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The Climate of Middle-Earth

Posted by Soulskill on from the climate-science-everyone-can-get-behind dept.

sciencehabit writes "One does not simply model the climate of Mordor; unless, of course, you are the University of Bristol's Dan Lunt, who has created a climate simulation of J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Using supercomputers and a model originally developed by the U.K. Met Office, his study compares Middle-earth's climate with those of our (modern) and the dinosaur's (Late Cretaceous) worlds. The Middle-earth model reveals that the Shire — home to the Hobbits — would enjoy weather much like England's East Midlands, with an average temperature of 7C and about 61 cm of rainfall each year. An epic journey to Mount Doom, however, would see a shift in climate, with the subtropical Mordor region being more like Los Angeles or western Texas." The full academic paper is available in English, Elvish, and Dwarfish.

163 comments

  1. Wait.... by LoRdTAW · · Score: 2

    I thought Texas was Mordor?

    1. Re:Wait.... by NoNonAlphaCharsHere · · Score: 5, Funny

      No, but it is full of Orcs.

    2. Re:Wait.... by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1

      I've read recently that Shanghai is mightily struggling to steal their Mordor crown.

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    3. Re:Wait.... by gmuslera · · Score: 1

      The eye of Sauron is in Washington (or Utah). Anyway the dark lord residing there had no problem if the climate of Final Earth turns far hotter than the Texas one. Who wants Shire's climate after all?

    4. Re:Wait.... by sgt+scrub · · Score: 1

      Or as we refer to them here in Texas, whorcs.

      --
      Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
    5. Re:Wait.... by sgt+scrub · · Score: 1

      The eye is in D.C. but the hole at the other end is here

      --
      Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
    6. Re:Wait.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Actually, Texas is the uttermost West.

    7. Re:Wait.... by thunderclap · · Score: 1

      Orcs are think of others as orcs when in fact they are orcs and the ones they believe are orcs are in fact elves.

    8. Re:Wait.... by thunderclap · · Score: 1

      The eye is in D.C. but the hole at the other end is here

      Fixed that. For the record its Illinois not Texas.

    9. Re:Wait.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Oh hai. Alaska here. Almost didn't see you down there. Not that I even like it much up here, but you've no idea quite how retarded you "Big" Texans sound.

      Texas isn't even a large geographic area in planetary terms. Nor is it particularly nice in any aspect. There are far greater cities, far greater wildernesses, far richer cultures, far more arable earth. It is merely for some the largest boundary of their terribly small and sad experience.

  2. Orcish translation? by femtobyte · · Score: 4, Funny

    We need this translated into Orcish, too, so the professional global warming denialists can properly read and respond to it.

    1. Re:Orcish translation? by SQLGuru · · Score: 1

      Don't forget Trollish...... :)

    2. Re:Orcish translation? by ObsessiveMathsFreak · · Score: 4, Insightful

      No need. Orcs mostly speak the common tongue or else their own tribal dialect. The Black Speech -- as devised by the Dark Lord in elvish runes -- was a failed attempt to linguistically distinguish his followers from those of the Alliance. It didn't take among the Orcs, but strangely the East End London accent did.

      --
      May the Maths Be with you!
    3. Re:Orcish translation? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well the shire was supposed to be pre industrial revolution England so if you wanted inbred retards a cockney accent is perfect.

    4. Re:Orcish translation? by Dahamma · · Score: 1, Funny

      Oh come on, every knows Orcs an global warming denialists don't read!

    5. Re:Orcish translation? by Chris+Mattern · · Score: 1

      Well, there's "take", and there's "take". By the end of the Third Age, many of the tribal dialects were in fact heavily corrupted and debased versions of Black Speech, but they were not intelligible to each other, nor to a speaker of pure Black Speech.

    6. Re:Orcish translation? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      No, it is not. (And stop getting your scientific news from your political media.) We are currently in the cool part of the El Nino - La Nina cycle, but every cycle is hotter than the one before.

      Look at a graph of the temperatures (link below) over a long enough time, and you'll see a regular rise and fall with a period on the order of a decade or longer, the El Nino cycle. We are on the "falling" part of that cycle now, but disturbingly, it's not falling as usual so much as it is just leveling off a bit. The consensus, except among political activists, continues to be that the globe is warming, and indeed, looking at that graph, it requires strong ideology to deny that obvious overall trend.

      http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/Fig.A2.gif

    7. Re:Orcish translation? by thunderclap · · Score: 0

      So the black speech = Obamacare. This means the Dark Lord = http://newsbusters.org/sites/default/files/2012/Obama%20Halo_0.jpg

    8. Re:Orcish translation? by Optali · · Score: 1

      Wrong.

      And it's actually the Dark Lady:
      http://www.gewoon-nieuws.nl/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/angela-merkel3.jpg

      --
      -- 29A the number of the Beast
    9. Re:Orcish translation? by Optali · · Score: 1

      Oh, well, we call it Winter and knows what? It happens every 6 months. and actually only half of the globe is affected :(

      --
      -- 29A the number of the Beast
    10. Re:Orcish translation? by Dahamma · · Score: 1

      And apparently I don't either... I sure mangled that sentence.

  3. Model fails to account for magic and Valar by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Does it really make sense to apply real-world climate science to a world controlled from the ground up by supernatural forces?

    1. Re:Model fails to account for magic and Valar by houghi · · Score: 2

      Yes. It is very useful to do this to understand other 'real' problems. It is training of the mind. I am sure nobody has problems with a sportsman playing against imaginary opponents or a boxer rope jumping.

      You do not say to a boxer that he should not do that, because it is not a real boxing match..

      That is if he understands that it is fiction. If he were to write about the climate of the 76 planets of the Galactic Confederacy AND saying that those also existed, THEN it would not make sense. (OK, he can write about Teegeeack.)

      --
      Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
    2. Re:Model fails to account for magic and Valar by rossdee · · Score: 1

      Science fiction is supposed to have science in it, some authors spend a lot of effort to model their fictional worlds climate etc.

      Fantasy is not controlled by science, so yes it is pointless to model the climate of middle earth with a scientific model.

    3. Re:Model fails to account for magic and Valar by hey! · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Well, C.S. Lewis had an interesting take on this. He obviously believed in miracles, but he thought of them as becoming "naturalized", in the way a foreigner becomes a naturalized citizen in his adoptive land, and is subsequently bound by the laws of that land. So when the *supernatural* occurs (e.g. drowning the northwest corner of the continent at the end of the First Age), the consequences should follow *naturally*.

