Lightning and Tolkien

Sharing 2 neat STEM findings

[Trivia: what are the 3 geological periods of the Mesozoic Era? (Hint: yes, one of them is “that one.”)]

I came across two STEM-oriented findings this week that I wanted to share.

First, a new publication in Nature describes work in Switzerland of the “first demonstration that laser-induced filaments—formed in the sky by short and intense laser pulses—can guide lightning discharges over considerable distances.” This work is done to come up with a better method than the lightning rod, Benjamin Franklin’s still-cutting-edge idea for keeping lightning away from vulnerable structures. The paper explains: “We believe that this experimental breakthrough will lead to progress in lightning protection and lightning physics . . . Although this research field has been very active for more than 20 years, this is the first field-result that experimentally demonstrates lightning guided by lasers.”

What comes to mind is this classic XKCD, illustrating conditional risk.

The other thing: I came across a project that’s taken J.R.R. Tolkien’s writings and is looking at statistics of the language. One fun result they found and were circulating involves the use of “don’t” vs. “do not” in his Middle Earth writings:

“tokens” in this text-analyzed-with-a-computer context means a unit of text, e.g. every individual word. Ironically, both “do not” and “do” “n’t” here count for 2 tokens, but regardless are counted per 100,000 total tokens.

The story these numbers are telling is that the slightly more casual “don’t” is overwhelmingly more common in The Hobbit, completely vacant from the more mythopoeic Silmarillion, and shares space with almost complete equality in the namesake trilogy.

If you want to read more about the details of the tokenization or the project in general, they describe everything here.

~

Answer: Triassic, Jurassic (named for some mountains in the Alps), and Cretaceous.