May 16 [The Space where Fractals Live]
May 16
Aric was a whole collage of scents when he got into bed. I woke up when the door opened and I don't think he even noticed I was in bed right away, 'cause he was struggling to get out of his pants without falling over. And then when he got in bed he smelled like hot theatre dust and sweat and beer and smoke so I guess they had had an after party.
He wrapped his arms around me and muttered something that didn't make any sense at all, something about his new orange hat, and then he put his head on the pillow and fell asleep.
He was still pretty out of it in the morning. When he woke up, the first thing he did was put on his wrinkled pants and made a beeline for the bathroom, and when he staggered back into the room he had to put his hand on the doorframe to steady himself.
I asked him how much he'd had to drink last night, and he said too much. He told me he didn't even remember getting home, and said his head was throbbing. Which I guess I could understand: he didn't look too good.
Aric stepped out of his pants and climbed back into bed and so I nuzzled his chest and told him that I hoped he'd feel better when he'd had a chance to sleep it off, and he said that he hoped so, too. He said that he'd see me at Durach, and the way he felt he'd probably be sleeping until then. So I opened the window and flew out, then landed on the roof to get my flight clearance.
I said I was going to keep low today, and I did. I followed Main Street east, through town, and then instead of continuing to go East, I went along a northerly route, through the part of Kalamazoo called Parchment because they used to make paper there.
When I came back, I went up Academy Street, and noticed that Winston was still sitting in the theatre parking lot. So at least Aric had had enough sense not to drive it home with him last night.
Peggy noticed that I was in a sort of grumpy mood, and so I told her that Aric had gotten home last night really drunk, and she said that was because boys were dumb. That didn't really cheer me up all that much, but then again he'd hopefully be well-rested tonight, so that was something to look forward to.
I was hoping that we would get to do more work with fractals today—and we did—but it wasn’t drawing them. Professor Sir Doctor Banerjee said that we were going to learn about the space where fractals live, and I sort of had an image in my mind of a wonderful magical place, but that wasn’t what he meant.
He spent the whole class talking about measuring things, and some of the stuff seemed kind of basic at first, like how a line between points x and y should be the same distance whether it’s measured forward and backwards, which seemed pretty obvious.
I trusted that was going somewhere with that, though, and he was, because pretty soon we were talking about Euclidean and Non-Euclidean geometry and the Hausdorff metric and he would ask us how far apart a pair of fractals were, and then when we came up with an answer, we’d go through the definitions of a proper xy line and make sure that it filled the criteria.
Plus the mathematical symbols he used to draw out the definition of a line were really neat. It seems kind of silly to write, but when you’re talking about complex things, it’s very important that everyone has the same definition, otherwise it would be like if we were trying to set out clouds but everypony was working from a different gridmap.
I had a feeling we were going to get into some really good stuff on Wednesday, and I was looking forward to it.
Between class and lunch, I stopped back at my dorm room to take some notes on the wedding books. I should have done it last night, but I was so comfy on the bed with Meghan and it's really hard to write on a bed. I was worried that somebody else might want to borrow the book and it wouldn't be fair if I still had it.
I didn't have enough time to take notes from both, but I finished using one book and returned it, which only made me a little bit late to lunch.
Sean and Christine were having a good-natured argument about Star Trek and Star Wars, and I sort of tuned them out. Joe was reading a book in Japanese called a Manga, and he showed me some pages of it. I couldn't read it, of course, but I liked the art.
Peggy said that maybe I ought to watch one of Miyazaki's movies, and Joe set his book down and had a look on his face like he'd just been struck by lightning and then both of them said together Castle in the Sky.
So we decided that we'd watch that tomorrow night in Christine's room (which meant that I could sit in the papasan).
Professor Amy started off the day by asking us what our essay was going to be about, and when it got around to me, I told her about my topic. Luckily, nobody else had picked it first, or else I might have had to come up with something else.
