March 2
My tail confused me when I first woke up—it slapped against my leg like a length of rope, and I jerked awake right away and kicked off the covers, then felt like a complete foal. At least I didn't wake Peggy up.
Flying with it took a bit of getting used to as well. I could get better speed, but lost just a bit of maneuverability. A lot of serious fliers will trim their manes and tails for their kind of flight, and some even clip their wings just a touch.
That wasn't for me, though. I would put up with a slight loss of top speed in order to look good.
The sound of sirens which were pretty close by caught my ear, and I listened around until I knew which way they were coming from, and flew off in that direction. Pretty soon I heard another behind me, too—a different sound—and I looked back and saw a red fire engine coming down the street behind me.
It passed under, and I followed along behind it. I lost sight of it when it turned a corner, but I could still hear the siren echoing above the buildings, and I cut the corner to catch back up.
When I got to the next road which I think is called Ravine Street, the fire truck was just around the corner, attending to a smashed car; there was another one with its side doors all crushed in sitting just off the side of the road.
I stayed around and watched for a little bit. A big white van which is called an ambulance arrived, and a couple of people got out of it and checked on the drivers of the vehicles. The fire truck left, because there wasn't any fire for it to put out.
Right next to where the cars had crashed was a big fenced-in place called Weller's that had lots of damaged cars behind the fence, so either this was a very dangerous intersection, or it was a lucky coincidence that they had collided right here.
I would have liked to stay around for longer, but I had to go to class.
The climate science professor announced the upcoming field trip to Grand Rapids, and asked for a show of hands to see who wanted to go. I raised my hoof of course; Crystal Dawn and Luke did as well. I'd be with friends, which was nice.
All in all, eight people said that they wanted to go, which was about a third of the class.
At the end of class, he gave us a fun bit of homework: a map of a made-up continent called New Atlantis. It had major geographic figures marked, and he'd put all the important information about the different layers of air, directions of prevailing winds, and so on on it. There were ten places named, from the big city of Gotham to the little town of Smallville, and each of those had monthly average data for them. Our job was to figure out what the monthly averages would be for ten other places on the map, based on that information.
I couldn't wait to get started. I could already see that Goldopolis was in an unfortunate location; even without running the numbers, it was probably going to be pretty arid.
I was dreading Sartre, but he actually made sense this time around. He talked about how not only does man influence the universe, but the universe influences man.
Well, there was a lot of the Earth that I'd seen wasn't controlled at all. The planet zoomed around its Sun in an uneven number of days, and the moon made her rounds out of sequence with that. The weather was feral; all the humans could manage were a few puny contrails here and there, and sometimes seeding rainclouds to make them rain a little sooner than they would have done, and probably all that accomplished was leaving the people downwind short of their rain. So that was all the universe influencing them.
But I guess at the same time they were controlling it. They made fields and roads and sidewalks where they wanted—almost all the major roads in town ran in nice, straight lines—and they made Arcadia Creek run underground as it went through the city, because they didn't want to see it. They couldn't fly, so they made airplanes to do it for them. They made spaceships and satellites so that they could go far far above the Earth and look down at it. And I'd overheard Gertrud telling one of her friends that in Switzerland, they were finishing a tunnel that ran under an entire mountain range so that the trains wouldn't have to go over it. She said it was fifty-seven kilometers long.
When I saw Meghan, I thanked her again for braiding my tail—I'd been careful in the shower so I didn't have to take it out of its braid. Becky and Lisa thought it looked really good, too.
Lisa asked me what I'd thought of Harry Potter, and I said that I'd liked it. I said that I kind of felt like Harry did sometimes; there were so many things here that were strange and almost magical, even though I knew that humans didn't really have magic. Lisa said that our world seemed like that to them as well.
Our conversation got interrupted by class, but later on when everyone was doing group work and I went around to their table, Lisa asked me what the strangest human invention I'd learned about was.
I said it was a microwave.
She asked if I was sure, and I nodded. Then I told her about how most cooking is done on wood stoves although there are some unicorns who know warming spells.
