Scaling Up

You'll See How Clever I Am

At least in my own head.  For today we are going to go back to a Quora question and my hair-splittingly pedantic reply to it, which requires that we add in a picture in order to set the scene, and also possibly click-bait a few credulous passers-by.  Art!

Scaling the heights

     This, as you should surely know, shows Frodo and Sam climbing the secret staircase to the pass of Cirith Ungol, almost at the gates of Minas Morgul.  The other party, Gollum, can't be seen as he's probably scouting ahead and plotting treachery - possibly the other way round.  Okay, now we've nailed that, let us conjure up another image.  Art!

     This is an army, LOTR-style.  Having established that, let me add in the question from Qoura that I answered.

Why couldn't an army march through Mordor like Frodo and Sam did?

     Well, my first response was: "How would said army get into Mordor in the first place? They’d have to get in either through Minas Morgul or the Black Gate. It would be impossible for an army to follow the route that Frodo and Sam did over the pass at Cirith Ungol."

     If you look at the first picture you can understand what I meant here.  O, let's have a little pictorial illumination.  Art!

Here, 'Morannon' is the 'Black Gate'

     Next we exert Author's Privilege: "If we employ hand-waving to get them into Mordor proper, then where do they get water and fodder for their horses (cavalry or supply wagon teams)? They would need to carry tons of provisions because there’s none on the Plateau of Gorgoroth. Not only that, it’s full of pits and chasms and poisonous fumes, making movement en masse difficult to co-ordinate or achieve."

     Not only that, the broken nature of the ground, especially on the PoG, would prevent the effective deployment and use of cavalry in large formations, which is when it's most effective.  One suspects that an army trying to cross the PoG would suffer a little in terms of morale, because it's a toxic, barren wasteland.  Art!

And all the water is polluted

     We are supposing that this army marching through Mordor suffered some losses getting into that unhappy country, yet not crippling.  However - "Then there are the armies of orcs who garrison Mordor, who would not be inclined to sit quietly by and watch the invaders. Then there are the Nazgul, Sauron’s air force."

     The Nazgul are a force-multiplier, capable of bombarding any army with boulders, picking up and crushing any single soldier, and of course causing men's morale to collapse completely.  Although that last risks them coming into effective bowshot, so Sauron would only use them sparingly.

     My post-script was: "Two hobbits sneaking across the landscape in disguise could pull it off, but not an army."

     You see, going from a mere two souls to twenty thousand - it just doesn't scale up.

     The last line was "Of course, I could be overthinking this ..." which is true of so much of BOOJUM!

A Which Of What?

Your Humble Scribe is enjoying reading "The Short Stories Of Sherlock Holmes", yet is occasionally puzzled by the odd word here and there.  This is not surprising as some stories date back 130 years and what was commonplace then is now utterly obscure.  In the story "Black Peter" - about the villainous retired sea captain Peter Casey, not the Dutch assistant to Sinter Klaas - mention is made of a 'Tantalus of brandy'.

     Now, Conrad is no stranger to Tantalus.  Art!

     A book no better than it should be.  Art!

     A 'Tantalus' was a lockable cabinet that displayed drinks, so you couldn't get into your rum or whisky unless you had the key - so you were 'Tantalised'.   Hmmm.  Late Victorian humour.

Filling In A Detail Or Two

In pimping the blog yesteryon, I mentioned a statistic or two about extrasolar planets, one of my favouritest areas of astronomy.  Just think that, prior to 1995, this field didn't exist at all, and the only planets we knew of for certain were those of the Solar System.  Art!

     'Neptune-like' means similar to Neptune or Uranus in our own solar system, that is, much larger and more massive than Earth.  'Gas Giants' are those similar (or bigger) than Jupiter or Saturn, i.e. even bigger than Neptune.  'Super-Earth' types are those several times larger than Earth with a widely-variant composition.  'Terrestrial' are those similar in size to Earth, Venus and Mars and are (comparatively) small rocky worlds.

     As detection methods have become more sophisticated, so we are able to detect smaller and smaller worlds, and with the James Webb Space Telescope now being operational, it may be possible to analyse the atmospheres of nearby worlds, detecting those with an oxygen-bearing atmosphere.  Art!

     Soon, perhaps!

"The Sea Of Sand"

Talking of aliens and far distant worlds ...

     The Doctor has secured himself underneath a truck, knowing it will be salvaged by the bio-vores, and it has been.

Thankfully the vehicle’s ground clearance was high, so he suffered only occasional bumps and scratches from the desert floor.  This slow progress became slower once the towing bio-vores moved onto loose sand, until they stopped briefly.

          Hot as it was underneath the car, it swiftly became even hotter as the two vehicles moved forward again.  Sweat beaded on the Doctors bare skin, and a blast of heat akin to an open oven struck his back.

          Partially-cooled molten glass! he realised.  The bio-vores had paused to allow a barrier of molten glass to cool sufficiently for the Sahariana to cross without sinking or bursting into flames.  The sweat poured off him, sizzling when it hit the smooth, radiant surface of the glass; airless and scorching, the underside of the car reflected heat back at him.  Stinking fumes from the tyres stung his eyes.

          Then, abruptly, the heat vanished.  Bare and dimpled sands beneath the Doctor’s back replaced the patterned mirror of glass.

          Aha!  A moat!  he realised.  A barrier established around the dig to protect the bio-vores and their Infiltration Complex.  Using geo-thermal power to keep it molten, directed from their science buildings.

          Progress remained slow as the pair of vehicles crept up the inclined sands leading to the sand bowl, then became dangerously erratic on the opposite slope, the Sahariana sliding sideways and running forward.

     Into the dragon's lair!

Manglement At It's Finest

This is quite a pithy example from Quora.  The question asked was whether a firing had backfired disastrously, and Quoran Amelia Andiamo answered.

     Her hubby worked at an international construction company, where his job as Chief Financial Officer was to ensure it turned a profit, and he'd been doing this successfully for many years.

     Enter the owner's son.  He was a recent graduate whose idea of a productive day was to get bombed out of his head on The Devil's Lettuce.

     You can see where this is going, can't you?

     Yes, Daddy replaced OP's hubby with Junior.

     Hub wasn't too bothered, he got an enormous severance package that he used to start up his own construction firm.

     Hubris didn't take too long to strike.  Hub's original company won a tender to build a London skyscraper, which they got as they underbid the competition by millions.

     Construction got underway.  Art!

     It turned out once things were underway that Junior had 'forgotten' to include the cost of electrically wiring the whole building.  This disastrous omission bankrupted the company*.

     Hub's new company is then able to step right in, poach a lot of the redundant employees, buy up all the old firm's industrial plant at fire-sale prices, and get the tender.

     Who's the daddy?

Finally -

It was absolutely raw outside when I walked Edders, and now it's snowing.  Not sticking, thankfully, and I hope that doesn't happen until nightfall as it's the weekly shop tonight.

*  I may try and find out how much this should be.