March 4 [up north]
March 4
I thought about skipping out on my morning exercise, but then I'd be all antsy through class and I'd probably wind up hurting myself when I went snowboarding because I hadn't exercised enough. So I trotted around the neighborhood to limber up and then repeated pretty much the same route in the air. Then before I took my shower, I met with Gates.
He gave me a small duffel bag full of equipment. There was his GoPro in there, still attached to the helmet (and now the ear-holes were bigger and they had a cloth tape around the edges to protect my ears) along with extra batteries, a battery charger, and a bunch of little postage-stamp sized memory cards. He explained how to use them all, and said that I'd probably need Peggy's help to change out the equipment, but that was okay.
He told me that if I wasn't sure of whether I ought to be recording something or not, to just record it. He'd go through the movies later and edit them. Gates said that there were enough batteries and memory cards there that I could record from the moment we left campus until the moment we got back and we wouldn't run out.
I thanked him and nuzzled his cheek, then hurried back to the dorm to set aside his gear and take a shower.
I had expected to just turn in our maps, but the professor wanted each of us to go over them and tell the class why we'd come up with the answers we had.
He'd ask specific questions about how we'd come up with our answers for a specific town on the map. When it got to me, he asked about Ilium—and I thought he might. I had a much lower snowfall total for Ilium than anybody else in the class.
The professor reminded me that Ilium was at the eastern end of a long freshwater lake, and I agreed that it was, and the fetch of the wind would be the entire lake, but when it made landfall, the snow wouldn't start coming down right away; it would be a bit inland before it really started snowing. Maybe the very eastern edge of Ilium would get the beginnings of the storm.
I admitted that the major variable would be when ice started forming on the lake. It would naturally want to pile up on the eastern shore, which would have the effect of moving 'land' lakeward, and would increase the amount of snowfall, but I'd estimated that the ice cover would have to be a few kilometers into the lake before that had a significant effect on the snowfall.
He nodded and said that I had made a very reasonable conclusion with the information he had provided.
When I sat back down and the professor's attention was on a different student, Crystal Dawn leaned over and whispered into my ear, asking me how I'd known that. I told her how important the water budget was, and how we worked with natural features rather than against them. I said that if she wanted, I could meet with her after class on Monday and show her how to calculate that if she wanted to.
The professor must have overheard us, because all of a sudden he called my name and then asked what we'd been talking about that was more important than the weather in Bayport, and so I told him what I'd told Crystal Dawn.
He got a thoughtful look on his face and then said that for an extra credit assignment, he was going to let anyone who wanted to come up with a plan for managing the weather in any one place on their map, and that I could help students and then grade the assignments.
I wasn't sure if he was praising me or punishing me, so I just said that I'd do it.
That was a lot of work I hadn't intended, and right before I was going to leave for the weekend, too. I had to make a lot of estimations—I figured that the easiest way to express it was how many millimeters of rain over how much of an area one pegasus could be expected to add or subtract. The numbers weren't exact, but they were close enough.
I didn't have time before philosophy to translate my scribbled notes into something readable, so I decided that I would write the professor a computer letter later, and he could just send copies to all the students.
Sartre said that humans had no purpose before they were born, and the teacher likened it to a paper cutter, which had no specific purpose. I didn't think that was a good example: a paper cutter is meant to cut paper. Maybe that's not what it gets used for; maybe the person who buys the paper cutter never cuts a single sheet of paper with it, but that doesn't change the purpose of the thing. A craftsperson would make a paper cutter for cutting paper, even if they haven't got control of how it gets used once they sell it.
But I did agree that we ponies weren't pre-destined to be anything; we had to go out and find our special talents before we got our cutie marks. If we'd been pre-destined to be what we were, we would have been born with cutie marks. That much was obvious to me.
Humans don't even have cutie marks, but some of them put on tattoos of things that are important to them.
I ate a quick lunch and stopped at the mail hut. I'd gotten another letter from Aquamarine, but I didn't have time to read it: I went back to my dorm room to send my notes to the climate science professor, then I went to Equestrian class.
I told Meghan and Lisa and Becky that I was going snowboarding at a resort for the weekend, which would be my second road trip and they said to have fun, and Meghan warned me to not hurt myself. I said that I would be careful, and I would tell Peggy to be careful, too.
When class was over, I hurried back to our dorm room. Peggy wanted to leave as soon as she got out of class, and I wasn't going to be the one to hold her up. Aside from the bag of cameras, everything was already packed in the car.
