butterfly hair clips and decided to get them, too. They were silver and had little jewels that Peggy said were fake, but they were still pretty.
We got back home in plenty of time for dinner, and I even had time to send Aric a telephone telegram asking for the pictures so that I could put them in a letter for my sister.
It was tacos again, and this time I'd learned my lesson about eating too many so even though I wanted to have a third, I didn't.
I took a little break from my essay and finished reading 1 Chronicles instead. Next, I'd start reading the World War 1 book, and find out what that was all about. The man at the Air Zoo had said that his father flew in the Second World War, so I guess it was a war that humans kept repeating for some reason, which meant it was worth learning about. I probably should have asked him about it, but I was enjoying listening to him repeat his father's stories, and he was having fun telling them.
I tried calculating out the equation for an oak leaf, and I thought I got pretty close. Then I tried to use the computer program that Professor Sir Doctor Banerjee had showed us, but I couldn't figure out how to make it work right and Peggy wasn’t much help. She said that she didn't even know what half the words on the page were.
Sean did, though. I called him and he came over with Christine, and while she and Peggy were talking, Sean showed me where to put my numbers, and pretty soon the program was drawing mutant oak leaves. But after working on my calculations for a bit I got one which sort of looked like a leaf. It was a lot harder than I'd thought it would be, and it wound up with extra little leaves in the center that didn't belong but if I recalculated probabilities I was pretty confident I could get rid of them.
Of course, I kind of forgot about going over to Aric's until it was pretty late. Christine said that she had the perfect excuse for me, so Sean sent the picture to Peggy's printer and made it make a copy, then told me to write the equation on the paper and he would be so impressed by the math he'd understand how I'd been distracted. She said that she'd played Dungeons and Dragons with him and he was bad at addition, so he probably wouldn't understand this at all.
That seemed kind of mean to me, but I did like she said, and he didn't even understand the first equation. But he didn't think I was being mean by showing him that; he thought it was pretty funny how smart I was and I told him that pegasuses invented calculus, and then the unicorns stole it from us. Well, they did improve it a little bit, too.
Aric wanted to know what we needed all that math for and I said it was really complicated to calculate weather requirements and the more efficiently you could do it, the fewer pegasuses you'd need on a team, or the more territory each one could cover. And if you were setting up counterstorms, it was important to not use too much or too little.
I could see that he wasn't really paying attention anymore, so I leaned over and unbuttoned his pants and that got his attention back.
He said that he had something to give me, and went out to Winston and brought a folder of me standing next to the airplanes, as well as one he'd taken when I was flying in the parking lot. I could see by my wing position it was when I was gliding, and he'd taken it when I was nearly overhead, so you could just see the sky above me.
I didn't want to put them in my flight vest right away, because they might get wrinkled when I put it on, so I set the envelope on his desk and put my radio on top of it so I'd be sure to have it in the morning. Then I finished unfastening Aric's pants and he wiggled his hips until they fell down, and he stepped out of them and said that if I could get his underwear off, too, I'd win a prize.
A prize, eh?
Sigh... Sorry Silver, disparity just got worse.
Did they really or did they simply invented it in parallel? They too would've needed it for advanced spell casting.
Furthermore, since the unicorn were most likely relying on trade with earth ponies, they would've need math to ensure an efficient trade.
Both getting inspiration from the pegasus and comming up with thing on the own at the same time are plausible in that context.
Just add a "d" and it will be fine
Is the prize eight tripe-equals fourth letter, capitalized?
It's the same prize you won before, Silver Glow. But think of it like the games at the fair: ask if you can trade up for a larger size.
7422322 On the other hoof, she might be amazed at how small the percentage of the population that is actively growing food in her host country.
...huh. So maybe that's why I don't like math. See, when I was 15 or so I was walking down a street with my friend when one of the trees dropped a rotted branch straight on my head. (Fucker was as thick as my hand was wide; if it hadn't been rotted out it probably would've knocked me out.) Could that have given me a subconscious hatred of math-trees?