Cloudhomes don't have access to either, so we're used to eating our food cold or raw, although it's always a nice treat to go out to a restaurant and get hot food (and it's really nice that the college has hot food for every meal). But the idea of a little box that you can put food in and a few minutes later it's hot even though the inside of the box isn't hot was just unbelievable, and kind of scary.
She told me that all the dorms had microwaves in the lounges, and I said that I knew that, but I was afraid to use it because I worried I might use it wrong and let the microwaves escape.
Meghan laughed and said next time I came over, we were going to make microwave popcorn together, and she'd make sure all the microwaves stayed in the box.
I told her it wouldn't be until after the weekend, because Peggy and I were going to a ski resort, and I had to go back to the makerspace tomorrow after class to make sure that everything for the snowboard had been built and worked.
When I got back to the dorm after dinner, I got out my New Atlantis map and started working on it. My computer is able to do math, but it was a lot faster and more familiar to use my weather wheel when running the calculations.
Peggy came in when I was finishing up estimating the weather for Pleasantville. She'd never seen a weather wheel before, so I showed her how it worked. She thought it was really cool, but didn't quite understand everything I was doing with it.
I got almost finished up with it—there were a couple of places where I was going to have to run some more numbers, but mostly it was pretty basic stuff. The water budget is one of the foundations of all weather work.
Then I got my flight gear together and flew off to Aric's house. I thought about taking the weather map, too, but I probably wouldn't have any time to work on it.
When I got there he was out in his driveway, working on Winston. It didn't look like he was having much fun.
But he let me help him, and I think it went faster with the two of us. I held his flashlight in my mouth and aimed it so he could see what he was doing. He was replacing a black thing on the back of the engine that he said was a distributor, because it distributed sparks to the spark plugs, and that was called the ignition, and it made the gas burn. It took him several tries to get it right—there were a bunch of marks that all had to line up in order for it to work like it was supposed to.
He finally got it right and then he had to put the wires back on, and then the air intake, but once all that was done, he could start the truck.
He had a little blinky light like my flight strobe, and he used that to line up a yellow stripe with a groove on a metal plate, which he said was called the timing.
When he was done and had put away his tools, I told him how I wasn't going to be able to come over Friday or this weekend because Peggy and I were going on a trip to a ski resort. He said that that sounded like a lot of fun, and maybe I ought to see if I could borrow the camera that Gates had. So I told him I would.
Clarke's Third Law definitely applies for Silver and microwaves, especially since the closest thing to them in her experience is actual magic.
Also, nice bit with Silver in her element with the climate science homework.
At first I thought the weather wheel was her name for a slide rule. I didn't expect it to be a real thing.
And presumably they use Equestrian numbers. Did you say they used Base 12?
7164387
It is a circular slide rule; the example shown is a pilot's E6B.
Yeah, it would be in base 12 unless she bought one over here (they're available in Amazon).
Hahah, you know, it'd be kind of funny if, after they turn in their New Atlantis forecast, Silver Glow challenged them to try it with weather management rather than prediction. Considering weather supplies, requests from the ground, and having to worry about at least one 'wild weather' zone... it might lead to some interesting revelations about how much the students have learned and maybe even teach them a few things.
Distributor on the back - okay, so not a Ford.
Don't tell Silver that the first Atlantis sunk, that might mess up her weather calculations...
I had to look up some of the city names, but it's cool how they are all "real" fictional places.
7164398 I may be mistaken, but the fact that she is doing water budget makes me think she is already doing a weather management planning for New Atlantis.
How old is she and how early do they start teaching these kind of things?
Unless she is a prodigy, being able to tell that kind of thing at first glance require more then just knowledge, it require a lot of experience.
That weather wheel looks like some things I've seen for calculating nuclear bomb blasts. IIRC you would dial in the yield on a bomb and it would tell you about safe distances and possibly a bit about fallout.
...Why wouldn't they want to see the river? Rivers make the place look much prettier!
7164506
She has said she has actual experience with the work, but I'd imagine it would look pretty obvious even just to students paying attention to the class if the city was in the middle of a rain shadow or something like that. They have prevailing wind directions, so rain shadows should be obvious at a glance.
