March 12 [National Weather Service]
March 12
I didn't want to be late, so I skipped my morning exercise (I'd be getting some in Grand Rapids if there were clouds in the sky), packed up my flight outfit, and trotted over to the dining hall. Unfortunately, it wasn't open yet, because humans usually sleep in on weekends, and it wasn't going to open until after we left.
I hoped the professor planned to stop somewhere for breakfast. I was going to be a grumpy pony if I didn't get anything to eat.
Before too long, other people from the class started trickling in. Most of them looked not all the way awake yet. I don't really understand how weekends are that much different than weekdays: everyone would have been eating breakfast or on their way to class by now if it had been a weekday.
Luke was the last to arrive, and then we all got in the van, which is called Express. I sat in the back next to Crystal Dawn. That wasn't a good place to be in order to see where we were going, but I'd rather be with two people I liked than all alone in the front seat.
Crystal Dawn fell asleep before we were even out of Kalamazoo. She'd rested her head on Luke's shoulder and closed her eyes as soon as the van started moving, and she was completely out when we turned north on the 131 Highway.
I thought it was kind of strange that I was already familiar with this highway; it was my third trip north on it. And I hadn't really gone much of anywhere else, yet. We passed by the road that went to Bittersweet, and then before we got to the big S-curve in Grand Rapids that Peggy didn't like, we went onto a different highway.
I was a little bit concerned; the highway number (6) was on a black sign with a white diamond, and I knew on the snowboard trails diamond courses were hard, so was this going to be a more challenging highway? But it turned out to be just the same as the 131 Highway.
We went east for a little bit and then got off the highway and onto a normal road. The professor stopped at a Burger King, which I didn't like all that much, even though Luke gave me a paper crown to wear.
The National Weather Service is right next to the airport, and that was going to be a problem if they expected me to get a cloud for them. It was a much bigger airport than Kalamazoo, and even as we were pulling into the parking lot, a big airplane roared overhead, shaking the ground as it went by.
When we went inside the building, we had to wait until Dr. Thomas Thompson came around to escort us—the woman at the desk wouldn't let us by before that. She was the guard to keep the station safe.
He was really happy to see all of us, and he shook everyone's hand and my hoof too, and then he led us past the front desk and into the back.
I noticed right away that there were computers everywhere. A lot of the desks had several on them, all of them showing different things.
He showed us the radar data first. The computer was able to remember past weather, and when he clicked a few buttons it brought up a picture of a big storm that he said had come through a few years back. He pointed to a storm cell that was in front of the others, which he said was called a supercell (we'd learned about those). It could be identified by the strong rotational current inside of it—the radar showed red blocks that were velocities away from it and green blocks that were velocities towards it, and so they knew what the air was doing inside that cloud. He said that that supercell had produced a tornado, but they'd been able to warn people that it was going to twenty-four minutes before it had.
Then he moved on and introduced us to a man named Ryan who was in charge of the amateur radio. Ryan's little office was full of boxes with buttons and dials, which were all parts of the radios—some of them were for getting messages and some of them were for sending messages, and some of them did both. He told us that people called Skywatchers would actually be out in the field with radios, and tell the weather service what they were observing on the ground. That was important, because the radar could only see what was happening in the sky, and not what conditions on the ground were.
We needed something like that. In well-controlled areas, it wasn't a problem, because you always had teams up in the clouds and really good control on what was happening, but on the coast where I worked, sometimes we misjudged the feral storms and didn't have enough ponies ready when they came in.
Inland, there were some weather stations that had a telegraph near them, and a fast flier could relay messages that way, but that didn't work over the ocean.
Sometimes when we thought it was going to be really wild, we'd station a couple of pegasuses out on the coastal islands, and they'd fly in ahead of the storm to let us know what was coming, but if it wasn't that bad when it made landfall and then got worse, we were caught out.