I checked real quick to see if I had any new computer messages, and I did; one was from my climate professor thanking me for the calculations, and then there was another message from him which he'd sent to everyone in the class which was just the numbers I'd told him. There was also an offer for discounted Viagra, but I didn't open that one because I didn't know who'd sent it and it was important not to open computer letters if you don't know where they came from.
When Peggy came in, I'd turned on my Facebook and updated my status to 'going snowboarding' and I couldn’t decide if I should add anything else to that.
We both used the bathroom which is important before you leave on a trip, and then got in Cobalt and left town.
After about an hour of driving, we got to a big city called Grand Rapids, and Peggy asked me where I wanted to eat for dinner. I said that I liked Taco Bell. She said that was okay, but if I started farting, I was going to be putting on my magnetic hoof boots and riding on the trunk the rest of the way to the resort.
I thought that was worth the risk, so we went in the little drive-through lane, and then got back on the road with our food. I hadn’t noticed when I was on the trip with Meghan and Lisa and Becky, but the little packages of sauce have inspirational messages on them.
There was a big curve on a bridge over a river, which Peggy said scared her every time she drove over it and there were a lot of accidents on it, and she said that she'd heard it used to be worse, but it had been fixed about fifteen years ago.
The farther north we got, the less and less there was around the road, but I didn't mind. I looked out the windows at the farms and woodlots that we passed. Pretty soon there was just forest on both sides of the road, interrupted by the occasional small town. Peggy pointed out a forest of pine trees that were all in straight rows. She said that people had planted these forests, but she wasn’t sure why, and there were a lot of them like that in the northern lower peninsula.
Not long after dark we stopped at a rest area, then we got back on the highway, which stopped being a highway once we got a little ways past Cadillac—which is both the name of a town and the name of a car.
We finally got to the ski resort. It was a bit of a problem to check into our room; the person at the counter had trouble figuring out how my card worked or something and then he wanted to see some other identification, so I had to show him first my student ID and then my passport but after that he was pretty efficient and gave us little cards for our room and even had a man help us bring all our luggage up.
Our room was about the same size as the dorm room, although it felt a bit smaller because the beds were bigger. There was a bathroom with a toilet and shower, and there was also a small hot tub that sat next to the bathroom but looked over the rest of the room. Then on one wall there was a small icebox and a microwave and a television, and there were a couple of chairs by a desk.
Peggy told me that I could have whichever bed I wanted, so I chose the one closest to the window. She went into the bathroom and came out in her lounging clothes, then she opened a plastic box she'd brought called a cooler and took a beer out for each of us, and we sat on my bed and drank beer and talked about what we were going to do tomorrow. There was a folder that listed all the fun things that we could do at the resort, which was a lot. There was an outdoor pool that sounded like it might be fun and they even had a spa.
Once we'd made our plans for tomorrow, we each had another beer to celebrate and then we both went to bed so that we could get up early and go snowboarding.
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I have a feeling that outdoor pool won't be open, Silver Glow.
7170653
if they warm it, I don't see why it wouldn't be open
There have been times that I've wished exactly that on a passenger in my car.
7170289
This. I think people are adding connotations to the word that go beyond its mere meaning.
So far the only argument for her being a commoner is "But I like her, so she's got to be one of us because everyone knows one percenters are bad".
Silver's just getting Viagra spam? Lucky her. Half of the spam I get in my Hotmail account is in Arabic.
And I can't read a word of Arabic.
7170695 I personally view her as a commoner for let's call it "style" reasons.
It is a common tropes in fantasy, a commoner rise to be a hero and save the kingdom, become a noble and so on. I am expecting the show to follow such a pattern beacause of it's nature: sell toys. I am expecting Twilight to be someone the litle girl can relate to, some sort of inspirational thing; be good, do your best, you can be a princess to.
And now I wan't to be in Silver's climate clas, just how cool would it be to learn how to manage weather?
And there is some extra credits as a bonus.
Awesome I tell ya!
It is exactly the kind of thing I got told as a kid when I had my first e-mail adress.
It is a good thing, now I know better then open letter from some african princes hated by dermatologist promising me a larger set of genitalia, or something.
7170205
These aren't mutually exclusive, she is both.
Also, can a five star general expect to get away with theft of federal property? Twilight does expect Celestia to "go easier on me". Can a five star general just call the president and get him to let a friend stay in a room at the White House? What about dropping in unannounced and just asking for a free hall to celebrate a birthday on the same day and right next to the State of the Union or something, as it happens?