This chapter reminded me of this image:
41.media.tumblr.com/6b73f2117ffe2760923fd5a8680d6a70/tumblr_no82vwMgO61uv5tb8o1_1280.png
Here's hoping Silver may one day master the science oven.
I don't know how to say this, but I'm going to try to go a week without reading.
That way I'll get to read up to seven chapters and get to see the relationship between them grow.
7164285 I'd say you can't have a coherent ideology without understanding the ideologies of your opponents, otherwise you can't know how you differ, how the ideas contradict, where they end and where you begin. This knowledge is mandatory but what has to be remembered is that we can't be friends or comrades with opponents - I will never be on friendly terms with a guy with "1488" tattoo'd on himself - because we have different aims.
In cases where two people have the same political aims but differing ideologies, at least one of them has to be wrong - following an incorrect line that won't, when put into practice, actually work, and probably is already disproved by history. 实事求是 as the saying goes.
7164396 Oh, God. I never want to see a E6B again. The general rule of using one of them is "and add ten percent or more" particularly when calculating fuel usage. If your tanks are around a quarter full, land. Right there. Yeah, it's more expensive, but you want to get where you're going.
7164725 Yes, I have. I have evangelical relatives, and I once had a boss who was a Baptist preacher (small hedge-church that obviously didn't pay their preachers) who held that the KJV, and no other, was divinely inspired. So long as nobody brings up evolution I generally get along with fundimentalists.
Now, I don't generally get into the fractal minutiae of the many, many fundimentalist traditions, so you can't absolutely generalize, but by and large they don't believe in divine authorship, but rather divine inspiration and substantive literal truth. That last bit is what makes them fundimentalist and not Augustinian historicists, but no serious Christians believe in divine authorship the way that orthodox Muslims hold that the Koran was dictated.
Fundimentalist imbeciles will cough up nonsense like the infamous Indiana legislative attempt to define pi as 3, but that has more to do with imbecility than fundimentalism.
Sirens?! How did they get through the portal from Equestria?!
Never mind.
Another cute chapter.^^
Oh, and how goes Onto The Pony Planet?
7164725
Sheltered, not privileged. You don't need a lot of money to be overprotective of your kid.
And regardless of Twilight actual origin, she ended up living in the palace, she don't need to be from a privileged familly to have gained overtime the trait of one from such a familly.
On the idea of her buying stuff in our world, I wonder what the bit / dollar exchange rate is? It looks like she doesn't have all that many outgoings at the moment, apart from a little food and shampoo all I can think of her buying was her weapon at the SCA event.
I wonder if bits are solid gold? If so they would presumably be worth quite a bit this side of the portal unless the continued connection with Equestria has devalued gold on our side.
7164869
I would argue that privileged is the right word. Not overtly so, she's not Blueblood, but definitely not a commoner. I mean, she has a live in servant, she calls Spike her assistant and they get along with their ambiguous sibling/parent-child relationship but that's very often his role and he accepts it. DT is the only other pony in Ponyville that looks like she has one.
Sheltered may also apply, but not so much, she was never so naive or clueless for that and she obviously enjoyed a lot of freedom to do her own thing before and after she left Canterlot.
What ultimately puzzles me in this vast fiction world with intricate headcanon... how you keep relapsing in writing durach instead durak It's totally understandable, but for native-Russian speaker it's kinda funny-slash-irritating.
7164725
I think show Twilight is a better character than most fanfics' Twilights, yes. Of course I think that the flaws are as important as the virtues in a character, and I don't think that being rich and/or privileged is implicitly bad, especially when she's proven that multiple times, but that's just me.
I actually like Admiral Biscuit's Twilight quite a lot, come to think of it, she has a small role in OPP, but she's feels very in character to how she was in the early seasons.
wheel ? that brings back memories of SWOTL and the "key generator" for it ...
7165186 Yes, she is privileged, no doubt on that, but not in the sense you seem to give to it. Her privileges were to be born with great talent, in a stable family, in acity with the necessary facility to help her grow, to be picked as the country's ruler personal protégée.
We have no evidence that she is from a noble/rich family.
7165364
No evidence that she isn't either, this discussion is all about conjecture based on the show, on which she fits the profile of a rich and/or noble pony more than anything else, but she is often made into something else for whatever reason, no one is arguing that she is evil or bad or undeserving of her position unless you feel that being rich and/or noble is inherently wrong.
