But then there are those small moments when all the hard work seems to pays off. Today I found out that a chapter that I had written for a scientific Encyclopedia got published. Although I wrote it over a year ago it was still a buzz to see it in print.
One down side is that I can't remember if in the agreement I get a hard copy of it or not, because if I don't, it is retailing at between $1,500 and $1,700... ouch. Maybe I wont be seeing a copy of it after all!
As a side note, when I was working on this I also wrote a hypothetical piece on the physiological and psychological impact of Mordians living on a planet of perpetual darkness. If I find it I'll post it up one day.
It was also around that time that I postulated that 'Cadian' was derived from 'ca' - an abbreviation for circa, and 'diem' or 'dies' - meaning day. ...Because really no one expects a Cadian to live for more then a day? Nar, I've seen Drax's troops, it more likely refers to the fact that Cadia is attacked circa diem.
Anyho back to the real writing.....
Ooooh, nice! Did you pick that so if you fell asleep while writing it you could claim it as research? I'd love to see that piece on Mordia if you find it ... me and Headologist have been doing lots on Battlefleet Gothic recently, and I was thinking about stuff like artificial days on board ships for long journeys etc
ReplyDeleteCool! For my last big experiment I put people in a dimly lit 'big brother' style house and shifted them to an artificial 28h day for 2 weeks (without them knowing). Good fun (for us, not them).
ReplyDeleteBy the 41st millennium I'd expect that we could just alter our suprachiasmatic nucleus and have people live to whatever cycle we wanted. But then again in the book Mechanicum, most of the servitors all had their need for sleep removed. Anyway I'm just rambling here, but I reckon that on ships in 40k 1 of 2 things would happen:
1) An artificial 24h cycle would be strictly adhered to across the ship.
OR 2) Everyone would just free run and keep to their own cycle of 24.18 hours, or shorter to 23h, or longer to 24.5h, and eventually the whole crew would be out of sync with each other. I have seen this happen with scientist in Antarctica. In the data we couldn't work out why two people's sleep/wake cycles spontaneously went into sync until someone suggested that they had started sleeping together!
Congratulations sir! Lots of people I know seem to be getting articles and pieces published at the moment... always enjoy reading about psychological experiments, interesting stuff. I think 1 is the most likely option, although 2 is an interesting one - definitely something to replicate on research stations. Not sure how often Techpriests sleep together though :P
ReplyDeleteOne of the main reasons I considered joining the RN as a Hydrophic/Oceanographic Specialist was to sod off to Antarctica (I'm not sure when people cite joining the Navy to see the world, that that's often what they have in mind).
My memory is pretty sketchy but I'm sure there's supposed to be an Imperial Standard Time of sorts based on Terran time, so my solution I suggested to Scipio was that anyone regularly travelling to multiple planets on a regular basis would wear two watches - one with Imperial Standard Time, and another that could be adpated to local time. A faintly ridiculous idea, but I think faintly ridiculous works well in 40k. You could have a watch with two displays but that sounds too "Star Trek" to me lol.
For most ratings on ships I imagine even if they do see any natural light, the hours they are on watch or off watch would govern their daily lives more.