Ansible Interview

Jordon Flato · 27 Jan 2009, 19:04 · 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: jordonflato at gmail.com (Jordon Flato)
Date: Tue, 27 Jan 2009 11:04:52 -0800
Subject: (urth) Ansible Interview
In-Reply-To: <39ed084f0901271025t6f23e05ar18525d34ce73ba8e at mail.gmail.com>
References: <60016944C0A74B77B9BDFC5E98C39B25@GATEWAY>
	<497CFDE6.2090104 at doubtfulpalace.com>
	<D9DA56007C5846C9A0A33DA17DB4B3B0@GATEWAY>
	<39ed084f0901252206n4b735e9ax284ba02febad5be2 at mail.gmail.com>
	<497D9B92.5010708 at io.com>
	<39ed084f0901260741k52c49b8csc93ef26cfed2dce9 at mail.gmail.com>
	<273409710901270919g5b0e3156rb0990890a5723af7 at mail.gmail.com>
	<39ed084f0901271025t6f23e05ar18525d34ce73ba8e at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <273409710901271104n68b812ean7d6b5944c37658e5 at mail.gmail.com>

Lol!  That last bit about what I was thinking is pretty much exactly what I
was thinking!  When I picture that (and I was able to with your fine
description) the thing that first popped into my head was "no way would I
call something like that, if I saw it above me, a valley!  I'd have to come
up with some other frakked up word, because it wouldn't look like any valley
I could imagine!

On Tue, Jan 27, 2009 at 10:25 AM, Matthew Groves <
matthewalangroves at gmail.com> wrote:

> I can make a drawing, but I'm afraid I don't have the means to create
> and post a digital image.  (I'm posting this email using some rocks
> and coke bottle I found.)  If there's genuine interest, I'll be happy
> to post an image in a day or so.  But someone will probably have to
> tell me how and where best to do that.  (Seriously, I'm not good at
> computers.)  Hang on, let me go draw something and then see if I can
> describe it...
>
> First, you have to give up the idea that the topography of the inner
> surface of the whorl is all relatively flat in relation to the spin
> Whorl's spin gravity, with habitat and cities everywhere.  Imagine
> that it's as eccentrically craggy and pitted as the exterior of a
> small asteroid.
>
> Imagine a roughly circular cross-section of the whorl, with the long
> sun as a point light source in the center.  Put a little stick-figure
> Silk down at 6:00.  Draw a cross-section of a bowl resting on with its
> bottom on the surface of the Whorl at, say, 1:00.  Sunlight shines
> into the valley at all times except shadelow.  Now, draw another bowl
> at 2:00, but tilt the bowl counterclockwise until the rim begins to
> eclipse the sun.  Now you've got shadow in your bowl.  If you draw an
> arrow indicating Silk's line of sight, you should find that he can see
> the shadow in the bowl.
>
> Now, if you can picture that, you're probably thinking, "Well, that's
> fine for bowls, and maybe for the exterior surface some very
> fracked-up asteroid, but no such geological formation would stand up
> under gravity.  Pas did some stupid shit when he built the Whorl, but
> surely he didn't build useless geographical features out of magical
> shiprock."  And I have no answer for you on that point.
>
> On Tue, Jan 27, 2009 at 11:19 AM, Jordon Flato <jordonflato at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > Are one of you going to pony up with some drawings or are we going to
> have
> > to arrange for a duel?
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