April 10
I didn't sleep well, even though I was with Aquamarine. I kept on having nightmares that I was ground-bound forever in a pasture and I was the only smart pony in the herd, and all the rest of them ignored me. I couldn't go away, because I knew I wouldn't make it far on my own before some predator or a horny stallion got me.
I kept on waking up and I'd just snuggle into Aquamarine and watch her sleep for a little bit until my eyes got heavy again and I fell back asleep to another nightmare.
I don't think that Princess Luna's reach is quite this far.
When I finally woke up for the day, I didn't feel like I'd slept at all. Aquamarine wasn't in bed; she was on the floor stretching out and her getting up must have been what woke me. Jenny was stirring in bed, too. So we wound up all getting out of bed at about the same time.
One thing that was nice about the dorm was that there was more than one shower in the bathroom, which let us talk to Jenny even though she wanted to be in her own shower stall and not share with us. I said that I knew how to shower with humans but that didn't impress her.
When we'd gotten groomed and Jenny had gotten dressed, we went back to the Pavilion and got there in plenty of time to see the plowing competition. It was across the road from the main hall, and there was a long marked-out area in the dirt.
Pretty soon the horses came out and got hooked up to the plows—Aquamarine said that was one nice thing about human helpers; it was hard to put on your own harness and hook up to the plow. Most of the time a sister would help but every now and then you had to do it by yourself. Then the drivers took the reins and when they were told to, the horses started pulling and the men followed along, steering the plow.
Jenny was curious about how we steered our plows, so Aquamarine started describing how a pony plow worked, and how you set it to bite into the ground like you wanted to and how to make it go where you wanted, and it sounded really complicated. It wasn't something I'd ever thought about much: I just saw the earth ponies below me turning their fields.
I suppose they thought the same thing looking up at us moving around clouds, not really having any understanding of all the technical details.
Aquamarine had a good eye for it; she picked the winner before he was even announced. I couldn't see any real difference between the attempts. Some were squigglier than the others, but plants didn't care if they grew in neat rows or not, as far as I knew. Nothing I'd ever seen that had grown on its own had been in a row.
Aquamarine said that I didn't know the first thing about farming.
We went back inside and walked around for a bit, looking at all the different things that they had for sale, and Aquamarine got a flier for a camp that taught you how to drive horses and said that she thought that might be fun to do. Just the very idea bothered me . . . sure, pony coaches often had a driver, just because she had a higher vantage point and could see what was coming up before the team did, which wasn’t the same thing at all.
When we’d seen just about everything, I said I wanted to go see the horses again, so we went back into the stable area and started off at the perimeter.
All the stalls were the same, and they had tall fences around them so that the horses had to stay on their own, but some of the draft horses were so big that their heads went right over the barriers and they could greet the horse on the other side of them.
Different horses were handling their confinement in different ways. There were some who were asleep on their hooves, resting up for whatever was next, and others were looking around at the people milling about. There was an ex-stallion who kept grabbing a bucket in his teeth and banging it against the wall, and a pair of mares in side-by-side stalls who were both leaning up against the bars so that they would be as close to each other as they could get.
Around the back, there was a set of pens that had mules, who were a lot smaller than the horses but still huge. And right next to that was a washing room, but instead of shower heads it just had hoses and I bet none of them were hot water.
We'd seen in the center some people getting their horses ready, and then there was a stream of horses coming in from the arena, which meant it was almost time for the next competition to start, which was the unicorn hitch. So we headed back out of the stables and into the main area.
When they came in they were in a wedge formation. Aquamarine said that earth ponies called that the triangle, then Jenny asked her what they called four, and she said it was the square.
So I guessed that six were the rectangle, and she nodded. Then we took turns at guessing what eight would be called, which turned out to be the double square.
I wanted to know how far it would go, so I kept prompting her with more and more, and it wasn't until she said that a team of eighteen was called the greater long double squarangle that I realized she was making it up. (In my defense, the names of ship sails are like that.)
Overall, the competition was much the same as the six-horse formation we'd seen last night. They went around the arena and had to step in a certain way and go around orange cones and back up at the very end of it.