7165571 The only point I am trying to make is that no, she is not clearly from a rich/noble background. She could fit the bill, but unlike MLai I don't think it is wrong to portray her otherwise.
The concept of hereditary nobility is wrong. It assume that because one was great, all her or his descendant will be too.
It doesn't make anything out of nobles, they can be equally good or bad, their ancestor don't define them, that's all.
7165616
Well, Princess Flurry Heart exists now so we just have to accept that hereditary nobility is a thing in Equestria and that ponies think it's a good thing, personal opinions aside.
7165616
I don't think hereditary nobility really matters. You're right by saying a person is not defined by their ancestor, but having a role model to live so close with provides some pretty big boots to fill. Hereditary nobility can mean the new monarch is encouraged to do well simply by expectations. Whereas in politics once the previous party is out of power you have no expectations to abide by. All you have is 'Don't do what the other guys did wrong'. Because that's all politics is. Petty squabbling over who did what and why another is better. Monarchies would be much less risky today. Do one bad thing and the whole world is breathing down your neck.
And besides, most royal families don't have any power anymore, which if I'm honest is probably a good thing. The public like to know who's in power is the person they wanted there. Fair enough really. But as a Brit, I can't help but love the Regals. They're good people.
Microwaves are pretty badass when you get right down to it. Even though they're everywhere, people still don't really understand how they work, and they're common for us!
Funny, though, I kind of imagined that in addition to fish, pegasi either ate what was farmed by earth ponies or ate wild-growing fruit if nothing was available.
I'm almost 100% positive I've physically handled a weather wheel. Somewhere in the 70's. Like the slide rule is now obsolete.
So what was the importance of the car accident? I have a feeling it was more than just chapter filler. Also, good ole driveway mechanic work!
7165616
7165636
Prince Blueblood is a prince by virtue of being Celestia's closest living relative, right? Some great xN nephew? Hereditary nobility was confirmed in S1.
7166846 I don't think there was any doubt about the existence of nobility in Equestria
Interesting to see how Silver believes the Microwave is the strangest item she has come across. I wonder if she'll come across something else that's stranger...
7167105
What's a Progressive to you?
Also, the definition you gave to SJW is calling them a form of trolling, It specifically states that the SJW is often a straw identity. (" A social justice warrior, or SJW, does not necessarily strongly believe all that they say, or even care about the groups they are fighting on behalf of. ")
Not all Right Wingers are racist, but as a rule racists and misogynists are not welcome on the left. That's not the fault of any given person on the left or right.
Sex ed and politics are two fields that are perhaps not best taught via the unfiltered internet.
How do you feel about addressing social issues through techno-anarchy or left wing libertarianism? The majority of SJWism I've noticed on the internet is insane fascism, because they're trolls. The majority of anti-SJWism I've noticed on the internet is also insane fascism, and typically specifically Nazism, because they're also trolls.
Thanks. I'm going to respectfully disagree with you as to the why though. Just because it happens in college doesn't mean it happens because college. This 20-something demographic is simply where political identity forms: with new and first time voters out on their own and empowered to make their own decisions for the first time. Professors simply don't have the dignitas to properly indoctrinate as well as they perhaps once did.
Also, if you ignore the insane, ill conceived, "shallow or not well-thought-out" troll logic of the internet, what little remains of social justice is quite reasonable. There are social problems, those problems would be better if they were addressed. The means best to do that, well, if it were simple, easy, known, cheap, and effective it would have happened already. I tend to think of this as an analogy of the old Iron Curtain. Both sides did objectively terrible and stupid things, and propaganda and misinformation outweighed facts. Even though they were perhaps unequally bad, both sides had rational and conscientious defectors. Reason and logic was caught between, outside both camps.
7164743
Is there a method where you don't add a fudge factor? I'm multiplying fuel burn rate x time, and wind speed x cos wind angle. All the E6B is doing is the arithmetic bitchwork. It's only a slide rule with a special marking on the 6.