Then when we were done she said that we were going to talk about race, and she started out by telling us that it is scientifically impossible to describe race. She went on to explain how there are a large mixture of characteristics, and that the significance of traits is cultural, not biological. There were some protests to that, and she reminded the class again that this was an anthropology class, not a biology class. But it didn't matter; the discussion got pretty heated for a little bit.
By the end of class, it felt like her lecture had been completely lost in the argument, and I kind of felt bad about that. Plus the whole thing had confused me: nobody in class could seem to agree on anything. I guess humans aren't split up in obvious tribes like ponies are, so I guess it was really hard for them to tell. All I knew was that I hadn't seen anybody yet who belonged to an obviously different tribe or race.
I asked Professor Amy about that after class, and she said it was really, really complicated, and then she explained how people had once organized different types of people into different classifications based on their skin color and certain features, and that there had even been a theory which was now discredited that all the different races had evolved independently from each other. She said that we now knew that wasn't the case; all of humanity had had common ancestors, but either way that wasn't the point of the class.
Then she said that the reason she had made the blanket statement at the beginning of the class was because all humans had common DNA, and they could all breed with each other, and as they did traits would get mixed, or, over time they would change in order to adapt to new living conditions. She told me if I wanted specifics on that, I'd have to ask a genetics professor, because that wasn't her field of study and she didn't want to give me wrong information.
And she also said that sometimes in different fields, different things matter. And what the students needed to understand was that if you took a human baby from any culture and put it in a new one, there was nothing to prevent it from growing up the same as any other adult in that culture. It would learn the language and customs of that culture, and that was the point. Humans weren't pre-programed to be one thing or another; it was all learned behavior.
Well, I guess that was true of ponies, too. But there were still some other important differences. I could see how an earth pony being raised in a unicorn house might act like a unicorn, but I didn't think it would be able to use spells. And probably a unicorn wouldn't be as good at farming as an earth pony.
Some groundponies had mixed families, and some pegasuses, too. I don't think I would like being in a mixed family; I think when I was young, I would have been upset to find out my parents and siblings could do something I'd never be able to.
I thought about that some at dinner, and I looked around at my dining companions and tried to decide if they might be different races. I didn't think that they were, even though I could pick out lots of differences between them.
I spent the early evening taking notes from the second wedding book, and then a third, and I returned both of them on my way to Fourth Coast. I noticed that Winston was gone, so Aric must have recovered enough to drive it home.
Sure enough, when I got there, Winston was in the parking lot, and Aric was sitting upstairs along with Lisa and his house-mates David and Angela. He said that he'd dragged them out of the basement.
There were enough of us to play, so we played a round while we waited for everyone else to show up, and they trickled in just as we were finishing.
It was a lot harder to play with only five people, and I wound up losing, but it didn't really matter because we had fun. And then we went back to the big group, and I didn't lose any more.
When we rode back, it was really crowded in the cab of Aric's truck. Angela sat on David's lap, and Lisa and I squeezed together in the middle. He left her at her dorm, which meant that everyone had to get out and rearrange, then he went home and parked and we all got out and went in through the side door. David and Angela went downstairs to the basement, and Aric and I went upstairs to his room.
Since he'd slept all day, he really wasn't very tired at all, and he wound up wearing me out. Then he was sort of tossing and turning like he couldn't fall asleep so I finally suggested that he'd be less fidgety if he read a book. So he got up and picked a book called Bloodhound off his shelf and propped himself up on a pillow and started reading, while I curled up with my head on his chest and fell asleep.
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Can't sleep Aric? Guilty conscience perhaps?
"Could it be our boy's done something rash?" (Mack the Knife)
7394389 ......alright grab the pitchforks and torches.
Of course an Equestrian would think that. It sounds more interesting than Flatland.
My theory of Poni genetics is that despite the tribal animosity of the past the tribes need at least some interbreeding to prevent adverse health effects.
That the offspring don't have partial traits from mismatched parents is part of their Non-Mendalavian biology.
(Exceptions might be Scootaloo and Flurry Heart)
Present Day Equrestria where intermarriage has lost most of its stigma (The Old Money Unicorns excepted) seems to have a vibrant and progressive society.
