April 1
It was nice to wake up next to Meghan again, even if I couldn't linger in bed with her. I didn't want to wake her up so I just eased my way out of her embrace and kissed her on the forehead and then let myself out of her room.
I had to be quiet going into our room, too, 'cause Peggy would be asleep. But I got in and out without waking her up at all, and once I was outside, I took to the air.
It was a bit cooler today and there was the smell of snow in the air, but that didn't seem right. Spring had been a couple of weeks ago, so maybe it was something else that was confusing me. There was a building in town that made the sky smell like mint, and another that made it smell spicy, so probably there were other buildings that made different smells in the sky and one of them was mixing me up.
I'd gotten a good bit of exercise yesterday, so I didn't feel like I needed quite as much today. Rather than speed around, I went up to the base of the clouds and boxed one around the sky for a little bit. I thought about bringing it down with me, but then decided it would be happier up in the sky, so I pushed it back with its friends and dove back down to the school.
Every day there were more birds on campus, and that made me happy. It wasn't the influx that Equestria had, since the birds had to decide when to come back all on their own, but I was kinda used to that because there were some seabirds that went on their own schedules without a pegasus to help them.
When I was at tree canopy level, I scouted out all the new birds and got chased by a cardinal who probably thought I was going to try and steal his territory. I taunted him for a little bit then flew off so he'd feel good about himself.
Since I had a short flight when I got back to our room Peggy wasn't there. I guessed that she was in the shower, so I went into the bathroom to see. Sure enough, she was in there, and Kat was waiting on the bench for her turn.
What would happen if everybody had classes first thing in the morning? That was something that the bathroom designers hadn't thought of.
After Peggy was done, Kat took her turn and was pretty quick, and I didn't spend too much time, either, so when I got back to our room Peggy was still there, getting dressed.
She told me that today was April Fool's Day, which is a day when people played funny tricks on each other, which I thought was an interesting human ritual. I asked her why today, and she said she didn't know, but she thought she'd heard once that the French started it.
Then when she was at her desk gathering stuff up for her class, she said that there was a cowlick in my tail and that she could get it for me, so I turned around to let her and felt a kind of tug at my tail and then she said that it was good now and she had to go to class but she'd see me later.
I heard a couple of people giggling as I walked across campus, but it wasn't until I sat down with my breakfast that I realized that Peggy had played a trick on me: she had used one of her hair-clips to put a sign on my tail that said 'pull me.'
Sean said that was really juvenile, but Christine thought it was kind of funny and cute, and over breakfast we talked about some of the other pranks that people played all the time like putting sugar in the salt shaker or the other way around, and Sean showed me how to tear off a piece of napkin and then fill the very topmost part of a salt shaker with pepper.
Christine asked what kind of pranks ponies played, and I said that hitting ponies with rainclouds or lightning was really funny, and she said that I shouldn't do anything with lightning because it could kill a person here on Earth.
She wanted to know if I was going to do anything to get back at Peggy, and I told her that I hadn't really thought of anything, but she said I had to, just because Peggy had started it.
I said that I could hide all her underwear, but Christine told me that was kind of mean, and she wouldn't find out until tomorrow anyway. I couldn't really think of anything else right away that would be funny and not mean, so I finished my breakfast and took my sign and put it in my bag so that I would keep her hair-clip safe.
Professor Doctor Sir Banerjee started off class by reminding us that we used linear models because they were easy, but complex systems were almost never actually linear, and he gave some examples of manufacturing and chemistry, where when you combine two elements what you get sometimes is nothing like what you started with.
The weather is like that. There were lots and lots of different things interacting together in the sky and on the ground to make it happen, and the supervisors had to have an understanding of how it all worked together in order to make the things you wanted happen. And sometimes despite your best plans it doesn't work out because there was something that you overlooked and then it usually turns into a lot more work from everypony. But a lot of the ponies on the ground didn't know that and just got mad when there wasn't the weather that was promised when it was promised.
Then he got into describing the equations, and I really had to pay attention because there was a lot of unfamiliar vocabulary like lambda and sinusoidal and Jacobian linearization. I was glad that I didn't have to dip my pen in an inkwell, 'cause it carried all its ink inside in a little tube.