After that was finished, we got up and went to a store called Pizza House for lunch, which was also in the same nearby mall as Jimmy Johns and Menna's. They had a pizza which was called a Chicago deep dish that was made like a pie and it was really good. It filled me right up, even though I only had one slice and shared a second with Aquamarine. The whole pizza was more than the three of us could eat together, so we took what was left over with us.
As we were walking across the parking lot, we decided that we didn't want to go back to the show. I was tired and thought I could use a nap (and eating a filling meal when you're tired only makes it worse), and so we went back to their dorm room and I dozed off for a bit.
When I woke up, we ate a snack of leftover pizza and then started walking across campus in the direction of the train station, taking our time. We went to the Abrams Planetarium, which had displays about what the telescope at the observatory had seen, and there was a little section that talked about space exploration and all the special vehicles humans had made to explore it. There was also a picture of a space suit, which looked like a diving suit, and it was what human astronauts wore.
Right next to that was a door that was blocked, and there was a sign that said in big letters 'Coming soon: Ponies,' and there was a piece of paper next to it that said in smaller print how our two worlds had found each other, and it was a shame that it wasn't open yet.
Jenny had us pose by the sign and took our picture.
There were a lot of other rooms we didn't get to see because we'd come late and they were closing, but the security policeman said that the gift shop was open for a little while after the exhibits closed so we went there.
Their gift shop had astronaut ice cream, and Jenny said that we had to try it, so we bought it and tore it open and it was kind of disappointing that it was just a striped block that didn't look like ice cream at all. But she showed us how you broke off chunks and put them into your mouth and they turned into ice cream, and even though I thought she was pulling my tail I tried a piece and just like the strawberry in Aquamarine’s cereal at first it was super dry and didn't taste like anything and then all of a sudden it was like ice cream.
I wanted to know how it was made, and Jenny said it was called dehydration, which was where they sucked all the water out of something and I knew how that worked with sun-dried fruit but I didn't know that you could do it with ice cream. What stopped it from melting before it was all dehydrated? Jenny didn't know, but she asked her telephone and it told her.
I bet that would be popular with sailors. There's a lot of stuff you can't keep fresh on a ship, even with a crew of earth ponies.
We finally got to the bus station and Aquamarine and Jenny waited with me until the bus arrived. It was bigger and nicer-looking than the white buses that went around Kalamazoo, and there were little compartments underneath for luggage.
I sat right in the very front, where I could see out the big front windows. That was something you couldn't do on a train, which I thought made the bus a better way to travel. Plus it was cheaper than the train.
After a little bit of driving, though, I decided that the train was better. It was mostly smoother, and it was a bit roomier, and it smelled a little nicer, too, plus the bus took a stupid route. It went to Grand Rapids first, then Kalamazoo.
When it started to get dark out, there wasn't much more to see, so I took out my anthropology book and read my homework and I tried to take some notes but the bus was so unpredictably bouncy I thought I might wind up swallowing my pen by mistake, so I just read a little bit ahead in the book.
I couldn't have been happier when the bus finally stopped in Kalamazoo. I put on my flight gear right there in the parking lot and called the airplane directors. There was a man I'd never talked to before on the radio, and he didn't understand at first where I was departing from, but he finally figured it out, I think. I kept alert for other airplanes and helicopters too in case he hadn't gotten it right.
There was something comforting about being back at my own dorm room. I hung my saddlebags over the back of my chair and scratched at my coat where they'd been strapped down and then hugged Peggy. I would have liked to tell her about my weekend but she was deep in her math homework and I could see by the way she was gnawing on her pen that she was having some difficulty with it and I shouldn’t distract her.
After a little bit, I thought about doing something to get her attention like banging a bucket on the wall, but I didn't have a bucket, so I checked my computer mail instead, and then when there wasn't anything interesting there, I decided that I could write a letter to my sister about horses, but I wasn't really sure how to begin. Then I thought that maybe it would be better to write a poem because Conrad said I was pretty good at poems (even if I can't rhyme) so I worked on that for a bit and then helped Peggy check her homework, and then it was time for bed if I wanted to get up and fly in the morning.
Ships have sail names like 'lower fore topsail,' and 'upper main topsail' and (in one diagram I've seen) the frontmost jib is called 'the jib of jibs.'
With all this talk of ships and sailors, are you sure Silver isn't a sea pony? (Shoo be doo! Shoo shoo be doo!)
