Onto the Pony Planet--Chapter 22 notes · 1:02am Mar 4th, 2015
OPP 22 chapter notes
A huge thanks to my pre-readers and creative consultants: Humanist, AnormalUnicornPony, metallusionsismagic, AShadowOfCygnus, bitbrony, MSPiper, MrZJunior, Forderz, Woonsocket Wrench, and my parents.
Since thestrals have bat-like characteristics, it's not implausible that they can also use some kind of ultrasonic or near-ultrasonic communication. IRL, bats' echolocation is sometimes as low as 40,000 Hz (although it goes as high as 100,000 Hz); a real horse's hearing peaks at about 33,500 Hz. Granted, that's a bit of a stretch for Dusk Glimmer to be able to pick it up at all, but if they're communicating using ultrasonic frequencies, they probably wouldn't want their conversations to interfere with echolocation.
Back in the olden days, dictionaries were made by putting each word on an index card, writing a definition for that word, and then putting them in alphabetical order. A misfiled card resulted in the word dord inadvertently being introduced into the English language, where it remained in Merriam dictionaries for almost a decade before anybody noticed that there was no such word, and never had been.
A hoof pick is a tool used to pick stuff out of a horse's hooves.
Presumably, we all know what fingernail clippers are.
If y'all remember back to the final chapter of OPP (the extend author's note), you'll remember that I issued this challenge:
Look around your computer or tablet or smart phone or neural implant, or whatever you’re using to get these words into your brain. Pick up something—it doesn’t matter what. Look at it carefully. Now imagine that you don’t know what it is.
One of my readers just recently suggested fingernail clippers, and that was a very good suggestion. They're clearly a well-crafted tool, and yet to a pony, their purpose would be impossible to identify.
There did used to be a horse ranch on South Fox Island. I don't think it's there any more, although I'm not certain. The book I had only dated to the mid 2000s.
Also, in case anyone didn't know, IRL horses can swim (and of course ponies can in canon).
Most people probably know that that the FBI's forensic lab is at Quantico. In what is one of the more fortuitious coincidences, I just recently was working with a person who works at MSU, and told me that police evidence was sometimes handled there, and that they had procedures in place to maintain chain of custody (for instance, he can't go in certain labs when they have police evidence there).
From watching Forensic Files (hey, it's one of the few overnight channels that doesn't turn into infomertials for the Shark Vac), I've learned of a few cases where some scientist or lab technician took a piece of evidence that nobody could figure out—or which was presumed to be useless—and used it to help make a case. In one example, a lab tech invented a procedure to test cremated remains for the presecence of certain poisons (in this case, arsenic).
For that matter, when I drove wrecker, the police were constantly underestimating what we could do with a sling truck, and would call for a flatbed when it wasn't really needed. Just because they couldn't envision how a truck could be safely towed with no front wheels didn't mean we didn't know how.
Most of y'all might be too young to remember the film bags. X-rays can fog camera film, and lead bags were sold which you could put your film into before you got on an airplane. I still have one somewhere, even though there's basically a zero percent chance I'd ever use it for anything.
Adams is a refernce to Ansel Adams, a famous photographer.
Pineda is a reference to a detective from the Kalamazoo Police Department, who investigated a case I was peripherally involved with. There's not much chance he's reading this, I suppose, but it kind of gives me a warm fuzzy feeling that he might be.
Hockam's Razor is of course a pun on Occam's Razor. William of Occam was a Franciscan friar and philosopher. His principle was "among competing hypotheses that predict equally well, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected (Wikiepdia)." Basically, the theory is that whatever the simplest explanation is, that's probably the right explanation.
Of course, that's not always the case: in Boondock Saints, Willem Defoe's character assumes it was six guys with guns, rather than one guy with six guns, and he's ultimately proven wrong. 
In other cases, though, the simple expanation proved to be the right one. Models of the solar system can be made where the earth is at the center, but the orbit of Jupiter's moons are really complex in that model. It's much simpler if you have a system where smaller things orbit bigger things, and the biggest thing is in the center. Eventually, most people came to accept that.
I don't know about doctors keeping things that they find inside patients (although I'd bet some of them do), but some tire shops keep a collection of things they find stuck in tires. Besides the obvious nails and screws, I've also found sharp rocks, metal slivers, glass (less common than you'd imagine), a cupboard door handle, drill bits, a gutter nail, staples, and porcupine quills. I also found a pair of earbuds inside a tire once; I can only assume they were put there deliberately.
