November 14 [Tupper's self-referential formula]
November 14
I got up a little bit early and I didn't want to wake up Peggy right away, so I got my camelback and I went to the bathroom and filled it up. And I was thinking that it might be smart to get some more of them before I went back to Equestria, because I could give them to my family as late Hearth's Warming gifts, 'cause I knew that they'd like them.
I sat at my desk and turned on my bendy lamp and studied my thermodynamics notes a little bit more so it would all be fresh in my head when me and Lisa reviewed it after class. And when I was sure that it was all sticking in my head, I shook Peggy until she woke up, and she picked up her portable telephone and looked at it and sighed and then sat up in bed and said that she could count the number of hours of sleep she'd gotten on one hand. Then she stretched her arms and twisted her back until it cracked and got out of bed and looked through her dresser for clothes.
While she was dressing, I put my camelback on, and then I stood next to her so that she could put her water bottles in the pockets on it.
We went to Jeff's house first, and we were a little bit late, so Caleb and Lindy and Trinity were already outside waiting for their bus. And I gave Trinity a real quick ponyback ride, and then we talked until their bus came, and I hugged the girls and gave Caleb a hoof-bump before they got on to go to school, and once the bus had left me and Peggy continued with our morning exercise.
She got too hot again by the time we'd trotted to the end of Dartmouth, and tied her sweatshirt around me, and then we headed towards the other side of the neighborhood.
I asked Peggy if she was dating Leon now, and she said it had been one of those one-time things that you do after a night of drinking at the bar and she didn’t think that it would go any further than that.
Well, I said that that didn't explain how he'd been over Saturday night, too, and she said that he'd still needed a place to sleep and they'd wanted to see if they had as much fun when they hadn't been drinking, so they wanted to try again, and she said that it had been even better the second time.
I thought that if they were having fun together than they ought to continue, and Peggy said that they might but she didn't want to make any firm commitments before Winter Break. She said she wanted to focus on her finals and then the break and going snowboarding with me, but when she got back she'd think about seeing if it went somewhere serious.
We went around the rest of the neighborhood, and then I offered to race her the rest of the last block and she said that she would if I gave her a head start, which I thought was fair.
So I let her get past the first driveway before I started, and that made it more of a challenge, and I didn't beat her until we were only a couple of dozen meters short of the end of the block.
Peggy didn't stop when we got to the corner, though, but she did slow down and I trotted to catch up to her as she went around the corner and up the sidewalk towards Trowbridge.
She took a bottle of water out of my camelback and poured some over her head and then drank the rest, then she used her plastic card to open the door for us.
We walked upstairs together and I stuck my nose in the bathroom and there wasn't anybody in the shower, and I told her that she could use it first if she wanted. She said that she had to get her shower things and I told her that I would get them for her, and push them under the door.
So she went into the shower and I went to our room and got her basket of shower supplies and took them in and pushed them under the stall door, then I went back and got a towel for her, and she opened the door a little bit to take that so it wouldn't get wet on the floor, and then I went back to our room and got my stuff, and I sat on the bench and waited for her to finish. And once she got out, I went right in 'cause Kat hadn't come for her morning shower yet.
When I got done, Kat was sitting outside, waiting for her turn, and I wished her a good morning before going back to my room to groom and preen.
Peggy was almost dressed when I got in, and I told her I wouldn’t be mad if she went to breakfast without me, but she insisted on waiting. So I skipped preening my wings, 'cause I knew that Meghan would preen them for me, and then I got my thermodynamics books and notebook and went to breakfast with Peggy.
I got some eggs and oatmeal and sat down at our table, which looked more empty than usual because we still had the extra one there but we didn't need it now. Meghan wasn't there yet, and I'd finished my eggs and half my oatmeal when she finally arrived.
And then I wasn't going to say anything about my wings, 'cause I didn't want her to miss breakfast because she was preening me, but she noticed that I hadn't done it and put down her spoon and told me to put my wing on her lap. Then she said that she was going to have to come back to Equestria with me since I didn't know how to preen myself anymore, and I stuck my tongue out at her.
She said that on Earth, they had helper ponies, so maybe she could try and explain how I needed a helper human, and then she could live in Equestria with me.
