October 4
I woke up early, and just listened to the birds chirping and Aric snoring for a little bit, and then I put my head down on his chest and that woke him up a little bit. He reached up and put his hand around my fetlock and then he sort of drifted off to sleep again, and so did I for a little bit, until I felt him moving around under me and so that woke me up and it was kind of unfair that it didn't wake him up, so I tickled him with my wing and when I felt him reaching for it, I stopped, and then when he'd relaxed a little bit I did it again, and finally he woke up and blinked at me and said that he'd had the weirdest dream that he was being attacked by birds. And I said that it was probably because he was hearing them all chirping outside, and he thought that was probably right. And then I kissed him and tickled his stomach with my wing again, and he looked at me and said that it was probably my fault.
He reached his hand down along my flank, and I swatted him with my tail but that didn't stop him, and pretty soon his hands were all over me, and I reminded him to turn off his alarm before it was too late, and while he was doing that, I rolled on my back to expose my belly to him, and he teased me for a little while before he got on top of me.
We snuggled for a little bit after, and then I asked if he'd be mad if I got a little flying in this morning before class, and he said that he didn't mind, as long as I wasn't mad thinking about how he might sleep for another couple of hours before actually getting up. So I pulled back the covers and looked at him and said that I'd think about it when I was in my physics lab.
I got my flight gear on and then flew out of Aric's bedroom window and to his bird feeder, and I kept an eye on his window but he waited until I'd put my head down to get a mouthful of sunflower seeds before he threw a balled-up sock at me, and he missed me but he caught the top of the bird feeder and rocked it back and forth.
So once I'd had my snack, I flew down and picked up his sock for him and flew it back up to his window, so he wouldn't have to go down and get it, and he leaned out the window a little bit so I kissed him before flying off.
There wasn't enough time before my thermodynamics lab to go to the Farmer's Market, but I was sure I had the hay-woman's telephone number somewhere, and I could call her so that she would know to have a haybale ready at the market for me on Thursday.
I kept low over the trees so that I wouldn't have to bother the airplane directors, and I circled over my old bird feeder once, just to see how many birds were still around it, and I scared off the sparrows again. But when I'd flown by and looked back, they were all flying back. Sparrows don't stay scared for too long.
I flew low over downtown, then I turned to follow the river towards the dam, although I wasn't going to get in enough flight time today to make it there and back again, 'cause I hadn't wanted to make Aric mad by leaving too early.
I went as far as Sprinkle Road, then I turned around and flew back towards home.
Peggy was just waking up when I got back to our room, and I asked her if she wanted to take the first shower, but she said I could because she needed time to wake all the way up.
She was in the bathroom waiting for the shower when I came out and I told her she could have just come in 'cause I wouldn’t have minded, and she laughed and then said that maybe we should have another shower party, which I thought would be a lot of fun. I wasn't sure if it would be okay, though, because Sean didn't live in the same place anymore, and so it might not be polite to just go use somebody else's shower when you weren't even visiting them. Peggy said that probably nobody would care.
I was trying to button my lab coat when Peggy came back from the shower, and she helped me. She said that maybe if humans still had fur and as much trouble with fasteners as I did, they'd still be going around naked.
I was kind of curious about that, because it was pretty useful to have a coat, and Peggy didn't know. She said that humans' ancestors had had coats like monkeys, but somewhere along the line they lost most of them, and she thought maybe it was because they'd lived somewhere warm and hadn't needed them.
While Peggy finished getting dressed, I got my saddlebags on and then Peggy put my mane back, and we went to breakfast together. The omelet cook was there today, and I got one, and also a couple of pieces of toast 'cause I was pretty hungry from all the food I hadn't eaten yesterday.
When I sat down, Christine asked me if I was playing doctor today, and I shook my head and said it was for my lab and I had to have somebody help me put it on because I couldn't work the buttons with my hooves, and there were a couple I couldn't get with my mouth, either. And then Anna said it must be kind of strange to have to have someone help you dress all the time, and Reese said that a lot of woman's fashion was like that back in the old days, and that's why women's buttons were on the opposite side as men's.