There is a book I read called "Daddy" by a French author named Loup Derand. If you can find it, it is well worth the read. If you loan it out you will never see it again. I can't begin to do the description justice. It's a book I'd feel comfortable reading every year.
Huh, Castle in the Sky. One of the few Miyazaki films I haven't seen. I should dig that up. Princess Mononoke was one of my first exposures to anime. The other was Evangelion
Human: "Well, see, they used to discriminate against people based on the colour of their skin, and some still do it today.
Technicolor magic small horse: "Well, that seems stupid."
7393817
Heating up your noodles with lightning just isn't the same.
I can't tell if that's your mistake or Silver's.
In sameness, there is peace. Exceptionalism is a lie. Difference is frustration. To excel is to fail.
7394494
Ahem:
why would anyone read a manga in japanese ? when there are people making MILLIONS of moneys with translating and printing the stuff ...
or just people translate them for fun and put them online ...
7394389
7394410
i'm with you guys !
7394449
certainly not an easy start in the media. seriously.
how ?
Aric with a hangover?
The whole headache thing got me wondering what's going to happen when Aric gets sick. Is he aware that the CDC may dogpile him?
Brace yourselves... The weeaboos are coming.
Yes of course, and girls never ever get drunk eh?
That's where imaginary number lives too.
Sounds like magma...
7394410
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I never really got into manga and anime. I just don't really get it.
The Chase does a good job with this, at least in the beginning. The three tribes feel psychologically distinct from each other (and really alien at times). There's a pair of unicorns being raised by a pegasus (dinky, sparkler, and Derpy) and they end up picking up a lot of pegasus mannerisms. Sparkler ends up with with some social anxiety (and maybe some depression, I don't remember), she feels like a pegasus trapped in a unicorns body and she has trouble interacting with other unicorns. Dinky ends up getting in trouble because she picks up a pegasus mannerism that isn't considered acceptable by unicorns and earth ponies and ends up in trouble getting in trouble for it.
7394449
)
Yeah, Miyazaki was one of my first experiences with anime - Castle in the Sky and Nausicaa, in particular (with a little bit of Porco Rosso and Kiki's Delivery Service for flavor.
My other first experience with anime was Akira. That should tell you something about my mindset.
And speaking of Miyzaki, I visited Japan in the summer of 2001, when there was a huge hype train being built there for the Japanese release of Spirited Away. Fun times, let me tell you.
7394449 7395056 Personnaly it was Howl's moving Castle, what a huge mind fuck it was for the litle kid I was!
A friend later introduced me to Dragonball, wich was more accessible...
7394395
Well Silver would have smelt most possible types of 'Rashness' on him.
Once upon a time, in the magical land of Fractalia...
And yeah, human views of race are going to seem bizarre to a member of a species with clearly distinct subspecies and a pigmentation spectrum of literally every conceivable hue. (Heck, for all we know, Octavia's incredibly colorful in ultraviolet.) Silver should just focus on one weird human thing at a time.
Get her into Flatland.
7395913
Stop me if you've heard this one before.
Once upon a time (1/t), pretty little Polly Nomial was strolling across a field of vectors when she came to the edge of a singularly large matrix.
Now Polly was convergent and her mother had made it an absolute condition that she must never enter such an array without her brackets on. Polly, however, who had changed her variables that morning and was feeling particularly badly behaved, ignored this condition on the grounds that it was insufficient and made her way in amongst the complex elements.
Rows and columns enveloped her on all sides. Tangents approached her surface. She became tensor and tensor. Quite suddenly, three branches of a hyperbola touched her at a single point. She oscillated violently, lost all sense of directrix and went completely divergent. As she reached a turning point she tripped over a square root which was protruding from the erf and plunged headlong down a steep gradient. When she was differentiated once more she found herself, apparently alone, in a non-euclidean space.
She was being watched, however. That smooth operator, Curly Pi, was lurking inner product. As his eyes devoured her curvilinear coordinates, a singular expression crossed his face. Was she still convergent, he wondered. He decided to integrate improperly at once.