It's always weird to learn new symbols to draw, too. Everyone else in the class could do it better than me, I bet. English and math weren't made with mouthwriting in mind, and for a minute I felt a bit jealous that Cayenne was probably learning the same symbols but could copy them a lot easier with horn-writing.
When class ended it was almost a surprise. We had a bit of homework for the weekend, but it looked like it would be pretty easy so long as I could remember all the symbols.
In the dining hall for lunch they had replaced the tags that went with all the food with silly tags, which I guess was their idea of a joke but it wasn't all that funny since anyone could see that the food wasn't actually what the tag said it was. The only one that made me laugh was the card by the bananas that called them 'yellow curved fruit.'
I still couldn't think of a joke to play on Peggy, but I kind of had that idea that I could do something with a cloud, maybe. I just wasn't sure what. I didn't want to bring one into the room, 'cause that would get everything wet and she wouldn't like that. I wouldn't like that.
If I'd known earlier, I could have brought a small cloud down and given her a sleetshower in the bathroom. That would have been funny.
We spent all class discussing how Margaret Mead had gotten things wrong in her book. At first I thought it was kind of silly that she would have us read a book that had a lot of mistakes in it, but it turned out that the truth was a lot more complicated than that.
After discussing that for much of the class, Amy said that it was important for us to remember when we read material that our biases might influence us in what we read, and that it was especially important if we were ever engaged in anthropological study that we be aware of our biases and how they might mislead us. Then she gave us a small pamphlet about an imaginary primitive village of humans and it had some drawings and descriptions of some of the people who lived in the village and what the land around it was like, and she told us that our assignment was to write an essay describing one thing we'd like to learn about these villagers, and how we would go about learning it, and what methods we might use to make sure that we weren't jumping to conclusions.
That sounded like it would be fun. My first thought was to see what they ate, 'cause there weren't any fields on the map, and I knew a little bit about farming and a little bit about foraging, so I had some ideas how I might figure out their diet.
So I worked on that a little bit before dinner and then I started reading Judges and I think that Liz was right when she said that the men who wrote the Bible weren't perfect. Even after all God had done for them, they kept breaking His rules and getting punished for it, and finally they would cry out for mercy and He would send someone to help them, but then when that person was gone they'd go back to their old ways, again and again. Probably if He hadn't promised that He wasn't going to drown them all in a flood anymore, He would have done that and started over.
Even so, it was really sad how they couldn't learn to live together and get along together. Nobody seemed to figure out that if they all kept fighting that none of them would ever prosper.
It was too much for me to think about, so I did equations until it was time for dinner. I had to look at my notes a lot, just to make sure I got all the symbols right. It would have been easiest to solve them using our symbols, but that would come back to bite me in the tail if I got in the habit of doing it that way.
I still hadn't thought of anything funny to do to Peggy, but when she got up to get dessert, I got an idea and I went and filled a glass mostly with grape juice and then put a little bit of Sprite in it for the bubbles, and I put that in the place of her drink. The cups were dirty and smudgy because of how many times they'd been washed, so it wasn't very obvious that it was kind of a purple color, and Peggy didn't notice at all when she sat down with a couple of cookies on a plate.
It worked just like I'd hoped; she didn't really pay any attention to the glass and picked it up to take a drink and then made a face and spit it right back into the cup.
I left right after dinner to go over to Aric's. He was down on the couch watching a movie and he said that it was almost over, so I sat down next to him and watched it with him. He said that I was kind of distracting, and I didn't really get what was going on since I hadn't seen most of it, so he stopped the movie and told me it was called The Merchant of Venice and it was an assignment for class so he had to watch it even if he really didn't like Shakespeare all that much.
Well, I thought he could watch it later, but he said that it was due back at midnight tonight, so he had to finish watching it now, and so I kind of sulked on the couch until it was over. I think I would have liked it if I'd seen the whole thing. The language had a nice flow to it, and the setting was really pretty, too. It was a city called Venice, and there were lots of canals instead of roads.
When we rode to the movie library so that he could return it, he apologized for being a little short with me, he'd planned to be done watching it before I came over but he'd spent more time than he'd planned working on his set design homework, and had had to run out to an art supply store and get more foam board for it. And I was happy because it was fun riding in the truck with him, even if it wasn't as nice as any of the other cars I'd been in.