Sean wasn't there because he was sleeping in, so it wasn't as crowded for Anna and Reese, but it was kind of lonely without him. Christine said that he'd stayed up late because the new Star Trek movie had come out on Netflix at midnight, and he'd wanted to watch it even though he'd already seen it in the theater. She said that it was probably all he was going to talk about the rest of the day, and that he'd probably want me to watch it.
I couldn't tonight because I was going to Meghan's room. But I did want to see it—I thought another movie night at Christine's would be fun. We hadn't watched a movie together in a long time.
It's not fair that there's still so much that I want to do but never enough time.
We had special pistons to experiment with the Carnot cycle on our own, so that we could see it working on our own. And we got to do it a couple of times, so that we could make sure that we got good data points, because we were going to do a lot of calculating from them. And it was kind of complicated to set up and Lisa had to do a lot of it, just because my hooves weren't too good with really small plugs and wires. But I did get to put the heatpack in the microwave, and I was the only one in class who could take it out without gloves, because of my hooves, and that was a silly thing to be proud of, but it was something that nobody else could do.
Once everyone was done with their experiments, Professor Brown showed us a working heat engine that had two metal legs, and one of them went into hot water and the other into cold, and after a few minutes, it started spinning a fan, which was really neat to see.
Me and Lisa sat in the lounge and went over my notes on the experiment. It was kind of frustrating to have so much of the lab equipment not be hoof-friendly; maybe that was why unicorns were better at this kind of stuff. I don't think I'd want to take a whole bunch of physics classes and labs like Cayenne.
I suppose I was still learning by watching and taking notes, but I'd rather be doing.
On my way back to the dorm, I stopped by the library and I got a couple of funny looks because I still had my lab coat on and my goggles up on my forehead, but I didn't care.
The first thing I found was the World War I book that I had started reading, because maybe if I had it I'd be more likely to actually read it like I was gonna. And then I used the computer to try and find a book of poetry for lunch—something new that I hadn't read before.
Even with a pen in my mouth, I wasn't a very good typer. The computer had too many little buttons, and they weren't arranged in a sensible order.
I found a book of poems by Edward George Dyson that sounded interesting, and I kind of wanted to look through it before lunch but it was better for it to be a surprise. I'd always liked how Conrad had never let us know what we were going to read next.
When I was back in my room, I took off my saddlebags and lab coat and then scratched at the spot on my belly where the girth strap made the button dig in, then I started looking through the things from the apartment until I found the hay-woman's calling card, and when I talked to her she said that she would have a bale of last-cut mixed clover and alfalfa for me, which was about all that she had left.
I hoped that Peggy wouldn't be mad that it wouldn't all fit in the box, not until I'd eaten some of it.
Then I packed up my things for astronomy class and the poetry book for lunch and then I put my saddlebags back on but left them a little bit loose, and reminded myself to be careful because I didn't want them to slide off me.
Trevor had beaten me to the table, so after I'd picked my food I got out my poetry book and he started looking through it to see what looked interesting. And then Cedric and Leon arrived, and Leon let out a big groan when he saw the book but he didn't mean it.
Cedric thanked me again for telling him about the airshow and said that he'd had a real good time there. Leon said that they'd had to stay at a bad hotel, though, and I felt bad until Cedric said that Leon's idea of a crappy hotel was one that wasn't internationally known, and that had rooms which were smaller than a tennis court. Leon said that he needed space to stretch out.
He was kind of impressed with the booth we'd gotten to watch from, though, 'cause he said that private box seats were really expensive, and wondered who'd paid for it. I said that I didn't know—Mister Salvatore had made the arrangements, but I figured that the tornado team had already gotten permission to use it, and we just joined them later.
Then he said that he'd invited Aquamarine to come to the homecoming football game, which was in a couple of Fridays, and than said the day after there was a dance in Old Wells and it would be fun if I came, too. He said it was for everyone, not just football players.
Trevor gave the book to Leon, and he pointed to a poem, and Leon kind of scowled, but then he got a smile, and he started to read it. It was called A Friendly Game of Football, and even though it was about a different kind of football, he thought it was pretty funny, especially at the end.