      I bring this point up with my fantasy writing friends. Just because your world *has* miraculous things in it doesn't mean *everything* should be a miracle. People should have common-sense responses to miraculous things. If wizards throw lightning bolts in battle, then the cavalry shouldn't charge in a tightly packed formation until they're right at the line of battle.

      George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire conspicuously soft-pedals magic, but ironically a lot of the world of those stories fails the naturalization test. For example kind of society depicted is dependent upon consistently generating a massive agricultural surplus, something that's not compatible in my opinion with decade-long winters. But I gave up after only a million words into the stories, so maybe that's explained elsewhere.

      --
      Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
    4. Re:Model fails to account for magic and Valar by Belial6 · · Score: 1

      That was my first thought. The climate of Middle earth can be anything because... MAGIC!

    5. Re:Model fails to account for magic and Valar by Oligonicella · · Score: 1

      The difference is they're not using a friggin' supercomputer to do it. There are far better uses of that resource.

    6. Re:Model fails to account for magic and Valar by TheSeatOfMyPants · · Score: 1

      Only if you rely on old genre stereotypes. A lot of "fantasy" worlds depict a highly advanced civilization that just happens to refer to things as magic rather than technology, right down to having "magic spells" that are effectively chemical formulas (or recipes) derived through scientific experimentation. On the flipside, plenty of SF universes ignore anything remotely resembling the laws of science and contain technology or weapons with near-magical properties that are clearly just made up.

      In other words, they're both forms of the same genre -- speculative fiction -- with different window-dressings. As the old quote goes: sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

      A good example is the old "Dragonriders of Pern"series by Anne McCaffrey. On the one hand, it depicts a post-apocalyptic space colony in which humans genetically engineer creatures from a native species that evolved to travel via (IIRC)hyperspace, use HNO3 to kill deadly interplanetary spores, and the author carefully designed everything (including the creatures' skeletal composition & structures) to be reasonably scientifically plausible -- which sounds like SF. On the other side, they end up living in a post-tech medieval society, use "agenothree"to kill deadly 'threads' that fall from the sky, lack any record of their origins, and pair up with "dragons" capable of "teleporting" -- much more like fantasy.

      --
      Now mostly at Usenet:comp.misc & SoylentNews.org (it's made of people!)
    7. Re:Model fails to account for magic and Valar by J+Story · · Score: 2

      I bring this point up with my fantasy writing friends. Just because your world *has* miraculous things in it doesn't mean *everything* should be a miracle. People should have common-sense responses to miraculous things.

      Today, as far as the layman's understanding goes, we *are* living in a world with magic. I hear "electricity", and have a vague idea of the relationship between electricity and magnetism (another magical force), but my understanding only goes so deep. However, I flip a switch, expecting light, and it magically appears. How is this different from the hero in a fantasy novel who uses his magic wand to light his way? Neither of us is filled with a sense of awe, because it's something we use every day. We just say "electricity" instead of "magic flux".

      When I first learned of Clarke's axiom, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.", I was thinking about some far-off future, but I have come to realize that a lot of technology is, for many, advanced enough *today* that it might as well be magic.

    8. Re:Model fails to account for magic and Valar by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You seriously don't expect us to believe that you don't understand basic electricity and magnetism, right? They teach that stuff in middle school science classes. There are sufficiently advanced technologies at the bleeding edge that laymen have to basically consider magical, but turning on the lights in your house (or any other mundane daily task) doesn't make the cut. If you don't know *exactly* what's going on in terms of basic physics when you turn on a light in your house, you're being ignorant of basic facts most people know. (Sure, there's a quantum version most people don't know, but that isn't necessary for simple macro phenomena like home lighting - just like relatively isn't necessary to explain basic gravity and ballistics, Newton's laws suffice for that level of practicality).

      You might argue that things happening at the Large Hadron Collider or Sandia's Z-machine or similar are advanced and strange enough to be magic to a layman, but then again laymen don't have any real daily interactions with these devices, either.

    9. Re: Model fails to account for magic and Valar by MickLinux · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Sure, ask my four year old son. Even before he flips the switch, the nearby coal burning plant has a turbine in a wye configuration that puts out a grounded three phase current. Over at the telephone pole, a transformer transforms it down, and two phases come to the house. One of those phases is tied to the light switch. When he flips the switch, the power is then transmitted -- at about a tenth of the speed of light, though the electrons themselves flow at a couple hundred mph -- to the light bulb. This being a fluorescent bulb, the voltage is transformed back upward through cheap junk capacitors, to a voltage capable of triggering the fluorescing gas. The gas then fluoresces according to the blackbody equations, somewhat in the UV, but heavily in the visible spectrum. The light produced sets up a series of changing electric and magnetic fields that then transmit through the air at something like ninety-eight percent of the speed of light in vacuum, to be absorbed by an electron somewhere in his eyeball. That then triggers an enzymatic chemical reaction, whic triggers nerve impulses that are set by the previous signal, and reset by the sodium channel.

      Of course he knows all that; everybody knows all that. Otherwise, they might think it was magic.

      --
      Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
    10. Re:Model fails to account for magic and Valar by thunderclap · · Score: 1

      Like what?

    11. Re:Model fails to account for magic and Valar by Smauler · · Score: 1

      No. Science fiction is just what it says it is... fiction based upon science.

      There are blurred lines (especially, for example with FTL travel). However, if you lump fantasy and sci-fi together, you're sticking Harry Potter with Hari Seldon. That does both a disservice.

    12. Re:Model fails to account for magic and Valar by Smauler · · Score: 1

      When I first learned of Clarke's axiom, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.", I was thinking about some far-off future, but I have come to realize that a lot of technology is, for many, advanced enough *today* that it might as well be magic.

      I hope you're not thinking about electricity here... it's been understood to some degree by decently educated people for hundreds of years.

      Just because I do not understand the exact fluid dynamics of liquids (no one does), does not mean I cannot figure out how to tip out a cup in the sink to not make it splash. You don't have to understand everything, you just need to understand enough.

    13. Re:Model fails to account for magic and Valar by bzipitidoo · · Score: 3, Insightful

      There's no escaping shades of reality in any SF/Fantasy I've ever read. Scratch at any of them, and huge problems are revealed.

      McCaffrey's dragons are too powerful. Large size, flying, and fire breathing is pretty stock stuff for dragons. But her dragons are also telepathic, and so emo they each bond with a chosen human rider so closely they kill themselves if their rider dies, and they can teleport (mere flying just ain't good enough), and worst of all, time travel. I'm guessing she realized she'd gone too far, but couldn't make any acknowledgment. Instead, she tried to paper over the problems by introducing restrictions and limitations that unfortunately come across as too arbitrary.