Does being a five star general qualify him or her for all of that special treatment? It does for Twilight. Those are some of the privileges she enjoys and to an extent expects for being herself, deserved or not.
I'm not sure I agree with Silver's climate professor's decision to suddenly drop more work on Silver and just Silver like that. On one hand, recognizing exceptional talent and continuing to challenge it is good, but at the same time, it's also a bit unfair to give only one student a non-optional assignment that others have. If it was meant as punishment for talking in class, that's pretty harsh, and he also should have given it to Crystal. But anyway...
This. I've never been fond of the way they throw casually around the word "destiny" in the show. I've always been of the opinion that the ponies could end up doing anything they were truly talented at, not that they were born with it decided already. Some might disagree, but I'm never comfortable with the idea that it's all been planned out and we're just running on rails on a course we have no control over.
7170706
That's personal choice, and it's fine if you want to see it like that even though it's not really keeping with what is shown.
I don't mind it being about a wealthy girl that is actually a decent being, if anything I appreciate the show more for subverting the trope you mention, which is in keeping with what the original intentions of the show were.
I don't know how the professor would know if the students are getting it right. Anyone think he might be sneaking Equestrian knowledge of weather out of Silver Glow for his own research?
All this "weather theme" makes me wodner: "Would pegasus interaction with weather be classed as use of climatic weapon?"
7170957
It would if they start making tornadoes in populated areas.
Those hand planted forests were the work of the Civilian Conservation Corps. A project started by FDR to help end the great depression. I've seen them sometimes during trip to the Wisconsin Dell's.
7170972, everything is quite more complicated:Our politics in this question is about maintaining status-quo. I'm pretty sure that ponies can cooperate with the government to not get punished but if they'll manipulate weather without permission, this may result in terrorism accusation, no matter of intentions.
7170995
Some of them are also paper companies, which replant their land after harvesting. In the UP, most stands of trees in neat rows belong to Mead Paper--or whoever bought them out.
7170931
I think he said she'd be correcting their work.
7171029 I've seen those types of stands along the highway though.
As to the rain, I went to college in Edinboro, Pennsylvania. This is about 20 miles inland from Erie, Pa. Seems like every time a storm came off the lake it didn't start raining until it hit us. (There was plenty left over for Erie, though).
As to the trees, I always thought they were meant as a windbreak, so snow didn't pile up on the highway. That is what my father told me when I was little. Driving on the highway, at least back in Pa., you never get out of sight of man's work if only power & phone lines.
As to freedom, to paraphrase Heinlein "it's a word in the dictionary between frazzled & frenzied & it means whatever you want it to."
I'd say Twilight was privileged. As to how much of that she earned...On her tryout she grew a massive dragon from an egg + got a cutie mark from the Tree of Harmony (Princess Twilight). Celestia can take a hint if it is inscribed on an anvil & bounced off her head. On the other hand, Starlight Glimmer hints that not everyone gets to apply in the 1st place. Twilight's parents probably aren't nobility but they ARE probably at least Upper Middle Class, senior Civil Servants, or Upper Class.
American Exceptionalism. I always thought it meant we were special. Kipling's poem "The White Man's Burden" was written as advice for us & if you substitute "American" for "white man" it pretty much describes what I see as our role in the world. That is why I think our current Middle East policy is so jack ass stupid & morally wrong We are supposed to be The Good Guys. There is supposed to be a difference between right & expedient
There are two periods.
You've usually been capitalizing Cobalt, so I can only assume they are now using leylines to travel.
7170289
Which is conjecture and there's nothing really to support it.
Many ponies live in Canterlot, just like many people live in capital cities around the world; her living there is not indicative of privilege
I've send before that Cadance as babysitter is probably the strongest evidence to suggest that Twilight may be from a higher social class, but its not perfect evidence of it. Cadance, at least according one of the books, was originally a pegasus orphan living in an Earth pony town. Even though she became a Princess very young, it's completely possible, perhaps even likely, that she continued to see herself more as a normal pony, including going out and foalsitting as a teenager for your average family. It's also been suggested by several authors that Cadance was there because Celestia had her eyes on Twilight long before the school incident, but that's a bit omniscience for my tastes.
It's also worth noting that, despite their high class, her parents hired a foalsitter rather than having the 'servants' look after her, suggesting they probably didn't have any to begin with.
