Bright, calm morning, and a brisk cycle to work, setting off a little before sunrise, and keeping a good pace in the cool. Maybe another couple of times to go this year. The waning gibbous moon was high in the northwest, in the place where the summer sun rides; and in one stretch, there was a layer of mist a few feet thick, a few feet off the ground, sitting on the fields, like ariver in the little valleys between the rolling uplands.
[Now playing - Labradford E Luxo So]
Well, actually yesterday would have been a cycling day , weather-wise but I had to go to the dentist to have a check-up, which would have taken rather a long time under my own power. Fortunately, I got a clean(-ish) bill of health. There is one filling that's got a polished wear spot on, and a tooth nearby is sensitive to cold (checking this involved putting a little swab soaked in some alcohol/menthol stuff on the tooth and watching me in agony) - all of which I blame on certain of my colleagues driving me to impotent grinding of my teeth.
Some discussion of a confusion over patient records - someone suddenly seemed to have acquired a perfect set of teeth. Short of a rebuild, this would suggest having not been subject to NHS dentistry on piecework rates during the 1970s, which got me a couple of new fillings every six months from a guy who displayed his rugby blue more prominently than his dental certificates.
Perhaps I'm a bit obsessive about teeth as a result - it has certainly shown up in my recent fiction.
[Now playing - Labradford E Luxo So]
Here are the answers to yesterday's questions. Most of these could have been googled - though the last one in the classical section is one where you would have had to know the answer in broad before that would have helped, and this page is now the only place that would help on the final question.
Q. Dante and Aeneas are linked by a person and a place. Who? And where?
A. Virgil, and the Underworld
The poems referenced are Virgil's Aeneid, book VI, in which Aeneas visits the underworld whilst yet embodied; and Dante's Divine Comedy, in which Dante, still embodied, is led through a descent into Hell and the ascent of Mt. Purgatory by the shade of Virgil. As a theological note, the function of the pagan underworld of the Aeneid is more akin to that of Mt. Purgatory, though its location matches that of Dante's Hell.
Q. Who was the Golden Ass?
A. Lucius
The poem is The Metamorphoses, by Lucius Apuleius, a work more commonly known as the Golden Ass. The viewpoint character, also called Lucius, is transformed into the eponymous beast.
Q. "Mind must be the firmer, heart the more fierce, courage the greater, as our strength diminishes..." Who died, and his body later buried at Ely?
A. Byrhtnoð
The poem is The Battle of Maldon or Byrhtnoð's Death - date and author unknown.
The words
"Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre, mod sceal þe mare, þe ure mægen lytlað.... "
are spoken by Byrhtnoð's old comrade Byrhtwold over Byrhtnoð's body, as the Danes under Sweyn Forkbeard, son of King Harald Bluetooth of Denmark [yes, that Bluetooth] are closing in on the last of the English. After the battle the Danes probably carried off Byrhtnoð's head as a battle trophy, but his body was recovered by the monks of Ely and buried there - there's a carven stone there in the cathedral today that reads
Brithnothus Northumbrior Dux, Prælio Cæsus a Danis A.D. DCCCCXCI
Q. Where in the Divine Comedy does Dante explain that surface brightness of an extended source is unvarying with distance?
A. The Moon
The reference within the poem is to Paradiso, Canto II:46. In this canto, a number of hypotheses as to the mottled appearance of what ought be a perfect - as being heavenly - body are discussed. Dante refutes the suggestion that the darker areas are simply further away by referring to an experiment with a candle and three mirrors, the middle one set back from the other two.
Q. "Thou art more lovely and more temperate" than what?
A. A summer's day
The poem - Shakespeare, Sonnet XVIII
"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:"
Q. If the Lamb is Innocence, what beast is Experience?
A. The Tyger
The poems are Blake's - the Lamb, in Songs of Innocence, and the Tyger, in Songs of Experience.
Q.
"There was a naughty boy
And a naughty boy was he,
For nothing would he do
But scribble poetry"
- Whose self-assessment?
A. John Keats, the poem being his A Song about Myself.
Q. Who was the Red Cross Knight, and where did King Arthur meet him?
A. The knight referred to almost exclusively as Red Cross is George, who later in the poem goes on to slay a dragon and hear the prediction that he will become patron saint of England; they met in the dungeons of the castle of Duessa, where Arthur rescues him from captivity.
