October 19 [Double Integrals]
October 19
We might not have been able to have too much fun when Amy was still up studying, but she slept pretty soundly in the morning, and so Meghan took off her shirt and let me put my head on her breast until her alarm went off for the second time, then she said that we should probably get up.
I asked her if she wanted to come with me to Aric's house on Thursday, and she said that she would, and that she was really looking forward to the three-day weekend. And then she asked if I wanted to shower with her after I got done flying, and I said that I was going to go trotting with Peggy instead of flying, and that I did want to.
So I kissed her and she put her shirt back on and I told her I'd knock on her door when I was done, and then I went back to our room and shook Peggy awake.
She said that it wasn't even light out, and she was an idiot for agreeing to have a pegasus personal trainer, but she didn't really mean it. And I snacked on a little bit of hay while she was getting dressed, and then the two of us walked out the front door and before we started to run she did some stretches.
We went by Caleb and Lindy and Trinity's house first, and we talked to them a little bit. Lindy had gotten a new Pokemon that nobody else had, which was called an Abra and it looked like a cat in armor. Caleb said it wasn't that great, but I thought he was just jealous of it.
I gave Trinity a little ponyback ride and she asked me if I could go trick or treating on Halloween and she said she was going to be Elsa, and would be really happy if we could go, and I said that maybe I could.
Their bus came and took them away, and me and Peggy waved at them as it left, then we went around the neighborhood and past Aric's house and around almost to Western's dorms, then back along the road between Western and Kalamazoo College until we were back at Trowbridge. And since we came up around the side, we went in the back and upstairs that way.
Peggy said I could have the first shower if I wanted but I said that I was going to Meghan's room, and we'd see her at breakfast.
I knocked really softly on her door and she must have been waiting for me, 'cause she opened the door right up. I think she'd lied about having all her homework done last night—her bendy desk light was on and her book was under it, but I didn't say anything. Maybe she was reading ahead.
We went into the bathroom and she started taking off her clothes as soon as the door was closed, and I got right in the shower and turned it on and stood in the water while it warmed up, to cool me down a little bit and to rinse most of the lather off.
I nuzzled her when she got in and then I sneezed, 'cause her hair was kinda bristly and it tickled my nose, and she said that maybe she should get another Brazilian wax before we did anything, and I said that I didn't mind, I just hadn't expected it, and I said that I thought she ought to do whatever made her comfortable.
And I had to warn her to be careful under my wings, 'cause she might get poked by a pinfeather, if she moved against the way that they normally lay. And she kind of didn't believe me, so she stuck her hand under my wing and very gently pushed back and then said that they felt really weird and sharper than she'd thought, and I said that was why they were called pinfeathers.
We stayed in the shower a little while after we were done just because we were having fun, and then when we got out we dried each other off and Meghan put on her robe and she let me help her pick out clothes.
She groomed me and preened my wings, and I showed her how to tell if a feather was loose enough to come out, and let her work a secondary loose. She was a little bit reluctant, just because of how I'd twitched when Anna had pulled one, but I said it was okay.
I still twitched my wing, even though it was easily loose enough to come out and I wonder if it just felt worse 'cause she was doing it instead of me doing it. I'd pulled out damaged feathers earlier than I probably should have and it hadn't felt as sudden and alarming.
We went to breakfast together, and I decided that I'd have one strip of bacon just for the protein, since they still didn't have any breakfast fish. Maybe we were allowed to make suggestions; maybe they didn't have them because they didn't think that anybody would eat them.
I tried a little bit of their oatmeal, but I didn't like it too much because it was all mushy and you could hardly chew the oats at all, so it wasn't very satisfying. And Sean said that I was turning into a real American, since I had bacon, and I told him to try shedding his feathers and grow them back and then he'd understand. And then Christine said she wondered if angels moulted.
While we were at breakfast, I asked everyone about trick or treating, and Anna insisted that I had to go. Christine explained that it was a special holiday where you got dressed up as something that you wanted to pretend to be, which sounded almost exactly like Nightmare Night. I asked what people did with their treats, since they didn't have a princess of the moon, and Sean said that they ate them all unless they were Milk Duds because those were terrible.