Yes, of course, because he couldn't possibly have earned that for himself.
Twilight's exact words were:
She got enrolled (or rather, her parents attempted to enroll her) because she was so interested in magic and pouring herself into studying it. There's nothing to suggest Twilight expected to go to Celestia's School for Gifted Unicorns, and it may not have been her original path.
You mean Pinkie Pie, who regularly ignores reality, Rarity, who is an Equestria-wide fashion designer, Fluttershy who literally tamed Discord to the point where he's mostly harmless, and Rainbow Dash--who did a sonic rainboom, a trick so rare it is generally thought to be myth.
7168679
Considering Twilight idolizes Celestia, it only makes sense that it would be from Celestia that she learned how to 'treat a servant as a servant'. If Celestia treated servants well, than it is likely Twilight would too, and if she treated them poorly, Twilight would likely adopt that attitude as well, regardless of whatever her parents might say on the topic.
And I'm not really sure Twilight does treat Spike as a servant: I've said it before but Twilight is essentially his mother and I'm not convinced she knows how to handle that sort of burden, especially not as someone who was so young when it was given to her. Certainly, Twilight piles chores onto Spike and sometimes appears to forget about him or treats him poorly. Yet, to me, this seems more like a screwed up parental relationship than anything else--after all, Spike often ends up looking after Twilight too. I think the best description was 'co-dependent'.
Pony farts. Talk about a weapon of mass destruction.
Or would that be a weapon of ASS destruction?
7171676 No, that'd be Starlight's equality spell.
Cobalt
7171136
^This is pretty much how I feel about Twilight's background.
7172462 Damm! A philosohpy class without Kant is like a cinema class without Hitchcock.
It can be done, but your are missing some major stuff.
The Zilwaukee Bridge can be daunting the first time crossing it. Especially when viewing it straight on. That angle makes it look like its height increases much more sharply than it really does.
You're going to need some ointment for that burn professor!
7172595 Well, yes. There was that.
And, besides, schooldays changed each year anyway, due to weekdays not happening on the same dates.
7172408
true, but you need protective gear for your mouth and respiratory tract that still allow you to use your mouth. Something like a respirator isn't going to cut it.
most real horses don't handle sharp metal with their lips.
It does depend a lot on headcanon, i go with near field telekinesis (for all tribes actually) but it gets kind of weird with really small stuff. There's also going to be a lot of stuff we forget, for example i just realized that ponies would have trouble just getting some parts like pins even out of the bad, let alone actually placing them.
In general avoid specialty tools whenever possible. They're expensive, take up space and can't really be used outside of a few tasks.
7172380
In my mind, Equestrian stage magic is the same as human stage magic. In other words, it's not done using real magic. It's usually performed by earth ponies and the objective is to create the illusion that real magic is being used. This would make Trixie an enormous hack for using actual magic in her show.
7172627 Ok, if it used to be a natural cycle before things broke (it was probably Discord's fault somehow) that makes sense. But your point about lunation being the basis for months makes me more confused: Isn't the lunar cycle also driven by the earth rotating around the sun? I mean with a geocentric solar system, wouldn't the sunlit portions of the moon be completely arbitrary on any given night? I mean, clearly they do use "moons" to mean something similar to months, but how did they decide to make a lunar cycle last a given number of days?
Thanks for answering my question, it's been bothering me for a while.
7172627
But seriously, there are only 10 federal holidays, we can do better than that.
7173947
Nope, didn't make it 6 hours.
I love the story to much, even the boring stuff that is really real like skiing and getting sized.
7173973 Excellent. Little by little, eh?
7173947
For the river, a lot of places did that. I live in Hawaii and most of the natural streams and fresh water springs were rechanneled and diverted under ground so developers back in the day could pave over them and maximize the amount of roads and buildable surface area.
Homes and shopping malls equal money. Natural beauty was burning money to them. An unthinkable evil to human industrial brilliance. By the time people figured out that others would pay top dollar for access to open water ways the damage was done.
A new multi hundred million dollar development going on now is thinking of putting in a lot more money to uncover a natural spring here to give their new high rise have a pretty little natural stream run through the outdoor landscape. Millions to return something back to the way it was. At least we may get one stream back.
7168265 Put in "college" these days and "politics" and you will get arguments.
But I still love this story and I do keep coming back to read it. Silver is so adorable.
What's admirable is Admiral still remains impartial and doesn't get involved in the arguments either.