      An integral and needless law of Tolkien's world serves only to make things needlessly more special and their loss more tragic. It's this notion that great things can only be done once. Why can't Yavanna simply grow more trees to light the world? Why did she quit at 2 trees to start with? Why can't Feanor make more Silmarillions? No explanation is offered, we're simply told that's the way things are. There's enough real misery in the world, there's no need to invent reasons to be even more miserable. But some people, especially story tellers, do that to be more dramatic, more poignant. This desire for specialness also infects authors' thinking on copyright. Even apart from the obvious self-interested reasons, they're predisposed to like copyright, like the way it puts art on a pedestal.

      Another problem with many fantasy stories is what I call the Godzilla or King Kong problem. Huge scary powerful solo monsters that no one expected certainly are dramatic. But improbable. Monster movies are inherently ridiculous because even if such a monster appeared, it would have no chance whatsoever of doing much damage before the massed might of millions of people brought it down. The Watcher in the Water at the west entrance to Moria would in all likelihood starve very quickly. One need only wait. If, somehow, the monster is magically sustained, there are all sorts of other things a crew of engineering sorts like dwarves could do to solve the problem it created. For one, could open another exit nearby, but out of its quite limited reach. Or, could probably set off a rock avalanche, crushing anything in the pool as well as displacing all the water with debris. Could also undermine the dam and drain the pool that way. Or perhaps a more low key approach might work, like dumping poison in the pool. To prevail against all the things a crew of determined engineers could try, the monster would need extraordinary abilities by the dozen. Even the Balrog should have a very difficult time prevailing against an entire nation of dwarves. The Balrog only ran them out of Moria. The sandworms of Dune are slightly more plausible, but still not a real problem for a civilization that can travel interplanetary space. Only Sauron went as far as setting up a rival empire, and thereby stood a real chance of prevailing.

      Middle Earth follows many rules of nature. The land is for the most part geologically plausible and sound, with mountains in ranges, rivers rising in the mountains and flowing downhill to the oceans, and woods, marshes, grasslands, deserts and ice in places one might expect. Despite the prominent place of magic in the typical fantasy story, its impact is really quite limited. Gandalf used his brains as much or more than his wizardry. Since the land is familiar to so many readers, why not model its climate for fun?

      --
      Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
    14. Re:Model fails to account for magic and Valar by Jarik+C-Bol · · Score: 1

      True on both fronts. Which is the main reason I find myself annoyed with so many streaming video services, (i'm looking at you Netflix and Hulu) which DO lump Sci-Fi with Fantasy. Its a real pain to weed through dozens of 'Dark Crystal' knockoff fantasy movies looking for decent Sci-Fi, and the inverse is also true, looking for good fantasy movies always means wading through piles of 'sharktopus' crap. I have no idea why they insist that these two genres are one and the same, when in reality, they often attract very different crowds.

      On a related note, I despise how both Netflix and Hulu boast 'Thousands of Tiles', when in reality, most of their library is low budget, off brand wares that no one wants to watch, intermixed with a few dozen blockbuster movies and new releases. Sure, its a marketing trick, and has everything to do with the fact that popular movies cost more to license to stream, but after a while, you realize you are paying 10 bucks a month for a selection thats about almost as good as your local rental store. (my local DVD rental place stocks about 90% low budget horror movies for some reason). Sure, you find a few gems in the middle of all the low budget jokes, but it does start to feel like Cable television. Thousands of channels, and nothing good is on. Thousands of movies, and nothing worth watching.

      --
      I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
    15. Re:Model fails to account for magic and Valar by ihtoit · · Score: 2

      <shootdown>the sand worms in "Dune" were not a problem at all, in fact they were essential to a large portion of the story; they were the whole point of the Spice plot: the worm *is* the Spice - as is specifically referred in the movie by the character Paul "Muad-Dib" Atreides.</shootdown>

      --
      Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
    16. Re:Model fails to account for magic and Valar by ihtoit · · Score: 1

      Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
      Arthur C. Clarke, "Profiles of The Future", 1961

      Every problem has a technological solution. People who didn't understand the technology called what they saw "magic" or "a miracle", and either embraced it or persecuted those who practiced it. Matter of undisputed, historical fact. Front projection cinema was considered "magic" by theatregoers when that was played in public for the first time: people actually ran for cover when trains came at them on the screen. I still see people leaning into turns during cop movie chase scenes (which are shot in such a way as to get people doing just that!), ducking laser fire during Star Wars; I know it's just a projection, but to some it's still magic.

      --
      Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
    17. Re:Model fails to account for magic and Valar by Optali · · Score: 2

      Sense maybe not... but you wont deny that it's damn fun and it definitely has the Nerd factor.

      I had a lot of fun calculating how much it would take for a group of well trained and dedicated professionals to bring the ring to Mordor and hurl it into Mount Doom. I thought on a group of woodsmen afoot: They would have needed 20-30 days or so. I can't bring back my figures right now (I posted in on facebook to my friends and I now found out that it's fucking impossible to get a post back from this crap site, so much for "data analysis").

      This would actually have meant that there was no story:

      1. Gandalf figures out the ring was friggin dangerous
      2. Gandalf as a wise guy takes the right decision to the get rid of the thing ASAP
      3. Gandalf being wise assembles a group of Elite woodsmen properly equipped
      4. They get the fuck off and hike to mount Doom living from the land and avoiding any city and town
      5. They painfully gut and mutilate Gollum just for the sake of it
      6. They hurl the ring into Mount doom
      7. Done

      Sauron and Saruman would have been caught still in undergarments, there wouldn't have been much time for the ring to tempt the party, there wouldn't have been any need for stopping to get stuff and no Hobbits screwing up with Mount Kings and crap.

      To fill in the book after getting rid of the ring I would have made the badass woodsmen to dedicate their souls to Crom, gather a Barbarian Horde and plunder and rape the fuck out of it.... CROOOOOOOOM!!!!!!

      " I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content.”
      --
      Conan the Barbarian

       

      --
      -- 29A the number of the Beast
    18. Re:Model fails to account for magic and Valar by Optali · · Score: 1

      Dune?
      the Dying Earth Saga ?

      --
      -- 29A the number of the Beast
    19. Re:Model fails to account for magic and Valar by Optali · · Score: 1

      Exactly.

      They died out except for a few of them after putting weather satellites in orbit.

      Dune were held artificially low tech too. And the possibility of laser-shield explosions on the ground that potentially destroyed the spice held the rivals of House Atreides back on using more advanced techniques... and the nukes were restricted.

      Also note that the civilization of the Dune universe is very different from ours, there are technologies that were intentionally drewn back to lower standards (computers for instance).