7286032 Feudal peasants, many of whom were fairly literate. There's an amusing inaccuracy that the vast gulf of human history has been the Church vs. Science/Learning.
The accepted dogma is that Genesis is metaphorical and the seven days it took is a stand in for "so suddenly everything. And then a whole lot of nothing. And then stars formed. And then a bit later the earth. And later still water. And a bit more waiting and then life. And then a whole lot of waiting and man, and then more waiting and modern man and then more waiting and now here we are" (Well, evolution has been doing poorly in America lately, but remember a monk demonstrated it with beans before Darwin and his finches) , and wossname wasn't put to death for the heliocentric model, he shared notes and the church went "Oh, so it is."
Basically, if you can read the Bible, you could read any ye elde word and understand its meaning, I.e. be literate.
I'm not certain where illiterate pegasi comes from. As you said, literacy was important to the Romans... and the Vikings... and the Mongols...
a good chapter with good detailing I really enjoyed it.
7285458 EH.
It's been six years. Why do I still have to point this out.
Schoolfillies. In a rural backwater. No older than 12-13. Orbital physics equation on the blackboard.
And then as of Ponyville Confidential at rhe very least we know for damn sure there's a reasonable literacy rate, or the newspaper industry couldn't survive in Equestria.
And there's enough anomalous tech to chalk up what we see in the show to aesthetics. They have colourized film, manufacturing of paper cups with plastic lids and straws, adaptive fucking terraforming, internal combustion engines.... highly specialized computerized laboratory equipment, modern hospitals, electricity, a working knowledge of the atom, NBC suits and civil defense (air raid) sirens ...
Ponies are a full technological singularity ahead of us. Sorry to break your wrongful conclusions. Our last singularity was the circuit / microchip. They're post-scarcity. Magic gave 'em a leg up, and things we need never caught on because they didn't need them.
7283288 Google already has. Binary switched keyboard. Two keys and an enter key.
"Uh, hey, Bob? There's an ornithopter wanting to take off from the bus stop. They did not cover this in my training."
7285326 So you're going with the concepts described in The Name of the Wind, where (equation) stands in as a way to write down and teach specific magic, or with the runic alphabet where a series of glyphs and the right chemicals can turn a crate with a copper bar along the back side into an icebox.
(Basically "This is how you convince the universe that this is how things work and get this effect.")
Hey, "greater long double squarangle" is a perfectly cromulent term!
Who needs a display? Silver can tell you that ponies have been coming on Earth for a while now.
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The pony world in canon is really inconsistent with technology. For example, they have a powerhouse on their dam, but no visible transmission infrastructure. The way they were repairing leaks on the dam isn't feasible. The collapsing building in "Mare-do-well" is of a wooden framing type that's not efficient (or probably possible) for the height of the structure they were building, and the crane used was wooden and had the same problems.
The writers, frankly, don't spend much time on world building. They put in whatever is needed to make their plot--or one-off joke--work, without too much concern as to how it fits in with what's been used before. It's honestly not much different than, say, Peter Griffin's history and childhood.
If a fanfiction author wants to make a more consistent world, he'll have to make choices about what to use and what to drop as inconsistent.
"Well, the train's broke down, call out the greater long double squarangle."
They should totally have life-sized statues of Silver and Aquamarine at the entrance to that section, in the same poses as from that picture. I'd pay all my money to see that.
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St. Isidore was a pretty cool guy. A churchman and the foremost scholar of the age. Today, he's the patron saint of students, computers and the Internet itself.
Also, if you've never seen Inherit the Wind, go do it.
Also, also, the various segments throughout both Cosmos shows dedicated to religious historical figures who advanced science (Bruno, Kepler, Gervase of Canterbury, etc.)
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Well duh, that's where they charge magic power-crystals to power the stuff in their homes that run on magic... everypony knows that.
Good. It's good.
Speaking as someone who's been teaching himself C++ for the past several days, "greater long double squarangle" seems entirely reasonable. Maybe add a "const" in there for good measure.
But seriously, this was a fascinating little arc. I really can't fully appreciate Silver's distress. I can picture it, yes, but she nearly broke her neck by tumbling down the uncanny valley. The closest thing we could appreciate would be if Houyhnhnms had a show for giant, domesticated Yahoos.
