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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.
... 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.
"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?
(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!
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.
Not with ten thousand men could you model this... it is folly.
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.
The traffic in Mordor isn't quite as bad?
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
So there.
Commence battle
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
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.
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.
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
Klingons are a fictional species.
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.
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"
<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
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
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