      And there is finally a huge component of stuff that I do regard as "magic", well back then in the 60s it would have been accepted as Sci but nobody regards nowadays all the ESP stuff and "prana" Energy and such as more than magic.

      But even as a Fantasy world it is still pretty consistent within it's own logic

      --
      -- 29A the number of the Beast
    20. Re:Model fails to account for magic and Valar by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Elite woodsmen huh? like Aragorn, and Legolas? Boromir to a pretty large extent as well?

    21. Re: Model fails to account for magic and Valar by Sigg3.net · · Score: 1

      You hit the nail. While magic works in mysterious ways, science (working the same process) strives to declare its power to avoid mysteriousness.

      It's inherited from the Enlightenment, probably.

      That said, reading old folklore reveals a different picture. The supernatural wasn't questioned (that came with experimental science) instead it held the position our 'facts' do. Or, sociologically, they were facts.

      This made the mysteries all the more mundane, taken for granted. This doesn't mean people was stupid, they were explaining phenomena in the way they could.

      This is captured brilliantly by Dune, where high-tech takes a back seat even though it's there.

      --
      Defining Statistics and Social Research
    22. Re:Model fails to account for magic and Valar by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Several interesting points. I think the simplest explanation of Tolkien's tragic "best ever" sorts of stories is that he was a medievalist. Consider medieval society, living constantly in the ruins of a civilization far more advanced and complex than your own. There were all manner of "best ever"s left over, all around.

    23. Re:Model fails to account for magic and Valar by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yes, yes, exactly!

      Get a whole group of these and let the hobbits and dwarves dancing polka.

      Put each of them on a horse and they'll be in Mordor and back for lunch.

    24. Re:Model fails to account for magic and Valar by bzipitidoo · · Score: 1

      A nice point yourself. I'd noticed this flavor of decline before, no more high elven king thanks mainly to not enough high elves left in Middle Earth to form a kingdom, the lost realm of Arnor, Gondor and allies severely outnumbered by their enemies and in peril, the earlier Atlantis like loss of Numenor. Even the Ents are in permanent decline. Only the dwarves have advanced somewhat, and that too is in danger. All that fits early Middle Age societies, living as they did within the ruins of Roman civlization, still using some Roman aqueducts, roads, and buildings centuries after losing the knowledge necessary to build more or even maintain existing ones, and unable to rediscover much thanks to the constant threats of war, disease, and food shortages. But I overlooked that this time.

      --
      Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
  4. Science by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Which part makes this science?

    1. Re:Science by phantomfive · · Score: 1

      Which part makes this science?/quote. The part where they model the climate of the late Cretaceous period?

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    2. Re:Science by savuporo · · Score: 1

      And, who exactly funds "science" like this.

      --
      http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.slashdot.org Errors found while checking this document as HTML5!
    3. Re:Science by femtobyte · · Score: 2

      FTFA: "The model simulations were carried out on the supercomputers of the Advanced Centre for Research Computing at the University of Bristol. They were not funded in any way, and were set up in the author’s spare time."

    4. Re:Science by hcs_$reboot · · Score: 0

      Who cares anyway... that's in England.

      --
      Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
    5. Re:Science by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Funny

      No one. You may find this amazing and possibly even difficult to grasp, but free market economics isn't necessarily the prime motivator behind science.

      I hope this revelation hasn't been too much of a blow to your world view.

    6. Re:Science by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "The model simulations were carried out on the supercomputers of the Advanced Centre for Research Computing at the University of Bristol. They were not funded in any way, and were set up in the author’s spare time."

    7. Re:Science by maxwell+demon · · Score: 0

      FTFA: "The model simulations were carried out on the supercomputers of the Advanced Centre for Research Computing at the University of Bristol. They were not funded in any way, and were set up in the author’s spare time."

      Were they also done on the supercomputer's spare time? And did the author pay himself for the additional electricity cost?

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    8. Re:Science by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The linguistic contribution to the esteemed languages of Elvish and Dwarfish can not be underestimated.

    9. Re:Science by femtobyte · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Why yes, I suspect they were done "on the supercomputer's spare time." That's what "nice -n 20" is for. Most university compute clusters aren't running at 100% capacity 100% of the time --- there are gaps between intense clusters of jobs queued up by researchers. Without strong proof otherwise, I'd highly doubt that any other researchers had their schedules set behind waiting for Middle Earth simulations.

      As for the electricity cost --- sure, someone may have spent a few tens of dollars there. For a result with high visibility and outreach potential, encouraging public attention to (and potential future participation in, via motivated youngsters) science. If you're so miserly that you don't think such expense is worthwhile, even just for putting a smile on many people's faces, then please fuck off; you're a miserable burden to humanity that would rather see everyone's life gray and miserable than dare spending 0.00000001% of tax money on anything you don't personally want.

    10. Re:Science by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yes...the linguistic contribution of only changing the font... Hint: try copy-paste.

    11. Re:Science by maxwell+demon · · Score: 0

      You clearly have no idea how compute clusters work (or maybe in America, they work substantially different? But I somehow doubt it). If you reserve nodes for your job (which you have to do for the queuing system to schedule it), then no other job will be put there by the queuing system until your job terminates (possibly forcefully because it has used up the reserved time), even if you use nice -20.

      And no, I've got no problems with using university resources for such a project, as long as the university approves it. But it makes the claim wrong that their research was not funded in any way. It was funded by the university, by providing the computing resources for it.

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    12. Re:Science by femtobyte · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You're technically correct that "nice" isn't the command you use for specifying batch job priorities on a multi-node system (I also don't know what the specific setup of the University of Bristol's computational resources is). Nonetheless, there's typically some equivalent in the batch job submission system (and/or automatically enforced by per-user or per-group policies) for specifying job priority --- how many nodes to run at once, and what priority they are given against competing requests. Unless you have evidence otherwise, I'd consider it highly unlikely that Dr. Lunt's simulations were run in "use every single node the system has, while blocking all other requests" mode --- much more likely, they would have been trickled in to otherwise unused nodes, with negligible impact on anyone else's "real" research.

      So, yes, these results were "funded" by the university --- at such minuscule levels compared to formal funding of personnel and resources that they will never appear above rounding errors. It was "funded" in the same sense that lights left on to illuminate campus walkways at night may provide benefit to pedestrians not at the moment engaged strictly in official university business.

    13. Re:Science by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Were they also done on the supercomputer's spare time?

      Yes

      And did the author pay himself for the additional electricity cost?