I got to class a little bit early, and I'd sat down and gotten out my notebook and clicky pens before Lisa came in and sat down next to me. Professor Brown said that we were going to spend the last week talking about kinetics, which was about rates of reactions and why things didn't get to their equilibrium. And he said that it could work for time scales as fast as femtoseconds, or as long as millions of years and anything in between.
So clouds disappearing in the sky could be kinetics. And the basic idea was that A plus B became C eventually, and I wrote that down even though it wasn't much of an equation, but then he started to put better equations on the markerboard.
There was a letter k that was the kinetic constant, and then there were more math letters called alpha and beta, and they were kinda hard to draw. Curvey letters were always hard with mouthwriting, and of course humans had lots of them, so it took a lot of practice to make them look good.
He started by showing us a zero order reaction, which was one that took the same time no matter how concentrated your reactants were, and they were rare. And next came first order, which were common, and it was a similar equation that we had to integrate, and we figured out that they had an exponential decay. The common one he said was radioactive decay, and he told us that that was something that people could use to find out how old something was.
Professor Brown also told us to try and express it logarithmically, 'cause is was easier to draw straight lines than curved ones.
And then when we did second order reactions, and he showed us how to change around our As and Bs so that we could solve it by using limiting cases, and also how we could figure by graphing if it was a first order or second order reaction.
Then when we had learned all of that, he said that we were going to learn complicated reactions in our next class.
Me and Lisa met in the lounge downstairs and first we looked over the lab report, and when we both agreed that it was all done, we started reviewing some more. And I was glad that I'd spent the time last night and this morning to study, 'cause we'd learned a lot of stuff and a lot of formulas.
Lisa thought that Professor Brown would probably give us some of the longer formulas on the test so we didn't have to remember them, but I wasn't so sure, and it was still good to know them anyways. And she said that he'd probably tell us on Wednesday or Friday exactly what was going to be on the test so that we could study the right things.
We studied together until Lisa had to go to her next class, and I walked with her as far as Dewing, then I went up to my own room. And I got out my homework assignment and started working on that.
It took me until lunch, and I didn't quite get it all done, and I thought about working through, but then I would be hungry and grumpy all afternoon, plus Sean might worry that I wasn't going to be in class, so I set my work aside and put my math things in my saddlebags.
I went out to the boardwalk and glided down the quad and landed just short of the dining hall and then went inside.
They had spinach again at the salad table, so I got a bunch of that and I also found some fish fillets that looked good, so I took the two biggest ones.
The fish didn't taste quite as good as it looked, and Anna said that they'd had the same fish for dinner last night and not too many people had wanted it, and after eating one of the fillets, I could see why.
Sean wanted to know what I was going to do for Winter Break—he asked if we were going to go back to Equestria right after classes were over, and I said that we would stay until the end of the year, 'cause we could travel and see things, and I was going to go to Peggy's house for Thanksgiving and then also go snowboarding up in the mountains. And then us four ponies were going to go shopping in Chicago, and we also wanted to go to Disneyland, which is in Florida, and maybe we'd see some other stuff while we were down there, too.
Sean said that they launched space ships from Cape Canaveral, which wasn't too far from Disneyland, and he said that we should see that. He said that he'd gotten a chance to watch an actual Space Shuttle launch, but now they didn't fly them any more.
Christine said that she didn't like Florida, and Sean said that was because she'd grown up next to it, but to everyone up north, it was like a magical land full of cartoon mice and sunshine all year long, and Reese said that he always imagined that Florida was really Xanth, which is an imaginary place in a book.
Me and Sean went to math class together, and Professor Pampena taught us more about objects in space, and how to use cross product to get normal direction and area element, and he wrote out the formula for that and then showed how he'd gotten it. And then he did an example on the markerboard with his paraboloid, and let us work through it with him, to make sure that everyone understood the concept, because that was the formula which worked on ninety percent of the cases. Since it wasn't all of them, he started to show us the next method. And that got pretty complicated and the equation started to cover the entire markerboard, and then he said that we could prove to ourselves that this equation worked by substituting in the values we'd used in the last example and we could make this equation into the other one, so I wrote them both down in my notebook next to each other so that I could solve them later. I was sure he was telling the truth, but it would still be good practice to do.
Then he started to tell us about the divergence theorem, and he told us a new math letter which was called del, and was like an upside-down delta, and you could use it to get dot products, too. He said it wasn't that useful yet but when we got to curl it would be.