Hearing a vulgar function behind her, Polly turned round and saw Curly Pi approaching with his power series extrapolated. She could see at once, by his degenerate conic and his dissipative terms, that he was bent on no good.
"Eureka" she gasped.
"Ho, ho," he said. "What a symmetric little Polynomial you are. I can see you're bubbling over with secs".
"O Sir," she protested, "keep away from me. I haven't got my brackets on."
"Calm yourself, my dear," said our suave operator, "your fears are purely imaginary "
"i, i," she thought, "perhaps he's homogenous then?".
"What order are you," the brute demanded.
"Seventeen," replied Polly.
Curly leered. "I suppose you've never been operated on yet?" he asked.
"Of course not", Polly cried indignantly. "I'm absolutely convergent."
"Come, come," said Curly. "Let's off to a decimal place I know and I'll take you to the limit."
"Never," gasped Polly.
"Exchlf," he swore, using the vilest oath he knew. His patience was gone. Coshing her over the coefficient with a log until she was powerless, Curly removed her discontinuities. He stared at her significant places and began to smooth her points of inflexion. Poor Polly. All was up. She felt his hand tending to her asymptotic limit. Her convergence would soon be gone forever.
There was no mercy, for Curly was a heavyside operator. He integrated by parts. He integrated by partial fractions. The complex beast even went all the way around and did a contour integration. What an indignity. To be multiply connected on her first integration. Curly went on operating until he was absolutely and completely orthogonal.
When Polly got home that evening, her mother noticed that she had been truncated in several places. But it was too late to differentiate now. As the months went by, Polly increased monotonically. Finally she generated a small but pathological function which left surds all over the place until she was driven to distraction.
The moral of this sad story is this: If you want to keep your expressions convergent, never allow them a single degree of freedom.
(Most retellings of that say 'the vilest oath he knew, but the original version probably said vilest language. Exchlf being a pre-cobol programming language used exclusively at Cambridge)
7395949
Ah, a classic. On the other hand, Silver might propose novel methods of integration. That or kick Curly in the spherical coordinates.
Everybody's talking about these really cool series that introduced them to anime, and I'm just sitting here thinking about how I watched Pokemon (if that even counts for anime) for the first time on my cousin's Gameboy Advance. It was when they were selling those game packs that instead had two episodes on it, and this one was the end of the Johto arc with Blaziken vs Ash's Charizard. Blaziken is my favorite Pokemon to this day, even though my first pokemon game was Leafgreen.
It's funny because without understanding how humans conceive separate races it's impossible to understand the motivations behind a lot of historical events. This is going to make Silver's opinions on them worthless.
It gets funnier when you realise that conceptions about race are different where and when you are from, even with humans on earth. The white guy - black guy model of race that dominates American thinking utterly breaks down when looking at the historical (and, honestly, current day) relations between Europeans, Ashkenazi Jews, and Slavs, for example. They all look white in a photograph (with the exception of minor differences that most people today wouldn't pick up on as racial markers) but at the same time it has been less than 100 years since a fairly famous genocide was perpetuated against the latter two for purely racist reasons.
7394389
Heh, oops.
7394395
Possibly. . . .
7395144
Most, yes.
7394411
Come see fractalland! It's infinitely repeating, but really pretty.
I disagree; however, the phrase 'better together' comes to mind--they don't need it (i.e., as long as they're not staying too close to home, they're not inbreeding), but it helps ensure diversity.
I think in some cases they do; I'd say that Bulk Biceps is probably part (or mostly) earth pony. But I agree that their traits probably don't work like ours, since they have different body structures based on tribe.
I think that there are still pockets where it has a stigma, but I think that's fading amongst most ponies. The isolationist pegasi (the ones who hate having their hooves touch ground), the uptightest of Unicorn dynasties, and the ruralist of earth ponies probably frown on it or outright shun it, while the rest of the ponies don't really care all that much. I think the group portrait of the Apple family is a good example of that--AJ's about as Earth Pony as you can get, but apparently not all of her family was all that picky.