There was just enough time for one more poem, and Trevor said that Leon could pick it, since he'd read that one, so he turned through the book until he found one he liked and he gave it to Cedric. And the poem was called Cleaning Up, and it was about sluicing for gold, but Leon said that he'd picked it just for the first line.
It would have been fun to stay and read some more poems, but I had to go to astronomy, so I took my book back and went to the Dow building and sat down next to Anna.
Professor Miller taught us that there was another way to find planets by transits, which is where a planet goes in front of its sun, and how it could be seen because when the planet crossed in front of its star it blocked a little bit of light. And she told us about the first one they'd proven that way, which they knew was there because of the Doppler method, but this was another kind of way of finding them or proving that they were there and the other measurements were correct.
But she said that didn't work on everything because you had to be exactly edge-on to the orbit of the planet you were looking for, and she said that there was a new satellite that was going to be launched soon which was going to be looking for that.
And she said that the exciting thing about that was that the radial velocity was really hard to measure, and took very special equipment, but that anybody with a decent telescope could find them, although it worked most efficiently when you could look at a lot of stars at once, and so they used the Hubble Space Telescope for that, and they predicted thirty but didn't find any, and so she explained how it turned out in star clusters (which was what they looked at) didn't usually have planets in regular orbits, because all the stars were so close together that they wrecked the orbits.
Everyone learned from their mistake, though, so next time they picked better stars and they found sixteen. And she showed us a picture of where it had looked, and there were so many stars! It was more stars than empty space, and I was hoping that maybe we'd get to look through a telescope and find that, because I'd never seen that many stars in one place before.
I couldn't help myself and when we got out of class, I looked up for stars but of course there were none to be seen since it was the middle of the day.
It was a nice afternoon and I didn't feel like being cooped up in my dorm room, so I unstrapped my saddlebags and sat on the grass under a tree, and did my astronomy homework there. This time there was hardly any wind at all, so I didn't have to worry about my homework blowing away.
I'd gotten to the third problem when I saw Anna walking across the quad and she saw me, too, so she came over and sat down next to me, with her back against the tree. And she had a big pad of paper for drawing, and she got out a pen and started making sketches, and when she'd finished each one she'd show them to me. They were all imaginary creatures called elves, which were slender and had pointy ears like Vulcans.
I left to go up to my room and get my Bible, then I came back and read Matthew, and after a while Reese showed up, too, and he sat down beside us and read his book.
I learned how Jesus went around and taught people wisdom, and how He healed the sick and cast out demons, which was really nice of Him. And He also even raised the dead, which I didn't think was a very smart thing to do. I'd heard stories about what happens to unicorns who try that.
And He got eight more disciples, and He taught them how to heal people, too, and how to teach people wisdom.
But the scribes and Pharisees didn't like that, and neither did Herod, who was a bad man, and they kept asking Jesus questions and hoping that He would say the wrong thing. And Matthew said that Jesus fed an entire crowd of people who had come to listen to Him speak, with only a few loaves of bread and a few fish and when they had all eaten there was more left over than when they'd started.
And more and more people followed Jesus, because of all the good things He was doing for them.
I could probably have finished Matthew, but Anna and Reese were packing their things away so that they could go to dinner, and I kinda didn't want to put my saddlebags back on, but I thought it would be a little bit rude to leave them to go to my room, so I wore them to dinner.
Just like Christine had predicted, Sean kept talking about how great the Star Trek movie had been, although not to the point that it was annoying. And he said that I needed to watch it, and so I said that I would but I didn't know when. He told me he could get it on Netflix whenever he wanted.
Peggy grumbled about her art class a little bit and said it was hard to believe that it was only Tuesday; it felt later than that. And everyone except for me agreed that the cooks couldn't make a proper meatloaf, but then they started arguing over whether a proper meatloaf had oats in it or if you should use catsup, and it sounded like one of those things that everybody had a different way to make, and maybe they were all right.
When I got back to my room, I was really glad to finally shed my saddlebags. They weren't fun to wear all day, although I had taken them off a couple of times. Some ponies had bags that were sort of like my camelback, and I'd tried one once but it got in the way of my wings, so it wasn't very practical.
