Author: Stainless Steel Fox
Description: A report by Twilight Sparkle done when she wasn't exploring the ramifications of friendship. A scientifically minded pony like her would try and figure out a connection between all the wierdness that the regular inhabitants of Ponyville take for granted. Inspired in part by the 'Political Economy of Equestria' treatise, and part by Twilight Sparkle writing her own report on comets. She does other research, so why wouldn't she research this?On the Nature of Anomalous Magic Levels Surrounding the Everfree Forest
Additional Tags: Twilight Sparkle science Everfree Silly
22 comments:
Nice use of vocabulary, definetly sounds like a smart person. This was interesting, it even made sense, which is shocking. Ponytastic.
It compels me to proofread. Anything by "Twilight Sparkle" should be correct.
Well done, in my opinion. I especially liked the theory about gemstones; their abundance and heterogeneous nature always bothered me but the idea that they grow like plants is quite imaginative.
The cover article of this month's Scientific Equestrian.
really good and that "gems seeds" sounds pretty interesting
Ponies, expanding my vocabulary one word at a time.
terpsechorian, adj: of or related to dancing.
I never thought I'd read a scientific paper inspired by My Little Pony, but here I am! I liked it, it reminded me of when I was back in chemistry class, and I had to write summaries and reports on these things. Ahh, I miss that class...
An absolute bounty of dry humor and interesting conjecture. Also, I loved the term "kilopony". The writing was delightfully in-character; completely serious yet I had the feeling I was being teased the whole time.
I thought the term kilopony was a bit much. "Hoof" makes enough sense, but if there are kiloponies, there must also be centiponies, milliponies, and... ponies.
Maybe if it had been Kilocanter instead...
lol, I realize that I actually ended up reading this like I read all scientific papers... intro, conclusions, then skim methods and results. Took me a minute to realize how silly that was.
The only flaw I can see is inappropriate apostrophe usage.
I can't say enough good things about this. I love the dry, reserved humor. You did a great job!
A question on measurements: Is it three hooves to a pony? Or four?
"may start to develop wild magical talents beyond the normal abilities for their races"
I am immediately reminded of Pinkie Sense and "The Stare"
This felt like reading a science article and actually made sense. Even the rock farming which reminds me of the jewel growing feature from the Pokemon D&P games.
I think the only thing missing from the report is an explanation or hypothesis on why the weather moves on it's own in the Everfree.
Also I liked the titles for the books in the biblography.
I see that diagrams are reference in the paper but aren't anywhere to be found.
My main critique is that it comes across like a high school lab report rather than a scientific paper. This is understandable, given that most people never see anything beyond the level of a lab report.
Also, in Methods you have Twilight collaborating with, um, Twilight.
I shall now change my college major to Poniology. It makes so much more sense...
Any chance we could see the figures the paper referenced?
Thanks everybody. I'm glad people enjoyed it.
@ Chakat - Yeah, I admit it, I'm not a scientist, but a knuckle dragging engineer. I'm more at home writing requirement specifications. I havn't written a science report since Secondary (High) school.
As for the collaboration issue, I originally wrote itr as an OC Professor Prism, then realised it was exactly the sort of thing Twilight would write, so I went through and re-wrote it for her. I missed this reference. I've corrected it in the original, but fanfiction dot net is not letting me upload.
@ invinible and others - I never actually did the diagrams, since I use ff net, and wouldn't have been able to load them. Besides, I didn't think people would actually want to see them. The references are just there to add vermisilitude, like the bibliography.
As for the units, I assumed they'd use a metric system, powers of 10 and prefixes for every 1000 multiplier. A hoof would be a standardised pony hoof width, and a pony, or body-length would be 10 of these, the metre equivalent.
Maybe I should have gone with a power of 4 or power of 12 system, number of hooves (like we use fingers) or hooves x 3, simply because it makes maths easier (12 divides so may ways so it reduces a lot of division to whole numbers).
The thing is that Pinkie Pie mentions inches and centimeters, but the story was well written nonetheless.
[a bit late in the game but I only read it yesterday...]
Liked it, although you'd need an abstract paragraph to get it in for publication (I dare you to try for 'Nature' this April the first...). Other than that I thought you had the dry style of most papers pretty much spot-on.
Post a Comment