Hmm. Someone definitely needs to tell Silver about Gulliver's Travels. I'm sure it's brought up plenty of times since this Earth first encountered Equestria, but it's new to her.
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My name is Ozymandias, Jib of Jibs;
Look on my Rigging, ye Mighty, and despair!
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const long *doubleGreaterSquareAngle(side,side,side,side,side,side,side,side);
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There was an interesting story, as related in the Hardcore history Podcast on WWI (long but worth listening to) about Ernest Shackleton. He left for his ill fated expedition just as WWI was starting, when writing about his return he said:
7286452 There's a small scale Tesla tower on top of said substation, and anyone who's seen a "tree" knows we can disguise a radio tower. Which is basically the mechanics of the Tesla tower. Take electricity and convert it to an EM wave that vibrates something that picks it up, and woosh back to electricity. We can do it over 30'. The in-house transmitters are innocuous as fuck.
They can literally hold the water back with their minds long enough for the concrete patch to set. Or in Mare Do Well as a stopgap until it can be rebuilt.
As for the structure, says someone from a civilization that cannot yet / cannot imagine the capabilities of a civilization that said "fuck you gravity" and built a city/factory in the fucking clouds.
As for the crane, they're obviously just figuring out that one diesel-engined vehicle is less expensive than a team of twelve unicorns working to lift the same mass to the same elevation.
And I wholly reject that way of thinking, because it takes all the punch out of the differences in worlds and reduces ponykind to... the way we perceive any civilization that isn't Western. Simple, backwards, half-retarded, and cute.
7286565 I hate the amount of derision that the church gets, because people are used to people running [group 1]'s lives without knowing what they're talking about. If you're any flavor of Christian, the Old Testament is tossable. Christ's last words "It is finished" at once speak of the end of his own life, and the idea that we are washed in the blood of the lamb forever afterwards, that Christ was God learning about His children and realizing that all the rules about absolution and salvation before Christ were impossible to adhere to, and not the edicts of a kind, loving, and just King of Kings.
7286259 Darwin discovering or proving evolution is a very common misconception. What he did discover and prove is the processus of natural selection. Darwinism is but one of the theories of evolution.
The first known evolutionist was a greek philosopher, Anaximander. And many other philosopher and scientist added ideas and theories that influenced Darwin; his ideas didn't come out of nowhere.
No Silver, Meghan don't count as experience with average human.
7286452 I've noticed that at the Hoofer Dam also. My headcanon is that some sort of quantum entanglement or superposition is used at the PowerHouse to send electricity to each of its subscribers. Most of the energy probably goes to Cloudsdale for the weather factory. It's not as if they could use wires there!
In the Project Sunflower Harmony story I'm waiting for the Humans to offer to bring the power station into the 21st century with computers and LCD screens and such but then be surprised the Poni have nearly-lossless wireless power transmission.
(As seen when Discord breaks then rebuilds Fluttershy's lamp.)
"Yo, I heard you like horses so I put a horse on your horse so you can ride while you ride."
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They're obviously best friends.
That sounds like a variable type in C.
Oh, you're a real tease with your worldbuilding.
At this point you'd think all the ATCs in Kalamazoo would have heard about the cute little Pegasus that likes to go flying in the morning. It would be this whole induction ritual for the new controllers.
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For the record, if you want someone to get notified for your reply to their post, you have to post that post in the same chapter that it appears in, not going off of the main story page that has all the comments in chronological order. It's a bug, and a nasty one.
If you read the parent post of the post I linked to, the author goes on to talk about the difficulty of determining just how literate people were back during the height of the Roman Empire, suggesting that people may have been literate to a degree, but not necessarily literate in a way that would allow them to read/write things with a comprehension.
I'm not really sure what the point is with the talk about the bible and church, but okay.
In Admiral's post, he suggests that pegasi and Earth pony languages merged together, and that the end result is mostly Earth pony language with pegasi influences because pegasi didn't write anything down. If they're not writing anything down, how can they be literate? It seems to me that far from being individuals with no real interest in learning or literacy or whatever, historically people like those in the legions would be more educated and more likely to write things down and use language than is implied with that.
I'm not saying the headcanon is wrong or unworkable but it strikes me that of the tribes the pegasi and unicorns were, at least here, more alike than apart yet it's the unicorns who are the odd horse out.