      The cost of running the CPUs is infinitesimal compared to the cost of them running idle (you don't power off compute nodes or interconnect switches). Plus it's better to keep the systems at a constant load rather than cycling them between load & no-load; that introduces thermal stresses which lead to early failure of components, which can actually be a big deal when you're dealing with an HPC cluster of any reasonable size.

      The net cost was essentially zero. Nice try though. Would you like to try an argument based on the intrinsic value of his time, instead?

    14. Re: Science by femtobyte · · Score: 4, Insightful

      As a member of the non-Ferrari-owning social class, I don't lose any sleep worrying that a non-multimillionaire might be permitted to have a little fun in life. For my own more meagre possessions, I'm perfectly happy to lend them out to friends and acquaintances while not in use; accepting a little uncompensated wear and tear on my books or electronics is a negligible price to pay for helping other people out, and living in a community of decent human beings (rather than being a spiteful multimillionaire incensed that a peon valet should enjoy more than misery).

    15. Re:Science by Entropius · · Score: 1

      And not even all the characters are there (I'm looking at the Cirth version). It's definitely not in Dwarfish, since Tolkien describes in some detail why the adjective form is dwarvish. This was also a secret language, and the dwarves wouldn't publish a paper in it (nor would Radagast, even if he knew it). The alphabet is the Cirth, designed for carved letters, and isn't unique to Dwarvish except for the fact that they carved a lot and there's a bunch of it in The Hobbit. (And, in the illustrations in that book, Tolkien didn't even really use the Cirth; he used the Futhark, upon which it's based.)

    16. Re:Science by meglon · · Score: 4, Funny

      There was a greater secret about dorvish...er...dwarvish.... it wasn't actually a language at all. Dwarves would simply scribble lines on things to make the other races think they were intelligent enough to have a language.

      --
      Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
    17. Re:Science by Chris+Mattern · · Score: 1

      The cost of running the CPUs is infinitesimal compared to the cost of them running idle

      Actually, that's not true. Even assuming that the CPU does not do voltage scaling, freqency scaling or other power management, a CPU under heavy load can use 150% or more of the power of the same CPU at idle. And since the higher energy use causes it to run hotter, you pay for that twice as you also have to pay for the A/C to keep it cool as well.

    18. Re:Science by plopez · · Score: 1

      Every researcher I have met has had 30 to 49 % of grant money tagged by the university they were at for overhead such as electricity, janitors, light bulbs, and computing centers.

      --
      putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
    19. Re: Science by Mirey · · Score: 2

      https://www.acrc.bris.ac.uk/

      I suspect it was ran on phase 2. There is usually quite a bit of spare time on it.... except a week before some coursework deadlines when everyone uses it D:
      At least, that was the case 2 years ago before I graduated.

    20. Re:Science by dryeo · · Score: 1

      It's in the UK, the extra heat would be welcome.

      --
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
    21. Re:Science by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I often wonder why supercomputer clusters aren't geographically distributed so the nodes can be used as space heaters. It seems such a waste putting them all together in the same room...

    22. Re:Science by dryeo · · Score: 1

      I often wonder why supercomputer clusters aren't geographically distributed so the nodes can be used as space heaters. It seems such a waste putting them all together in the same room...

      How else to claim that you actually have central heating?

      --
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
    23. Re: Science by ihtoit · · Score: 1

      didn't he drop it in a ditch?

      --
      Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
    24. Re:Science by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Thank you for honouring Tolkien by writing "dwarves" and not "dwarfs". He never approved of the latter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwarf_%28Middle-earth%29#Spelling_.22Dwarves.22

    25. Re:Science by meglon · · Score: 1

      Well, typically i write it as dorf... or footstool... or stumpy.... but i figured not everyone would get it.

      --
      Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
  5. Yeah, but... by Type44Q · · Score: 1, Funny

    with an average temperature of 7C

    (Insert hick accent) Yeah, but what's that in degrees?

    1. Re:Yeah, but... by femtobyte · · Score: 2

      (Insert physics hick accent) That's 280 kelvins, and don't let me ever hear you spewing that "dee-grees" nonsense in my house again!

    2. Re:Yeah, but... by jones_supa · · Score: 1

      As a tool, let me actually ask why is the word "degrees" used with "celcius"?

    3. Re:Yeah, but... by femtobyte · · Score: 1

      As in OED definition 1a,b, in the sense of a "step" on a scale --- each "degree" is one of 100 steps on the (somewhat arbitrarily chosen) scale between the freezing and boiling points of water (at standard pressure).

    4. Re:Yeah, but... by Brett+Buck · · Score: 1

      This in an article that amounts to a nerdgasm over academics spending their efforts to model the climate of a fairy tale.

             

    5. Re:Yeah, but... by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 2

      Because "degrees" is used with every unit used to measure temperature, as in degrees Celsius, degrees Fahrenheit, degrees Kelvin, degrees Reumur.
      Usually you won't write it, but 'say' it while reading, or you even ommit the unit.
      In europe no one says / writes degrees Celsius, or says the temperature is 35 celsius, you only say: it is 35 degrees.

      --
      Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
    6. Re:Yeah, but... by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 2

      Unlike the degree Fahrenheit and degree Celsius, the kelvin is not referred to or typeset as a degree.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelvin

      --
      systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
    7. Re:Yeah, but... by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 1

      Wikipedia does not count :)
      Ofc every one I know 'says' degree to kelvin, too.
      However strictly speaking as a physicist, you ommit the degree part and only use the unit, just like in feet vs. meter.

      --
      Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
    8. Re:Yeah, but... by TapeCutter · · Score: 1

      I was taught Kelvin does not use the "degrees" qualifier but the others do, I thought it was some weird quirk of the English language so I never asked for an explanation.

      --
      And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
    9. Re:Yeah, but... by TapeCutter · · Score: 1

      They probably learnt something about their models, I haven't read it so I'm not sure why anyone would publish it in a journal?

      --
      And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
    10. Re:Yeah, but... by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 1

      As I see it we have a "discrepancy" of used language versus what a physician would say.
      In the "used" language, most people (well, can only talk about germany) like to add the "degrees" and then mention the unit (Fahrenheit etc.)
      Or only use degrees and assume the "assumable" unit. Or they simply use the unit, if they are in a situation where this is relevant. I mean, in germany they say: temperature tomorrow is 12 degrees average. (implying 12 'degrees' celsius)
      But in a physics experiment they would say it is running at 300 kelvin. (adding a 'degrees' is optional)

      --
      Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
    11. Re:Yeah, but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That's because the word "degree" means something. Degree scales are relative; when they are used absolutely, they are still relative to an arbitraily chosen zero, not an absolute zero. Angular degrees, for instance, are relative to an axis (for instance the x axis). Degrees Celsius are relative to the freezing point of water.