So I brushed out my coat where the girth strap had been, and then I went down the hall to Meghan's room.
Amy was at her desk studying, and Meghan said that since it was a nice day we'd ought to go walking or something, and I thought that was a good plan. I hadn't gotten all that much exercise yesterday or today anyway. So she said goodbye to Amy and then we went out and walked through downtown, and all the way to Southerland Park, which was along the river across from the railroad yard, and then we took the people-bridge across the river, which was right next to a train bridge that didn't connect to any tracks, and she saw all the cement foundations with trees growing up through them and said that this had once been a paper mill, but it got torn down a long time ago. And she said that the soil under it was probably still kind of toxic and I should never eat any plants that grew in a place like this, because chemicals might have leached up into them.
We stayed on the trail until it got to the 96 Road and then turned around, and decided that we wanted to explore the foundations. We probably weren't supposed to, because there was a fence, but there was also a big hole in the fence. There really wasn't anything to see besides broken concrete and trees, but it was still fun, because there was always the chance that we would find something interesting.
And then when we were walking back I told her about the railroad bridge that went nowhere, and so she wanted to go over that, too. It was kind of scary for her because there were a couple of places where the crossties were missing, and she couldn’t just fly over them like I could. We both had to watch our footing, though, because we could slip between them and get hurt or get trapped.
There was just a big fence on the other side, and I flew up to look over it and it was another big yard full of broken cars.
Then we went back to the trail and crossed over the proper bridge, and went back through town again, and she wanted to stop at McDonald's which was right by the railroad tracks so that she could get something to drink, because she hadn't thought to bring her backpack with her. I was kind of thirsty, too, so we sat down and I had a milkshake, which was okay but it tasted a little bit wrong, sort of like the soft ice cream that the college has.
It was starting to get dark when we finally got back to campus, and Meghan said it was too bad that there weren't any rooms where we could have some alone time together.
I said that I could ask Peggy if we could use our room again, but Meghan thought that was kind of mean to kick her out like that. She thought it was nice if she offered, but that it wasn't polite to ask.
So we sat down under a tree, and just relaxed for a little while, until she said that she was getting a bit chilly, because all she had was a t-shirt.
So the two of us went back to her dorm, and since Amy was still studying we had to be quiet so that we wouldn't bother her.
Meghan said that we could watch a short movie on her computer before we went to bed, and she said that she had some earbuds and if I wore one and she wore the other, that wouldn't bother Amy. So she unfolded her computer, and while it was starting the two of us lay down side-by-side on our bellies, so that the earbuds could reach both of us.
We looked through all the choices that Netflix had to try and find something fun to watch. I saw the Star Trek movie listed as a new movie and I bet Sean would be mad if I watched it with Meghan.
Well, there were a whole lot of choices and it was really hard to decide on one, but we finally decided on Shrek. I thought Donkey was pretty silly most of the time, but every now and then he said something really smart, plus he was really loyal to Shrek. And Farquaad was a jerk, and deserved to be eaten by a dragon.
Meghan said that her favorite scene was when Princess Fiona fought all of Robin Hood's merry men, and that was pretty funny. Although if she was that good at fighting all along, I don't know why she didn't fight the dragon in the first place.
Meghan told me that fairy tales didn't work like that, and that she was cursed to be unable to leave the dragon until a prince rescued her, and I thought that was a silly curse, but I guess that she didn't have a choice.
My ear felt a little bit weird from having the earbud in it, so I kind of twitched it for a little while and Meghan thought that was really funny.
Amy was still studying—she was completely focused in the book she was reading and every now and then she'd mark something with a bright yellow marker. Meghan got out of bed to put her computer away and then asked Amy if it was okay to turn off the lights in the room, and she said it was.
Meghan went to the bathroom to put on her sleeping clothes, and then she got in bed next to the wall, and after she had turned on the alarm on her telephone I got in bed with her, and she curled up with her arm over my back and her head pressed against my cheek.
Now, now, you just have to ask nicely. No need for litigation. =P
So was it Star Trek or Star Wars?