I wanted to know if I could become a Skywatcher while I was here, and Ryan said that he'd get the information together for me. Most of their Skywatchers had ham radio licenses, he said, but there might be a way to get around that; he was going to have to check. I told him that I sometimes told the airplane controllers what the weather was like in the sky.
Then we moved on to the aviation and marine forecasting. They looked farther away than the local weather forecasters, and had pictures that were taken by satellite of the United States and Canada. They had different satellites that saw different things: during the day, they had visual images that looked down and saw the clouds; at night they used infrared, which could see them even in the dark. That was really clever: night flying in storms is super dangerous, because you can't see what you're getting into.
There were other small boxes off to the side of the big cloud map that showed humidity data and temperature data, and the forecasters used both their experience and different computer models (I don't know how a model computer helped) to estimate what the forecast was.
We moved on to the man who was in charge of the weather radar. That was the big white sphere on a tower behind the building, and I'd been warned that they were very dangerous to fly close to. There was one computer that showed how the weather radar was working, and then another that showed a picture of what it saw. Then he told us about how we could see what they were seeing on the internet. There was a picture of the whole United States that was a mosaic of all the different sites, which was really neat, and there was also a place where we could look at the current weather satellite pictures that they were seeing.
I was really excited about that: I'd be able to see with my computer the same things they saw, and I could get a different understanding of how things worked.
We had a pizza lunch in their break room, and once we'd all gotten some, Dr. Thomas Thompson showed us a movie about radiosondes and how they were used to directly monitor data. He had an instrument package that he let us examine, and he explained that not all the stations used them, but that there were two in Michigan that did: KAPX in Gaylord and KDTX in Pontiac.
Then when the tour was over, he looked outside at the scattered clouds and wanted to know if I thought I could bring one down. I said that I probably could (I was looking forward to it, to be honest).
We were going to have to go outside of Grand Rapids to do it, because like I'd thought we were too close to the airport, and I'd mess up the schedule for all the airplanes if I was to fly around with a cloud. So we got back in the van and drove down to Moline, which was far enough south of Grand Rapids to be safe.
Luke had to use his telephone to find out what the frequency for Grand Rapids airport was, and I finally got permission from them to fly. They were a bit confused at first. The Kalamazoo airplane directors know who I am, but the Grand Rapids ones don't and I had to do a bit of explaining because they weren't clear on my type.
I kept a good lookout as I flew up for other airplanes, and watched my altimeter carefully. I also made sure to get a good look at the landmarks near where I'd taken off from, since I was in new territory and didn't know it very well. The last thing I wanted was to get distracted and lose my bearings, then I'd be up in the sky with a cloud and have no idea where to land with it, and then I'd have to fly all the way back to Kalamazoo on my own.
The clouds were a little higher and a little bigger than I'd thought from the ground. I wasn't going to be able to get a whole one; they were too big, so I'd have to tear off a chunk.
I scanned the sky for a good candidate, looking upwind. It was going to be a lot easier to have the wind help push me back when I had a cloudlet. I found a good candidate a couple of miles west of me, and headed off in that direction.
I flew around the cloud to get a good feel for it, and decided that the trailing end would be the easiest to get, since I'd be able to break it off and slow it down some, letting the main part of the cloud drift ahead.
Once I'd gotten a good feel all around on the cloud, I found a good fracture spot and worked it apart. That was a bit tricky, and I actually overdid it a little bit and made some rain come out when I accidentally oversaturated part of the mother cloud. It's a lot easier to just break clouds up, or put clouds in the sky.
I'd learned a lot from the first one I'd brought down, and it didn't take me as long to compact it down to a workable size.
Once I'd gotten it stable, I started pushing it down towards the ground. I had to drop altitude faster than I'd planned, because the wind had pushed me further than I'd anticipated. I ought to have picked a cloud that was further away!
When I got it to the ground, I made sure it was stable and would stay together before I let anybody touch it. Dr. Thomas Thompson went all around it with various little portable analyzing instruments, which was neat to see. He stuck a couple of probes inside it that fed data to his folding computer, and even tried to take a sample with a jar but wound up nearly freezing his hand instead.