I'm just glad that the impact didn't cause any lasting kumquat.
ohh...
7422318 what's that comic?
7422322
Silver Glow's getting the 'D.'
Maths is my downfall.
Hmmmmm... Biscuit, you rebel! Giving me the idea that mares might use perfume scents other than lavender?! (Seriously, it's nearly the only scent authors use around this site!)
I do really like the idea that popular scents for mares might be things like "fresh grass," "morning dew," or even "spring forest."
You didn't properly solve the yA parameter then, did you? (Disclaimer: I don't high-end math.)
So smart, and yet so relentlessly adorable. Where can I find more like her?
I mean in real life.
7422329
And I just read the Sam and Rose chapter were Sam was checking the human diagram that Cheerilee had.
"Is this what human stallions look like?"
"Smaller."
"How about now?"
"Close enough." It'll suck if any man also ends up in Equestria; he'll feel so inadequate.
7422380 Rigth.
So she got her prize then?
7422391
Me also. It is all in Klingon that was translated from Huttiese from something in Acient Babylonian.
I once was working on a story involving blood magic, murder, college, and hijinks. There was a scene where the protagonist was sitting on a hill behind his dorm with friends toking and one of them brings up that they're getting close to being able to clone using bone marrow or something so soon men will be totally extraneous. It went downhill into ridiculous from there. It was pretty funny. Wish I remembered it.
1 Corinthians??? I thought she was in the Old Testament history books tho. If not... I'm surprised slightly-- 1 Cor has a looooottt worth commenting on.
The equations required for the inclusion of angry squirrels are more complex and temporal-based, and probably require assistance from unicorns. So yeah that's gonna happen.
So the universal parallel is Newton (unicorn) vs Leibniz (pegasus)?
Wow, Silver! While ultimately this may turn out to be true for her, I suspect this attitude is a result of 1) being a pegasus and more 2) her local upbringing. It makes me wonder how much of a panic she'll be in once she realizes that she won't be with Aric, possibly ever again, once she leaves. Either way, it could be a very sad thing which she doesn't appear to be giving thought to yet.
my belly
next week. Singular.
calculating
and
... She doesn't know about the world wars...
History! She needs a history class if she has any more classes coming up! Oh god that'll be amazingly entertaining.
7422322
Comparing Canterlot and Manehatten on one hand with places like the village in the Flame Swamps and the settlements of the Hooffields and McColts, it looks like Equestria has a GINI Coefficient similar to South Africa's.
Aqua is probably having a harder time of things than Silver. I grew up in the sticks. When we called food fresh we meant "you picked it in the morning and ate it for dinner that night". Fresh did NOT mean "Pick it green so it can ripen in the truck as it is shipped to a store where it will sit on a shelf for days".
The only episode that had canned food was the alternate futures episode. AJs farm was canning stuff. Military food is notoriously bad. You try living in a college dorm on a budget & NOT eating canned food. IMO, Silver lives in a sea coast Pegasus town, she is used to food not being the freshest because most of it is hauled in.
7422370
IDW My Little Ponies: Friendship is Magic Micro-Series Issue #10.
There is not a guy in the world whose attention would not be brought back, unless my theory regarding the only way she could be undoing those buttons is wrong.
7422451 Chronicles, not Corinthians. I'm still looking forward to what she has to say about all the genealogies that make up the first 2/3 or so of 1 Chronicles, though.
The Famine was less because of crop failure and more from the British shipping off most other food to feed their armies elsewhere and crooked landowners and regional governors understating the crises in their reports back to London or outright diverting and embezzling what few relief supplies were sent over.
That's why many Irish Republicans and Nationalists call The Great Hunger outright genocide on the part of the Brits rather than a simple natural disaster.
independent.ie/incoming/article29926652.ece/ALTERNATES/h342/Famine%20Memorial.jpg
Maybe Professor Sir Doctor Banerjee can help her figure out the numbers to make a Sierpinski Valentine for Aric.
imgs.xkcd.com/comics/sierpinski_valentine.png
Yeah, about that....