He ran in really quick to return the movie and then we drove back to the house and I leaned up against his shoulder and just enjoyed being close to him and this time he didn't swat my hoof away because he could still drive when he was distracted.
Then when he shut off the truck in the driveway I just climbed up on his lap and it was a little bit difficult but a whole lot of fun.
Well, now she just have to bring a cloud for Peggy and her boyfriend and they will be even, won't they?
I feel disapointed that Amy's teaching didn't made her reflect on her own experience. In a way, she is doing anthropology 24 hours a day, I would've expecte her to see the parallel.
Maybe later on?
"...Even after all God had done for them, they kept breaking His rules and getting punished for it, and finally they would cry out for mercy and He would send someone to help them, but then when that person was gone they'd go back to their old ways, again and again..."
This is the reason God let us have children: So we would know what he went through.
This website really needs a spittake emote.
Ah.. The merchant of Venice. The first taste of Shakespeare. I'm sure she'll enjoy the comedies but how will she take Titus Andronicus or Hamlet? Now that is the question.
http://satwcomic.com/humans-never-change
Silver Glow: the Bob Ross of pegasi.
...She's darn near insatiable
Back in the day, we removed the mouse ball or put tape over the mouse laser, set MS office's autocorrect to replace common words or consonants with obscene adjectives or else took a screenshot, set it as wallpaper and then hid the taskbar and icons.
7259244 I think that's more of a general idea.
7259488 She has taken the seventh commandment, dropped it from a high altitude and trotted all over it.
7258465 Sure, but it wouldn't be as much fun
ahh, greek symbols in math. I can see how those would be hard to do using your mouth, it took forever for me to learn how to easily hand draw psi (although that was because my professor used powerpoint for the lectures). phi and theta are pretty similar as well and that could really be a pain.
Equestrian causation is so peculiar that I can't imagine how nonlinear or linear weather control processes would have to be in practice. Real world nonlinearity is why 50s era experiments in weather control never became anything other than novelty acts... magic must have some will based way of loading the dice, choosing which attractors to favor in a series of processes.
7258254
Only Florida Man.
7259726 That reminds me of my math classes in the university. My professor always used xi and zeta together, mu and nu, u and v and of course i and j. Mostly he could write them very well on the blackboard, but when I had to decipher my notes at home ... oh my ...
7259506
Scroll lock. Screen rotation. Language. Webbrowser homepage. File associations. Shortcuts. Lots of little annoying things you can change.
I used to only be an occasional visitor to this site, but this story (and the fact that you post a new chapter every day) has me coming daily now.
7260234
"And this week we have a guest lecturer from Equestria, can you all put your hands together for Doctor Discord!"
"Thank you, thank you ladies and germs. I think I can truthfully say that anything I don't know about chaos isn't worth knowing!"
7258543
nvm mixed up canter with trot ... stupid english
7260279 Try the hash browns from A&W then, same concept but less disgusting and bigger. Same with Tim Hortons, but I don't think you have many Timmies down there.
As for hash browns done right? Well you gotta grease those things up like a transmission and throw the winter roads crew at 'em (ie lots of salt and pepper) Hash browns are part of a balanced greasy breakfast, if your heart doesn't cry out for help after breakfast you aren't doing it right.
Yeah, that nonlinear dynamics course is going to be more like a language class until Silver gets used to human notation. Cayenne probably went through the same thing. It's not like our mathematical symbols are logically extrapolated or in some single possible form. Heck, a lot just involve pulling from other alphabets. Other human alphabets.
Also, Silver's classmates insisting she get Peggy back presents a nice lesson on human nature. It may help Silver understand biblical behavior a bit better.
And that anthropology assignment should be very interesting, since Silver has a completely different set of biases than the rest of her classmates.
7260340 Really? I thought it had to do with being remote and sparsely populated, thus less of a chance of getting your nudie party crashed by moral busybodies.
they thought of it ... after work
Zippers are magic, the time when Silver figured out a way to open them quickly its all over for Aric
7260329 A&W has fried cheese curds (or had, been awhile). Not breakfast material but a party food.
7260379
According to this Wikipedia article, this was not the case - sadly.