So I decided that I would go trick or treating with Caleb and Lindy and Trinity and I hoped that some of my friends would want to go with me, because it was after school so I knew that I could.
And then I flew across the quad to my thermodynamics class, and Professor Brown told us more about gas alchemy and Gibbs Free Energy and how a lonely gas in a chamber would try to get out and mix with two gasses on the other side of the chamber, even though that would make one side of the chamber have more pressure than the other side. And there was a law about figuring that out called Dalton's Law.
Then he told us about the Haber Process, which made ammonia, and he went on to explain how the entire German chemical industry had gotten started because of it, because in World War One they hadn't been able to get the ingredients that they needed so they had to improvise and then even though they lost the war the companies got really big and were really important. And I still needed to read my World War One book.
That wasn't in the textbook, and so he went back to talking about how we figured out how the reaction worked, and how to take samples during parts of the reaction to find a couple of points on the graph to know what it was doing and what it wanted to do. And then he started writing out the equations and one of them took up the entire length of the markerboard, and I had to put it on two lines in my notebook. I saw that Lisa turned hers sideways to fit it all in in one long row, but I didn't like to go across all the lines like that.
What was really interesting about it was that the product went to equilibrium before it went to completion because of entropy.
Me and Lisa went over my calculations from the lab, and then I gave her all my notes and equations so that she could type them up neatly, and then I flew back to the quad and sat down on the grass to do my homework, because it was a really beautiful day out and I didn't want to be inside if I could help it.
I didn't get them all done before lunch, because I kept getting distracted by the squirrels. They were all out on the lawn today, gathering up nuts and whatever snacks they could beg from other students. You could tell who the best beggars were, because they were the fattest.
I went up to my room long enough to put away my thermodynamics things and get my math things, and then I went to lunch.
They must have run out of square fish, because they actually had normal fish fillets, and it was scrod again, which I'd liked, so I got that and a salad. Everyone was kind of making plans for the weekend coming up. Anna was going to take a train home to Chicago for the weekend, and Christine and Sean were going to visit some friends. Me and Meghan didn't have any specific plans to share, but we'd figure out something by the weekend. And she said that she was going to try and get a spa date for after class on Thursday and I could join her if I wanted to, which sounded like fun. I said that she should see if the farrier could come out and file my hooves, and she said that she'd ask.
Me and Sean went to math together, and Professor Pampena told us we were going to learn about double integrals, which we could use to find the area of irregular shapes by making them into little boxes and adding them all together, and the smaller the pieces the more accurate the area was, like trying to figure out a circle using polygons instead of pi.
And double integrals took iterated integrals to work, and so he drew out the equations on the markerboard and gave us an example problem to show us how to solve it, and we had to solve the inner integral before we could do the outer, and we had to do trigonometry substitution to figure that out, and instead of getting easier, the equation got bigger and uglier as you started solving it, but he promised that he would teach us another way that was simpler but he wasn't going to teach us that until later.
I wanted to do our math outside, but Sean said that it was a little bit chilly, and then he sighed and said that he'd get a sweatshirt. So he went up to his room and when he came back down he was wearing a Kalamazoo College sweatshirt and we sat on the quad by the Olds-Upton building and did our math homework together. He said it was kind of strange to be doing it outside and without music, and he got distracted by the squirrels, too.
That made it take longer for both of us to finish our homework, but we finally got it done, and went over our answers together, and we'd both done pretty well and hadn't made very many mistakes at all.
I told him that I was going on an astronomy field trip after dinner, and he said that that sounded like fun and asked if it was open to everyone. I told him that I thought Professor Miller had said that anyone could come to the astronomy club, but I didn't think that she'd drive him there.
He got a kind of determined look on his face and he said that he'd find a way to get there, and I hoped he did, because I thought it would be fun if he was there.
Then I went back to my room and got my thermodynamics homework again, so that I could finish that. I probably could have not done it until later, since we didn't have class on Friday, but I knew if I did then I'd put it off most of the weekend and be scrambling to finish it when I wanted to be doing something fun with Meghan and Aric, but if I finished it now, I wouldn't have to worry about it at all.