Unfortunately, googling for an image of a dart also gave me all sorts of results of the darts stuck in unfortunate parts of the human anatomy (I presume cops are supposed to aim for the chest, but clearly they don't always get the right spot). I don't recommend that particular google search, unless you feel you need another good reason to not be tased.
This is how insignificant the Earth looks from Saturn.
As we all know, Saturn is in our solar system, and relatively close from a galactic perspective. The sun would still be pretty prominent from that distance. But imagine that you were further away. Much further away.
You might see a starscape like this, and only one of those stars would be your own—a star which is insignificant in the grand scheme of things.
For what it's worth, that picture contains a star which is approximately the same magnitude as Sol, and is as far away from us as Dale is from Earth, although I wasn't going to embarrass myself by trying to identify it in the photo (I tried, but after an hour of poring over star charts, trying to figure out star nomenclature, I gave up—a wise man knows when to throw in the towel). Any of my readers who are good at astronomy, send me a PM, I'll tell you what the name of the star is, and then let you do the legwork in exchange for credit in the next blog post as well as my eternal gratitude.
That picture of from Saturn was just........wow I feel really insignificant now. It reminds me of something from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy but I can quite think of it.
Friends: regarding TASERs - The darts are designed to spread on launch to impact as widely as possible on an average male human torso out to about 21 feet. Coppers know that this can result in some... lurid impact points. After his search, the author knows, as well. Trust us, you do NOT want to know...
2847570 There's an even more significant picture like that referred to as the "Pale Blue Dot" - http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/73/Pale_Blue_Dot.png
When the Voyager 1 probe was leaving the solar system, NASA faced it toward us to take a "Family Portrait" of the planets. The image linked is the picture of Earth. In the far right brown band, a little over halfway down, there is a single blue pixel. That's us.
"All of human history has happened on that single blue pixel" - Carl Sagan
It could be possible, I wonder how they would produce the sounds for such communication / echolocation.
s3.amazonaws.com/dk-production/images/33222/large/img-woj-blog-belief-in-the-pale-blue-dot.png?1369108706
The further out we go the more insignificant everything is. I once read somewhere that most distant star we can see (with the naked eye) is ~4000 light years away (varies based upon the brightness of the star in question and local conditions). For reference our galaxy is 100000 light years in diameter. Without considering the other galaxies out there that is an inconceivable amount of stars planets and other stellar phenomenon. Sure we can assign numbers and do all the math but I don't really think anyone can really comprehend the true scale of it all.
2847570
It's weird to think of. When I was looking for the image of the stars (and you can believe that I chose the one I did for a very good reason), it got me to thinking about just how tiny a part of the universe we really are. It's both frightening and reassuring.
2847773
I suppose having a taser dart stuck in your eyeball is preferable to being shot (I've had neither experience, so I'm just assuming here).
In a way, it's not unlike the vaccines debate. True, there are sometimes adverse effects, but by and large, it's better than the disease.
I once was in an ER in lake country in Wisconsin. They actually had framed on the wall a collection of all the fishing lures they'd removed from patients.
I remember those lead bags quite well..... Only wish I'd been able to use them the last long trip I went on for a photo shoot with film. Kinda hard to lead bag 500 rolls of film and still get through security. Also still a pain to get them to hand inspect that many too, but yeah fun times and tales of a photog on run to a place you can't resupply.
2847775
That was the other choice, in place of the Saturn picture. Up until the very end, I was dithering between the two choices. Either way, it's hard to wrap the mind around.
2847782 that's why whenever I want something guaranteed to blow my mind from sheer scale I always turn back to astronomy.
2847782
I don't know--I'm not sure how bats do it, to be honest. More research is needed!
Cassiopeia is just over 16,000 LY away (according to a quick Google search), and is apparently visible to the naked eye.
Yeah--the distances are so large, and the number of stars so vast, it's so hard to get a grasp on it. It really makes everything that we think is important seem so petty.
2847831 Yeah, I've never seen that one in person, either, but the photos were bad enough - and I routinely attend autopsies.