The poem is Spenser, The Faerie Queene, the meeting in Bk I, Canto VIII
There are a lot of red-cross knights out there - Galahad (though I don't know of a poem), Hugo, son of Sir Uwaine, (Sir Uwaine's daughter by Thomas de Berverley (George Newcomen) - which dated 1925 is out of period), the Red Cross Knight by Geoffrey Chaucer (1343-1400) - his poem of which I have no further detail, but is out of period, and Sir Lancelot (Tennyson's The Lady of Shalott) a poem from which Arthur himself is absent - but the epithet is only applied occasionally (once per poem) to those knights in the texts I do know.
Q. What is done in Madingley on Christmas Eve?
A.
"And things are done you'd not believe
At Madingley, on Christmas Eve."
- Rupert Brooke, The Old Vicarage, Grantchester.
This is from the middle section of the poem in which he libels most of the villages and towns in south and west Cambridgeshire
Q. If "London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down" by the end, what is cruel at the start?
A. April - "the cruelest month"
- T.S. Eliot, the Waste Land.
Q. Who tells you "That's the way things are."
A. Your father
The poem is from Roger McGough, The way things are, and has the refrain
"I'm your father, and that's the way things are."
Q. If one invented a cure for the common cold, what other cure would be required?
A. Another cure for complacency
The poem is by the late Robert Calvert, The Recovery, and celebrates the return of the sense of smell after a filthy cold. This was a deliberately recherché question. The poem appeared in his 1978 collection, sold as merchandise on the Hawklords 1978 tour, Centigrade 232, and can be heard under the final section of the track Psi Power from the Twenty Five Years On album, from which, at time of writing, we are a few days over 25 years on from. (Doesn't time fly when you're having fun!)
Today is National Poetry Day, and as I won the it last year, I'm having to set a little quiz on poetry for the guys at the office; and I'm posting it here for the hell of it. As the theme is Britain, almost all of the questions are on the works of poets writing in this country, the exceptions being some of the Classical section. To make up for that, a couple of the questions relate to very local events indeed.
Ten fairly straightforward questions, and a couple of obscure ones to stretch you, and bring the count up to a round dozen in three sets of four.
Answers tomorrow.
"There was a naughty boy
And a naughty boy was he,
For nothing would he do
But scribble poetry"
- Whose self-assessment?
Caught a real nostalgic gig at the local Corn Exchange last night - Keith Emerson & the Nice, on the first date of their new tour. Yep, you read that right. c1970 keyboard rock rides again, down to the smoke machine, psychedelic light show and honest-to-God Moog Synthesizer, festooned with patch cables!
The first part of the set had the old hands, plus a young guitarist, doing old Nice numbers, then the old guys were substituted by a younger bassist and drumer to play a selection of ELP tracks, then absolutely everybody on stage for the finale and encore.
The down-side was that the voice mixing was mushy - could hardly make out a word anyone said or sang; and while the box we were in had the best view of the stage, it seemed also to be filled with the biggest prats in the audience, fooling around, throwing paper darts, and bootlegging, rather than just sitting back and letting the music wash over (or through) them like the folk in the body of the hall.
Certainly one of the loudest gigs I've been to for a long time, with the ears still noticing it a bit this morning - albeit nowhere near as loud as Motörhead were on the Bomber tour 25 years ago, where I was in the mosh-equivalent with the press of the crowd forcing me against the side of the speaker stack.
Only two more weeks after this before daylight saving ends, and it gets dark at 17:00; 12 working days. And in the last 12 only one day of cycling as we get rain - and now strong winds, fragments of equinoctial gales, as well. The most annoying thing about the office having moved out of town - and 10 miles from home not six - is that on the days in spring and autumn where it starts wet and ends bright and sunny, I can't fall back to my old strategy of catching the bus in and walking home :( - yesterday's weather was like that, with showers in the morning, but bright autumnal sunshine in the afternoon (blinds down to keep it off my screen), albeit breezy, that would have been gorgeous to walk home in from town, with a stop for a pint at the half-way point.
It was back in '91 that a Shadowrun supplement had a throwaway about one Senator Schwarzenegger. Being born outside the US, that really is the only possible next destination for the new Gubernator.