Dinner was almost exactly the same as lunch, which Sean and Christine grumbled about but I didn't mind because I got more fish. And Sean told me that he and Christine were going to come out in an Uber-Car, and he asked what time it was and I told him that we were meeting in the parking lot by the theatre at 7:30, so that we'd have time to get out there and she could teach us a little bit about the instruments, but that the good astronomy wouldn't start until after dark.
But I was a little bit worried because it was getting kind of cloudy and it felt like it was going to rain. And I didn't think that we could see anything if it was cloudy or raining, unless human telescopes could see through clouds.
And when we were done eating, it was even cloudier and there were a few drops of rain coming down. So when I got back to my room, I checked my computer in case Professor Miller had sent us a computer letter saying that the astronomy was canceled, and she hadn't, but I'd gotten a telephone telegram from Pastor Liz who said that she wasn't going to be able to meet with me tomorrow since she was going to be attending a protest, and she said that she was sorry but it had come up at the last minute.
That was kind of disappointing, but I guess it just meant that we'd have more to talk about next week, and anyways I hadn't always been able to make the meetings, either.
Since my computer was already on, I looked at the weather maps and it looked like there weren't going to be any storms at least, but it looked like it would probably stay at least partially cloudy for the rest of the night. So before I went to the theatre parking lot, I got all my flight gear together, because if the clouds were broken and scattered, I might be able to push some of them out of the way if I needed to.
About half the students in the class had come to the field trip, and Anna sat next to me. It was a little bit strange to be driving to the Nature Center, since I was so used to flying there. And Anna asked me why I'd brought my vest and radios and I said it was in case I had to move some clouds. And I heard someone behind me snicker when I'd said that.
I'd seen the building where the telescope lived, but I'd never actually seen the telescope. It sat inside where it would be protected from the weather, but they could move the building off of it when they were looking, and I thought that was almost as amazing as the telescope itself. It was called a Meade 12" LX200 Schmidt-Cassegrain Telescope, and they had the roof off on its supports so that we could take turns looking through it, at least until it started to rain, and then they had to put the roof back so it wouldn't get damaged.
But there were lots of other telescopes set up outside, which were smaller, and the people out there did their best despite the weather. They looked for what they could find between breaks in the clouds, and I did get permission to fly up and move a couple of clouds out of the way so that they could focus on Mars. It was kind of complicated to figure out which cloud to move at first, until someone on the ground pointed a green laser at the path of where they wanted to look, and then I knew what to keep clear.
I didn't get to do a whole lot of astronomy because I was moving clouds, but everyone else in the class did, and that made me feel pretty good about my work. And when I finally landed, I got to look through the best telescope that they had out for as long as I wanted, and so I got to see Mars, which was really neat. It didn't look like all that much, just a dusty red ball that had lots of craters like the moon did, and I'd seen better pictures in class, but it was still really fascinating to have it go from a little point of light in the sky that I could see by myself to an actual image in a telescope.
And there were a couple of stars that you couldn't really tell from the ground that they were a different color, but you could see that with a telescope, too. And it also was a good lesson in how much things were moving even though it didn't seem like it, because they had to keep refocusing the telescopes to keep looking at them.
So when we finally got back in the van, I sat back where I'd been and when everyone was in, I said to Anna that I was glad I'd brought my flight gear, and I felt pretty smug.
I hadn't had much time to talk to Sean or Christine, 'cause our class had kind of stayed together, but I had waved to them, and I'd seen Sean showing something he'd found in the sky to Christine.
Professor Miller thanked me for helping, and she said she was sorry it had been cloudy and a little bit rainy and next time she'd try to schedule better but the weather forecast had said that there was only a ten percent chance. But everyone had had lots of fun anyways, and we all just hoped that next time we went the weather would be better.
When I got back to my room, Peggy was on her Facebook, and she asked me how my field trip had been, so I told her all about it, and then I checked my portable telephone and I'd gotten a message from Meghan, and she said that we could go the salon tomorrow after class.