Well we don't seem to be all that good about learning about it.
Although generally true this does potentially tell you something about the resources needed to raise a foal and the food available to each pony. Although if I remember correctly child raising has been described as being more of a community activity in Silver's part of Equestria still it would depend on the number of foals around at any one time. It might also be an issue that foals develop to a point they can held adults at a younger age.
I guess it was a war that humans kept repeating for some reason
Back to back champs! USA! USA!
Converting a fractal to its numbers, Im still trying to get round to uisng the freely abailable Hilbert.c code and the freely available fft.c code in order to first convert a 2D image into a 1D hilbert curve, then apply an FFT to get a spectrograph, then apply an FFT to extract the scaled, phased, shifted envelopes of the spectrograph that represent the fractal. ?
Oh well, would be nice to play with.
Looks like might need Quaternion FFT to do it properly due to z rotations.
Dont forget kids, if you fractally compress images, you can store far more movies on your old data tech, meaning you dont need new stuff as much, and then it can scale far better to new displays meaning you dont need new driver code or hardware players.
7422451
Corinthians, Chronicles . . . basically the same thing, right?
(I fixed it)
7422729
It was Corinthians in the text, then I fixed it. I somehow managed to write one while thinking the other.
7422546
Corrections made, thank you!
Part of Hitler's platform was that the Armistice came before Germany had a chance to win WWI. In some ways WWII was WWI brought to its conclusion.
In WWII the Allies didn't pursue surrender terms, Germany had to be really defeated so WWII would be over and no one could say otherwise in the future.
Oh my, Silver+Meghan is starting to get even cuter than Silver+Aric.
This cuddle position is known as "the plushie".
"I mean, how did he know? Note to self: Find and eliminate security leak, possibly eliminate Joe." - Silver Glow, secret journal.
"Afterwards, he's as useful as a unicorn."
It was because the British government forced all the food they could grow to be exported to Britain, while completely refusing to listen to those who told them there was a potato blight, and also refusing to allow the import of food aid. Irish food exports actually INCREASED during the famine, and this was enforced by the British Army.
Britain did the same thing to Bengal during WWII, also killing millions of people, and there wasn't even a crop blight there. Winston Churchill denied Canada's offer to send famine relief on the basis that Gandhi hadn't died yet.
7421100
Honestly we just went over colonial history again and again and again. If I wanted to learn about other types of history I would've had to take an AP History class. If I remember correctly the history classes I took from grades 9-11 were:
Economics(history of American economy and justice system)
American History I
American History II
History wasn't required for the 12th grade.
We brushed on other countries histories in middle school but that was...such a long time ago that I can barely remember what we even did.
It's really sad. Stuff like African American history, European history, and American history that wasn't just "how was America formed?" "how were slaves freed?" were considered advanced classes.
*Shuffles awkwardly*
yeah so why should males pay support ? i dunno XD
not to all
i thought she was doing this to sean ...
Silver should work on her diary writing
7422393
True, but we have fingers. Lots and lots of fingers.
And also toys. Lots and lots of toys.
And we have forbidden fruit. Very very forbidden fruit.
And for the bigger ponies? We also have arms.
More relevant, for the first few years at least a human is going to rate pretty damn interesting on any scale of curiosity.
Nope. We might be having with bananas at some point.
Haven't actually tried this, but i'd probably try a parametric version of the Fourier transform.
not necessarily, especially as we have calculators and advanced math can be done symbolically. One of my math professors has said "the hardest part of Calculus is Algebra" different types of math require different types of thinking. I'm better at derivative calculus than integral and I'm better at both than algebra.
Hah! Some conflicts are universal.
This is depressing.
As is this.
Aha, poor naive Silver, thinking humans never go hungry anymore. I wonder if this means stuff like homelessness or being hungry isn't common in Equestria? I was internally screaming at her statement of humans not having any problems with getting food.
