Month: August 2016

alexecinz
replied to your post “Nerds, help me out here: I am not a science person, but my…”

Another part of the answer would lie in the properties of the atmosphere. If you had aerosols with the right optical properties (could be biogenic and from the trees themselves) this would result in scattering and diffuse light. If you also had lots of low cloud that could also reflect light. The effect would be a misty glow, which would not cast harsh shadows.

YESSSSSS! Oh, that makes all the sense! All these parts are coming together to paint Aman as a misty, luminous, rainforest of refracted light and prismatic haze; totally unlike a world lit by the sun, but ethereal and soporific, with a unique atmosphere that is never to be replicated. Just the sort of thing to set the tone for an age of peace in a land tended by gods, a dream-state that will seem increasingly unreal once shattered. HNNNNGH THANK YOU ❤

periodicpumpkin:

misbehavingmaiar:

vardasvapors
replied to your post “Nerds, help me out here: I am not a science person, but my…”

I’m not touching the physics with a ten foot pole, but I think a *visual* theory for how the tree-light looks is that the “light” itself is luminous, so all the light doesn’t actually radiate from the tree, but the radiance from the tree takes the form of rays/halos which in turn radiate more light, on throughout the atmosphere, as if the light is a substance that looks like light but does not behave like light (rays traveling in a straight line = totally optional)

Now that’s a cool idea!!  😀
Maybe it’s a kind of luminous “pollen” the trees emit, the particles of which disperse light wherever they go? A sort of mist of light, too fine to touch or smell, hovering mostly at cloud level, fading as the tree it came from goes dormant. The day/night cycles could be like a radial wave coming off the trees every 12 hours in a pulse. I quite like that visual. :3

There’s actually a passage from the Silmarillion that supports this! 

“…of Telperion and the rain
that fell from Laurelin Varda hoarded in great vats like
shining lakes, that were to all the land of the Valar as wells
of water and of light.”

I’m not going to pretend to understand plants, but one of your questions (letter I?) did ask about somehow reflecting the light. What if instead of mirrors, there were luminous clouds? If we assume that the dew/rain of the trees is A.) literal liquid and not a metaphor, and B.) has similar properties to water, then it should be possible for it to be collected in tiny droplets suspended in the atmosphere like clouds. Which could then cover a much larger portion of Valinor than the direct light of the trees. 

That might also answer the other question (F?) about not blinding everyone. If the trees themselves weren’t very bright, but the dew was, then it might be more plausible.

Of course, this all leads to what must be very peculiar weather patterns in Valinor….

I really hope I’m not annoying you by jumping in on your posts like this…I’m just really passionate about made up physics… 🙂

YOOO, this! This is approaching the visual answer I think I’m looking for! 😀
Thank you! (Never apologize for lending your expertise to my fandom queries– that’s why I’m asking! I have a very limited scope of knowledge, and this fandom is full of cool people who specialize in areas of study that I know zilch about. It’s my greatest pleasure to collect and hoard these skeins of eclectic wisdom.<3 ) 

vardasvapors
replied to your post “Nerds, help me out here: I am not a science person, but my…”

I’m not touching the physics with a ten foot pole, but I think a *visual* theory for how the tree-light looks is that the “light” itself is luminous, so all the light doesn’t actually radiate from the tree, but the radiance from the tree takes the form of rays/halos which in turn radiate more light, on throughout the atmosphere, as if the light is a substance that looks like light but does not behave like light (rays traveling in a straight line = totally optional)

Now that’s a cool idea!!  😀
Maybe it’s a kind of luminous “pollen” the trees emit, the particles of which disperse light wherever they go? A sort of mist of light, too fine to touch or smell, hovering mostly at cloud level, fading as the tree it came from goes dormant. The day/night cycles could be like a radial wave coming off the trees every 12 hours in a pulse. I quite like that visual. :3

heartofoshun:

misbehavingmaiar:

Nerds, help me out here:

I am not a science person, but my understanding is that sunsets are caused by Rayleigh scattering as light passes through a relatively larger amount of air molecules when it is low in the sky and the light travels perpendicular to the earth’s surface; the light then bounces off the clouds and reflects fancy colors into our eyes all pretty-like. 

