//------------------------------// // January 15 [Friday] // Story: Silver Glow's Journal // by Admiral Biscuit //------------------------------// January 15 After yesterday's ice storm, this morning was quite uneventful. It was above freezing by sunup, and the air was full of the sounds of meltwater rushing off roofs. I'm a bit confused about the human calendar; winter is supposed to last until March 20. I know humans don't control it as well as we do, but to miss by over sixty days? That's a sixth of their year. I asked the professor about it, and he said that it was typical for Kalamazoo to have thawing cycles like this. Humans, it turns out, define their seasons simply by the length of the day, switching on the equinoxes and solstices. That would be like having summer start on the day of the Summer Sun Celebration, and was kind of silly. The climate lagged a bit behind. We continued our conversation from before after class today. I think the two of us sort of got off on the wrong hoof right from the get-go. He assumed that I was taking the class because I wanted to know the facts, when the truth was I wanted to know how humans named their weather. A good foundation is necessary to understand anything. It would be like a writer who doesn't know the most basic parts of speech. He thought that we didn't have a rigorous understanding of the climate and of weather. He said that he had been reflecting on what we talked about before, and he thought he understood where the misunderstanding had come from: back in the old days, humans thought of anything that they didn't really understand as witchcraft or magic, and only later did they really understand what was going on. He'd assumed that our weather control was like that—that we just pushed around clouds not really knowing why it worked. Really, it was just different approaches. We pegasuses started off with experimentation, and eventually that became a rigid science. We'd try something and see what happened. It must have been an exciting and dangerous time to be alive! So much of it is lost to history; by the time the Sisters became stewards of the unicorn throne, we were already pretty good at it, and have spent centuries since refining our art. Humans took the opposite tack: they observed what had happened, and then figured out how to explain it. That's why they name their clouds for their appearance and their function was tacked on later, rather than the way we do it. The intent of the cloud is known before it's put into the sky; what form it takes is the logical result of what it does. Incidentally, that's why we were the first to develop complex math—there's a lot of energy involved in the atmosphere, and a lot of calculations required to get things right. Even now, pegasus-founded universities have the best mathematicians. (Unicorns like to pretend that they're unicorn universities, 'cause they're on the ground, but how else were we going to attract other ponies?) He still doesn't believe that we can actually work with clouds. I'll have to bring one in to show him. It's really difficult to wrangle them after they've fully-formed, though. They're big and diaphanous. We wrapped up Plato today. A lot of what he said in The Republic could be applied to pony culture. The division of labor is an important point: while unicorns can manipulate the weather, earth ponies can cast with potions, and pegasuses can grow crops, it's not in our nature. Our society is better when everypony sets herself to the tasks which she is best equipped for. A boy in class asked the professor if Plato's Republic could be said to justify the caste system, and the professor said that she didn't think so. She rejected the idea that a person is born into a role, and I had to agree with that. Despite the expected roles, there are occasionally pegasuses who are good with plants or animals, and it's that unexpected cross of talents which makes our society function so well. Everypony knows that earth ponies make the best leaders (not counting alicorns, of course), but if there weren't pegasi who were also good at it, our cloud cities would be leaderless. It's very important to let ponies use their skills properly. Some parents desperately want their daughters to follow in their hoofsteps, even to the point of denying what a pony's cutie mark really means. I thought about bringing up sports in Equestrian class, especially since I now know about a few humans sports like golf and water skiing and hockey (there are very many hockey teams in Michigan), but decided to focus the first part of the class on how the unified Equestrian alphabet came to be, and why the unicorns are stubborn and don't use it all the time. And that wasn't as good a topic as I'd thought, because people kind of got confused by it and I guess I didn't know enough about the unicorn alphabet to really teach it. There is a little mail hut near the dining hall. I checked it on the way from dinner, and discovered that I got a return letter from Aquamarine. This left me with a bit of a dilemma—I had already promised that I would go over to Christine's room and watch the last Star Wars movie, and I'd also then had to reschedule that a bit so that I could watch an important human event on the television (which is a small flat screen that can show movies or current events, sometimes right when they're happening). In America, they have a political system which they call democracy where every four years they all get together and decide on who's going to be their leader for the next four years. Earth ponies do this, too, although rather than have it take place at a set time, they wait until they have lost confidence in their current leaders and then decide if somepony is more qualified. We pegasuses like to see deeds first, rather than a lot of hot air, and that's how we choose. Unicorns—who are sometimes the most backwards tribe—think bloodlines are important, and take great pains to keep track of who birthed who and use that to determine who sits on the Nobles' Council. It’s kind of a mash-up between our system and the earth pony system. Each candidate will not only talk about his or her deeds, but also what they intend to do if they are elected. They have a very clever process to winnow down the candidates; there are two major tribes (Democratic and Republican), and each tribe puts up a number of candidates, which are winnowed down in a series of debates until the very best pair remain.  Their debates are shown on television, so that all voters can make an educated choice. Tonight it is the Republicans' turn, and then in a few days, the Democrats will have their turn.