I've heard Mane and Tail shampoo/conditioner is really good if you want to grow your hair and although my hair is long I want it to be longer(I want it near my waist) but I'm a bit scared to try it. I've also heard it smells bad, too. But most importantly it is a shampoo/conditioner you use on horses so I would wonder what my roommates would think of seeing it in the shower...
7422405
The statistics indicate that fewer guns equals fewer suicides:
Means Matter
People like sure, quick, and painless. If one cannot have all 3, people prefer painless and fully reversible. Guns meet all 3 criteria. Hanging, if done wrongly, and nonfatal, slow, and painless.
Sleeping Pills are popular, because most people believe that they are painless and that if the attempt fails, they believe that they will recover completely. Since most suicides are not planned and most people prefer an whole bottle of sleeping pills for suicide, just to be sure. Those without full bottles usually to off to buy the pills. By the time they return, they usually are no longer suicidal.
As stated before, I believe that people of all ages, including University-Students, but people are responsible for their actions:
When I last protested the Convention of the AAP (American Academy of Pædiatrics) for being greedy arseholes sexually mutilating the genitals of poor defenseless babies for money, I took vacation-time and spent mine own money. I did not abandon my job and the demanded to be rehired upon discovering that my boss fired me for abandonment of responsibilities in abstentia.
Certainly, the actions of the trigger-happy police deserve protests (I am for body-cams, dashboard-cams and no restrictions on civilians recording police as long as they do not cross police-lines (that yellow and black tape one finds at crime-scenes) , but the students have bad time-management skills.
Okay, I feared that you were about to make fun of the intersexed. The intersexed suffer greatly.
I figure that if something can go wrong with genitals, something can go wrong with the brain too. I figure "¡Live and let live!". Indeed, at work, we have a woman the yappers (I do not trust what these motormouths say) claim is a man. She punches in on time, works hard, completes all of her work, and causes no trouble. I see no problem with her working at my work-site as a woman, even if she has male genitalia.
In 19th Century England, they sentament was that women cannot vote. Because some municipalities let women vote, parliament passed the "1832: Great Reform Act – confirmed the exclusion of women from the electorate". it was not until 1928 that women in England got the full right to vote ("1832: Great Reform Act – confirmed the exclusion of women from the electorate).
A prize, huh?
7424504 Hello again Mr "If you don't agree with me, you're an Alt-Right racist white-supremacist".
I made a generalized statement that said women could technically vote if they passed restrictions that limited voting to a very tiny portion of the population, namely the business and land owners. Which was true in a sense, but there has been evidence that's recently turned up showing women could vote in per-suffrage era England in 1843, vetted and researched by Sarah Richardson, Associate Professor of History at the University of Warwick. Out of the 30 women in that poll, one was a wealthy butcher who was awarded 4 votes and there was a few paupers as well who had 1 vote. http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/24244
And what did you say? "NO WOMEN, ANYWHERE IN THE UK, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, COULD VOTE. NONE. It didn't matter if they were rich. It didn't matter if they owned a business. They were forbidden. Anything you have read otherwise is wrong. This is undisputed historical fact." Burns when you and your feminist\socialist narrative is so wrong, isn't it?
7426245
You are simply wrong. The few incidences of women attempting to vote prior to 1918 were breaking the law. It was illegal. They were not allowed to do this. Parliament even clarified this in an 1832 act; which is BEFORE the incident of women sneaking in votes you bring up. So you haven't disproved anything I've said, you've actually reinforced it - those votes you bring up are still forbidden.
You do not get to rewrite history, friend. You don't. When your argument is "women weren't oppressed because thirty of them out of four million managed to illegally vote, once" you should really be quiet forever, just like how you should have been quiet forever when you said "racists are right because blacks have more single parents".
I bring that up again because while you deny being "alt right", you seem to agree with them on literally every single issue you bring up, and you even use the same talking points. Everything from anti-feminism, to justification of racism, to gamergatery and complaining about the Ess Jay Dubs, and all with the signature attempt to make it sound milquetoast, moderate and worthy of consideration. Weird, right?
