Ansible Interview

David Stockhoff · 21 Jan 2009, 21:50 · from 2009-January.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: dstockhoff at verizon.net (David Stockhoff)
Date: Wed, 21 Jan 2009 16:50:02 -0500
Subject: (urth) Ansible Interview
In-Reply-To: <mailman.9636.1232574093.2909.urth-urth.net at lists.urth.net>
References: <mailman.9636.1232574093.2909.urth-urth.net at lists.urth.net>
Message-ID: <4977988A.2030404 at verizon.net>

I have been browsing the Ansible interview, and I notice what seems to 
be a simple, incontrovertible error on Wolfe's part:

8. /How is Silk able to see these valleys filled with shadows [in the 
skylands at night, at the opening of chapter 4, book 1] if the Whorl is 
a cylinder with the long sun running approximately down the centre?/ -- 
This one throws me completely. Where is the difficulty, unless all the 
valleys run parallel to the Long Sun? Naturally they don't. [DRL: I see 
a Wolfean trap here. The groundlings' references to the 'shade' of night 
strongly suggest a literal revolving shade around the sun. But there are 
later indications that night involves some sort of dark stuff sent in 
pulses along the axis to mask a certain length of the Long Sun.]

Thing is, the Whorl is the interior surface of a cylinder. Therefore, 
"up" is always toward the center.

Since the LS runs along the center from end to end, you can treat the 
issue of shadows with only 2 dimensions. It won't matter whether the 
valleys run along the Sun or the other way. Only if they are tilted or 
overhanging will they cast shadows.

Anyway, as Langford notes, there is a shade of some kind always blocking 
one side of the Sun.

So we should not assume Wolfe to be perfect in his physics. ;)

---
avast! Antivirus: Outbound message clean.
Virus Database (VPS): 090121-0, 01/21/2009
Tested on: 1/21/2009 4:50:03 PM
avast! - copyright (c) 1988-2009 ALWIL Software.
http://www.avast.com

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net