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I think the critical mistake people make when looking at the world depicted in the show is that they assume that, because ponies don't live like we do, they must be more primitive/less advanced/etc than we are. I think it's more likely that ponies are at least as knowledgeable about their world as we are, but simply don't express that knowledge in the same ways we do.
I then to think of ponies as having the knowledge to build a computer, but for whatever reason they don't. Sort of like how the steam engine was invented in 1AD, but at the time it wasn't applied to anything until much, much later.
Silver seems to be developing a fascination with Earth horses... A morbid one, akin to observing train wrecks)
Oh, and
I guess it's true when people say that equines are quick to pick up bad habits from one another
I'd been wondering about that.
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underground wiring is a thing and it's entirely feasible that they're using that. Plus they could be using wireless transmission. And inefficient doesn't mean impossible, but in general you're right
7287284 You mentioned illiterate Earth ponies, who for all the world seemed to be feudal peasant inspired... who were largely literate because of the church.
And then you further prove your lack of comprehension skills. I wasn't sure where the concept of illiterate ancient pegasi came from, since every other fierce warlike tribe we know of was literate.
And then the concept of illiterate ponies is utterly ridiculous. At an age when humans are learning times tables, foals are learning calculus.
7287688 That's what I said.
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When I mentioned that, of the three tribes, it seems more likely that the earth ponies would be the ones with less literacy, I was, in fact, thinking about such things as they would have appeared during the Roman Empire/Republic.
Further, I have to confess that I'm skeptical that poor peasants would have been literate at all. At most I would imagine some of them would have some functional level of literary, but on the level I mean. You're welcome to provide citations that show it to be so, but it isn't wholly relevant to the discussion.
And, for the record, Earth ponies? don't have the church.
I literally just explained 'where the concept' came from. Being 'literate' means you can both read and write. I'm not even suggesting that pegasi would be, or should be, illiterate, that's what I'm suggesting appears to be here and doesn't make sense.
Modern foals, and you'll recall that universal literacy is something that only recently showed up in Equestrian society, at least outside of unicorns.
7287727 yep, missed your comment when I first posted and I agree with you. Plus it's really hard to get a feelf or technology based on one data point. Construction methods and equipment can vary greatly based on region, skill of the crew and architects, and available equipment.
7287868 We're given countless.
I'm not sure if Silver will ever get used to seeing earth horses up close. There is always something new or depressing for her to observe.
Is the unicorn hitch also known as a tally ho?
I ask because one of the earliest science-fiction stories is about Frank Reade and his steam horse. Later...steam team. Later... tally ho, which in the illustration shows the one horse in front, two horses behind.
7288060 what do you mean?
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The main character in Seven Fates' "When a Pony Calls" narrowly escapes a similar fate (the situation was convoluted and there were massively mitigating circumstances), so it's not a stretch to think that such a punishment would exist in his storyverse.
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Eh, I guess? I don't really see much difference between that and say, a Zoo or Circus.
Also I have very little empathy.
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My headcanon is that the Mane 6's generation is the first to have mandatory primary education. That doesn't mean that nopony went to school before that, just that it wasn't mandatory. Some small towns probably didn't have schoolhouses, and it's possible that even now (in story time) there are homeschooled ponies; Pinkie's family, for example, seems likely to homeschool, if for no other reason than they appear to live in a desolate area.
That means that as of the Mane 6 generation, literacy rates for ponies are getting pushed up to the 100% mark (presumably you can never quite hit 100%, no matter how hard you try).
I do know (thanks to googling) that the first newspaper in Europe was published in 1605 in Germany, and the literacy rate in Germany at the time was between 25 and 30%. I consider that the ponies are far more literate than that; probably in Ponyville at the time of the show, 80%, and most of the ponies who are illiterate are older.
I like to separate 'technology' and 'magic,' and not jump to conclusions on things we can't see inside of. To the best of my knowledge, we don't know if they have microchips, for example. Inside of their computer might be nothing more than an enchanted crystal, vacuum tubes, or even a very smart centipede pulling on a system of levers. Their film could work on the same chemical process ours does, or it might be purely magic. It could be paper with an enchantment on it. The straws might be manufactured plastic, or they could be the stems of a straw-like plant.