As a Baby Boomer myself, I understand how Silver doesn't always understand about computer things. You kids grew up w Internet, I was almost 40 the 1st time I bought a computer & it was years before I had internet access. Before the 1970s Virtual Reality was considered so weird that sci fi stories rejected it (Gibson & Neuromancer, IIRC Also one of the 1st Cyber Punk novels. Before that, if you wanted to be depressing you had to go Post Apocalypse)
It is human to assume everyone knows what you know & understands what you understand, but it ain't necessarily so. Also, her hooves may be too big to use a touch screen & she has a voice activated model which may not do too well with her Equestrian accent.
7173851 Yeah, here it is.
7173930
My high school had a collection of Scientific American going back decades, and I remember coming across some of the earliest advertisements for the Radar Range printed around 1960 - which were much closer to a flashy defense industry promotion than a consumer electronics ad as we know it today :-)
7172595 You're not good enough yet.
7174677
I wonder why that is. It is clear that she is smart enough to grasp it. Is it cultural? Would a unicorn manage better? Or a non-pony perhaps? Or does Silver posses some mental blind spot herself?
7170653
7170675
It is a heated pool, and it is open year-round.
7170685
Me, too.
7170701
Silver's just getting Viagra spam? Lucky her. Half of the spam I get in my Hotmail account is in Arabic.
I'm disappointed I don't get Arabic spam. It would make my spam box more interesting.
What I do get is fun targeted ads. For example, right now they're hoof boot ads (because I looked up prices and--more importantly--how many came for that price [if you're buying hoof boots, make sure you check if they come singly, in pairs, or in a set of four]).
7170717
Admittedly, it's going to be the extremely short and simplified version, but it's still going to be an eye-opener for the other kids in the class.
Those amuse me. Since I've got a interesting internet setup, most of the 'local' people who want to meet me are in a different state. One particular advertiser thinks Ft. Wayne and Ft. Worth are the same place, which is even funnier.
7170763
Yeah, it was kind of a dick move on his part, and even Silver sees that.
I agree, mostly (see below). I think that in the show, we've got a skewed view because it's coming from the character's perspective--mostly the CMC--and they're assigning more importance to the marks than they deserve. I think that even when they get the marks, there's some wiggle room in what they mean--Cheerilee's flowers (the smiling faces of her students), Rarity's gems, Fluttershy's butterflies, etc.
My religion professor, in a discussion about predestination, put it pretty well: if you jump off a bridge, you're going to fall. You made the choice to jump of your own free will, but the result is like predestination. In other words, there may or may not be an agency which 'knows' what cutie mark ponies are going to ultimately get (and this could be an explanation for why pony names generally match their cutie marks and special talents), but even if that's so, it doesn't take away from the fact that they have to discover for themselves what their special talent for--i.e., even if the outcome is already known, they have to discover it.
Having said that, I don't buy into that particular headcanon. I think that some ponies get their adult names when they get their cutie marks, and I also think that a lot of pony parents can make a pretty good guess what their foal is going to be good at (naming an Apple an Apple is probably a pretty safe bet).
7170931
He wouldn't. Silver has to grade the assignments.
7170957
Depending on what they did with it, absolutely. Want to empty out a pesky pony village? Forty days and nights of rain ought to do the trick, especially if it's in a valley. Fighting griffons? A good storm's going to make it pretty hard for them to fly.
7170995
That's what I've heard, as well. I don't know if there was a purpose behind it other than busywork, but it's always weird to see rows and rows of pine trees along the highway.
7170999
That's actually an interesting topic. We've seen in the show Rainbow taking a raincloud to rain on the CMC in that Gabby Gums episode, and she had a little thundercloud in the Luna Eclipsed episode. If all the weather is controlled, than both of those cases would be stealing government property for personal use, and presumably illegal.
I think if a pegasus did something with malice aforethought, that would certainly be punished, but what if it's unauthorized irrigation of Applejack's orchard?
I'd expect that there's some leeway, but where would you draw the line? Or is it possible that ponies have a different view of 'property' than we humans do?
7171136
My parents live right on Lake Michigan (well, about a mile inland), and they usually don't get a whole lot of snow. Ten to twenty miles inland is where it started coming down hard--one of my co-workers lived in Allegan, and sometimes in the morning I could judge by how much snow was on his truck when he came in how bad the storm was going to be when it got to Kalamazoo.