7424218
A delayed suicide is better, though after reading going through those articles, a couple things did stand out. For example, when non-adults have access to guns that are in unlocked safes or they know the combination is the leading cause of gun related suicide. I would seriously advocate for parents to keep their weapons locked up at all times so their child doesn't do anything with them, especially if they notice that their child is depressed. If it's an adult with access to guns, the only responsible thing is for a family member to have an intervention and take away their gun until they're not depressed or suicidal anymore. I would strongly advocate for gun stores and owners to have materials on what to look out for with people with depression. I think being proactive about it would be better than a national blanket ban on guns.
I agree with you whole heartedly on those issues (especially after looking up the AAP just now) and you did the right thing taking time off to do that.
Hehe Yeah, she does sound like one of those type of people that use transgenderism as a fashion statement. Kind of annoying, but as long as someone like her doesn't try forcing others to go along with her non-sense, I have no problem. Real transgender people however, the ones with the psychological issues, those I'm more concerned about. Mainly because of the high rates of suicide and depression among them, especially after they transition and don't really find the happiness they seek with their transformation. I believe they need a way to talk about their issue and either try to come to terms with their body identity issue, or if they want surgery, give them psychological council to make sure they really do want to transition. There's no going back after that.
So I was mostly wrong in my statement in an earlier post then. (It was also 30 women, not 30%, out of 175 and it wasn't a real national election in that polling ledger.) I do need to read the the Great Reform Act to really get the full details of it and that's probably what KB was referring to. I still don't think women were a wholly "oppressed" group however.
She told us that the Irish Potato Famine had been caused by their staple crop becoming sick, and as a result a lot of people had starved, and those who could had moved away.
That was a strange sort of tragedy. A case of a wonderful new thing ending in despair. Potatoes aren't native to Ireland. The Irish were getting by on what they could raise. Then somebody introduced potatoes, which will grow and produce a crop even in poor soil. Suddenly, plenty of food was available, and the population grew and rejoiced while more land was dedicated to potatoes.
Then a disease called potato blight hit. The rest is history.
7431859
That... is pretty inaccurate. It was nothing at all to do with "the population growing and rejoicing". Proportionately to land area, Ireland at the time was about as heavily inhabited as Britain was. The land was also good enough to grow more than enough food, and it had nothing to do with the land not being good enough to grow other crops or support that population. It was economics and terrible government responses from London rather than lack of food that caused the deaths during the famine.
For a complicated variety of reasons, most of the actual land in Ireland was owned by English landowners, many of whom didn't actually live on their land, but lived the good life in England from the rents paid by their tenants. There were a small number who actually tried to improve the lives of their tenants, but the majority were just extraordinary leeches.
By contrast, a very large segment of the Irish population lived off what they could scrape out of a very small patch of land rented to them in exchange for both rent plus working on the landowner's own farmland. They could be evicted for any reason with no recourse at all, and any improvements they made to the land on their own initiative still belonged to the landowner, making it an actual disincentive to improve anything - if you improved anything, your rent would be raised or else you'd be evicted and the land would be rented out to someone else for a higher rate.
Since the rich landowners didn't want to live in Ireland, they hired middlemen to collect as much money from their property as possible. With their goal being to squeeze every penny out of their tenants, this ended with many people who had nothing but a very tiny patch of land to grow their food and no other source of income. Potatoes produced more food from the same planted area (rather than producing food from land that otherwise couldn't support food growing), and the very poorest literally didn't have enough land to grow anything other than potatoes if they wanted to eat.
Once the potato famine hit, there still would have been enough food in the country from all the land not rented out to small tenants if the British had decided to close the ports to exports of food, as they had in a previous famine. Because the ports weren't closed and the landowners could earn more money by exporting the food to Britain though, food continued to pour out of the country.