I think that there'll always be a slight undercurrent of tribalism, just because the three tribes are different in significant ways, but I think that mostly they all get along these days.
7394412
Amazon.com found it for me.
I'll add it to my next order.
7394449
You should. I really liked it. Although I suppose I just spoiled the end for you, for which I apologize.
7394494
There was an essay on how MLP was racist because the grey ponies were serving Celestia in the first opener. I can only assume that was as far as the essay-writer watched: color-based racism in Equestria would be about the dumbest thing ever.
Oh, I don't know. I'd like to see someone try. By the way, you can't heat a can of Spaghetti-Os with an acetylene torch, not even with a rosebud tip.
7394653
That one was mine.
I think it would be hard to be the only earth pony in a unicorn family, or a unicorn in an pegasus family, or whatever.
Silver Glow--getting right to the heart of the matter while tragically missing the point.
7394711
Because he's planning to move to Japan after he graduates, so it's good practice and fun.
Sex.
7394749
He is blissfully ignorant. Unlike Peggy, he didn't get the 'so you're rooming with a pony' classes.
7394772
It's certainly the most commented-on typo thus far.
7394773
Sure, but they're not dumb when they do.
All I could think of:
bodo.com/simpsons/3dhlook.jpg
7394780
Ooh, does the traditional model come with a free torch?
7395039
I'll confess that I don't really get magna, either, but I suppose if someone pointed me to a good series I might give it a try.
Hmm, I might have to check it out one of these days. Of course, by the time I get around to it, it'll probably be about a billion words long.
7395056
I think Akira was the first one I watched, and I didn't get it at all. But I've seen almost all of Miyzaki's movies (not Kiki's Delivery Service, because the movie store where I used to live didn't have it).
7395913
I want to go there.
Exactly! Color-based discrimination doesn't make sense to her, especially since humans don't really come in very many different colors, thus making it even dumber.
7395936
I bet the college library has that book.
7396613
And everybody's all hyped up about Pokemon Go, and here I am never having played any of the games nor particularly interested in the franchise, since it came out while I was in college.
7396987
Well, I wouldn't say that her opinion is worthless (after all, 'that's dumb' is a reasonable opinion). . . .
That's very true. I was actually just doing some research on that for the upcoming chapter (you'll see), and I sure as hell couldn't tell a difference by looking at pictures on Google, and probably couldn't have if I was there, either.
7404566
No, but he might get some "So You're Fornicating With A Pony" classes.
Oh Miss Silver Glow, parchment is animal-skin. You do not want to know about vellum.
I really ought to re-watch all my old Miyazaki films. Of course, first I'd have to figure out where the hell the VHS player has ended up...
I trusted that was going somewhere with that, though, and he was,
*that he was
derpicdn.net/img/view/2016/8/30/1237569__safe_solo_animated_derpy+hooves_cloud_lightning_jumping_the+last+roundup_gif+with+captions_dutch.gif
But then you think that maybe there's something you can do that they probably would never be able to.
Well, that is, unless you're an Earth Pony. Then you're probably fudged.
A human raised in Equestria....... Do eet
8088968
Ooh, that would be interesting. Gnoll Reader kinda touched on that in Diary of a Store Clerk (not updated in quite some time, sadly). And that's probably not the only one, but it's the only one I can remember coming across.
Ultimately, you'd wind up with a human acting like a pony, probably. Lots of hugs, nuzzles, no nudity taboo, possibly malnutrition (and, depending on how horse-like one wants to make the ponies, serious dental problems).
Now that I think about it, there's one story where a human gets a cutie mark . . . Derpy's Human, maybe? But as I recall, she kinda travels back and forth, and wasn't raised in Equestria.
That's not restricted to complex things. If you don't have agreement on what words mean, you aren't even really talking to each other.
11007125
This is very true. Actually comes up at work a lot, with ‘what we call the part’ and ‘what the manufacturer calls the part.’