Once he'd gotten all the data he wanted, I pushed the cloudlet up and over some trees (to help break up the rain that was going to come out of it) and bucked it apart, then flew back down to them.
Dr. Thomas Thompson had all sorts of questions for me about how I was able to manipulate it like that, and I answered them the best I could. Some of it I just didn't know; it was something that all pegasuses could do, and I didn't really know the makeup behind it. I told him it was just like walking—nopony had ever had to tell me how to do it, I just figured it out on my own when I was a foal.
He was disappointed that I couldn't give him an exact answer for every single one of his questions, but he admitted that he'd learned a lot from what I could tell him. Then he wanted to know if I could form a small cloud.
That was a bit more complicated, especially to do at near ground level, but I told him I could try. And I gave it my best effort, but there just wasn't enough humidity for it to work out right. I kinda got one started, but it wasn't really that much darker than the surrounding air. I think if I'd had a couple of partners, it could have been done.
He went all over that area with his instruments as well, and he assured me that even though I hadn't made an actual cloud, what I had managed was really interesting and scientifically important.
He told me that I would always be welcome at the office, and said that as the year went by to let him know if I was planning to do anything interesting with storms or fog or anything else. He said to call him any time and he'd come down to visit me.
He also wanted to know if I'd be willing to wear sampling instruments while I flew. He said that he could get me some radiosonde instrument packages which would work if I wore them, and he could even show me how to transfer the data from the instrument package to a computer.
That sounded like a big responsibility, but then I thought that if I did, I might be allowed to fly into clouds and in fog and other weather where I wasn't allowed to fly now, so I told him that if I could get that permission, then I would do it.
He said that he'd have to make some calls, but he could probably arrange for that. I hope he does: I might get to be an official Stormwatcher!
I had my turn to nap on the way back—between wrangling the feral cloud and trying to make a new one, I was completely exhausted. Luke and Crystal Dawn let me stretch out on their laps, which was really nice of them.
After dinner, my first priority was figuring out how to grade the climate science assignments. I still hadn’t thought of anything. It didn’t help that not everyone had picked the same place, and some were more of a challenge than others. It wouldn’t be fair to give someone worse marks just because they’d picked someplace hard.
Then I decided that I’d give everyone seventy five points for just doing it, and add ten points for everything that they got right, and take away five for everything they got wrong, but not go below the seventy five. After I’d decided that, it was pretty easy. My teachers weren’t as generous, but then nobody in this class had ever tried to calculate weather like this before.
I sent a computer letter to the professor telling him what grade everyone had gotten, then went over to Aric’s to study a little bit more and then relax.
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Somewhat later than anticipated . . .
Now I will spend so much useless minutes trying to imagine a more challenging highway!
Sometime you get to live in places with interesting name...
Go Silver! We're rooting for you!
Seems like one too many befores.
Also, Silver Glow is about to simultaneously nail down (what I naively assume would be) an insanely lucrative career and make a massive step forward for pony-human integration in one fell swoop. Good for her.
Another good chapter. Kind of amused at all the gadgetry. First the gopro, now she's decked out as a living radiosonde. Maybe next she'll get an offer from google to host project loon?
I wonder how her prof scored on the paper.
We seriously need an illustration of Silver Glow wearing a Burger King crown.
This is my favorite thing:
http://radar.weather.gov/Conus/Loop/NatLoop.gif
A pictoral representation of US weather in .gif format updated every fifteen minutes.
used both their experience and different computer models (I don't know how a model computer helped)
This made me chuckle. Lol. Toy computers.
If nothing else, economic trade between Equestria and the US would have to include several pegasi teams to play stormchasers during tornado season. Even if they couldn't break a F5, they could at least damp it down a few F levels or direct it away from populated areas. Hurricanes, however... Probably not.
I'd've gone with a participation grade on that weather assignment: 100% because you did it and here's what you got right and what you got wrong. But maybe I'm too nice ...