I probably could have stayed up a little bit later, since I didn't have any classes right in the morning, but it was late and I was kind of tired, so I just got in my bed and Peggy said she'd forgotten what it was like having me sleep in my own bed, and I stuck my tongue out at her and said that I was going to wake her up at five to go trotting, and she said that I'd better not.
I said that I wasn't really—I was going to go on a nice long flight instead, and I promised I'd be quiet in the morning when I got up.
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I think you messed up a bold tag...
Also:
I think that dinner is supposed to be lunch.
What's with all the bold?
Silver is very good at getting what she wants.
7810997 Looks like our dear Admiral forgot to close the tag.
7810956 7810997 7811017
For some reason, bold tags sometimes transfer from gDocs to FimFiction reversed (so it closes, then opens). And I don't always catch them, and you can see.
Having just finished up Vector Calculus this last term it is strangely cathartic to read how Silver is faring in the class. I wonder how she will handle flux integrals.
This is why math teachers are pure evil.
Pre 20th century, gunpowder was made from natural nitrates (largest deposit in the world are in Chile) as was fertilizer. Haber was trying to make fertilizer. It was never used for that, but was used to make explosives, starting in WWI (the old Connections show on PBS). IMO, without that, WWI would have been over a LOT sooner (1915, perhaps?) because the Germans would have been out of ammo. Try & help humanity (& make a few $) & end up killing millions. It's God's way of giving humanity the finger.
On the other hand, after the war the poison gas factories had to find something else to do & invented insecticides. (Yeah, insecticides are nerve gas. Same process, different ingredients. They are just better at killing bugs than people.) By killing insects & preventing the spread of diseases (such as malaria) they probably saved more people than died in both WWs. I'm not sure what that proves.
Me: Silver, did you give Sean the puppy dog eyes again?
Silver: Umm, maybe?
7811089
Which is why I manually copy over the text and do the formatting myself. Saves me a lot of headaches in the long run.
What about the stars?
Really liked the bit with the SG helping the field trip become a success. Finally some proper pegasus work! Just add a little earth technology like a laser pointer and the usefulness of pegasus magic increases exponentially. Good stuff.
Ah, the Haber-Bosch process, arguably the most important invention ever. Not because of the gunpowder (which of course was pretty important, too) but because of the chemical fertilizer. For good or ill, there wouldn't be seven billion people on this planet without it.
On a side note: there never was a mention of hurricane Matthew, was there?
Wait why would Silver be able to reach her hair when nuzzling... oh
I'm sure those clouds put up quite a wrestle, but the word you were going for is flight gear.
Professor Miller had sent us a computer letter saying that the stormwatching was canceled, and she hadn't,
Stormwatching? Osnt thst someone else's bailiwick?
7811137 I remember when I learned to calculate arc length using a parametric approach instead of a pythogorean theorem based one.
Can't herbivores synthesize all the amino acids? It's why they don't need to eat protein rich foods (like meat).
And believe me, they don't stop there. Silver will probably hit three in this class
This is a crappy way to learn it. You don't inherently need trig subs and integration by parts for double integrals. He just used a bad example.
If they're working with circles it's probably going to be a change of variables to polar coordinates.
Probably still better than a minotaur personal trainer.
7814864
No, horses have pretty much the same set of essential amino acids as humans do, plus arginine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_amino_acid#Essentiality_in_humans
http://www.myhorseuniversity.com/node/672
Oats and alfalfa seem to already complement each other for the full set, so horses with more or less balanced diets have no difficulty getting the right protein intake.
I remember liking that thing both because of it's punny name, but also because when evolving it gained spoon, wich was awesome and funny.
*cough**cough*
*cough**cough**cough*
7811015
Because she's so damn cute, that's why.
7811137
I don't envy you. I nearly failed basic Calculus, and gave up on math after that. Until now, that is.
Well, sometimes you've got to understand the hard way to know why the easy way works. Other times it's because math teachers are evil.
7811223
That with great technology comes great good and great evil, I guess. I honestly don't know, either. Maybe that's one of those stories where there isn't a moral.
