Fantasy and Science Fiction Trivia

Thursday: “It occurred to him that ghosts might not particularly like songs about ghosts.” Stasheff.

From The Warlock in Spite of Himself. Rod has run into the ghosts in the castle, and (as they are starved for music) is performing for them as a minstrel. He’s not sure they’d like “Ghost Riders In the Sky.”

Friday: “I’ve never noticed that being nonsensical keeps things from happening.” Leinster.

From Time Tunnel, published in 1964. This is the novel on which the TV series was based. To provide confusion, Leinster later wrote The Time Tunnel and Time Tunnel Adventure #2 Timeslip!, which were based on the TV series. They are totally different books. Back to the quote: the next sentence is, “Don’t you ever read about politics?”

Saturday: “Maxim Hirt was not very bright, but he knew a devil when he saw one.” Harlan Ellison. Context? #Scifi #IAN1

From “Deal From the Bottom,” in Earthman, Go Home! Actually, this particular devil was wearing tight jeans, a black turtleneck, thong sandals and a pointed beard. But he had a tail.

Sunday: “Love stinks.” Steven Gould. Context?

From Jumper. Davy is having a hard time really relating to another person.

Monday: “We’re in the middle of the army, Kiera. How much safer can we be?” Lauri J. Owen. Context?

From Fallen Embers. Marco is being just a bit sarcastic here, as he has reason to think the soldiers may have orders to kill or capture him.

Tuesday: “One dose of anything, be it medicine or tales, is only the beginning, not the immediate cure.” Gayle Greeno. Context?

From The Ghatti’s Tale. Two of the Ghattii, Mem’now and Koom, are trying to heal a third, Saam by telling him tales normally told to the young.

Wednesday: “Her only grief at her own impending death was that she could not return to Riya.” Bowling. Context?

From Homecoming. Marna has spent two centuries on an isolation satellite, but now the life-support system is failing.

Next week I’m going to switch genres and post quotes from mysteries.

Why Temperatures Remembered Don’t Match the Record

This has been a cold winter in North Pole, Alaska. (That’s a suburb of Fairbanks, by the way, not the North Pole.) It didn’t feel like a cold winter. I really expected it to be warmer than usual, mostly because we had so little weather with temperatures below -40 degrees F. (Or C, the two temperature scales cross at that point.) Instead, the period from Dec 1 to February 28 averaged 4 degrees F below normal. Why?

We don’t tend to remember events that are near normal. For us here in interior Alaska, winter temperatures aren’t perceived as all that cold until they reach 40 below. That’s when ice fog becomes a problem, tires become square and no longer grip the road, snow is like loose sand, and plastic shatters. Anything above around +20 in midwinter is a heat wave. Above freezing, we really worry–roads are usually ice covered, and they get very slippery when they thaw, even a little. We also tend to go more by daily high temperatures than by low in winter–anything that can freeze is frozen. (This obviously reverses during the growing season, but we’re talking winter here.)

The numbers differ according to where you live and how long you’ve lived there. I came to Alaska in the 60’s, and I remember all too well periods of several days with the daily high temperature being well below 40 below. (My old Master’s thesis records a five-day stretch of continuous 40 below, much of it 50 below or colder, and another that lasted 9 days.) That’s frigid! But we didn’t have any periods like that this year, so I didn’t perceive the winter as being particularly cold.

How about month by month? December was cold: -17.9 is 12 degrees F below normal. But there was very little extreme weather, in either direction. No high temperatures outside the +20 to -40 range, and only four days when the overnight low dropped to or below -40. Average, on extremes, or perhaps less extreme than normal. But it was also true that every single day had a low temperature below 0 F, and all but four days had daily high temperatures below 0. (That average, by the way, is obtained by adding up all the daily highs and lows and dividing them by twice the number of days in the month.)

January was quite a bit warmer by the official record. The average monthly temperature was – 6.0 degrees F, 3.7 degrees above normal. I would have said about the same as December except for the warm spell at the beginning of the month. But that warm spell, with two daily highs above freezing and five above 20, was enough to offset the three days of -40 or colder lows later in the month. We also had quite a few more days with daily highs above 0 — 19, in fact. So it did feel a little warmer than December, but not all that much. Again, the really cold weather was lacking.

February had an average monthly temperature of -6.5, 2.7 degrees below normal. It felt warmer than that, probably because the sun was back. But we still had only 5 days with temperatures at or above +20 F, and 3 days with lows below -40 F — colder than any of those in December and January, in fact. But the lack of really extreme low temperatures made February and the winter as a whole seem warmer than it was.

