Interesting Links for 07-08-2017

[andrewducker]

A brief history of quantum alternatives

(tags: quantum history )

Neil Gaiman talks about writers’ humility, bygone bestsellers, memory loss, heroes and being exactly famous enough

(tags: neilgaiman interview )

Government debt per capita for European countries

(tags: debt Europe visualisation )

In Conversation: Trent Reznor

(tags: music interview )

Break the silence on partition and British colonial history – before it’s too late

(tags: India Pakistan history uk )

"I hacked my body for a future that never came" (Well, yet)

(tags: thefuture cyborg Technology )

Tolerance is not a moral precept

(tags: philosophy society morality history )

The Messed Up Mountains of Middle-earth

(tags: geology fantasy Tolkien )

How do you find integer solutions to x/(y + z) + y/(x + z) + z/(x + y) = 4?

(tags: mathematics )

Flesh-eating bugs at the beach: What really ate Sam and why

(tags: ocean meat australia )

Comments

[momentsmusicaux]

Not just Middle Earth. The Wheel of Time's map has moutains which are basically just convenient borders around the sides of the rectangle that aren't sea.

[jack]

I have read many explanations of the "with a 45 degree polarising filter between two polarising filters at 0 and 90 degrees, light gets through, but without it, none does" experiment. I don't *understand* it. As far as I can tell, this is one of the confusing things which apply to waves to general, quantum or not; and the best explanations are not in terms of observation of other quantum weirdness, but in terms of EM radiation being absorbed and retransmitted (albeit in a way that preserves some important properties). Can anyone explain this better?

[movingfinger]

I always took the Middle-Earth maps to be schematic in the way that medieval T-O maps of the world are schematic. These were not used for navigation; nautical charts and real-world-based maps coexisted with these. (Orbis terrarum or mappa mundi should land you loads of examples.) Modern fantasy fiction maps generally derive from that type of map, not from reality; they are intentionally stylized.

[calimac]

Any geologists writing blithely about Tolkien really ought to do a literature search first, where they will find "The Geology of Middle-earth" (1995) and other writings by the late William A.S. Sarjeant, a professor of geology at the University of Saskatchewan, who had no trouble producing a tectonic analysis of Middle-earth geology.