Goldfencer has died and is unable to answer your call right now. Please leave a message after the HNNG. HNNNG.
7196506 They used to call old Rt 22 between Altoona and Monroeville, PA the Ho Chi Minh Trail, before generations of Shusters on the Transportation Committee poured buckets of tax money and concrete out over the hillsides and ridge tops east and west of Ebensburg. Before my time, but I suspect it was like Rt 45 east of Tyrone - that road does a loop under itself at one point heading up a hillside.
But at least the highways are all paved these days.
derpicdn.net/img/view/2015/12/18/1046648__safe_solo_twilight+sparkle_blushing_cute_magic_filly_sitting_floppy+ears_frown.png
Gotta love grumpy ponies.
Yes. Yes, Silver. That's exactly how driving works. As you can see these two chaps running on a Double Diamond course. We take our driving sports very seriously
As far as I can tell, there isn't a way to get around it. There's international treaties bound to radio since radio signals can go across borders. It's easy though since it just takes a 35 question exam to get the lowest level (Technician) license.
I'm starting to think we need a story told from the PoV of this professor, he seems like an interesting character. I kind of imagine him being slightly bitter about ponies, since they can understand the weather in a way he can't, and more importantly they could probably easily put him out of work when they come over and started controlling the weather.
He stuck a couple of probes inside it that fed data to his folding computer, and even tried to take a sample with a jar but wound up nearly freezing his hand instead.
Dr. Thomas Thompson is unaccustomed to dealing with vaporware.
Unnecessary trivia: I was a volunteer ham radio operator with Stormwatch in Wichita Kansas, and that taught me this important bit of wisdom... Standing outside in a thunderstorm, watching street signs shake, is a very silly thing to do.
<Oooh--it broke off at the ground!)
I immediately imagined the van going on giant car-sized ramps and halfpipes towards it's destination
Radio enthusiast skywatcher Silver is a very appealing prospect.
7196506
What a more challenging highway might look like:
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3d/Million_Dollar_Highway_10_2006_09_13.jpg
"... was this going to be a more challenging highway?"
If only!
I would love to know just what those instruments picked up, though I suspect it's beyond anyone's ability to tell. At least, not without a real, live pegasus.
7197401
So that's why highway signs are greenish squares; because the highways around here are easy-mode!
7196506
You don't have to work hard to imagine it; go find a local road built in the '30s. If you've got a modern US highway (numbered US-XX), you can probably find a road called Old XX.
If you find the right one, you can find out why compound curves are a bad idea, and why we stopped building them. Also why, contra Cars, we don't build roads that "move with the land" anymore.
7196645 I suspect a connection between Earth and Equestria would imply they could take down a hurricane or at least seriously weaken it if there was a big enough team. After all, a massive warm-core storm in Equestria would have been named for a pegasus who first wrangled one.
7196506 Try the Autobahn for starters.
then
I liked all the cross-cultural climate science learning going on.
I think her professor failed her here. It's not reasonable to expect an undergraduate student in your class to know how to grade your class - they should at least have discussed grade curves and what sorts of performance he looked for in in the assignments he graded.
7197875
The Pasadena Freeway was supposedly one of the first segments of the Interstate system built. It has interesting features like right turns from surface streets onto the freeway - apparently traffic and speeds were much less in those days - and my favorite, the curve of constantly decreasing radius of curvature.
7196506
Watch an episode of Ice Road Truckers.
I live not that far from Hell. Sometimes in the winter it freezes over.
Go Silver! We're rooting for you!
The best part is when she tells you it's gonna be bad . . . put on your helmet and head to the basement.
7196567
Technically, I could probably justify both, but there was only supposed to be one.
AFAIK, Stormwatchers are volunteers. So there won't be much in the lucrative end of things. She might be able to monetize the weather data, but probably not.
On the other hand, putting her in NOAA's good graces probably actually counts for a lot.
7196583
She can't fly high enough for project loon (or stay aloft long enough).