    12. Re:Yeah, but... by Jarik+C-Bol · · Score: 1

      Does the region referenced really have an average temperature of only 44 degrees Fahrenheit? Rather unpleasent place, hovering a mere 11 degrees above freezing. Of course, one assumes that is a yearly average, meaning much warmer and cooler temperatures are experienced during the sumer and winter months respectively.

      The point is, telling us the 'average' temperature does little to describe the actual temperature. Thats like saying the average temperature on the moon is only -23 degrees Celsius. Sure, the temperature in sunlight is 107 C, and the temperature in shadow is -153C, but that averages out to a relitively comfortable middle ground!

      --
      I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
    13. Re:Yeah, but... by vrt3 · · Score: 1

      The unit is "Kelvin" or "degrees Celsius". Sometimes people add "degrees" to Kelvin, but that's incorrect and I've only ever heard non-sciency people do that. People often do omit Celsius or Fahrenheit, and I think there's nothing wrong with that when talking about the weather or other everyday temperatures.

      You're saying the unit is "Celsius" and you can optionally prefix it with "degrees"? I've never heard it explain that way. Seems very weird.

      --
      This sig under construction. Please check back later.
    14. Re:Yeah, but... by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 1

      There is no unit 'degree Celsius'. Just like with Kelvin the official unit is without 'degree'!
      And yes, you are right, only non scientific people,do that. That is 90 - 95% of the population. Do you really expect any german, european, wether forcaster to include 'Celsius' when he says: tomorrow the temperature will vary between 10 degrees in the morning and peak to 26 early afternoon and go down to 2 in the night?

      --
      Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
    15. Re:Yeah, but... by vrt3 · · Score: 1

      There is no unit 'degree Celsius'. Just like with Kelvin the official unit is without 'degree'!

      Do you have a citation for that? Wikipedia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celsius#Name_and_symbol_typesetting] seems to disagree.

      I agree that much of this is academic and not relevant in everyday speech. But I think even there you are wrong: according to your previous post the "degree" part is optional, but in everyday speech it's the "Celsius" part that's left out (to which I have no objection whatsoever).

      --
      This sig under construction. Please check back later.
    16. Re:Yeah, but... by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 1

      The degree part is optional if you use foreign/unusual units of temperature.
      The "unit" part is optional if you assume you use the local used unit.
      Well, I can not say about the US e.g. but for my 'speaking' 40 degrees would imply 40 fahrenheit, which would be equal to 40 degrees fahrenheit.
      Anyway, in germany at least people woul add the (unnecessary) 'degree' if they would say fahrenheit or reymoure.

      --
      Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
  6. "Elvish" by Arancaytar · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ... that's not even badly transliterated. Without even looking at it closely, you can tell the entire text lacks vowel diacritics. They probably selected the text and changed the font, which works about as well with Tengwar as it would with Arabic or Hebrew.

    1. Re:"Elvish" by Arancaytar · · Score: 5, Insightful

      (And if this kind of griping sounds overly nerdy, keep in mind they're the ones who decided to model the climate of Middle-Earth. :P )

    2. Re:"Elvish" by Megahard · · Score: 2

      That's it exactly. Cut-and-paste into Emacs and it's in English. And no, I have not installed mod-auto-elvish-translate.

      --
      I eat only the real part of complex carbohydrates.
    3. Re:"Elvish" by Sun · · Score: 3, Interesting

      OT, but I couldn't resist :-)

      Actually, non Arabic natives could gain from doing precisely that. The cursive nature of the writing, coupled with the amount of characters that are only differentiated by the number of dots they have, make it a relatively hard language to learn to read. The multiple forms each letter take depending on its position in the word don't help either. In fact, some elementary schools in Israel teach spoken Arabic by using Hebrew letters, not bothering with trying to teach reading or writing.

      As someone who went through the motion of pretending to try to learn literary Arabic in school, I actually don't think that's a bad idea. Get some vocabulary and grammar going, and only then dump trying to decipher the text on students. After all, that's also the order in which native Arabic speakers do it.

      As for Hebrew, there are some madmen who tried something very similar. See, for example, http://www.stav.org.il/karmeli/. Needless to say, it did not gain any significant traction.

      Shachar

    4. Re:"Elvish" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Also, the text in the figures has been left in Roman font. As a result, in figure 5 (for example), the subplots are labelled (a)-(f), but the references to these labels in the figure caption have been lost.

    5. Re:"Elvish" by maroberts · · Score: 1

      Personally I'm surprised Google Translate doesn't do this sort of translation. There's enough nerds working there, so languages such as Elvish and Klingon should be available by now.

      --

      Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
      Karma: Chameleon

    6. Re:"Elvish" by Entropius · · Score: 1

      Came here to post the same thing. Also, Dwarvish is a secret language, and even if Radagast knew it he wouldn't publish a paper in it (nor would anyone writing on paper in whatever language use the Cirth, since the Tengwar were designed for that.)

    7. Re:"Elvish" by Chris+Mattern · · Score: 1

      Elvish really suffers from a lack of sufficient definition. Quenya is close to having enough material in it, and people have done some writing in it, but even there, you'd have to make up large swaths to fill in the blanks to be able to fully use it as a language. Sindarin is worse, and there's nothing more than snippets of anything else.

      Klingon, on the other hand, has been sufficiently defined that people can and have used it as an actual lanaguage.

    8. Re:"Elvish" by Smauler · · Score: 1

      As someone who went through the motion of pretending to try to learn literary Arabic in school, I actually don't think that's a bad idea. Get some vocabulary and grammar going, and only then dump trying to decipher the text on students. After all, that's also the order in which native Arabic speakers do it.

      Do native speakers of any language do it any other way?

    9. Re:"Elvish" by Sun · · Score: 1

      I remember reading somewhere, and I do not remember where, that a study found out that Arabic was the language most difficult to read/write from all the languages that use consonants as a writing basis (i.e. - not Chinese). I vaguely remember that they connected this to the cursive nature of the writing, but as this is all from memory (and a while ago), I cannot tell you how.

      Shachar

    10. Re:"Elvish" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yes, you'd think they'd at least publish the paper in the original Klingon.

  7. Mordor weather is like Los Angeles?? by Spy+Handler · · Score: 1

    Do they even know what LA weather is like? It's about 300 days of sunshine here. On the other hand, Mordor is a barren wasteland, riddled with fire and ash and dust, the very air you breathe is a poisonous fume.... from all that volcanic discharge from Mount Doom.

