Tag Archives: fantasy

“Winter is Coming”

Leave a reply

Notes from A Song of Fire and Ice and SCIENCE: A panel on George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones series. Saturday, July 5, 2014, at Convergence 2014.

One of the distinctive features of this world is that the seasons last for multiple years, and the length of each season is unpredicable. How can this happen? Not by axial tilt, as on our Earth. Nicole Gugliucci said it could be achieved by planetary dynamics and referred us to “Winter is coming”. This paper (and I strongly recommend a look at the full paper as well as the abstract) suggests that the planet is orbiting a double star, in which case the orbit could be chaotic, leading to unpredictable seasons. Apparently (I have not finished reading the series) GRRM never explicity wrote that there was only one sun. In any case, one of the stars could be a roughly solar mass black hole, and hence invisible. Contrary to popular culture, black holes do not suck up everything around them. If you are in an orbit that stays well outside the event horizon you will never fall in. I asked about the long term stability of such a system. You want to be sure your planet stays in the “Goldilocks zone” — not too hot and not too cold. From “Winter is coming”:

To study the long-term stability of the CBP, we embarked on a long voyage of integration.
The orbit was stable after integrating for one million days. On Day 1,000,001 the Andals invaded. Funding cuts to all research projects promptly followed. We were unable to continue our work. Those of us who expressed strong opinions against the cuts were sent to the Wall.

You have to use days as your unit of time here because the years would vary in length. In winter they would be longer. I think these would also have to be sidereal days, certainly if both stars of the binary system are visible suns.

The mummy’s curse: It came from an Egyptian tomb…

Leave a reply

Well no, actually, it didn’t. But once a myth lurches into life, there’s no stopping it

…the epidemiologist Mark Nelson from the University of Tasmania, Australia, designed a formal trial of the curse based on protocols for testing the effects of drugs. He compared people who were in the tomb at key times with people who were in Egypt but not in the tomb. His report, published in the British Medical Journal in 2002, concluded that being in the tomb did not significantly hasten death. The ‘participants’ in the study lived on average for more than 20 years after the tomb was opened, whether they visited it or not.

…the mummy’s curse as we know it is a product of 19th-century England. Dominic Montserrat, an Egyptologist from the Open University, traced the first mention to a science-fiction book called The Mummy! (1827) by the little-known novelist Jane Webb Loudon, who was inspired after attending a public unwrapping of a mummy near Piccadilly Circus in London. Loudon set her story in the 22nd century and featured an embalmed corpse who threatened to strangle the book’s hero, a young scholar called Edric.

Islam and alcohol (and fantasy)

Leave a reply

Tipsy taboo. I particularly noticed:

A handful of scholars permit alcohol as long as it is not made from grapes and dates, because these are specifically mentioned in the Koran.

I had run across this concept exactly once before, in Poul Anderson’s 1971 novel Operation Chaos. From a scene in chapter 5:

“I believe you are concealing something,” went on the emir. He gestured at his glasses and decanter, which supplied him with a shot of Scotch [This is a world of magic], and sipped judiciously. The Caliphate sect was also heretical with respect to strong drink; the maintained the while the Prophet forbade wine, he said nothing about beer, gin, whisky, brandy, rum, or akvavit.

Pentecost

Leave a reply

Pentecost, May 27, 2012

Lá na Cincíse, 27ú lá Mí na Bealtaine 2012

This past Sunday was Pentecost. At St. Mary’s, as I have seen elsewhere, a tradition is to read one one of the lessons in multiple languages. I volunteered to read in Irish. We read the Gospel, after our Deacon introduced it. The Irish translation is from An Bíobla Naofa.
Léigh tuilleadh