Another one of those weeks where miracles need to be performed on a daily basis at work, and then just too much to do in the way of hobby activities. On one strand I've been upgrading my network-facing machine at home from one I got 4 years ago to a more recent second-hand machine, which means a ton of stuff to do in the way of hardening it (not helped when Norton AV LiveUpdate doesn't play nicely with WinXP). Still to come are setting it up with all the external network stuff, installing all the hardware and software from the old box, swapping the network around, and decommissioning the old one.
Then, in the time I'd normally spend blogging, I've been advising my friends at Mhorann Games on the web-site they've put together. At the moment it looks slightly better than a "My First Website" - and at least there are no broken links now - but the table driven layout has its problems. If I were doing it myself, I'd be using .pngs with transparency for the banner and the buttons, and CSS layout, for reasons explained on sites like A List Apart. [That piece was written over 30 months ago. There's no reason to be molly-coddling old browers in Q4'03!]
The Norton LiveUpdate issue turned out to be a proxy problem of some sort - at time of writing, both XP machines were going out through a copy of the Privoxy proxy server. Moving the new one to have the modem, LU seems to work OK. Although the modem seems to need to be on at boot time for XP to notice it's there. My older XP box has the same problem with my Visor in its synch cradle - have to see if the new one is better behaved. At least having an industrial strength OS kernel, however wrapped in consumer glitz and entry-level limitations, the frequent blue screens seen with the Mailwasher spam-filter on Win98.2 are a thing of the past.
Colleen McCullough's the October Horse is a fine conclusion to her fall of the Roman Republic sequence, carrying on past Caesar's assassination to the victory of the Triumvirate - i.e. just about to the end of Shakespear's Julius Caesar. A pity, as I would have liked to read the next volume that would bridge the gap with I, Claudius, covering Antony and Cleopatra too.
Not so good was Thomas Harlan's the Dark Lord, billed as the conclusion of his Oath of Empire sequence. It managed to merge a "with one mighty bound" resolution and a more realistic messy, incomplete, compromised outcome, falling between two stools. There is also one blatant dangling plot thread which strongly implies sequels. A disappointment, as it was going quite nicely up to then - but this volume really seemed to have gotten out of hand.
A not recommended - Kevin Anderson's Hidden Empire. It looked borderline (first volume of N being a danger sign), but then so did Karl Schroeder's Permanence, which I liked, used a similar sort of scenario (two distinct human factions, various mysterious extant and extinct aliens). And it seemed to start out OK, though the economics of the mercantile human society seemed a bit implausible. But things soon went downhill - gas-giant planets that are being mined for hydrogen but which have breathable atmospheric layers just don't work chemically. And then the tired old "aliens want our women" plotline gets invoked. Verdict - avoid.
The setting for Underworld is really White Wolf's World of Darkness with the serial numbers filed off; and with enough running gunfights (with a pounding dance music backing) to match the average run of gun-bunny Vampire, a slight plot designed to string the action sequences together - and a hook for a sequel if the box-office take looks good.
It's the sort of film that you watch as a couple of hours of complete frivolity, or not at all.
That time of varied temperatures. As noted, Monday was wet, but but 19:00 the rain had ceased and there was just a sheet of cloud, with a gap of a few degrees between the western edge and the horizon, displaying brilliant turquoise sky, with the crimsons and golds of the sunset reflected off the underside of the cloud, filling the house with a bright golden glow.
Tuesday morning was dull and overcast, but brightened later - a good cycling day that ended clear. The dull morning was enough to make me put the sunrise alarm on for the first time this season, and I roused about 06:15 feeling that it must be a lovely day outside - which is what the alarm is meant to suggest. Indeed it was - a bright crisp autumn morning, with the first frost on the car roof, and in patches of the verges open to the sky. I needed heavy gloves and shirt for cycling in - and now the sun is streaming through my office window, onto my desk, and it's over 30C in here, worse than in the height of summer.
Well, we're past the equinox, and I am taking today's weather forecast of a cold front, rain and cool northerly winds on trust - so I drove in today. There was quite an assortment of roadkill after the weekend - squirrel, another snake, and the first hedgehogs I'd seen for a while (in recent weeks the corpses have been rabbits and the occasional farm cat).