She didn't actually score that one, just gave him what he got right and what he got wrong.
7196600
That's the mosaic that Silver Glow learned about. Fun fact: some of the dots near the stations are ground clutter . . . and you can easily see where the Gaylord, Pontiac, and Grand Rapids stations are.
7196638
If the big computer can't solve the problem, build a model computer to do it.
7196645
That's pretty much what Silver Glow's team does now--take incoming ocean storms, and either stop them or at least drop them down a bit on the destructive scale.
Probably could, given enough lead time and familiarity with the atmosphere. Storms can build when they collide, but they can also break. Send a strong system to keep it from making landfall, and you're golden.
7196665
The professor might wind up doing that. Also nice use of a double contraction.
7196716
7196856
There's one highway that goes near Breezewood IIRC that rates three warning signs for trucks on the turnpike. Mostly saying 'if you're thinking of taking this road, don't.' And I've heard that with GPS, truckers who don't know better are being routed along Deal's Gap.
There was one road near where I used to live that had a pair of descending 90-degree turns posted at 25 (but that was overly ambitious), then an uphill section that went from pavement to gravel because they couldn't afford to repave the road. It was intersected by a road where they'd finally closed the bridge because it was too dangerous to drive across (it was sketchy just to walk across it [and it was probably one of the few road bridges in the US still paved with wood planks]).
Another one in near Clarksville is reverse-crowned, because the road settled after it was installed. Rumor has it that they lost a D-9 dozer out there in the swamp (and that it was still running when it sank, because you can't stop a Cat).
Or when I was on the back roads in Tennessee, and there was a section where a lane had just fallen off the mountain. They'd helpfully put cones around the chasm.
7196921
They're even cute when they're pissed off!
I have been on a few that were slightly challenging. And I've seen some on TV that just make me say 'nope.'
I was thinking in terms of her not getting a Ham radio license at all, and just transmitting on a single frequency that's allocated to her. I don't know if NOAA's got any they can use for that. But I do know when I drove wrecker, I didn't need a license to use the in-truck radios, and that private pilots are allowed to use certain bands, mariners are allowed to use certain bands, and so on.
7196923
Silver Glow's Professor. Hmm, sort of has a nice ring to it.
Until pegasi learn how human weather is measured, he's got job security. Once they all know, he could be replaced by a pegasus.
7196927
That pun hurt me.
I watched a tornado form outside a factory where I was working. I thought it was pretty neat when the shingles started coming up off the roof of the old Michigan Bean Company building, and that's when they dragged me back inside. My thought was if the plant got hit, the break room tables weren't going to protect us from the steam-operated presses, so I might as well be outside and see it coming, but my boss thought differently.
7197281
That would be awesome.
She's going to wind up carrying so much equipment she won't be able to fly.
7197300
Or this:
projectinspo.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Tianmen-Mountain-Road-China.jpg
7197753
Mostly humidity and temperature.
Our M-road signs look like this:
heavenlymetal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/m-52sign.jpg
Hence Silver's thought that it might be a more challenging road.
7197875
In the middle of the state, at least, the old US routes are still pretty nice roads. Out in the country, though, there's some pretty sketchy ones. I got stuck once on a dirt road that turned into a swamp. If I'd seen what I was getting into during the day, I never would have tried.
When I lived in the Thumb, there was a dirt road that started off with three yellow diamond warning signs.
7198005
They could by setting up a counter storm (assuming they had enough lead time, anyway).
7198042
To the best of my knowledge that's just fast. Having a road that jogs fifty feet as it crosses over another road . . . now that's a challenge when you hit it at sixty. I'm amazed I kept the car on the road at all. Must have been why they put stop signs there (which I foolishly ignored).
7198809
Correction made, thank you!
7199229
He should have been more clear in his expectations. The problem (for him) is that he has no idea what the correct answer is, so he's relying on her to judge that.
Besides the S-curve, there was an entrance to 131 in Grand Rapids that was a 270-degree sharp curve, about five hundred feet to merge, and then a bridge abutment. I think they've redone that entrance ramp.