He showed us how to use what we knew to figure out a vertically simple region, and we could make it into a double integral times a single integral which was a lot simpler. And we could use our flux integral in it, and it had lots of fun calculating in it.
And once we'd learned how to do all of that, then he said that if we had a region that wasn't vertically simple, we just had to slice it into simple parts so that we could basically do the same thing.
Me and Sean went back to his room to do our homework, and when we were done he said that we should watch another Numberphile movie and I thought so, too, but I said that we should study some first.
And he didn't really want to, but I put my hoof down and so we spent the next hour reviewing all the math that Professor Pampena had taught us.
I knew I needed to do more review to make sure that I had everything down perfectly, but we had both gotten to the point where we reached our limit of reviewing for one day. Studying is kind of like exercise: if you do too much all at once, you don't gain anything and you can even lose progress if you push too hard.
So Sean found a Numberphile movie for us to watch, which was about Tupper's self-referential formula, which when you plotted it on a graph made itself. But he was kind of cheating because you had to go a really really really long ways up the y-axis before you got there, and there was a lot more stuff above it. And he showed how you could figure out from your picture what your k value would be, and I was still thinking about it when I went back to my room. You could put my name in both English and Equestrian in the plot, and I'd have to do a lot of calculating and write out a really big number, but I could do it if I really wanted to, and then a computer could do the work of converting it to decimal and multiplying by seventeen and drawing it out, and everyone back in Equestria would be really amazed.
I sat at my desk and finished up my thermodynamics homework, even though I probably could have put it off until tomorrow, and then I got my World War One book so that I could find out what happened next, even though I didn't really want to know. But I was getting near the end so hopefully they were going to figure out that their war was stupid.
Germany had an advantage until the United States entered the fight, so they needed a quick victory on the Western Front, but they didn’t get it.
Thousands of airplanes were fighting in the sky, and the Allies started winning, 'cause they could build more airplanes.
The United States was adding ten thousand troops a day, and they started fighting the Germans, while Austria-Hungary was losing to the Italians. And the British and French decided to invade Russia to help stop their revolution.
The Allies finally started advancing after years of not really going anywhere, and the Germans began to surrender, and in the south, Bulgaria surrendered, and the Allies took Aleppo from the Ottomans.
The Ottomans signed an armistice, and four days later the Austro-Hungarians did, too. And the Kaiser fled, and an armistice was declared by the Germans, too, on the 11th of November, and then in Africa, the German general Von Lettow-Vorbek surrendered exactly ninety-nine years ago.
Everyone signed an armistice at the Paris Peace Conference which Marshall Foch said would last for only twenty years, and I guess that was why they had to have a second war.
The book said that nine and a half million soldiers were killed, and twenty one million were wounded, and seven million civilians were killed, and as far as I could tell nobody really got anything out of it at the end. I thought it would have been better if Serbia had just accepted the concessions that Austria-Hungary had wanted, or if everyone else had just told their friends to think before they did something stupid. But they hadn't; they'd just rushed in, and then everyone was so determined to win that they didn't care what they lost, and so everyone weakened themselves. I wasn’t sure how many people there had been in Europe before the war, but there were a lot less of them after.
I had a little while left before it was dinnertime, so I went out to the boardwalk and flew off, and then I headed out over downtown.
I had to stay pretty low and watch out for helicopters, since I hadn't told the airplane directors that I was flying, and I wasn't wearing any of my flight gear.
So I circled around the hotel below the roof level, and then I flew right up to the big g on the Gilmore building, and I went around it but didn't touch it, and I had to be careful because there were antennas and other obstacles on the roof. And then I went back down and over the parking lot stack, and I thought about flying into one of the lower levels but I might get hit by a car that was coming up and couldn't see me, and there wasn't a whole lot of room between the tops of cars and the bottom of the parking lot above.
Then I flew back to campus and went to the dining hall and they still had the same fish again but this time I knew better than to eat it, and I got lots of salad and they had one kind of salad that was green peas and peanuts and I tried that because I thought it would probably have lots of protein in it. I didn't think that it was left over, 'cause it looked like it was popular, since the bowl of it was mostly empty when I got there. And it turned out that it was pretty tasty.