Official temperatures often don’t match what we remember, simply because what we remember tends to be the really extreme weather. It’s not that the weather service records are inaccurate, it’s just the way they are put together to make averages. It’s not the way we remember things.

How did the “official” temperatures compare with the way you remember the winter where you live?

North Pole Weather

64 degrees 49 minutes North:

Sunrise 6:57 am; sunset 8:53 pm for nearly 14 hours of daylight. We’re gaining almost 7 minutes a day, and by the end of the month sunset will be after 10 pm. What’s more, it’s finally beginning to warm up—it was far enough above freezing yesterday that I was able to shovel the snow off the top of the compost roller. My thermometer in the sun said 80 yesterday, and the air temperature was above 40, so I should be able to start putting garbage scraps into the black roller once it thaws enough to roll.

The snow has melted enough to settle more than 2” since last week—current snow stake measurement around 19”. The forecast is calling for snow showers this week, but I hope not much accumulation. Forecast high temperatures are in the 40’s except for Wednesday (below freezing that day) so I hope the net snow pack depth will continue to decrease. Of course it’ll stay below freezing at night for some time yet.

My web updates may be spotty the next few days, as I’m having computer problems. I went straight from CP/M to Macs, and I’ve never had a problem with them. Until now. My iMac has been getting slower ever since I had Snow Leopard installed, and Friday it gave me a blue screen when I tried to restart it. After several hours unplugged it started up, but I didn’t turn it off until my Mac guru came to work on it Saturday. First thing he did was start a backup of my hard drive. Would you believe the backup took 26 hours? We still don’t know exactly what the problem is, but I’m able to access my files again. I’ll try to get the Twitter quiz answers queued for Wednesday this morning, as well as transferring a few more files to the laptop. Hope I can continue to use the iMac for my primary machine, though—the laptop gives me a sore back.

Priority number one? Get the editing done on Tourist Trap. At least I transferred that file Friday!

The Leopard Gene in Horses (continued)

The pattern most people first think of in Appaloosa horses is the one that gave the gene its name—leopard. This pattern gives a white horse with round or oval spots of base color. There may be shading of the genetic base color on the flanks, behind the elbows or on the head.

Genetically, a leopard must have at least one Pattern-1 allele in order to have most or all of the body white. In addition, it must have one leopard allele and one wild-type allele at the TRPM1 locus. Two leopard alleles will lead to a few-spot leopard, with only a few colored spots. Other factors leading to the leopard pattern undoubtedly exist, but are still unknown.

The mane and tail may be mixed in color if some of the mane and tail hair grow from colored spots. The spots may have roan edges, called haloes, which normally develop after birth. Blacks tend to have more and larger leopard spots than do chestnuts, with bay being intermediate. Also, horses with black mixed in the coat (sooty) will sometimes have the black and red colors form separate spots.

Three of the horses in Tourist Trap have leopard markings.

Token is the mare ridden by Flame. She is fairly tall—around 16 hands. She is a chestnut leopard, white with copper spots. Genetically, she is homozygous for the most recessive of the extension alleles, has two copies of the Pattern-1 allele and one of the leopard allele. She is wild-type at all dilution, pinto spotting, grey and roan loci. She could have genes for minor white marking on face or feet, but they cannot be seen.

Dusty is the gelding ridden by Timi, who would just as soon not be riding. He is the calmest and laziest of the group, and the easiest for a novice rider to handle. He is also the least responsive to leg pressure. Dusty is a buckskin leopard, around 15 hands tall. He has wild-type extension genes, bay alleles at the agouti locus, and one cream and one wild-type gene at the cream locus. His pattern-1 and leopard alleles are the same as Token’s. He has quite a lot of white in his mane and tail, so they are not noticeably sparse.

Penny is the guide and her horse, Freckles, is a bay leopard gelding. Freckles is a little keener than the horses assigned to Penny’s clients, but he’s a bit younger and the cross-country trip is part of his training. Freckles’s underlying bay color is a little sooty, so he has both red and black spots. Genetically he is the same as Dusty but with sooty and without the cream allele.

The other two horses have the leopard allele but are not leopards, and I’ll talk about them next time. Today I have a balky computer, so this will be a very short post. If anyone has photographs that match the horses described, I’d love to be able to use them.