    1. Re:Mordor weather is like Los Angeles?? by Viol8 · · Score: 5, Funny

      "Mordor is a barren wasteland, riddled with fire and ash and dust, the very air you breathe is a poisonous fume"

      So how's that different from LA?

    2. Re:Mordor weather is like Los Angeles?? by Xaemyl · · Score: 1

      Well, we DO have a Fire season here ...

    3. Re: Mordor weather is like Los Angeles?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      Not with ten thousand men could you model this... it is folly.

    4. Re:Mordor weather is like Los Angeles?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      "Mordor is a barren wasteland, riddled with fire and ash and dust, the very air you breathe is a poisonous fume"

      So how's that different from LA?

      Dime a dozen movie star wanna be hot chicks

    5. Re:Mordor weather is like Los Angeles?? by kinkozmasta · · Score: 4, Funny

      The traffic in Mordor isn't quite as bad?

    6. Re:Mordor weather is like Los Angeles?? by Chris+Mattern · · Score: 3, Informative

      On the other hand, Mordor is a barren wasteland, riddled with fire and ash and dust, the very air you breathe is a poisonous fume.... from all that volcanic discharge from Mount Doom.

      The Plains of Gorgoroth that Frodo and Sam struggled across fits that description, yes. But Nurn, around the Sea of Nurnen in the southeast was quite fertile (though not pleasant--no place in Morder was pleasant) and raised abundant crops. After all, Sauron's armies had to be fed somehow.

    7. Re: Mordor weather is like Los Angeles?? by MickLinux · · Score: 1

      Well, the rate of earthquakes has doubled this last decade,focused at the Nevada border, where some think that a Mount Doom is about to break loose (well, aecaldera super-volcano, anyway.). There's another such location at volcano national Park in northern CA.

      --
      Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
    8. Re:Mordor weather is like Los Angeles?? by ihtoit · · Score: 2

      sounds more like New Delhi. The only place I know (there might well be others) that uses "smoke" to describe local weather phenomena.

      --
      Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
  8. Hawaii everything okay? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Just checking.

  9. Yes but... by Lije+Baley · · Score: 4, Funny

    ...what are we going to do about Middle-Earth warming?!?

    --
    Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
    1. Re:Yes but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      ...what are we going to do about Middle-Earth warming?!?

      We'll just have to mount an expedition consisting of halflings, dwarves, normal sized men (that includes a very old magical wizard), plus one computer generated character. Send them all off to destroy the all seeing bloodshot eye, and the earth's climate will soon be back to normal.

      Easy-peasy!

    2. Re:Yes but... by Vanders · · Score: 1

      That sounds like a lot of work. Can we at least wait until after second breakfast?

      --
      Syllable : It's an Operating System
    3. Re:Yes but... by maxwell+demon · · Score: 1

      Stop wasting magic energy, of course.

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    4. Re:Yes but... by maroberts · · Score: 1

      ...what are we going to do about Middle-Earth warming?!?

      seek the council of Saruman.

      --

      Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
      Karma: Chameleon

    5. Re:Yes but... by Chris+Mattern · · Score: 3, Funny

      But go not to the Elves for counsel, for they shall say both solar and oil.

    6. Re:Yes but... by maroberts · · Score: 1

      I am Gandalf and I approve the previous comment :-)

      --

      Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
      Karma: Chameleon

  10. Mordor... by PrimeNumber · · Score: 1

    East TX (think Houston) would be more appropriate, as it is truly a subtropical climate. West Texas is semi arid.

    1. Re:Mordor... by Notabadguy · · Score: 1

      Well, Texas *does* have more Trolls than anywhere else, if Patent Litigation is any indicator.

    2. Re:Mordor... by Notabadguy · · Score: 1

      Egads, that was supposed to be...

      Well, East Texas *does* have more Trolls than anywhere else, if Patent Litigation is any indicator.

    3. Re:Mordor... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Less trolls than Slashdot.

    4. Re:Mordor... by Anubis+IV · · Score: 2

      Yeah, if you look at a climate map, West Texas, as you said, is clearly arid or semiarid, depending on exactly where we're talking about. East Texas is classified as subtropical, but, then again, so is almost all of the southeastern US, and I'd imagine that a place like the backwoods of the deep South is hardly what most people have in their head when they think of what "subtropical" looks like, despite the fact that it actually is.

      But Houston is a great example. Houston is essentially a massive marsh that was built over rice fields, hence why it's still referred to as the Bayou City to this day. If you think of that field where all of the dead were at in Mordor (the book's take on it, not the film's, which is clearly in a colder place with fog and mountains), that's pretty much Houston. I've lived either in or within an hour of it for the last 14 years, and it does get rather humid with the Gulf winds blowing in and the thick "gumbo" soil preventing the water from soaking in, meaning a lot of it sits on the surface and stagnates (or becomes mosquito-ridden). For additional reference, I spent the 9 years prior to my current time in Texas in south Florida, which is where the only truly tropical (as opposed to subtropical) climate is located in the continental US, and in many ways I'd consider some of the descriptions from LotR to be more descriptive of a climate like what we had there (which really is quite different than what we have here).

  11. Amazing. by Petersko · · Score: 2

    This story broke my nerdometer.

  12. fishing by fche · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Fishing for an Ig Nobel Prize perhaps, good luck!

  13. Not Elvish and Dwarfish by cervesaebraciator · · Score: 2, Informative

    It's not translated. It's just using elvish and dwarfish scripts.

    1. Re:Not Elvish and Dwarfish by hey! · · Score: 1

      ... as were nearly all examples of tengwar and dwarf-runes we have from Tolkien's own hand.

      --
      Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
    2. Re:Not Elvish and Dwarfish by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      A lot of Tolkien's tengwar writing was English, but it was actual English writing, where the ‘t’ tengwa stood for the ‘t’ sound and the ‘a’ tehta stood for the ‘a’ sound.
      But even a glancing look* at TFA shows that they just selected the text and changed the font. If it had been transliterated English, that would have gotten them some points in my book, but this...
      * There are no tehta (vowel diacritics) anywhere, nor any full-mode vowel characters; that should be a hint even to those who cannot read tengwar.

    3. Re:Not Elvish and Dwarfish by Arancaytar · · Score: 2

      And it's not even using them properly. You can transliterate English into Tengwar script pretty well (though you have to decide whether to go with phonetic or English spelling), but whatever happened to this text makes it just a bunch of random letters that can't be pronounced.

    4. Re:Not Elvish and Dwarfish by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I seem to recall that Tolkien never finished the Dwarfish language....

  14. These guys have broken the Fifth Rule by dkleinsc · · Score: 1

    They have taken themselves far too seriously.