7422318
7422322
I think that's a solvable problem . . . if we wanted to. IIRC, there's enough food production in the world to ensure that no one goes hungry.
My headcanon is that pegasi invented calculus specifically, and that the unicorns adopted it quickly, and then continued developing it. So basically, the pegasi said, 'hey, we invented this math to do a thing we need to do,' and then the unicorns got it and said, 'oh, that's neat, I wonder what else you can do with it?'
So technically not stolen by the unicorns, but not invented by them, either.
7422328
Yes, it is.
7422329
In Michigan, there are something like 60,000 farms, and about 950,000 people employed in the agricultural sector, or around 10% of our state population. So not as many as the ponies (probably), but still a pretty good number. It's actually a bit higher than I thought it would be.
7422357
If you were born a few hundred years earlier, you could have invented gravity.
In all seriousness, a surprisingly large number of people get killed in the US each year by falling tree branches/falling trees.
7422391
Me, too. I'm so bad at it. (Seriously, I suck at math.)
7422434
She did.
7422437
The part I like from watching the videos for research is that this is a level of math where letters (Greek or English) are more common than numbers.
7422393
Remember in Silk Pajamas where Minuette liked rosemary soap?
I find it enjoyable to look up the scents that horses seem to like, and work from that. I suppose if I was writing Diamond Dog fics, than something like 'dead animal' or 'sort of fresh vomit' might be the popular scents.
There is probably some statistical number which could be applied to determine if any given tree has a squirrel in it. There are about 14,1 billion trees in Michigan, and probably about 92 million squirrels. At least that's what some quick googling came up with (squirrel population of 1.5 squirrels/acre).
I don't know. I wish I did.
7422451
In theory, it's actually already possible to do this. Besides cloning, researchers have used two female mice to make an 'offspring' of them, and you can also (in theory) use a woman's stem cells to make sperm, which could then (in theory) fertilize one of her eggs. AFAIK, nobody's done this with humans yet, but it's possible.
Also we often went to the cemetery for deep thoughts. It was just a little bit off-campus, and it was usually pretty quiet out there.
7422477
Probability wise, it's not so hard--14 billion trees (in Michigan) and 92 million squirrels (again, in Michigan). Putting that into a fractal equation . . . yeah. Probably doable, but I bet you'd need a really high-end computer to crunch those numbers.
More of Newton and Leibniz both being pegasi. Silver's use of the word 'stole' is more her tribalism flaring up again; it was more like something they invented and showed to everypony they could find. The unicorns immediately saw the potential, and also added to it by figuring out what else you could do with calculus.
Correct on both counts. Also on the purely pragmatic fact that once the egg's fertilized, there isn't anything else that the woman has to have him for.
She knows that, but she tries not to think about it. Not just Aric, but odds are she'll never see any of her college friends again after she goes back. Maybe one or two will make the journey to Equestria, or she might at some time in the future get a visa back to Earth. . . .
7422596
"Why did you put all your tea in the harbor? Fish don't drink tea."
7422602
Although that would be a somewhat complex calculation, since we don't know what 'wealth' is to ponies (and it could vary by tribe). Or what they consider 'good' and 'bad' living conditions. Heck, it could be that half the ponies in Manehattan wish they could live in the Flame Swamps.
7422636
Yeah, that's got to be tough on her. Plus, living where she does, she can't grow her own little garden. On the other hand, she's just a short trot from the horse pastures, where she can graze to her heart's content. I'm sure MSU wouldn't mind if she was there with them.
I think we've seen empty cans in other episodes, though (not 100% sure) and we've also seen other jars of food (peanut butter, zap apple jam), so they do have ways of preserving food and keeping it for later. That having been said, nearly any pony who lives in the country is going to be used to fresh food nearly year-round, and also they would probably find it odd to not be able to talk to the pony who had a hoof in growing the food you were about to eat.
7436500 I read somewhere we produced rice as much as we need, and waste most of it.
So yeah, we could solve hunger problem with some logistics and far more less obsession over making money.