(urth) Ansible Interview

[David Stockhoff]

It's true that ambient/reflected light would cast weak shadows---not so much "shadows," really. The bottoms of valleys would catch less of that light, since much of it comes from the sides.

Of course 

(1) this could not happen at all at "noon." I haven't read the book recently: does the shade have zones, so that daytime would feature something other than noon all day? I recall that the shade snaps up in the morning, so we know it is at least relatively swift. And 

(2) the shade would prevent daylight from directly overhead from illuminating at night, so this would be a nighttime phenomenon.

However

(1) when day recedes or approaches, there surely would be light reflected from adjacent lands, so there would be an after- and a foreglow. How long, I don't know, but I bet you'd see RELATIVELY brighter mountains and darker valleys at some point in the process. Perhaps this is what Wolfe/the text referred to. At least, this is ARTISTICALLY acceptable/plausible.

(2) It would have been so easy to introduce dawn and dusk, if Typhon's people had wanted to. Just create 2x 50% shades wider than 12 hours, and stagger/offset them. You'd have a transitional period: 1x 50%-dim hour on each side if you made each shade 1 hour wider. But it seems they didn't.



------------------------------

Message: 4
Date: Wed, 21 Jan 2009 22:31:59 +0000
From: "Son of Witz" <sonofwitz at butcherbaker.org>
Subject: Re: (urth) Ansible Interview
To: "The Urth Mailing List" <urth at lists.urth.net>
Message-ID: <W7671630349258991232577119 at webmail38>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

well.......

the sun turns. It may be a cylinder or a plane, but the point is that half of it is shaded.
meaning, it's photon vectors are not omnidirectional.
At some points the sun is a sliver. it widens & narrows through the day.
and there IS a shade, that's why sunset is called Shadelow, I don't remember pulses of darkness and I just finished that book.
So as this light plane, or half cylinder rotates, it would have shadows.

And then there is ambient reflected light, and we're talking about Shadows in the skylands, where, conceivably, there would only be reflected light off of neighboring lands that aren't yet in darkness. Then the fact that the Shade is not opaque, since you can see the skylands in the first place, so there would be additional reflected light.  I think all of that adds up to enough an uneven distribution of light, and thus shadows.

/my two cents.
~witz



---
avast! Antivirus: Outbound message clean.
Virus Database (VPS): 090122-0, 01/22/2009
Tested on: 1/22/2009 7:25:23 AM
avast! - copyright (c) 1988-2009 ALWIL Software.
http://www.avast.com