So, if you had your primary light source actually affixed to the surface of the earth, with light emanating radially from a central point (say, two massively radioactive glowing trees): 

A) Would you see sunsets the farther away from the trees you got, with clear light and blue skies the closer you got?
B) Would you see sunsets only at a certain elevation, and from a distance?
C) Would there be insufficient air molecules to scatter the light? 
D) Would you have to be like, WAY far away to see sunsets? Like on another continent? (Assuming the earth isn’t curved.)
E) I guess shadows would always point the same direction and it would vary depending on where you were relative to the trees?
F) HOW DO YOU GET A LIGHT SOURCE BRIGHT ENOUGH TO ILLUMINATE A WHOLE LANDMASS WITHOUT BLINDING ANYONE THAT LOOKED AT IT?
G) …Okay, would only Manwë and Varda ever get to see Sunsets from their stratospheric perch on Taniquietl? 
H) The trees would have to rotate somehow. I mean. They just would have to. Otherwise you’d have one always casting a shadow on a certain part of Aman. And everywhere else that had something blocking the path of the light, for that matter. Some bits of vegetation would get all the sunlight forever and then it’d be like WELCOME TO THE DEADZONE as soon as you hit tree shadow.
I) Would the lighting situation improve if Varda put like a big ol’ mirror in the sky to reflect the light back down?

J) Should I give up trying to make actual giant glowing trees work as a viable world building element and stick to a magical/metaphysical/non-literal explanation? orz ;; trees tho

My head would explode if I tried to make everything work scientifically in my fanfiction. But there are people like @lucifers-cuvette who do figure out certain things. But even in her case, she doesn’t necessarily make everything work! I know I don’t and I lose no sleep over it either. Hey, it’s fantasy!

Well, naturally! But half the fun of fantasy for me is taking the weird whimsical bits and grounding them in real principals. At the very least, I need to find solid and unique visuals for them that I can base scenes around. 
Lucifers-cuvette is a genius and a bonafide science person and I love her solution to the tree problem; plasma trees definitely work for her verse. 🙂 

My personal Arda playground needs its own version that I can draw and have characters interact with. I also really, really enjoy the brain puzzle of taking Tolkien’s mythos literally and trying to figure out how it would look, how it would work. I usually settle for a compromise between the canon descriptions, real-life cognates, and my own aesthetic twist. 

I’m not hung up on making everything work. I frequently jettison great swathes of canon, but I like to dissect it for usable parts first. Some of my favorite ideas come from taking a kernel of weird canon or quasicanon and building structures around it. 

And hey, if I wasn’t losing sleep over Tolkien, I’d be losing it over much less pleasant stuff. 

Nerds, help me out here:

I am not a science person, but my understanding is that sunsets are caused by Rayleigh scattering as light passes through a relatively larger amount of air molecules when it is low in the sky and the light travels perpendicular to the earth’s surface; the light then bounces off the clouds and reflects fancy colors into our eyes all pretty-like. 

So, if you had your primary light source actually affixed to the surface of the earth, with light emanating radially from a central point (say, two massively radioactive glowing trees): 

A) Would you see sunsets the farther away from the trees you got, with clear light and blue skies the closer you got?
B) Would you see sunsets only at a certain elevation, and from a distance?
C) Would there be insufficient air molecules to scatter the light? 
D) Would you have to be like, WAY far away to see sunsets? Like on another continent? (Assuming the earth isn’t curved.)
E) I guess shadows would always point the same direction and it would vary depending on where you were relative to the trees?
F) HOW DO YOU GET A LIGHT SOURCE BRIGHT ENOUGH TO ILLUMINATE A WHOLE LANDMASS WITHOUT BLINDING ANYONE THAT LOOKED AT IT?
G) …Okay, would only Manwë and Varda ever get to see Sunsets from their stratospheric perch on Taniquietl? 
H) The trees would have to rotate somehow. I mean. They just would have to. Otherwise you’d have one always casting a shadow on a certain part of Aman. And everywhere else that had something blocking the path of the light, for that matter. Some bits of vegetation would get all the sunlight forever and then it’d be like WELCOME TO THE DEADZONE as soon as you hit tree shadow.
I) Would the lighting situation improve if Varda put like a big ol’ mirror in the sky to reflect the light back down?