In the spirit of blogging, I'm adding a new entry rather than overwriting the earlier draft.
Greg Stafford asked an interesting and correct question over a decade ago, when asking about "who is the Orlanthi sun god?" - but the answer he got is one that caused a lot of confusion, until it was hammered into a compromise , such as this summary by Nick Brooke…
Unfortunately, I still think Greg's answer was wrong in its essentials. One god is the night watchman who stayed behind when Orlanth went on the LBQ - his aspects are twilight and the watch-fire. The reconciliation with Yelmalio is an identification of the twilight aspects, which presumably rejected an origin amongst the Lowfires that the watch-fire implies. This is the god most obviously deserving of the name of Elmal. His devotees are able to use some minor fire magic appropriate to a night watchman's role (no Hill of Gold in his story), while Yelmalions are not. That aside, any deity around during the Great Darkness really, by definition, cannot be a sun god – the mythic precedent is too strong.
At about the same time that Greg dropped his bombshell, Neil's RQ game almost stumbled across the what I feel is the right answer, when the PCs stumbled across a remote Orlanthi tribe who partook of very austere ways like the Solar monks of the far northern Empire of long ago. Their Orlanth is, I think, much more likely to be the real Orlanthi sun-god.
The obvious Orlanthi Sun-God is, of course, Orlanth in his aspect as the successful completer of the LBQ, restorer of the Sun after the Great Darkness and the Gods' War, Orlanth Lightbearer, or Orlanth Lucifer if you rather. We can see the influence of Orlanth in the fact that what he restored was not the static Sun of the old sterile Fire Tribe Emperor, but a Sun that follows the Storm Spiral, around and around the world, sometimes to the north, sometimes to the south. Orlanth Lucifer would be the god of the Sun, but clearly not the Sun himself. The Orlanthi New Sun, the thing he came back with would be a separate entity - and Ehilm sounds the most plausible name for the sacred fire itself, which may or may not now be borne by Elmal.
Variant keywords:
Orlanth Lucifer: Affinities:
Light, 
Underworld, 
Reconciliation; Secret: Return from Underworld. [This very mystical
cult would have almost no devotees.]
To be initiated in this aspect, the candidate must have completed the Lightbringer HeroQuest, either as principal or by significantly supporting one of the principals. As a consequence, there are few initiates; and almost all of them are devotees.
Elmal: 
Combat as in
Storm Tribe, but replace Light with 
Fire: Illuminate Surroundings, Tend Watch-fire, Kindle
Brand, Unquenchable Light, Withstand Cold.
Ehilm, the sacred torch:
Light as Storm Tribe's Elmal ,
Sunpath: Find Sunpath, Reveal Sunpath, Follow Sunpath,
Sunpath Defence, Rising Leap, 
Warmth - Banish
Frost, Resist Chill, Ripen Fruit, Cruel Heat; Secret - Radiant
Gaze.
Well, as the equinox approaches, it's not until well after 07:00 that the sun lifts over the rooftops opposite in the morning; but the weather is staying as Indian Summer - though yesterday the clear bright start turned into mist about half an hour after sunrise. The fair weather means that this is the first week of the year when I've cycled to work every day, without weather, logistics or just plain laziness preventing.
Then in just over a month, the days will be too short, and I'll be back to driving again. Always the way - just about get the legs into proper condition, and the season's over. At least I'm still cycling - the couple of other occasional cyclists seem to have given up, going by the complete lack of other bicycles in the racks even when leaving work a bit early to cycle into town, or fit in an hour's blackberry picking [enough to fill my lunchbox so the fruit doesn't rattle and thereby turn into purée] on the way home.
First some numbers. The speed of light, c, is 300, 000 km/s; a year is 365.2422 x 86400 = 31, 556, 926 seconds. The earth's gravity, 1g, is 9.8 m/s2. So 1g for 1 year gives 309, 258 km/s, or 1.03c. A year is 8765 hours ~ 10, 000 hours. The Earth-sun distance, called one astronomical unit (AU) is 150, 000, 000 km or 500 light-seconds (i.e. light takes 500 seconds to cover it).
And some formulae. From a starting point at rest, under constant
acceleration a for a length of time t, the velocity
change is at, essentially by definition, and the distance
covered is just the time multiplied by the average velocity or
at2/2 .