7165186
I don't think using Spike is a very good argument for Twilight being privileged. It's true that she treats him like a servant/employee and he lives with her, but to me, putting aside everything else, they're that way largely because Twilight is essentially his mother, and Twilight probably doesn't know how to deal with being a mother because she was at best a young teenager when she "had" Spike.
7164382
Science ovens are awesome. It's mundane gadgets like that which would probably be our most successful exports to Equestria.
7164398
That's such a good idea, I put it in
7164415
It's a Chevy. Not as nice as this one:
images.craigslist.org/00f0f_kjx4GksYFIS_600x450.jpg
7164431
New Atlantis floats better than old Atlantis.
7164482
Goldopolis was the hardest one to find. I knew what town I wanted, but I couldn't remember the name of it. I was about to start digging through my comic book collection.
7164503
She's kind of approaching it that way, but not really. It's more of a 'this is what we have here,' and then she's falling back on a lot of her experience (and what she learned in class) to estimate from there how much water the places would normally get naturally.
She is experienced; she's been working weather ever since she got her cutie mark, and before she got to Kalamazoo College was working feral storms on the coast. Pegasus school is a lot more hooves-on than classroom instruction (the easiest way to learn how to work weather is to just do it), and she's also taken advanced weather planning classes. Silver's on a career path for upper weather management, which is why she has both the practical experience and the book knowledge.
First glances aren't always right, anyway. There's a lot of stuff at work that I can just look at and have a pretty good idea what I'm going to find, but I'm not always right.
7164537
Conceptually, it's probably pretty similar. The basis of her 'weather wheel' is a circular slide rule, and it's probably also got some handy (hoofy?) weather functions built in, too.
7164587
I don't know why they did it, but Arcadia Creek runs mostly underground from the base of Kalamazoo College to where it drains into the Kalamazoo River.
That's exactly what she saw.
7164597
I'd forgotten about that image, but yeah, that's apt.
7164598
I hope you can make it!
7164743
I'm thinking of getting my brother one for Christmas, just in case he hasn't already got one. They're pretty cheap on Amazon.
I think the big advantage of tools like that is that they give you a good approximate answer fast, but it's not exact. Back when my grandpa was teaching Coast Guard classes, he had one problem where you were supposed to figure out the course of your ship and another one; the trick was by the time you did all the proper calculations, you would have already collided with the other ship. So then he taught the fast way of figuring out if you were going to hit the other ship (which you want to know quickly)--it doesn't give you exact information, but it's good enough to avoid a disaster. The crews of the Andrea Doria and Stockholm would have done well to take that kind of class.
7164816
Back through the portal under the horse statue at CHS, then wear disguises to get through the one to Earth. Simple.
7164828
Incomplete rough draft is out to pre-readers; I'm hoping to finish it this weekend.
7165145
I don't know. That gets really complicated, so I probably won't actually be detailing it in this story. She's got a reasonable budget for incidental expenses.
If the ponies aren't clever about commodity values, I could see that happening. They could crash the gold market and the gem market in a week or less.
7165187
gDocs doesn't catch the misspelling (probably because there's a city in Germany called 'Durach'). So that's how it keeps happening.
7165210
Similar concept; the weather wheel is basically a circular slide rule with additional useful markings on it.
7166064
I know how they work (more or less). Silver might also know that if she tries to land on a broadcast tower, the same thing will happen to her that happens to something in the microwave.
Yeah, I think of the three tribes they're the most likely to be hunter/gatherers. They probably prefer farmed food when they can get it, but aren't against eating wild food.
7166380
A good chance of it. Circular slide rules have been around for over 100 years.
7166819
Just another sight to see in a modern city. Nobody she knows was in either of those cars.
Which sucks in the wintertime. And all the time if you have a gravel driveway.
7167172
Maybe a Thermos: it keeps hot things hot and cold things cold, but how does it know the difference?
7168635
I personally would expect there is not: slide rules often only give you an approximation. I was just watching a video on how to use one; the slide rule answer was 'about 15 million;' the actual answer 141,000 bigger. In days before the ubiquity of electronic calculators, though, I'd think getting those approximations was good enough for a lot of work. In architecture, for example, as long as your approximate structural calculations put you above your design safety margin, you're probably good to go without running the actual numbers.