127 north of St. Johns still has cross-streets, driveway entrances, and so on. They're slowly working to turn it into a limited-access highway, but there's a good ten miles or so still to go.
I'd have liked to hear what the controllers would say if SG told them "I'm designated a VTOL Ornithopter Ultralight".
I wonder how the ponies deal with volcanic eruptions, they can be pretty destructive weather wise. The eruption of Laki in 1783 is estimated to have killed as many as six million people, many of them in India. Wikipedia says that it killed about a quarter of Iceland's population, but the Icelandic National Museum puts it at more around three quarters; perhaps that includes emigration and refugees.
There's a road near my house which was being built as an Interstate but the locals revolted and stopped construction. It now has some unique features, like an off ramp that requires you to make a tight 180 degree turn to navigate, several radical changes in width and other such eccentricities.
Fair enough. But, what was the grade distribution? Min and max score, average, and standard deviation?
What the hell was his mother thinking when she named him?
I don't know how you can keep making Silver even more adorable, but here we are.
7199272
I can't say I'm too surprised there's a Hell, Michigan. There are some people out there with good senses of humor that get to name places.
But what I find funnier (or maybe this just says something about people in general) is that when I looked it up, the wiki said that it's basically become a summer resort town. I can imagine their ad campaign: "Looking for a vacation this year? Go to Hell! :)"
7202069
Man, I don't know. The ash cloud would be too high for them to effectively deal with, and of course any pegasus who was foolish enough to try and stop a pyroclastic flow would die almost instantly . . . I think that's one of those things that they just can't do anything about.
Does it rate as a black diamond road, then?
7211488
Lack of effective maintenance is one way to do it. Twenty years ago, there was an article in the Detroit Free Press about the ten worst sections of road in the metro Detroit area, and I remember that the reporter said he'd seen bombed-out roads in Beirut that were better.
Minimum would have been 75, max 100; no idea about the rest. Silver Glow probably doesn't know anything about curving grades.
7267376
I don't know, but the funny thing is he's named after a real person.
7280363
7459206
For what it's worth, there's also a Paradise, MI. And in fact, you can buy a cheeseburger in Paradise.
They do a lot of things that are plays on their name. They also have a post office, which I think is just because of the postmark (they're too small otherwise to still have one in this era of cutbacks). I think if it weren't for the name, they would have faded into nothing like a couple of other towns near them.
I can say, having driven there several times, that the road to hell is not paved with good intentions; it's asphalt.
There's a town called Gaylord?
7491595 Here.
Wikipedia
There is also one in Minesota too apparently.
They do put way to much salt on their food.
8016951
Plus, they're not Taco Bell.
But then there'd be no failures! What's the point of an assignment if everyone passes?
8066205
It's a valuable learning experience for everyone?
Silver Glow isn't all that good at grading papers, anyways. She'd do better grading hooves-on weather work. Or if they were reporting on a real weather system--if she'd had them fill out an Equestrian weather schedule, she'd be better able to judge who knew how to do it right and who didn't.
And time for pony and classmates to take a trip to see how humans predict the weather. How many things will have Silver pointing out some obvious to her error?
Fair enough reason, and I'm sure they will all want plenty of demonstrations of this once you get there. Though..... have any pegasi been there before? Seems like learning from them more about weather would be a big thing on the to do list. Though could just be some of them meeting weather ponies and not any showing up at this particular station
He better stop then, no one wants a grumpy pony! Plus, she's tasted the deliciousness of flesh now.
Well, most people would tend to stay up later the night before due to generally being able to sleep in. Plus generally using this to catch up on lost sleep from the week.
Two people, yet you only mention being next to one. Also, you really need to start bringing your hoof boots and offering to ride on the roof.
Ah, kind of forgot to mention him before Silver.
This is such an adorable mistake, and one that you can see the internal logic for. Very clever Pony.
