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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.
I thought Texas was Mordor?
We need this translated into Orcish, too, so the professional global warming denialists can properly read and respond to it.
with an average temperature of 7C
(Insert hick accent) Yeah, but what's that in degrees?
... 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.
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.
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."
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!
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."
...what are we going to do about Middle-Earth warming?!?
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
East TX (think Houston) would be more appropriate, as it is truly a subtropical climate. West Texas is semi arid.
This story broke my nerdometer.
Fishing for an Ig Nobel Prize perhaps, good luck!
It's not translated. It's just using elvish and dwarfish scripts.
They have taken themselves far too seriously.
I am officially gone from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAyh23l1mx4
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.
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
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.
Mordor has a much better public transit system.
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....
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
Couldn't they have saved a lot of time and just pulled up the data we have on New Zealand?
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).
...the word "jobs" typoed "orcs."
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
That was my first thought. The climate of Middle earth can be anything because... MAGIC!
So there.
Commence battle
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.
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.)
The difference is they're not using a friggin' supercomputer to do it. There are far better uses of that resource.
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!)
Wot? No Klingon?
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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+
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.
Like what?
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.
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.
It's in the UK, the extra heat would be welcome.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
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
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"
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.
seek the council of Saruman.
Saruman, Saruman, does whatever a Saru can, but how will that be enough?
...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
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
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.
<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
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
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
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.
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!!!!!!
-- 29A the number of the Beast
Dune?
the Dying Earth Saga ?
-- 29A the number of the Beast
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
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
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
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"