I'm not sure that's why they were planted--most of the stands of trees up north predate the highway (at least it being a highway), and if you just wanted it for a windbreak, you wouldn't have to plant the trees a hundred rows deep.
Next time I'm running on a north/south highway in Michigan, I'll have to look and see if there are more pine trees in the medians than on the east/west highways. The state roads don't have any windbreaks along the fields, and they can get nasty after a snowstorm.
7171676
If there's a donkey behind them. . . .
vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/mlp/images/b/b8/Cranky_Doodle_Donkey_in_Ponyville_S2E18.png
7172491
I'm going to see if I can find a way to work it in.
7172492
Especially if you know that they broke it during construction and had to glue it back together. Or that a contractor accidentally drilled through support bars during repair work.
7172514
7172677
That's true. I could see them having invented some of that stuff (maybe filtered noseplugs and a mouth-glove of some sort?) that would help with that. In some cases, they could also presumably separate the work steps to at least minimize the problem.
That's true. Some of it does depend on how you grip it--I can hold a knife by wrapping my hand around the blade, and as long as I don't squeeze down too hard, I won't cut myself--and how thick the skin is, but of course there's a very real potential for injury.
I've figured that the unicorns aren't very good at near field TK, just because once they can use their horns, they wouldn't use that skill much and would probably forget how over time.
But that is one of the big challenges about writing in the MLP-verse and filling in the blanks--how much do you handwave things like that away? There have been cases where I've put something in and when somebody asked in the comments how it was supposed to work, I had to admit that I had no idea, but it was similar to something we've seen in the show, so it was legit.
Yeah. I have the same thought when it comes to tools for work: how much am I going to use this, how much time will it save if I have it, and are there any other tools I can use which will perform the same task?
7172843
I suppose it would depend on what the ponies were used to seeing. Twilight running through some of her more esoteric spells would probably amaze an audience, especially in a small, out-of-the-way town.
There was some discussion that Trixie wore her hat so that ponies wouldn't know she was a unicorn. In that case, she would really be a hack.
I think that Trixie's show blends unicorn magic with earth pony ingenuity, and that's what makes it good. Slight of hoof work, traditional misdirection, and a little bit of magic here and there to help push things along (and that's usually for show, like her fireworks) and you wind up with a show that earth ponies and unicorns alike are amazed by.
7172845
Yes, but there's no reason why they couldn't artificially duplicate that in Equestria. It wouldn't even have to be completely accurate: the first day of a month could be a new moon, and then it could get fuller and fuller until the last day of the month, and then just be a new moon the next night. Or it could wax and wane just like our moon does.
It could also always be a full moon, but slowly rotate on its axis over a month so that the crater features on it changed over the course of the month.
7173779
I don't really need pony legos; I've got lots (probably over a hundred) of the blind-bag sized ponies that I could put around the castle. They've even got a hole in one leg that's almost the same size as a lego peg.
7173948
7173992
little by little.
7174011
I think that they did it in Kalamazoo because they used Arcadia Creek as part of the stormwater drain system (and probably also the sewer system in the early days). I think that I remember it runs through a little channel in an alley downtown, and then comes out into a holding pond, then goes back underground until it drains into the Kalamazoo River. I've been through part of the stormdrain system, but can't get into the part where the creek is because of the water flow (probably could, but it would be stupidly dangerous).
Given the way they built the downtown, I don't think they could return the creek to a 'natural' state without knocking down a bunch of buildings.
7174089
7174213
Yeah, I run into that people not knowing stuff that I thought was common knowledge all the time. Like don't lubricate oxygen fittings, for example.
My voice-activated software (which I rarely use) has trouble knowing what I'm saying, at I'm at least a native English speaker. I can only imagine how much trouble it would have dealing with Silver's accent.
7174286
That's just awesome!
7174456
I love reading old magazines and looking at their predictions for the future and then just laughing. For example, and old issue of Trains magazine had an article about the new coal-turbine locomotives, and it said that the engineers had figured out how to solve the problem of fly ash. Given that those locomotives were all scrapped because it turned out the fly ash destroyed the turbine blades . . . I guess the engineers weren't as smart as they thought they were.
7174568
I know.
7175035
It's kind of cultural and kind of a mental blind spot. She's went into it thinking that philosophy was a hard science, rather than a series of guesses about something that can't really be tested.
7170685
Reading that, followed by the trouble with SG's card, was when I realized I'd been an electronics repair technician too long. Why else would I be wondering, "Did she get too close to her mag-stripe card with those magnetic boots?"