I think that they are less technologically advanced than us when it comes to manufactured goods as we know and understand them. In terms of their overall knowledge, I assume that they are at least on par with us. They might not know all the same things that we do, and they might not understand some things in the way we do; by the same token, they absolutely have understandings of things that we humans don't even have a concept of, like magic. Silver Glow has even mentioned that before; there are things that she knows that aren't in the text book, but there are also things that humans know that ponies don't. Ponies don't have doppler radar--why would they bother? That also means that they might not know exactly what goes on inside a cloud before it produces a tornado . . . but you can bet that they know what kind of clouds make tornados, experienced weatherponies can 'feel' a cloud that's likely to produce one, and then they can probably break it up.
And that's not even getting into what they can do with magic that we can't come close to duplicating the effects of. I don't know if a magical shield which can stop changelings without deflecting and can cover a whole city (and can let non-changelings in) is even theoretically possible. I suspect it isn't.
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What do you think's going to happen in the sequel to OPP?
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The problem, in my eyes at least, is that she hasn't established the parameters of her current relationship before pushing her way into another one.
If Aric's fine with an open thing, that's one thing. But she hasn't even asked, when she knows humanity is a pretty monogamous race. Well, she actually might not know that. It would be a pretty big gap in her knowledge, though, considering she seemed to have been well educated about humanity before she came to earth.
I get that she's a Pegasus, and people have the opinion that they're flighty in their relationships. Heh, flighty. Come on, though!
I doubt she has any ill intent, but it always gives me indigestion when I see someone standing in front of an oncoming train they don't seem to notice. I guess I'm just surprised Peggy hasn't dropped any hints about how it might be a good idea to figure out where she is with Aric before she gets involved with someone else. Unless I'm mistaken, she's aware of the situation at least.
Maybe not, though, considering we have a different perspective.
Bleh, I just don't want Silver to get mired in relationship drama. I'm not going to enjoy her journey any less if it goes in that direction, but I'll be a little sad for her. She seems to really like Aric, and if they end up having a falling out over the whole situation, well, it would just suck.
Woo, that's more than I meant to write...
7288613 YES! I was sure this was set in the same 'verse!
As to literacy. Check military records. The USA had universal education for about a century before WWII & still had illiterate soldiers. We've lost ground since then.
IMO, they have electricity but not AC -no Tesla. This means that you have to be within a few miles of a generator.
The first computers weren't built for about 40 years after they were possible. They were made to help aim artillery. No artillery, no perceived need for computers. IMO, their first computers will be used for either taxes or weather management.
7288671 Tesla didn't invent alternating current, he was an advocate for it. As far as computers, there's been one in the show: Feeling Pinkie Keen. Also arcade cabs.
7288671 Actually, one of the first machines that we would really recognize as an early computer was used to preform the 1890 Census. While it was hardly programmable, it did all the counting up for you allowing it to go much faster then before.
And even in 1800 the Jacquard loom used punch cards to control the weaving.
Even the term computer predates computers, as they used to refer to the people who did the complex artillery calculations.
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I was pondering that as well, and I think the ponies would have a moral obligation not to grant horses intelligence. Could they be sure they would be doing them a favour and not something terrible? Right now they can be content or not here in the moment. After the transformation they would be able to reflect on their lot in life and might come to know misery in the true sense of the word. Doing it to earth horses as they are today would be a trainwreck of epic proportions. Intelligence can indeed be the poisoned apple.
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Not sure I would... chimps don't look human, however close they are to us. Ponies on the other hand... your ponies are more horselike (without the ridiculous anatomical proportions I guess) and might indeed find it disturbing. Put a Shetland Pony or a small Fjord Pony next to SG for example - not much difference except eye size and colour. A more fitting analogy for the human perspective might be the Neanderthal, even if that one probably wasn't our direct ancestor but a convergent evolutionary side line that went extinct.
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Same here. As for magpies: when I was studying at Bangor in Wales, one day I observed a group of seven magpies on the top of one of the higher buildings. It was very windy that day and the tower obviously created some strong turbulence or updraft, and the birds took turns jumping off the roof with wings tucked in. Close to the ground they snapped open their wings and the wind catapulted them back up to the roof. All the other magpies had formed an actual queue (and seemed very polite... except for when one of them purposely pushed the one at the front over the edge). Watched them for over half an hour.
