Re: writers rant

On Mon, Aug 11, 2014 at 5:58 PM, Grey Malkin <grymalkyn@gmail.com> wrote:

Strange things can throw you. Some while ago, I was reading, and enjoying,
a book set in the 7th century in Ireland.

It somewhat threw me when one of the characters referred to some place as
being a number of kilometres away.

I once read a standard medieval fantasy in which a noise that the main character heard was described as being like the droning of an airplane.  Which, just...no.  It would be one thing if the narrator was telling the story, like, say, in The Hobbit, so that the airplane was a frame of reference for the person being told the story.  But this didn't have that sort of conceit.  It was just lazy writing.  (And so mediocre, apparently, that I don't even remember the book or what the story was about.  Just the airplane droning where it shouldn't have been.)

Laurie

As much as I loved Frozen and mainlined "Let it Go" for days, the line about "frozen fractals in the air" always trips me up because somehow I just can't imagine that the Queen of Arendelle learned advanced mathematics as part of her royal education.

Gwyn

That line always sticks out for me too. Given that this is a world that appears to have bicycles but not firearms, I can't get too worked up about anachronisms here. I read it as implying that fractals are just one more thing that kids these days assume always existed, which I find fascinating. (And a little sad, because learning that fractals and chaos theory were things that real people, many of whom were still alive at the time, discovered through their own curiosity was something I found quite inspirational as a teenager. Math isn't just something that gets handed to you in dried out textbooks. It's something you can do and make!)  But to respond to your point, you don't have to know advanced mathematics to know what fractals are in a colloquial sense, (funny crinkly shapes where little bits look more or less like bigger bits). Presumably the kids who are watching the movie generally only know about fractals in this sense, so we don't have to presume that Elsa knows what a Hausdorff dimension is, or anything like that.

Owen