Is it because of the difference in "cowfeed"? Cows in Equestria probably had a "All-Natural" diet compared to American cows.
Actually, I wonder if milk cows in America are also fed corn like corned beef. Hmm...
"he'd stayed up late because the new Star Trek movie had come out on Neflix at midnight" -- Sounds like a clear-cut case of copyright infringement. I hope Netflix sues them.
"And then I sued the computer to try and find a book of poetry for lunch" -- Speaking of lawsuits....
7774034
Fun/weird thing about a person I knew. I live in the south and there was this person at my college who just transfered over from Los Angeles. She was getting used to the south, and I guess LA people are morning showerers because she thought showering at night was weird. But then the heat/humidity struck and she started showering at night too...but then she kept showering in the morning because she said she felt icky if she didn't. So basically she was extra clean for quite awhile!
As a current college student myself I feel that the one thing missing from this story is Silver meeting a college student who likes to fight with others over the stupidest things. Then again those type of people tend to get weeded out freshmen year. I'll never forget the moment I saw a girl make fun of someone for carrying a bookbag instead of a designer purse....
I only watch real Star Trek and Star Wars —— ¡not the STINO (Star Trek In Name only) and SWINO (Star Wars In Name Only) of Abrams!
Silver is running out of free time?
I wonder what she's going to tell Princess Luna, when she comes back to equestria.
"Princess, Princess, you do it all wrong! You need to put more stars in the sky!"
Funny thing is that equestria has a lower light pollution than earth, so depending on who is doing the whole stars thing, pony's should be able to see a lot of stars.
Pegasi even more, since they can fly higher in the atmosphere and all that stuff...
So one I'd had my snack, I flew down and picked up his sock for him
So once?
Id forgotton about it, butGoogle Doodle today, 2016 Dec 7 has a simple anim celebrating the 340+ years of the discovery of the finite speed of light, due to simplest explanation of the variation in the times of the transits of Io accross Jupiter. When you have to look accross the Earth orbit diameter in addition to th closest distance to jupiter, light takes longer to arrive, so the very accurately expected times can be a quarter hour late.
The Carnot demonstration engine would be even more impressive if it was one of two variations? One being the built out of household parts, like soda bottles, coffee tins, waste pipes etc, or, the minature version that sits on top of your cup of coffee and gets going in a couple seconds. Lots of hobby designs to build.
Disused railway bridges. All those extremely rare crossing links that they cant decide one way or the other what to do with, too expensive to maintain, cant afford to demolish, untl they eventually collapse and the clean up costs even more.
The great thing about Star Trek etc, is that people who want to solve the technology problems, end up creating so much advanced stuff, that when they find out how to actually create the working equivalent, theyve overshot so far that they often cant beleive how simpler it actually is. If the Transporter creates quantum stasis field, then it only has to move a single particle, which is in a noninteracting state. One of the explanations for Twilight teleporting, and an evolution of the working theory of The Fly Telepod. Uses a BEC shell layer.
Wonder what Porkymons wouldve been on the middle of that bridge?
And all was right in the world.
7776972
At least his Star Trek had the courtesy of moving things to a new dimension.
Trying to erase 20+ years of C-canon was unforgivable. There is no Episode 7. There is only the EU.
Fuck Abrams.
Fuck Disney.
I'm glad Aaron Allston didn't live to see this travesty.
7776571
The "corned" in corned beef has nothing to do with corn, actually. It derives from the Old English word corn, which refers to any small, hard particle; in this case, the large-grained rock salt and/or potassium nitrate used in the curing process.
7777397
Ah.
The More You Know.
Dyson is it?
This one makes me sad, and I'd hold back from letting Silver read it.
BTW, in the Australian vernacular of the time whim = winch.
once
Huh? wow...
Is a jerk, get eaten by a monster...
Didn't that escalated a bit too quickly?
7777327
¡Hear! ¡Hear!
¡Testify!
Personally, I would prefer that Aaron Allston would be alive, but this travesty never would have happened.
