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The Climate of Middle-Earth
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.
... 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.
Fishing for an Ig Nobel Prize perhaps, good luck!
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.
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!
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.
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.
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).
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
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
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"