This is the new book from Dan Simmons, who for the most part writes horror, rather than hard SF, so may be excused to some extent. Alas, when he actually quoted some numbers for a high-speed dash across the solar system it was enough to interrupt my reading with a bang with a "those don't tie up even on a simple order-of-magnitude calculation".
The moravec flight from Jupiter to Mars, then at opposition is quoted as accelerating at 3000g, and ending acceleration at a speed of 0.3c. Relativistic effects go as square root of (1 - (v/c)2), or about 95% - so enough to throw your watch out, but not enough to seriously affect the Newtonian formulae used above.
To achieve 0.3c with 3000g acceleration is to take 1/10, 000 of a year or 3156 seconds, and will cover 0.15 x 3156 light-seconds = 473 light seconds, or 0.85 AU - but their accelerator is the Io flux tube, and Io's orbital radius is only about 500, 000 km.
Later it takes them a day to cover the distance between Mars' orbit and Earth's - about 0.5AU. That's 250 light-seconds in 86400 seconds or about 0.003c - and that's before their big deceleration. Assuming that lower speed, then the acceleration would take only 32 seconds, and cover 0.048 light seconds or 14,400km - a much more reasonable size.
Then there is the matter of the neutrino ring that intersects the Earth at a certain date of the year that isn't seen moving at some noticeable velocity across the ground as the Earth rotates - let alone as it moves through the intersection point...
Now Stephen Baxter is a hard-SF writer who ought to know better. In Ring, he has an expedition set out to go 5 million years into the future. The ship accelerates at 1g constantly, turning over after 1/4 of the time, coming to a standstill at half the time, then returning as it left; relativistic effects keep the duration on board much lower.
For a uniform acceleration, the relativistic formulae are
at/c = sinh( aτ/c)
and
ax/c2 = cosh( aτ/c) - 1
where t is the external time, x is the distance covered and τ is the time on the ship. The sinh and cosh functions are hyperbolic sine and cosine (what the "hyp" checkbox gives you on the Windows calculator in scientific mode). If we work in years and light-years, and assume that the ship accelerated at 0.97g, so that a=1 in these units, we have for t = 1.25 million years, then
τ = sinh-1(1,250,000)
So using Inv Hyp Sin 1 250 000 gives 14.73 years shipboard. By symmetry the total voyage is 59 years, and the furthest distance is a whisker under 2.5 million light-years - a bit further than M31 in Andromeda.
Then how come the journey took his ship 1000 years shipboard? After 250 ship years, the external date would be 1.8 x 10108 - and the return would come at 7.2 x 10108 if we ignore the corrections that would be needed to account for cosmological effects. This is about as far into the future as the deepest look in his later book, Time. So the acceleration must be wrong. At a 0.097g rate, the shipboard time for the 5 million year voyage is 125,000 = sinh ( 0.1τ ) or τ = 10 sinh-1(125,000) = 124 years per quarter, or 500 years in all, so a kiloyear excursion would need less than acceleration even than that.
But that's not the end of the howlers. When the ship arrives back at the solar system after a 5 megayear excursion, they find that the constellations are just as they left - in particular, α Centauri is 4 and a bit lightyears away, opposite a W-shaped Cassiopeia. It's a pity that in about 350, 000 years, α Cen will be the brightest star in the sky, about a parsec (3.3 light-years) away in the constellation of Cancer, before drifting away into the northern sky, getting further away all the time.
There's a similar howler in forgetting about things moving in Time, too, where the first of the fast-forward-future views would happen after M31 collides with our galaxy - unless of course the posthumans have done the engineering work to use the magnetic fields of every star in M31 to channel its stellar wind as a rocket and moved the whole galaxy en masse - central 100-megasol black hole and all - sometime in the next gigayear. We certainly have to assume that there is such massive engineering for there to be a coherent galaxy in the Black Hole Miners epoch, as dynamical effects will have caused a galaxy that is not being actively maintained to have disintegrated by that sort of timescale - see John Baez's useful summary of the end of things; or my own riposte in fictional form.
Posts
All Comments
Previous instalments at Life before Blogging.
Forum Administrator : EvaGeeks.org — An Evangelion Fan Community
Copyright © Steve Gilham, 2003-2013
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Code snippets released under the WTFPL