7259787 i had a professor who referred to lower case zeta as squiggly line thingy, needless to say, i wasn't a fan of that professor. Then in engineering we just use c and k for everything. There's one equation that has something like 6 different variables all called k with a subscript
7260078 true, forgot about those. I'm a mechanical engineering student so I don't work with capacitors a whole lot.
7260413 They also do root beer floats
7260583 Oh .. nice You could always use u, v, mu and nu as subscripts
7259202
Yup.
That's something she'll probably be reflecting on throughout the course.
7259244
7259312
It does, doesn't it?
7259330
And her next taste of Shakespeare will be seeing Gusty as Puck.
7259446
See, I always wonder about some stuff like that, if we're being trolled by ancient people. I think that a lot of the more recent stuff, there's a lot of evidence for how things were, but things found on their own can probably only be guessed at.
7259478
Silver Glow the painter would be adorable.
7259488
She's a teenager--of course she is.
7260662 Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos seems interesting, Unfortunately I won't get the chance to take it though.
No calculator required for vector calc, at least at the level i'm at. It's basically stepped up multivariable calculus. Although all my math classes have been no calculator. Typically the problems are set up so that they work out nicely, and if they don't you just simplify as much as possible. For example cos(3*pi/8)+sqrt(3) would be a valid answer.
I like the northern California coast better than SoCal. Don't get me wrong, I like beaches, but there's something about the more rugged coastline I like more. There's a highway that runs the entire length of California pretty much entirely along the coast. My family drove it every once and a while on vacations.
7260644 oh dear god, the thought of that horrifies me.
7260706 I feel a nightmare incoming. Dear Luna, please help me!
7259506
One of the schools I was at had computer keys with easily removable caps, and it was fun to change them around and find out who could touch type and who couldn't.
7259521
Yeah, that's a commandment she hasn't got any intention of keeping.
7259726
ahh, greek symbols in math. I can see how those would be hard to do using your mouth,
It probably wouldn't be any more difficult than any other particular letter, but certainly a new thing to her. She would have learned how to write in English before coming over, but it's pretty doubtful they would have taught the Greek alphabet.
She probably also had trouble with letters like Q and O, or lowercase d/b and p/q.
7259757
My own headcanon is that they're nonlinear, but that with practice the pegasi have come up with a good enough understanding of the system that they can use somewhat simple models and usually get what they want. And if it's not working, you can always add more pegasi to the mix, assuming you have them available.
But really the deeper you try and get into how Equestrian magic might work and still be remotely compatible with our understanding of physics and whatnot, the more implausible it gets.
7259787
I run into that when I handwrite stories--when it's time to type them out, sometimes I discover that I can't read what I wrote at all, and have to guess at what I meant. Luckily, since it's fiction, it's not really that important if I don't get it quite right.
7260034
One of the classics back in DOS days was naming a directory and ending it with alt + 255 (which was a blank space). You could find it in directory lists, but unless you knew that blank space was there, you couldn't open it.
7260201
7260239
He'd be the best guest lecturer ever. Especially if deep down there are universal rules he has to follow, and he can explain them to the students.
7260315
lol that's all right. From reading about various horse gaits, there isn't any firm consensus about what they all are or what they're all called.
7260518
No matter the limitations, just the existence of time travel will probably have had a lot of physicists throwing textbooks out the window in disgust.
7260329
A&Ws are a bit few and far between here, too. I think there are just as many Tim Hortons around me these days.
Yeah, that's the truth.
7260360
Yeah, Cayenne did. Lots of new math and physics vocabulary for both of them, but at least they're both familiar with the basics, so they wouldn't be as lost as I was in my first (and only) Calculus class.
And a completely different way of problem-solving, too. "What do you mean we can't just sit on a cloud and watch them with binoculars?"
7260375
That's a possibility, too. But I doubt that's the sole reason.
7260393
7260417
That's a pity.
7260583
From what I know of airplanes, they use V with subscript for about a zillion different things (V1, V2, Vmo, etc [and my personal favorite, Vne, or V never exceed]).