There was a book about non-lethal and less-than-lethal weapons where the author addressed arguments about cruelty, pain, and suffering with the question, "Compared to what?" In his example, a TASER or a pepperball launcher on a knife-wielding suspect was certainly painful, and potentially crippling, or even fatal, but compared to 9mm bullet from a Glock 17, or a Beretta 92 service pistol? Not nearly so much.
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Once you mentioned it I also went to Google. From what I can find Cassioppeia is a constellation that contains some supernova remanants. One in particular is called Cassiopeia A and is ~16000 LY away and has left behind a Magnetar (which is apparently a neutron star with a strong magnetic field.)
The stars themselves which are part of Cassopiea range from 54 to 10000LY from Earth. Rho Cassoppeiae is 8200LY away and is 500000 times brighter than our sun and can be seen with the naked eye. It is one of the brightest in the sky and is only one of a dozen recorded yellow hyper-giants. That is a seriously amazing star.
2847820
I find it absolutely fascinating.
2847924
Strong is understatement.
Get close enough to one and it would rip you apart atom by atom. To put this in perspective, the magnetic field is so strong that atoms become needles and the very fabric of reality starts acting like a piece of calcite.
Space is scary.
2847924
Seriously--space boggles the mind. Some of the starlight we see started its journey before the Egyptians thought of making a pyramid, for example. When we observe a supernova with our telescopes, it's hard to imagine that the star has been gone for hundreds of generations; what's now to us is ancient history to the universe.
bats’
Also, did you mean “as high as 100 kHz”?
2847834
Yet another reason to mock Wisconsin.
What were you shooting that took 500 rolls of film? I think my personal record was somewhere around 20 in a single trip.
Of course, these days most of us can just happily do digital, and not really have to worry about the storage space. I have 40 years worth of physical copy of a magazine; the digital version only takes up four DVDs....
While I don't know about the film aspect, I know all about the personal hand-inspections (and this was pre-9/11, too). At an airport once, a drug dog misidentified me. That was fun times.
2847922
I'm glad I don't have to deal with that in my day-to-day life. Back when I drove wrecker, I never asked. The paramedics were gone before I got the call, and I really didn't want to know. There were some calls that I found out after the fact had been fatal accidents, and some where I was pretty sure they had been, but it wasn't as hard to think about if I only concentrated on the wrecked car.
And this is a context which I think is missing from a lot of debates. I don't like getting shots, but I suspect I'd like getting a preventable illness even less. When I played the antagonist in live-fire police exercises, I didn't like getting shot (although being given free rein to shoot cops was fun), yet the training benefited the population at large: I watched a team waste an innocent bystander (luckily, not me), and you can bet they won't make that mistake again if they ever happen to be in a real-life shooting situation.
2848081
Yes. Oops.
2848090 I was on a trip into the bush in Botswana and Zambia for a month with two other photographers. We were shooting for stock at the time. It was also our first trip using digital SLR's, but we weren't sure how they'd hold up in the sub-kalahari dust. Was the last big trip where I ever used film. When working with wildlife it's not uncommon for me to shoot 1k plus frames a day.
I also remembe, ahem, gifting a couple rolls to a checkpoint guard in Johanasburg for a hand inspection once on that trip, much less expensive than when we had to bribe customs in Mozambique once to keep our gear instead of having to pay the $10k in *cough* import taxes (see extortion from a guy with a big gun) on our gear. They tried justifying it by saying we hand manuals therefore we were bring the gear in to sell. Man I 'love' traveling in places where everyone is on the 'up and up' on entry fees.
Yeah love the drug dogs here as well or perhaps I should say they all love my mother when we travel together.
It's worth noting that Occam's Razor is "the simplest explanation that fits all the evidence is most likely to be right". That part really ought to be obvious, especially since it's in the quoted definition you provided, but you'd be unpleasantly surprised....
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Another good one is this to-scale map of the Solar System out to Pluto. Scroll all the way through it, and then ponder how it only shows about 6 light-hours' worth of distance - you'd need to line up over 6000 maps of the same size to get to the nearest star.
2848436 That's a damn cool map.
2847773 I think the most impressive(ly cringeworthy) I've seen has been a headshot... with both darts. One in the bottom lip and the other hit a closed eyelid. I looked away pretty damn quick.
Interestingly enough, there are humans who can use echolocation. this man, blind from 13 months, sees through sound, and teaches others to do the same.