After dinner, I walked with Meghan and Peggy back to our dorm, and I didn’t really have anything to do before Durak and Meghan didn't either, so she came back to our room with us, and we all watched a YouTube movie called True Facts about the Octopus, which was very strange. Octopuses were very strange, and male octopuses had their penises on the end of a tentacle. Also he said that clams were dumb as hell, which was true. Clams were easy to catch, and I think that they thought that their shells kept them safe, but you could just put them on a rock and crack it open to get at the clam.
Peggy said that we could watch another one, but Meghan remembered that she should pack some clothes to take to Aric's house before we went to Durak.
I thought I ought to take the World War One book back to the library in case anyone needed it for their finals, so I picked it up, 'cause we could stop at the library on the way to Fourth Coast. And that reminded me that I should put the Kama Sutra in her duffel bag, too, and we could look through it and find something fun to do, so I got that, too.
I went with Meghan to her room, and she packed up her bag with clean clothes for tomorrow and brushes and more shampoo because there wasn't much left at Aric's house, and then we went out and stopped by the library and I gave the book back to the librarian, and then we walked to the coffee shop.
We played a couple of games of Durak, and when we were done, I made sure to hug everyone, 'cause I didn't know if we'd play next week because of finals. And Keith said that I should teach ponies how to play the game when I got back to Equestria, and so he gave me the cards to take back with me.
Me and Meghan got in Winston and Aric drove us back, and when we got to Dartmouth, he said that I could ride on his lap and drive the rest of the way home, and I was just about to move over when Meghan asked if she could instead. And Aric thought that was a really silly idea, which is why he decided to do it.
I had to switch places with Meghan, and I was going to get on her lap and slide over but she opened her door and said it was a Chinese Fire Drill, and she went around the front of Winston and then got in on Aric's side and sat on his lap, and we drove the rest of the way to his house with her sitting on his lap and steering and using the stick while he controlled the pedals.
When he'd shut off Winston, Meghan said that he hadn't had to hold her boobs while she drove, and Aric said that he had wanted to make sure that she didn't fall off his lap and that was why he'd done it. Which I didn't think was true.
We went inside and went right upstairs since I had my lab in the morning, and the two of them got undressed for bed and I got in bed and waited for them and I was thinking that it had been more fun when they got each other undressed, and so I decided that next Wednesday we'd do that, although I didn't tell them. Sometimes it was more fun to have things be a surprise in the bedroom.
But it was still lots of fun because Meghan got the book out of her duffel bag and the three of us sat in bed together looking through it and thinking about what we should try, and then when we found something that looked interesting, we tried to figure out if it would work with a pony and where the third person should be, and so we finally picked one that looked adventurous and fun, although it was going to be a little tough for me but Meghan promised that she'd help hold me, so then Aric turned out the lights and we snuggled for a little bit before trying it out. And it was kind of strange and not something that a pony normally would even try, but it felt really amazing.
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I almost want to know what position they used but I know better then to ask becuase that ruins the fun.
I think it's kind of funny how SG probably sees Kat more than some of her friends, but it's just randomly in passing in the shower.
I was waiting for someone to correct her on where Disneyland was...maybe next entry. :)
I occasionally suffer gout, and the only thing worse I can think of would be getting it as a homework assignment.
What is Aleppo?
It's kind of amazing to think this fic is nearly over
we're nearly free!.Miss Silver Glow confuses Disneyland and Disneyworld.
7874039
Okay now, the cat is out of the bag. We all know that you are Governor Gary Johnson.
This is 1 of the reasons relations with the Soviet Union were so bad. It might also be why the Soviet Union had little freedom:
Perhaps Lenin never intended a free Soviet Union, but we must look at the possibility that planned freedoms died in the long civil war exacerbated by outsiders trying to restore the Czar.
7874135
I was hoping someone would catch the reference.
Meghan — Professional Wing Preener.
I honestly did not expect something from the Syrian Civil War to pop up in a WWI history book.
The ponies' idea of why "WWII started 21 years after WWI". :V
The scary thing about human population is that despite the tragedy of all the deaths and the lament of a lost generation, that was less than 2% of the then world population. We have just that many humans running around.
"It's the boobs safety belt, you know?"
The USA also sent troops to Russia. I remember reading about it when I was a kid, but that was 50 years ago, so ICR any details. The big problem was: Nobody wanted to commit enough troops to get the job done, so they sent just enough to piss off the Russians
The Spanish Influenza (1917-1920) killed more people in 3 years than WWI did in 4. I've read that it actually started in Army camps in the USA. It's called the Spanish Influenza because Spain wasn't at war & published death lists in the newspapers. The US government didn't want the Germans to know they were having problems & hushed it up.