    --
    I am officially gone from /. Long live http://www.soylentnews.com/
  15. and they have a cave troll by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 1

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAyh23l1mx4

  16. "No university would employ me today" by globaljustin · · Score: 1

    Just a few stores below in my feed, I see this

    Physicist Peter Higgs: "I wouldn't be productive enough for today's academic system"

    I'm not against screwing around with the lab computer on off hours and make it model "Middle Earth"...that's a fun idea...no, I'm mortified that this became an official research project and was published.

    It proves what Peter Higgs was saying in the most weirdly fun yet depressing way....

    --
    Thank you Dave Raggett
    1. Re:"No university would employ me today" by femtobyte · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Proves? You mean, disproves. This publication isn't in a peer-reviewed journal; it's not contributing to the author's official publication count. Instead, it's an example of a researcher being able to follow his own interests, and do personally-motivated stuff with no short-term payoff in "publish-or-perish" terms; in other words, exactly what Higgs is worried researchers today aren't able to do. This one isolated counter-example doesn't prove that Higgs' concerns aren't valid, but it certainly does not support them.

  17. Re: So how's that different from LA? by M.+Baranczak · · Score: 5, Funny

    Mordor has a much better public transit system.

  18. Subtropical? by multimediavt · · Score: 1

    with the subtropical Mordor region being more like Los Angeles or western Texas.

    I do believe that anyone that bothered to read the books would know that Mordor was arid, volcanic in climate, hardly subtropical. L.A. is temperate bordering on semi-arid, and West Texas is certainly semi-arid to arid, a bit more like Mordor minus the volcanoes, fishers and orcs. (And, did I forget to mention the giant spider, spawn of Ungoliant at the back door?) That Mordor? Texas ain't anything like that Mordor. But, then again there is evil that lives there. Hmmmm....

    1. Re:Subtropical? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Fissures*

  19. Making climate science serious. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    What better way to prove the validity of climate science than to write an "academic" paper on what "scientific" computer models say about a 100% fictional environment.

  20. This, but no Higgs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    We just had a posting here Peter Higgs speculates that no university would have employed him today. Meanwhile, this.

    1. Re:This, but no Higgs by g01d4 · · Score: 1
      I thought about this too and decided to skim TFA:

      The model simulations were carried out on the supercomputers of the Advanced Centre for Research Computing at the University of Bristol. They were not funded in any way, and were set up in the author 's spare time.

      I wouldn't argue this was a waste of resources as one's weather models should be tested for reasonable results in 'alien' settings. The amount of information and research methods have come a long way. It's not meaningful to compare the environment fifty years ago.

  21. East Midlands? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Tolkien intended the Shire to be similar to his home region, which was of course the West Midlands. How could he have been so far from the mark?

  22. Taxes by scsirob · · Score: 1

    This kind of research is exactly what the government needs. Another excuse to blame Global Warming on some computer model. First they did this on upper Earth, now it's Middle Earth.

    I can see it coming, CO2 taxes to 'save Middle Earth'..

    --
    To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
  23. Doubtful by wisnoskij · · Score: 1

    I find it very hard to believe that Tolkien created such a perfect world that its climates would naturally be just as he described.

    --
    Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
    1. Re:Doubtful by hey! · · Score: 1

      Models work from assumptions. The assumptions you put into them don't have to be plausible; a model simply spits out the consequences of the initial conditions you choose. Thus you could start a simulation of the Earth which started with the tropical seas being frozen and the polar seas being at 38 C. Those initial conditions are impossible, but the computer program will faithfully spit out *some* kind of result.

      --
      Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
  24. New Zealand by luckymutt · · Score: 4, Funny

    Couldn't they have saved a lot of time and just pulled up the data we have on New Zealand?

  25. That's the first time I've ever seen... by Nova+Express · · Score: 2

    ...the word "jobs" typoed "orcs."

    --
    Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)

    http://www.lawrenceperson.com/

  26. emacs doesn't translate it but vi does by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    So there.

    Commence battle

  27. I bet the author... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    throws up when people speak badly of hobbits.

  28. not everyone uses metric by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    7 degrees Celsius = 44.6 degrees Fahrenheit
    61 centimeters of rain = 24.0157 inches

    1. Re:not everyone uses metric by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      But how many hobbit-nuts is that?

    2. Re:not everyone uses metric by readin · · Score: 1

      7 degrees Celsius = 44.6 degrees Fahrenheit 61 centimeters of rain = 24.0157 inches

      Thanks but people who know Fahrenheit and inches are generally well-educated enough to also know the common lesser measurement system (sort of like how most who speak Elvish also know the common tongue). No translation is necessary for us.

      --
      I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
  29. The Climate of Middle Earth by StewBaby2005 · · Score: 1

    Wot? No Klingon?

    1. Re:The Climate of Middle Earth by plopez · · Score: 2

      Klingons are a fictional species.

      --
      putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
    2. Re:The Climate of Middle Earth by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      But their language isn't.

      What a conundrum.

  30. By Radagast the Brown by globaljustin · · Score: 1

    yeah you got me there...this looks like what I was advocating

    you can tell I'm a bit disgruntled about the whole experience of working in academia....this is actually good news!

    --
    Thank you Dave Raggett
  31. According to the mode of Beleriand by tepples · · Score: 1

    you can tell the entire text lacks vowel diacritics

    So did the writing reform that came out of Beleriand, where vowels were promoted from tehtar (points) to full letters. Remember Durin's gate on the west side of Moria, noted for the weak default password that Narvi set and Celebrimbor leaked? The inscription on that was written with vowels as letters.

    1. Re:According to the mode of Beleriand by Arancaytar · · Score: 1

      Fair point; there's a Tengwar mode without tehtar. (This text doesn't use it, of course.)

  32. Does whatever a Saru can by tepples · · Score: 1

    seek the council of Saruman.

    Saruman, Saruman, does whatever a Saru can, but how will that be enough?

  33. Good news for me by ihtoit · · Score: 1

    ...a move to Middle Earth would be a sideways one, climate-wise.

    (according to this, if you want to know what the weather in the Shire is doing right now, come to Nottingham. Right now, it's wetter than an otter's pocket, colder than a penguin's chuff and darker than a black bull's arse).

    --
    Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
  34. Fantasy climate models: only ones that are valid by fygment · · Score: 1

    Finally, climate models find a world where their accuracy doesn't constitute a risk; a world where their results aren't partial lies or won't be used for political or financial gain.

    Just keep them out of reality, thanks.

    --
    "Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
  35. Two Fantastical by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Two fantastical periods of time... Mordor of Middle Earth and the Cretaceous period.