Here's a sort of plausible reason for thestral echolocation and communication being low enough in pitch that other ponies could somewhat hear it: The thestral is larger than a bat, so would have a larger larynx, which would naturally produce a lower-frequency range of sounds ...Maybe. Am I putting too much thought into this?
By the way, almost anyone will naturally use some rudimentary echolocation. In a dark room, you can tell when you are about to walk into a wall ...Most of the time.
2848172
Cool! That sounds like quite the trip!
Yeah, with film you never know what you're going to get until you develop it. Digital gives you instant gratification.
Still, that feeling when you finally make the print and it's perfectly composed . . . I used to shoot with an old Canon (can't remember the model), which had automatic light metering, but not autofocus. I used it a lot; I was pretty familiar with the old girl, and kept carrying it even after I got a nice SLR. Anyway, I once took a quick shot with it where I had to lift the camera, flip off the lens cap, focus and fire, and I'm proud to say that picture came out well-composed.
My brother owns a small plane; when he lived and worked in Canada, he had to leave the plane in the US, or else he would have had to pay import tax on the airplane.
2848832
Huh. I wouldn't have thought it was possible. Our ears aren't all that great at pinpointing sound--not like some other species (like ponies, for example).
I did know that there are other forms of blindsight, when the visual cortex is damaged, but the optic nerves and eyeballs remain functional.
2849347
While that might be a factor, I think there are more complicated mechanisms than just larynx size, although I'm no expert.
Are we talking somewhere you're familiar with, and have mental maps of, or someplace totally foreign? Because I can assure you that when I worked in the theater, where everything backstage is painted black so the audience can't see it, I ran into walls a lot. Of course, that could just be me. . . .
2850438 Yeah that was one of the great eye opening experiences of my life on so many levels. But atm it's only tied for first in places I'd like to go back to. At the moment it's tied with the Antarctic, now that was really like visiting another world.
Yeah I know what you mean there. I kept the body and lens for the old Olympus OM II I started with on hand for the longest time. It was my old faithful.
Yeah nothing quite like it. I'll never forget my first time in the ol black and white darkroom. I think one assignment in collage was actually the last time I used an actual silver based darkroom. I miss it sometimes, the color darkroom on the other hand... Nope will never miss that
But then the fun of working with inject printers these days is all the fun materials and water soluble papers you can print on.
2850460
Stage prop walls and backdrops are a definite exception to the rule! Canvas stretched over a frame has almost no sound-deadening or reflecting effect... I worked in television, but we occasionally mingled with the theater (theatre) crowd...
What I described was something I've noticed while wandering about at night--there are some otherwise very nice campsite facilities which have no electricity for lighting, and I don't always use a flashlight... Yeah, I'll just leave it at that. Anyway the sound of your footsteps, bouncing back up to your ears, will generally tell you if you're walking into something solid. It's not a sure thing, but it's there to some degree. If nothing else, glazed brick walls produce an obvious echo.
It's not like being able to see, but it's better than nothing.
If you get really close, you might even detect the warmth of your own breath coming back at you just before you whack your face against something. That's pretty much your last warning, though.
>>One of my readers just recently suggested fingernail clippers, and that was a very good suggestion. They're clearly a well-crafted tool, and yet to a pony, their purpose would be impossible to identify.
Or maybe not so impossible?
Hoof clippers:
s57.radikal.ru/i155/1503/2e/122e7b677f4c.jpg
Relevant: http://thespectacularspider-girl.tumblr.com/post/112676690924/this-show-is-built-upon-steves-reactions
In my (brother's) experience, the item removed from the wound was returned in a specimen container. A splinter from a picnic bench that was removed from my brother's eyebrow is an artifact still amongst my household.
A funny little anecdote from that story is that if the accident had happened only weeks later, there would be far more stitches, since the wooden bench was later replaced with a metal one that was anchored to the ground.
I'm not sure why but public benches and other things of a similar type had a tendency to move around in my town.
2875045
I heard that from another person, too--the screws from a shoulder surgery were saved and returned when the second surgery was performed. I'm not really sure why anybody would want that, but I guess some people like to hang on to that type of souvenir.
I don't know if I was given the opportunity to have the bone pieces they pulled out of my finger. I was a minor back then, so they might have offered them to my parents.
2848832 I actually heard bat sonar once. I'm pretty sure it was just that one species using a frequency just barely in my hearing range, since I've never heard any before or since.