I invite you to join 1 of my groups:
¡Star Wars Ⅶ: The Farce Awakens is SWINO (Star Wars In Name Only)!
bird horse noises
Being hairless also makes thermoregulation easier. It's thought that this increased human endurance and helped with hunting, but apparently it's not quite settled yet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endurance_running_hypothesis
:science horse noises:
https://derpicdn.net/img/2014/2/2/541336/full.png
Hmm, I bet he did.
Pony Necromancers confirmed.
Netflix and chill.
7776820 Eh, a night-time shower spares your bed sheets and pillow, but leaves you with a bed-head in the morning, and if you're a guy who shaves with a blade, a little extra effort shaving. A morning shower gives the opposite. Such is life.
7776571
(Correction made; thank you!)
Star Trek. Oops.
No (although there is a difference in what they're fed); it's because the McDonald's milk shake isn't exactly natural.
You learned something new!
7776573
?
My mama always said if you're gonna have a typo, make it a funny typo.
7776820
Yeah, I could see it being more appealing living in the south, where you can use it to cool down after a long day. Most of the college students aren't going to get all that sweaty over the day, though.
When I first started at K, it was really mostly very smart and very artsy people who didn't give a crap about fashion or anything else, and a number of people went to morning classes in pajamas. I'd show up for my morning math classes with a beer stein full of coffee. Over my career there, it got a little bit more yuppified, but there was still such a high percentage of eccentric people that it stayed fun.
7786705 You misspelled Netflix in that sentence.
7776981
In terms of all the things she still wants to do, yes.
...
They do, and she can. But no matter how clear Equestria's sky is, it's pretty unlikely that Silver Glow has ever seen anything like this:
scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/files/2011/03/heic0603c.jpeg
7777040
Yes, thank you!
7777275
Huh, that's interesting. I wonder how they noticed--you'd think that since all the observations would be equally late, they wouldn't notice anything special about that one.
I've seen a demo (online) of the one that sits between a hot and cold cup, and you could probably build one that uses air as its cold side.
There's a lot of abandoned railroad bridges in the US. Over here, at least, they're more concerned with ones that are above navigable waterways, but when it's over the Kalamazoo River (for example), it's not in anybody's way, so it makes sense to leave it.
It's funny because some tech has turned out to be remarkably simple, while other stuff like AI has turned out to be far more complex than anybody imagined. And some stuff has been conceptualized for decades but only now are computers getting fast enough to actually do it, as was the case with GDI on cars.
7777316
7778215
Ooh, I like that one.
7778332
Correction made; thank you!
7778510
Well, I dunno. He kind of got what he deserved, didn't he? And it's not like the ponies don't occasionally celebrate some villain getting eaten:
derpicdn.net/img/view/2015/3/18/851999__safe_pinkie+pie_idw_spoiler-colon-comic_pre-dash-vore_imminent+vore_imminent+death_hydra_big+no_king+aspen.png
derpicdn.net/img/view/2015/3/18/852321__safe_rainbow+dash_pinkie+pie_fluttershy_applejack_spike_edit_vore_spoiler-colon-comic_artist-colon-andypriceart.png
From the actual IDW comic
7780509
I bet that Silver Glow can mimic some birds. Seems like something that pegasi would be able to do.
It also might have helped keeping parasites off; I've heard that theory before.
Of course he did
It's basically canon; look at the titles of the books by Sweetie Belle.
derpicdn.net/img/view/2016/5/7/1148699__safe_pinkie+pie_rarity_sweetie+belle_idw_spoiler-colon-comic_artist-colon-andypriceart_preview_explosion_cookie+crumbles.jpeg
7781369
The best way to spend an evening. Well, I've heard. I don't have any Netflix.
7781824
If you shower early enough in the evening, your hair has time to dry, which at least eliminates the bed-head.
7786760 They look a bit green and uneasy for celebrating ponies, no?
There's going to be a decent percentage error for this lab. It's impossible to actually construct a Carnot engine.
There actually is a wrong way to make a meatloaf. My dad doesn't add any binders when he makes his. It's not great.
7786723 The thing is, when Earth and Jupiter are on the same side of the sun, the light from Io transiting Jupiter gets to Earth faster than when Jupiter's on the other side of the sun. That's how they found that light had a finite speed!
'her'
8150463
Correction made; thank you!