Post WWI, the USA wanted to let the people vote about which country to belong to (a plebiscite). The Europeans just wanted to put lines where convenient. I remember that the French prime minister protested "My God! Must every little language have a country to call it's own?" These days, seems like the answer is "Yes"
True Facts About the Octopus? Aw yeah, you're showing Silver my documentary!
I'm kind of surprised nothing was mentioned about the armistice on the 11th November. I guess it's not as big a thing in America as is Britain but over here most places have a one or two minute silence at 11am for it.
The equation that can define its own glyphs? Ive been wondering if this thing was around since I went looking for i at Universisty in th 80s. Back then it was for sentient plasma structures, but here Id want to apply it to magic spells. After all, have you seen how much smarts they have to have to be able to actually do anything?
The goodbyes continue. The endings occur. The last book, the last cards.
The Winter Winddown.
picked
than that
they
didn't
It's going to be a wierd feeling when this story has finally run its course...
It's had a surprising influence for me, since the start of this year I now keep a diary, something I'd never considered before. It also managed to goad me into restarting my running program, I figured if a pony and some slack uni student can manage (fictional as they may be) then I probably can too...
Also Silver should start a camelback importation company, that way she could visit Aric and Meghan (who I hope stay together...) Also, I 10/10 ship Peggy and Leon.
Who's Al? How many humans are you doing, SG? You really ought to talk to Meghan and Aric about this.
One time when I was at my grandparents' house in Florida, everyone raced out the door because there was a shuttle launch in a few minutes... and I refused to go. I was seven and it was a Saturday morning. My priorities seemed clear at the time. Now I wish someone had dragged me out the door.
In any case, definitely sounds like this will end on a high note. Also, add me to the legion waiting for someone to explain the Disney distinction.
The Germans and Austrians were itching for war so they flat out demanded Serbia effectively cede sovereignty under the guise of investigating and purging Serbian officials suspected of being complicit in the assassination, fully expecting them to refuse. Even though Austrian investigators reported over a week before the ultimatum that there was no evidence that the Serbian government was in any way involved and plenty of evidence to the exact opposite.
Several leaders gave orders for full invasion even if all the demands were accepted. Summaries of causes for the war can go on for pages and pages, but at the top is simple sickening greed and hubris among the bloated old empires and their inbred rulers, each convinced that the new advances of the Industrial Revolution made their armies invincible and were eager to try out the new toys.
Battlefield 1 may be console-optimized trash but it's quite satisfying. Especially since the Winchester 1897 Trench Gun is the finest shotgun ever designed and the Mauser C96 (and all of it's variants and copies) is the best pistol ever designed. Han Solo and Leon Kennedy can attest. (I don't think the Trench Gun in that game has the bayonet. FIX THAT!)
I hope Silver reads about the Battle of Beersheba. Equine-kind's finest hour on Earth.
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/15/Battle_of_Beersheba_90_anniversary13.JPG
Of course most sources say even if Austria and Germany had acted justly and in good faith towards Serbia, the Powder Keg that was Europe would still have been lit elsewhere and the result would have been much the same.
7874263
The real scary thing is that while that was all going on the 1918 Flu pandemic killed 20+ million people as well.
Not really. As I understand it, kinetics is chemical reactions not state changes.
The good news is that these constants are named arbitrarily so silver may be able to get permission to use other variables. It wouldn't surprise me if there is a modified Greek alphabet making the rounds for ponies to use
7874524
So was I, but then in America that day is also known as Veteran's Day.
crafty, she just needs to marry Aric befor hand, so he has a valid reason to come with them hehehe
and one call later Red B has a new event to host ... or at least something fun to do with a stunt pegasus.
you are getting slowly better at this Silver
Disillusionment came... I finally visited Florida one October; the tourist beach-hotel area between Clearwater Beach and St. Pete's Beach. Too warm and humid, and nothing but sand, salt water, and expensive food... Boring. There are interesting and beautiful places in Florida. I've seen pictures! But they aren't where I was.
All according to plan.
Meghan is only pretending to be joking.
Using his stick? Shouldn't she be concentrating on driving?
7874263
We ran out of original material; most of recent world history is basically reruns of 19th-20th century conflicts.