J) Should I give up trying to make actual giant glowing trees work as a viable world building element and stick to a magical/metaphysical/non-literal explanation? orz ;; trees tho

justastormie:

mistergandalf:

one of my favorite lotr facts is that gondorians speak sindarin as a first language and yet when faramir was talking to frodo and sam about cirith ungol he was like “we don’t know what’s in there.” like faramir. cirith ungol is sindarin for “pass of the spider.” do the math

i want the gondorians to just be in denial. sitting around a fire after a day of badass rangering telling ghost stories and “I wonder what haunts Spider Pass” and one guy goes “hahaha what if it’s a giant spider. or like. a billion spiders. ghost spiders”. everyone else throws shit at them and is KNOCK IT OFF. 

faramir is IT’S NOT A GIANT MAN EATING SPIDER OKAY

‘cause look there’s the unimaginable evil of mordor and then there’s the thought that you basically live next to a pass entirely of evil death spiders. i’d be in denial too. 

misbehavingmaiar:

Oldest Welsh Lullaby: Pais Dinogad –Ffynnon, Lynne Denman

“Pais Dinogad, fraith, fraith;
O grwyn balaod ban wraith.
Chwid! chwid! Chwidogaith,
Gochanwn, gochenyn wythgaith.
…saithhgeith
…chwechgeith
…pimpgeith
…tairgeith  
…daugeith
…ungeith

Un, dau, tri, petuar, pimp, chwech, saith, wyth.

Yan, tan, tether, pedder, pimp, sether, hither, hother.*

Pan elei dy dat ty e helya; llath ar y ysgwyd llory eny law. Ef gelwi gwn gogyhwc. Giff! Gaff! Dhaly! Dhaly! Dhwg! Dhwg!
Ef lledi bysc yng corwc. Mal ban llad. Llew llywywg. Pan elei dy dat ty e vynyd. Dydygai ef penn ywrch penn gwythwch pen hyd. Penn grugyar vreith o venyd. Penn pysc o rayadyr derwennyd. Or sawl yt gyrhaedei dy dat ty ae gicwein o wythwch a llewyn a llwyuein. Nyt anghei oll ny uei oradein.”
-x

*The first count of eight, as well as the number of slaves, or ”ones in chains”, is in Old Welsh. The second (yan, tan, tethera, methera, etc.)  is one of the variations of Cumbrian sheep-counting numerals.

“Dinogad’s shift is speckled, speckled;
It was made from the pelts of martens.
`Wheet! Wheet! a-whistling,
I would sing, sang the eight in chains. 
(….seven, six, five, four, three, two, one in chains…)

When your father went out to hunt –
A spear on his shoulder, a club in his hand –
He called on his lively dogs,
`Giff! Gaff! Take, take! Fetch, fetch!’
He killed fish from his coracle
Like the lion killing small animals.
When your father went to the mountains
He would bring back a roebuck, a boar, a stag,
A speckled grouse from the mountain,
And a fish from the Derwennydd falls.
At whatever your father aimed his spear –
Be it a boar, a wild cat, or a fox –
None would escape but that had strong wings.”  
–x

Reblogging with a better transcription and notes! 

It took me a long time to figure out the series of numerals counting down the number of slaves/ones in chains, because the song is actually missing a numeral; it skips from “five in chains” to “three in chains”; there’s no “petuargeith”, or equivalent.  At least, I think so. I’m flying blind, I don’t speak Old Welsh. 

masteroftheseas
replied to your post “// tumblr has some sort of law of conservation whereby for every five…”

ur onto me. wesley i confess. sometimes, when a website makes me prove i’m not a robot, i fail.

yesterday, when i tried to log on to tumblr, i inputed the same information six times, and it made me prove i wasn’t a robot six times. on the seventh try, it let me in. my humanity is flickering on and off like a lightbulb. it won’t be long now.

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