My father and I have one of those kinda fans up north in our cabin. We keep it on top of the wood burner, and it does two things: Helps move the hot air around, and is a great gauge for how hot it is, and when we need to add more wood or when to close the burner door. He calls it his "magic fan."
8813227
That's actually really cool. I hadn't thought of any sort of practical application for them except for as a science project/thermodynamics demonstration, but being on a stove would be practical (especially somewhere that you've got firewood but not electricity).
One of the coolest temperature gauges I've seen (on TV, not IRL) was on a crude gold forge--the chemist took several materials with known melting points, and they knew the forge was at the right temperature when two of them were melted and the third was still solid.
Ah but here is the million bit question: Can you use wings to type?
9307892
The canon answer would probably be yes; wings are more flexible than they ought to be IRL, and feathers are practically prehensile.
I prefer a more realistic view of Equestria, so the answer would essentially be no. I mean, she could smash a wing against a keyboard, but that wouldn’t make any more sense than pounding it with a hoof.
derpicdn.net/img/view/2013/1/16/214234__safe_artist-colon-arc-dash-ecclesia_applejack_rainbow+dash_applejack%27s+hat_computer_cowboy+hat_desk_dialogue_earth+pony_female_hat_horse+prob.png
There was sense to it half a century ago. The Qwerty keyboard is deliberately designed to be as inconvenient as possible, because typewriters would jam if you used adjacent keys in quick succession. Computer keyboards don't have that mechanical defect, or the one that warrants the diagonal staggering of the keys, but inherited the setup anyway because the world is still run by a handful of old white guys who hate change.
11218556
There was sense to it half a century ago. The Qwerty keyboard is deliberately designed to be as inconvenient as possible, because typewriters would jam if you used adjacent keys in quick succession.
Yes, and one of the reasons that typewriters as we know them were adopted (and not some other arrangement, of which there were plenty) is because the designers sent them to people who would break them, then fixed what went wrong until they had a machine which was reliable.
You can arrange your keyboard however you want. I stuck to the arrangement I learned on typewriters, ‘cause I can type pretty fast with this arrangement and can’t be bothered to learn a new one. Heck, I can’t even use a split ergonomic keyboard ‘cause of how I type—I use some of the keys in the middle wrong-hand due to an old finger injury.
11226000
correction made, thank you!
11226000
Correction made; thank you!
I think the actual reason (or at least the most widely accepted theory) is persistence hunting. Walking on two legs is a lot more efficient than four, even though four is faster, and without fur, we can cool ourselves off by sweating. Dogs pant because they sweat through their tongue, and the blood vessels inside are cooled. It's for the same reason that kangaroos lick their arms.
11705757
I don't know if there's a broadly-accepted theory. When I was in school, the theory was that it was an advantage against pests (fleas etc.). Either the advantage against pests or the advantages for persistence hunting could have been a reason why that mutation was favored and then became standard, or either could have just been a nice side benefit of it. I'd tend to think the anti-pests would be the more likely reason, based on a study of a wild horse herd somewhere in Europe--they horses tend to favor light-colored coats, which puts them more at risk of skin cancers later in life, but also makes them less attractive to flies and other biting insects. As far as evolution is concerned, getting through breeding age is what really matters, living to old age is largely irrelevant.
Fun fact which I'm sure you know, equines are one of the few mammals who can whole-body sweat to cool themselves down.
Also equines are one of the few mammals where the males don't have nipples.
Recently, I had a pretty bad hotel experience. The original hotel was overbooked, so I got bumped to a smaller, not as nice hotel, but that wasn't the issue. The issue was that the toilet kind of exploded in the night. I wasn't present at the time, I was doing something overnight, so I wasn't even there, but the carpet was still wet when I came back, and still when I woke up. If I had paid for the hotel room, I would have demanded some kind of compensation, but none of my stuff was lost or damaged, that was the last night before I left, and my employer was the one who paid for the hotel, so I didn't worry about it.
11705763
I can't remember a genuinely terrible hotel experience I've had. I've been to bad hotels a few times, but nothing where anything unexpected happened to me, my room, or any of my belongings.