7875598
In chemistry, phase changes are generally treated as any other thermodynamic reaction. You could certainly talk about the k of the reaction H2O (liquid) -> H2O (gas) just as easily as any other reaction. Modelling that particular reaction might be complicated by phase boundaries, etc. but there's no reason it couldn't in principle be done.
A common, memorable example in this kind of course for demonstrating the difference between thermodynamic favourability (the Gibbs energy stuff Silver was doing recently) and rate kinetics is actually the conversion of C (solid, diamond) -> C (solid, graphite), because while the reaction is favourable (diamond is technically unstable at room temperature), the rate of decay is still negligible.
7875405
~25 million, IIRC.
7874685
Tupper's formula isn't actually self-referential. It produces every possible binary bitmap that is exactly 17 pixels tall, and you have to know where to look to find the one that happens to show Tupper's formula. You have to know that you want a 106-wide region and you have to know where to look along the y-axis, which is not found in the output.
There is a rather more complex thing that is self referential (a mathematical quine), as you can clearly see all required information in the output (and also attribution!):
jtra.cz/stuff/essays/math-self-reference/travnik-self-referential-formula-graph.png
I guess you meant all, rigth?
looking at population pyramid for Western europe can be very scarry, there is that huge hole wher the generation born in the 1890's should be...
7873905
Yeah, you're better off using your imagination.
7873937
Isn't that the weird thing about college sometimes? For a while, the only time I saw my roommate was if I ran into him at the dining hall.
7873961
Heh, oops. I use the two interchangeably. We'll pretend that she just wrote the wrong one in her journal because she doesn't know that there are
twomore than two of them.7874018
Oops! Correction made, thank you!
7874039
i2.cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/160908084056-gary-johnson-what-is-aleppo-00002011-large-169.jpg
7874116
I know, isn't it? It's gonna feel really weird hitting the 'complete' button.
And then spending the next month catching the rest of the way up on comments.
7981758
TBH I think the comment section is the worst part. The best part of the story, in some ways, is the discussion in the comments... but now its like 16k comments ffs! I'll never be able to reread them all!
7874135
It's an easy mistake to make. Especially when you've never been to any one of them.
7874263
It's a skill that she could use in Equestria!
Figure if it's in the Middle East, it's been somewhat significant in every major war going back about six to eight centuries.
Technically, 20 years and 94 days, IIRC.
Yeah, which is
why CelestAI needs to straighten things outkind of amazing to think, isn't it. Then think of how many more people there would be in Europe if not for the two wars . . . .And it's very important. Boob safety is not to be taken lightly.
7874286
I think we were trying to prop up the Czar but that didn't work out quite like we'd planned.
IIRC, one or more of my great grandparents died of it.
I don't know if it's a relic of WWI, but there's apparently a lake in Europe that nobody is sure quite where the national borders actually cross. And there are also some places in Europe where national borders diagonally cross the middle of streets, etc.
7874417
Octopuses are awesome.
orig14.deviantart.net/4f28/f/2011/336/5/1/octo_octavia_by_johnjoseco-d4hycwc.jpg
7874524
Yeah, we don't really celebrate it as the armistice. We have Veterans Day, which started off to honor the armistice, but now covers all veterans and is celebrated with mattress sales mostly.
7874685
It's not the only one, either, apparently. And there are probably other ways of doing it for a larger area, as well; that having been said, you can literally make it make anything that fits into the grid.
It's a rough time of year.
7874846
I've managed to write every day (obviously), and have a bird feeder now, and I've gotten back into reading poetry after a nearly 20 year hiatus. It's interesting how reading something can make you pick up a new habit. . . .
That's not a bad idea. She could fly around demonstrating them to other pegasi and get orders that way.
7874948
Correction made; thank you!
7875011
Yeah, I missed a road trip to Punxsutawney to see the groundhog; that's something I wish I'd done now. And I turned down a trip to the barrier islands to attend a wedding aboard a tall ship and it wound up getting caught in a white squall which would have been a really interesting life experience, too.
Maybe nobody at K is enough of a fan to know the difference.
7875116
And in some ways, we've not really learned from their mistakes, have we?
She would really do well to read about horses through history. She'd probably like the Mongols, too.
7875202
Yeah; it seems like one of those things where everybody was itching for an excuse to go to war, and if it hadn't been one thing it would have been another. Did anybody even actually care about Archduke Ferdinand?