7811405
Hey, nothing wrong with using your adorableness to get what you want, is there?
Usually, I don't have trouble with them. Usually.
7811470
Heh, oops. Correction made, thank you!
7812032
As long as nobody gets the bad idea to shine the laser into her eyes . . .
Clearing clouds for star-gazing is just the kind of thing that SIlver Glow was made for. Not as exciting as feral storms perhaps, but everybody in the class and the astronomy class benefits from her work.
No; and there probably should have been.
7812152
Yes, it was. But fight gear's a good description, too.
Less likely to pick you up and bodily drag you out of bed, then prod you with horns to motivate you, at least.
Silver could survive on a fish-free diet, but she'd have to eat more because plants don't have as much protein as fish, I don't think.
7813078
Yup. My mistake there. Got stormwatching on my brain.
7814864
I'd assume that they can either synthesize the ones they need, or else they can get them out of plants and we can't . . . IIRC, timothy has a lot of protein that horses need. But they can also get it from meat, and we've seen a fair bit of canon evidence suggesting that some ponies fish, and if it's not for eating, why else would they be doing it?
Also, SIlver Glow is going through a moult, and she's about to start growing in her winter coat, so she needs more food input to make up for that.
She does, indeed.
I'm sure he had a reason for teaching it that way, although I have no idea what that reason was.
You're right; he started using polar coordinates for several problems.
7853659
What the hell does it do with spoon? Now I'm thinking of the Blue Raja in Mystery Men.
Oops.
7889039
Medicine? Some forms of fish may be good for Pony Carpel Tunal.
Sorry not sorry. But for goodness hake, there was no way I was going to let that joke bass me by.
8495494
<groans>
As someone who works at an airport... *internal screaming intensifies*
I have a friend at the airport who's a pilot, and he almost got eye damage from someone putting a green laser on his plane during some night flying. I happened to be on shift, and the tower couldn't see where it was coming from, but luckily some of the houses near the airport have wood heat and I could see the laser barely from the ground and helped report it.
Lasers are no joke, especially with airplanes.
8814993
Probably with full cloud cover, a green laser isn't going to penetrate far enough to be a problem for any airplane that happens to be flying overhead (especially since the clouds are below Silver Glow's legal flight ceiling), but you're right, they're a big issue for pilots. I have to guess that randomly pointing one up into the sky to highlight some sky feature (like a cloud) isn't likely to hit an airplane in such a way to cause any damage to a pilot . . . but of course that's not for sure.
Deliberately aiming the things at the cockpit of an aircraft is a totally different matter, of course. One of the sites I'm on mentions that on occasion, especially since some of the users are professional pilots, and have either had lasers aimed at them, or know people who have.
And you're totally right that they're no joke. Some people don't realize the potential harm they can cause, and I suppose we can forgive their ignorance. Other people--the ones who do it intentionally--deserve to be punished for their actions. Sooner or later, there's going to be a plane crash caused by someone shining a high powered laser at an aircraft . . . if there hasn't been already.
8824310
Tom Clancy's character John Clark did in one of his novels
8860553
Yeah, but he didn't use a green laser pointer, he used a super-bright tactical flashlight thingy.
Does Equestria Girls canon exist in this multiverse, and if so, are they in the same universe as these humans, or a different one? My guess is the latter if Equestria Girls exists in this multiverse
9724317
I think it vaguely does (there’s mention of portals and Twilight Sparkle, anyway). They’re not in the same universe as these humans, though.
Or else you'd both made a lot of the same mistakes. Two data points isn't nearly enough to say for certain.
It's a reference to Uri Geller's infamous "bending spoons with his mind" trick. Also Kadabra's appearance and Japanese name are sufficiently close to his that he sued them over it because he's a known con artist who feels the need to protect a reputation he shouldn't have in the first place.
I love Christine. She thinks differently, like a lot of us.
11225979
That’s a fair point. Silver Glow should take a statistics course.
11227939
She’s asking the questions we all want to know. Do angels moult? Or is heaven so perfect they don’t have to?