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I prefer to call it a 'mixed blessing'.
7287724 No, feudal peasants were not "largely literate". They were not provided education beyond what the local lord needed them to know, which was how to farm using hand tools. The invention of the printing press was considered an extremely dangerous event, because it might provide peasants with ideas above their station. This is the same reason people were burned to death for daring to translate the bible into English.
This remained true until feudalism was finally abolished in Europe and China in the 20th century. Pre-revolutionary Russia had a peasant population which was 80% of the total. The literacy rate of the entire country, across all social classes was not yet 30%. Similar numbers were seen in china.
I apologize for the scattershot nature of this reply, but I haven't had time for a longer reply before now. I've included everybody in one post, but most of the replies to me were regarding the power transmission thing, and I think my responses to Dieselpunk Trixie and jxj will cover most of my thoughts.
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Considering you want to be careful standing next to a 100W ham radio antenna, I'm not holding my breath that large-scale EM transmission of power is going to be coming soon. Especially since the inverse-square law means most of the energy will be going to nobody. I know it can be done small-scale: I have a wireless induction charging pad for my phone, and it is glorious.
If you want to say they can wirelessly transmit power, though, we've seen they have magic. Why try to bring electromagnetic energy into it? Fuck it, it's magic.
I don't question the ability to set the patch. That's trivial. What is an issue is that the hydrostatic pressure that develops after you stop the leak will tend to break the patch off in short order, either through failure of the patch material or the substrate. If you know of a product that can be applied to the downstream face of a dam that doesn't have this problem, let me know. The guy in the next cubicle has been tasked with fixing broken waterstops in one of our grout galleries. He's making attempt number 3 or 4, by as many engineers. If you've got something that can just be slopped on the downstream face of the contraction joints, we'll at least consider it, and probably use it.
For having this capability, they seem to be using rather prosaic materials for their construction on the ground. It's not stated anywhere that they use magic to keep a building standing--and if that were the case, you'd think that they'd have seen the building collapse coming sooner--but you can also say "fuck it, it's magic" here too.
My issues with the crane were that it looked similar to a steel truss used in current crane booms, but in wood. I'm not going to say you couldn't build it from wood (though if forced to make a bet without penciling it out, that's I'd put my money), but the detailing is going to be a lot different because wood and steel tend to fail in different ways. To me, it looks like something an art major spun out of their skull on a tight timeline--they took a picture of a crane and redrew it with a wood finish to match the show's aesthetic.
I don't feel any need to worry about that. When confronted with stuff inconsistent with the shows (original) aesthetic of pre-modern, just industrializing, I tend to drop things rather than try to develop epicycles to explain them. You like to do the epicycle development. Neither is "wrong." To go back to the original point of my post, an author writing a long-form fanfic in this universe is going to have to do one or the other (or some mix of the two), because the canon isn't self-consistent. The original, season-one, direction under Faust was to avoid modern technology whenever possible ("use a candle rather than a lamp" I believe the guidance was). After she departed, writers felt a lot freer to take shortcuts to tell the story they wanted, even if they conflicted with earlier episodes.
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We haven't seen either the at-grade transformers, or (in Ponyville) the manholes necessary for vaults containing below-grade transformers. Like I said, "no visible transmission infrastructure."
As a general reply to everybody: You can handwave pretty much any inconsistency in the show. But my point was that the worldbuilding in canon is so loose that this handwaving is necessary for a lot of pretty basic stuff. Nor is it wrong for somebody to make different handwaves, like disregarding something rather than adding a lot of "unseen" stuff to try to make it work.
7291443 It might be worth noting that in Look before you sleep, the power goes out in Twilight's house during the storm.
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She isn't, but she's not far from it.
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Thank you!
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I would imagine by now all the K'zoo tower controllers know of her. But I suppose that's not the same as getting a radio call from her.
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I'm not familiar with that source, so I can't say for sure that's how I see it working. But conceptually, I see that as being how a high-level unicorn visualizes the world and the magic she creates, in much the same way as an artist works; however, there's a lot of underlying theory and practice that goes into it, which is why not every unicorn is Twilight Sparkle.