7875405
Pretty sure that's what killed one or two of my great grandparents.
7875598
Oh yeah. Duh. Now I feel dumb.
Although unless Equestrian math is very similar to Earth math (in the way the formulas are set up, how the variables are used, etc.) it might be more confusing if she uses different letters. Hell, engineers sometimes have time switching between Standard and Metric, and that's a simple conversion factor.
7875670
Or maybe she's hoping to marry SG and get a visa that way.
Never mind parking structures; think of the fun that a pegasus could have racing at an abandoned oil refinery! All sorts of things to go through and around.
Slowly but surely, she learns that humans lie a lot for no good reason except that it's funny.
No NSFW images rule, sadly.
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I've been there a couple times, visiting family and whatnot . . . mostly none of the touristy places (except for Universal Studios once). It's alright, I guess. I didn't find it all that special. And I do love the fact that when you swim in the Great Lakes, you can drink the water.
7875853
If she thought she could get in by being a helper human, she'd do it in a second, pretty much no matter what she was helping with.
Shouldn't she be concentrating on driving?
Nah, the road they're taking is so easy to drive a horse could do it.
Depressingly true.
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So in a nutshell, diamonds aren't really forever, and eventually that expensive diamond pendant will turn into a pencil?
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And in the video, Matt Parker showed how to draw what you want as the output and then how to calculate where on the axis that would be. But it's still kind of cool, I think.
That's a whole lot of numbers!
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Yeah, and there are probably estimations of what it would be if there hadn't been WWI and WWII. It would be a lot higher, that's for sure.
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Yeah, I know. It's really amazing, when you think about it. I don't think that the comments are longer than the story, but there sure are a lot of them! It would be nice if there was some good way to sort them but I don't think that there is, unfortunately.
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Diamonds are for close enough to forever. If you keep it at room temperature, it will outlive the Sun (modulo getting it out of the Sun's way when the Sun turns into a red giant &c.)
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Yup. I forget what the actual number is, but diamonds effectively have a half-life. It's on the order of billions of years, but yes, that pretty rock will eventually break down into a regular old carbon chunk.
I think wikipedia has estimates about the percent of grown males lost by every country involved in WWI. It's in the 10-15% range for most of Europe, though if I recall correctly, Serbia's numbers were insanely higher. Silver's not wrong to call us dumb for that kind of thing.
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Yeah, they'll outlast the Earth, sure, but technically, that's still not 'forever.'
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Graphite, IIRC, so that means that even after it breaks down you can still use your fancy diamond ring as a pencil, at least briefly.
At least on the plus side, from Silver Glow's perspective, it was mostly males, so if you're got a sort of 'meh' opinion towards monogamy, you can get your population numbers back up fairly quickly.
Just looked at the Wikipedia . . . Serbia lost between 16 and 27 percent of their pre-war population . . . Silver's right; wars are dumb.
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The estimate I remember seeing for 1 cm^3 of diamond maintained at room temperature is on the order of 10^80. 10^80 what? At this scale it doesn't really matter. The universe is only about 10^60 planck times old. But for the record, it's 10^80 years.
This estimate is wrong, by the way. It's right based on the kinetics, but at this timescale the kinetics stop being the only factor in play. Proton decay might very well get rid of all your carbon before it can become graphite. And when you have to worry about that, I think you're definitely close enough to forever.
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I can't remember exactly what it was, but I seem to recall one of XKCD's What-Ifs--or perhaps more than one--being able to discard what would seem like a significant measurement because on the scale involved, it was completely irrelevant.
But I think that the point remains; diamonds aren't really forever.
Brought to mind by a comment by Raj (Big Bang Theory ) "Hey, WE wrote The Book of Love" (about the Kama Sutra)
https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=lyrics+who+wrote+the+book+of+love&&view=detail&mid=522EA67C8C267B176190522EA67C8C267B176190&&FORM=VRDGAR
Ah, the 50s. My favorite song by that group
9395058
That’s another great song.
Tupper's formula is so cool. Try pasting this binary into this link.
For some reason, the decimal k value gives a derped plot that's vertically shifted/wrapped.
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Nice!
On the episode of Numberphile where they showed the formula, one of the graphs was Tupper’s formula being eaten by Pacman, while being chased by a ghost.