7260764 V2 is a myth to single engine pilots.
7260234
I was thinking more like the Hork-bajiir from the animations series; most are borderline sapient, while one in a few hundred thousand are born with full sapience, possibly even hyper sapience, and are only held back by the fact that they are in a society with no civilization.
Oh, poor Silver. Crazy Earth weather is gonna drive you... well, crazy.
I had a sinusoidal infection once. Took some antibiotics and it cleared right up!
7260704
I'll take your word for it. I scraped by with a D in Calc 1, and then gave up on math.
Rugged coastlines are nice. We've got a few in Michigan like that, mostly in the UP.
7260740
True, or a lot of other magic as well. Teleportation, for example. Or grabbing clouds and bringing them down for the climate science class to poke at.
7260776
In theory you could get a single engine plane going fast enough it could take off without the engine, although it would probably be a fairly short flight after the takeoff.
7260822
I'm not familiar with the reference, so this might be a dumb question, but what's to stop one of the hyper-sapient ones from leaving its civilization behind and going to a different one?
7260941
Starting April 2, in fact.
7260615 I remember back in the day, it used to be a car hop. The waitress would rollerskate up to the window.
7261066
I guess it does. Though it differs from how I see Equestria. The reverence in Twilight's voice when she's talking about Gryphonstone hints that to me that it's more to it than 'ponies first because ponies are the best'.
I would be interested to see Silver Glow's take on human technology if she ever gets an inkling to just how complicated something as common as a PC is.
It would also be interesting to see what Silver would think about when it comes to 'cultural superiority', with how much of the modern culture and modern technology was invented in nations where it's strongly frowned upon to consider yourself 'superior' to cultures that haven't contributed much to making the world become modern, yet still benefits from it. Because from your description, it would seem that if advanced technology was invented by a pony, the ponies of Equestria would have no problem whatsoever with being all smug and superior about that fact in the face of other species.
7260518
Oh, that would be priceless! Now it totally needs to happen
... or maybe just a normal and reasonable atheist, that'd fun too.
Damn that's a good one. I don't think I can beat it, but I will try. A self-hating Solipsist with dissociative identity disorder is unsure of which god he hates... okay that was bad... I am sorry
I bet her rump bumped against the steering wheel a couple times causing the horn to honk.
I guess humans didn't know pegasi could easily do this, but someone really should explain to them what not to do to humans.
Mister Professor Doctor Sir Banerjee, Esquire.
7259446
I am an adult man (none too young) who is enamoured of magical pastel ponies, entirely thanks to the internet (bear that in mind, it may be important). Indeed I like to read stories about them on this very site. I also like to read the comments on said stories.
So it was with a sense of comfortable complacency that I followed your link to Scandinavia and the World, a webcomic I had not previously encountered but will now follow.
One cartoon there launched me in the direction of the 'Studio Killers' (now my new favourite band).
Of course, finding myself on YouTube, this road could go anywhere.
Let's check the evening's loot haul:
1 x new chapter of a favourite pony tale
1 x new webcomic
1 x new band
1 x new (dubious yet compelling) music sub-sub-genre
1 x overwhelming sense that the internet is doing something to our brains, but I'm too old to understand quite what.
7261873
I'm on the older end of average bronies and millennials, but the Internet and I have grown up together. I was born on the Ides of March 1985, The same day the first .com domain was registered.
Of course, there's a lot of folks who say the Internet is ruining kids' identity and ability to focus.
https://theamericanscholar.org/saving-the-self-in-the-age-of-the-selfie/
My dad has mentioned it from time to time, until I got him into Ghost in the Shell and William Gibson.
7261616
Heh, reminding me of Doctor Princess Twilight Sparkle from Demense of the Reluctant Twilight Sparkle.
7260735
All I know about the greek alphabet is from math, physics, and engineering classes. It's not like they give us greek for mathematics, it's just oh, the professor used a new symbol today. It's called psi. Plus considering, that variables by definition are arbitrary, I don't think Silver would be at much of a disadvantage (although she'll still get massively jacked up on notation).
You can think of Vector calculus as Calculus as regular Calculus but in higher dimensions.
Plus they have tidepools, lots of great memories exploring those.
7260764
that doesn't surprise me. i've had to do stuff where v is both volume and velocity ... in the same problem. Typically we designated V with a slash in it for volume.