Then they got you the wrong thing. Though can't think of any breakfast sandwiches they have sans meat.... but they have some freaking AWESOME hash browns. (Also, their 'Egg-nourmous Burrito' really is freaking huge, and good.)
Also, ALL HAIL PRINCESS SILVER GLOW!
Yeah..... just maybe. I'm sure they can work something out though.
It is so adorable you think that, and yet in a way....
Again just the fun little twists on how she ordinary things in ways that make sense for a pony while being so wrong, and yet having some real sense of logic to them
UNF so GOOD!
And, letting some human ideas actually work better and be things ponies can learn from, very nice touch. They might not know as much about weather overall as ponies, but that very fact means they will be more inventive about things and likely try stuff no pony would ever really thing they need to.
D'AWWWWWWWWW
you know you want to say yes people. She will be the BEST! ONE! EVER!
Of course she'll love that one. Now the trick will be pulling her away from the screen.
That had to be rather fun convincing them what was going on....
I can imagine.
All the while he's internally squeeing like Twilight Sparkle finding out she was just chosen to be Daring Do's proofreader.
Speaking of Twilight, that's the pony you'd want to talk to, one that actually looks into the theory of how magic works. Silver just focuses on the practical applications.
Hmmm, yeah, being able to drop the humidity in an area could have all kinds of uses. How long till weather scientist everywhere are fighting to get pegasi over to help them?
AKA win/win
Also, so could this get her reclassified as a weather balloon?
SQUEE!
I would say all the d'awwwww.. but all the d'awwww was stolen by Flurry Heart in today's ep.
Not necessarily in that order.
8113964
Not as often as you'd think, simply because the human way of predicting weather is a lot different from the pony way of making it.
There have been some pegasi tourists before, but not any really long-term visitors, so they haven't had as much opportunity to study them as they have other tribes of ponies. And a lot of people, like the weather professor, probably think that some of the stuff that they've heard is probably blown out of proportion--ponies can't really control the weather, that kind of thing.
Well, depending on how you view fish, she's not unfamiliar with the deliciousness of flesh.
That's what my weekends have been lately. Blah. I stay up way too late on Friday nights and it messes up my Saturday.
That's probably not a very safe idea. Although it would probably be fun, at least until the van went under a low bridge. And she might have to have someone climb up there to unstick her from the roof, too.
I've been on roads that should have had a difficulty rating. Usually when there are more than three warning signs at the beginning of the road, you should pay attention.
Also, when I was younger, I got my truck stuck on a road once (it kinda turned into a swamp), and the wrecker driver that came to tow my truck out said that he'd never seen anyone else get that far. So I was proud of that, although they ought to have put up a sign for people who didn't know, saying that this wasn't really a road at all, but more of a boat launch arrangement.
I never really liked their hash browns (or anyone else's, for that matter). Too greasy, IMHO. Do they still have the cinna-sticks? Those were good, but kinda messy.
Since you can have it your way at BK, Silver could order an Egg-normous Burrito without any meat in it. Although she's got to be careful; besides Taco Bell, too many eggs make her fart, too.
That's something that there ought to be fan art of.
"Alright, all flights are grounded for the next hour--there's gonna be a pegasus fetching a cloud."
One of the best moments like that in real life (well, sorta, it was a TV documentary) was on a show called World's Toughest Fixes. They were at a nuclear power plant, and at one point the host realized that the guards who were following them around were to keep the plant safe from them. He asked the guard if she was supposed to shoot him if he did something dumb, and she said "We hope it doesn't come to that," which is of course a wordy way of saying 'yes.'
So in this case, if Silver Glow or any of the other students start wrecking up the place, the guard will probably try to stop them.
I think that's the big difference. Any weather monitoring that ponies do is probably just a few pegasi in the air, flying around and saying what things look like/feel like, but they probably don't have any centralized monitoring, and their reach probably doesn't extend too far beyond what Estee likes to call 'settled zones.' So sometimes they probably get blindsided by storms that come in from the sea, or over the Everfree or other places that they don't really monitor. Plus, there are likely some storms that stretch up higher than a pegasus can fly.