I see she has been taught bad terminology
Could be useful in a fight, unless you need your opponent to survive
7174001 You missed puttin' the quote tag around (and italic tag in) that last quote
Hah! I figured that it was some kind of Equestrian equivalent of a slide rule; didn't think it actually existed on Earth too.
"Sorry, Silver. I'm afraid your calculations for Smallville are completely off," the professor told her.
"But the conditions are ripe for a force 4 tornado!" Silver Cloud protested.
"Except you forgot to account for Clark Kent," Trevor explained.
"Who!?" Silver demanded.
"Clark Kent," her professor repeated what Trevor was saying. "You know, Superman. He put out the tornado and saved Lana Lang."
"Wait...are we back to Nietzsche again!?"
7174001 The transmissions from a broadcast tower probably don't have the power needed to act like an oven. I know the output from a mobile broadcast van doesn't, and neither does military radar equipment (I think the Mythbusters did that one at one point). At most, I'd expect it would take long exposure times to achieve a tissue burn, right next to the transmitter of a fairly powerful signal.
7181280
I see she has been taught bad terminology
i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/facebook/001/018/504/1cd.png
If you could target a specific area, they'd probably survive. Might wish they hadn't . . .
7280039
Yeah, it's something that we were smart enough to invent for when you didn't have enough room for a full-sized slide rule. Some of them were really nice, too, designed like pocket watches.
7660951
Can Superman stop weather? I'm not up on Marvel canon.
8026418
Some of the really powerful broadcast towers might. And there's no way of knowing what might happen to her flight magic, plus also the possibility of her damaging the tower or antennas . . . it's probably safer to warn her that broadcast towers could kill her and she should stay away, rather than try and explain all the different types of towers.
They probably don't, true, although who knows what effect they might have on her flight magic? Ans
Sky Blue is the same way... preferring grace and style over speed and power.
8065129
Something that doesn't come up all that often in stories (or at least ones that I've read) is that different pegasi probably have very different flight preferences, and that probably has an effect on their jobs. Like, for a messenger service, you'd want a pegasus who was fast; weather patrols you might want one who's got really good endurance; some things might call for a pegasus who is strong but slow, and other things might be best with pegasi who can do fast bursts.
Okay, time for some more adorable pony being Adorable.
Somepony went and forgot it's braided, didn't she?
Not RD though... for her it's less the flying thing, then it is laziness, shorter manes and tails are easier to not have to pay attention to.
Wrong idea. You want to go AWAY... then again, that kitty part of you just needs its curiosity sated afterall.
Wrecking right in front of a junkyard... not quite as apropro as having a heart attack in a hospital, but close. And, yeah can't blame her for wanting to watch this and see what's up, at least it wasn't anything major, just a seemingly non-fatal or even injury heavy crash.
Of course she'd find that fun....
And I can't blame her, it does sound kind of fun, love puzzles!
Interesting way of looking at it... and would love to see a pony with a more philosophical bent that gets this stuff dealing with these and offering the pony point of view on this type of thing. OH, or having a pony philosophy teacher doing some lectures for humans!
Even better, have some pony Theologians come over and try to talk about their stuff with human ones. Pony ones would have a much different perspective given the deities they are studying are physical beings, who are polite enough to talk about such non-issues as the weather, and live just a few doors down. So the Royal Theologians task is mostly keeping track of things like shoe size, preferred colors, and favorite foods.
Yup, really good analogy to things.
Hmmmmm..... I can buy it.... yeah that is certainly something interesting for them.
Or then you get something like hot pockets, where the outside is steaming, burn your tongue hot.. while the inside is a solid chunk of ice....
Silver... we make this stuff as idiot proof as possible. Besides, you cannot do worse then Brownie Bun. Go on, go use the Science Oven.
Again, makes sense Ponies would come up with what I'm guessing it a weather equivalent of a slide rule for this stuff. Has she shown it to her professor yet?
Yeah... not likely. unless you are good at multitasking, but even then, might send the wrong signal.
Auto work... yay. Yeah that's rarely a time you have fun. So, something break, or just general maintenance?
Ohhhhh more pony movies for him to show off. Nice.