Now, I think that with their overall weather control, they've really damped that down, and wild storms are a lot less likely to occur, since the energy and moisture mostly gets used up by the ponies somewhere else . . . but I don't think that they have total control. The sky's too big, and there simply aren't enough pegasi to control all the air currents, ocean currents, jet streams, and so forth.
And I'm happy to say (spoiler) that that's one thing she does do.
At least she's more used to getting the firsthoof view, rather than staring at computers all day long. So she never does wind up going on a weather channel bender, which is probably for the best.
That's one where she might have been better off being in Kalamazoo's airspace. At least those airplane directors are mostly used to her.
Oh, yeah, can you imagine? He's never seen a cloud like that before. Whatever kind of lab experiments they can do in college pale in comparison to what she can do with clouds.
There are probably pegasi who study their interactions with clouds, and how they work. I'm not sure how much of it Twilight has studied.
I seem to recall a couple of stories focusing on alicorn Twilight exploring the earth pony and pegasus aspects of her new alicorn body. And maybe in the context of this story, which is set some time after she ascended, she's done more studying and knows more about it than she did in the show.
Well, there are some problems with having a pony play with Earth weather, which kind of puts a bit of a damper on the experiments at first. Plus, you've got to figure out how to design them and so on. Heck, they haven't even put a pegasus in a wind tunnel yet.
Exactly!
I'm not sure that's a classification she'd really want, to be honest. Although I'm not entirely sure how that works out. I could ask my brother; he probably knows.
So most of the d'awwwwwww?
Exactly!
Adorably clueless
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She really is. But put her to work doing what she knows how to do. . . .
Silly pony. If you don't understand things like that, ask
Ah yes, she's classified as some kind of VTOL craft, isn't she?
)
(Technically she's an Ornithopter
Ha, nice.
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Where’s the fun in that? Imagining a weather station full of model computers, sort of like a tabletop RPG, is way more fun.
Yes, and in fact she is technically classed as an ornithopter in this story. ‘Drone’ would probably be more accurate, but as I recall back when this was written, the FAA didn’t have proper rules for drones in place yet.
An end-run around bureaucratic rules for the win.
Of course, the corollary is that there are some physicians who actually do understand how humans walk. Presumably there are some pegasi who understand the nitty-gritty, and if there aren't then the humans have an opportunity to fund some groundbreaking research (possibly literally, if they expand the scope to cover earth ponies as well).
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That’s true, although I bet most if not all of them figured it out on their own before figuring it out with math and Science!.
And the same would apply to ponies. . . .
And yes, there’s a very likely chance that there are pegasi (and perhaps unicorns) who have studied the nuances of pegasus flight and can explain it to an extent to Earth scientists (some concepts might be difficult to translate), plus there is the opportunity to put a volunteer pegasus into a wind tunnel and experiment with that.
There’s a lot of stuff about bird flight that we know, and there’s probably some stuff we still don’t . . . I remember watching a couple Smarter Every Day video that touched on some aspects of it:
People underestimate RADAR and SONAR all the time. The SONAR on a Navy submarine produces a 235 decibel pressure wave. A 200 decibel pressure wave can rupture your lungs, and a 210 decibel wave can cause brain hemorrhaging. Remember that decibels are a logarithmic scale, and a ten decibel increase signifies a sound ten times louder than the last. A 210 decibel sound can hemorrhage brain tissue, and a submarines SONAR is more than 100 times louder than that.
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Oh yeah, those waves don't mess around. Legend has it that the microwave was invented when a radar tech had a chocolate bar melt in his pocket while he was working on a unit, although I suspect that's an urban legend; if it was on and melting the chocolate, it'd be cooking him, too.
I have to imagine that sometimes sea creatures that are close to a submarine's sonar output don't fare well. Not sure about birds and radar, although there's probably a study on that--I have to imagine that birds don't fly too close to active radars.