conuly | Speaking of things I resent about my childhood reading -

or in this case, my adolescent reading - a few weeks ago I was looking up sunrise/sunset times around the globe, as you do, and discovered that the sun doesn't go down until after 8pm in early September in Scotland.

And my brain immediately was hijacked by the realization that even if they sorta run through everything, and don't allow any downtime between one student and the next, there's no freaking way they're finishing the Sorting Hat ceremony any time before 10pm. After nine hours on a train with minimal supervision. And that's if you assume the smaller size Hogwarts where there can't be more than 50 of them per year.

They have to get the older kids seated, explain things to the first years, and then if we assume exactly two minutes per kid - bam, there's an hour and a half gone, right there.

So if you're still writing or reading fanfic at Hogwarts, enjoy this little fact bouncing around your brain! It does not work! There's no way it can work! Those kids would riot from hunger, and probably more than a few of them would cry. I don't care how much candy they ate on the train, it wouldn't help. It never does.

Of course, fixing that still wouldn't fix the fact that it's all more than a bit toxic, but I knew that already.

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

nicki

Ugh. I have this problem with authors all the time. It throws me right out of whatever I'm reading.

From:

conuly

None of them can do math, but in this case what bugs me is that my brain is still being hijacked into doing the math for Harry fucking Potter.

From:

kengr

Yeah, I got jolted when an author had a half moon (quarter? it's been a while) rising at *sunset*. Not possible. If it's rising at sunset then it *has* to be full or nearly so.

That's not math, though, that's geometry.

for math, consider all the authors who don't grasp the square-cube law. If you make something X times bigger, all of the areas go up by X squared, and all the volumes (and hence masses) go up by X cubed.

The intro to Babylon 5 suffers from this. "a million tonnes"...

Sorry, a quick back of the envelope calculation shows that the *air* in B5 masses more than that

From:

conuly

There was a TV show I watched for a while in which the moon was always full. Like, they'd explicitly say that today's night mission was taking place exactly a week from the last episode's night mission, and - the moon would still be full! And nobody commented on how weird it was that the world ending disaster also, incidentally, broke how the moon works along with all the electricity.

From:

moonhare

I think the movie I watched that made me unable to unthink of these things was Stalag 17, when William Holden catches up the German spy by asking him when Pearl Harbor was attacked.

Edited Date: 2024-11-03 06:59 pm (UTC)

From:

purplecat

More like 30-40 students per year, I would think. It's a while since I read them, but I can only recall about 8 Gryffindors in Harry's year.

I mean the point still stands...

From:

cactuswatcher

Everything points to there being no more than 40 - 50 students in each year at Hogwarts, and that works only because the sleeping rooms can be magically any size needed. As I understand it, the students can quit and move on after they take O.W.L.S., so there aren't ever 350 students there. The thing that got me the most reading was the Christmas during the TriWizard tournament. Most of the kids younger than 4th year would have no reason for hanging around school, they wouldn't be part of the Yule Ball. Yet at JKR says there are around a 100 turkeys served at lunch that day. Hope they had a lot of magical freezer space! At the Ball there are about a hundred small tables in the hall with about a dozen people sitting around each of them. Who are all these people?

Then with 80 to a 100 kids at each long table normally, and Harry sitting in the middle how do he and Hagrid manage to wink at each other so often while sitting in the hall? Very still children sitting between them and good eyesight, I suppose.

Edited Date: 2024-11-03 01:53 pm (UTC)

From:

thewayne

One of my favorite trivia questions to stump most Americans with is if you draw a line from the northernmost point of the Lower 48 U.S. states, what part of the U.K. would it intersect with? And the answer is, of course, none. It's pretty darn far north!

From:

meowmensteen

That always throws people off when they move to Seattle from California. They have no idea how being that much further from the equator can change the times of daylight in a day so drastically. In the winter I'll leave home in the dark, and come home in the dark. In the summer the sun is still shining when I'm trying to go to sleep at night. I imagine it's even worse in Scotland.

From:

adrian_turtle

"In summer, quite the other way, I have to go to bed by day" was written by somebody in Scotland. Not (or not only) from the perspective of a little kid put to bed early.

A few years ago, it came up in conversation that my niece was well into her teens before she had any idea that seasons were reversed in the southern hemisphere. It had just never come up. In January, her grandparents in South Carolina had warmer weather than she saw in Virginia. She had family in Australia, who had warm weather in January, and she thought it was obvious that they had warmer winters than SC because they were even farther south. Perfectly reasonable.

And when I was tutoring pre-calculus, I saw several textbooks use sunset times as an example of a cosine function. (Just giving them a few functions for different cities, not having them do the full lattitude calculations.) More than one student was unaware that summer sunsets were later up north. Not just they didn't have any sense of how much later. They didn't have any awareness that they were later at all.

From:

conuly

Everyone kinda thinks that London is more or less the same as NYC, but in fact, it's on the same latitude as Calgary.

From:

kengr

Space: 1999.

In the Breakaway episode where the waste dump explodes and throws the moon out of orbit, they show the acceleration plastering folks to the floor on Moonbase. That's gotta be 4 or 5 gees.

Which means the stuff on the other hemisphere of the moon would be being pulled *away* from the surface at that same acceleration (minus 1/6th gee). Which means the moon would have fallen apart...

From:

conuly

I choose to believe, for the sake of multiplying by 50, that Harry's year is slightly smaller than the norm. I mean, it's plausible.

Of course, JKR's estimate was that there are 1000 students in Hogwarts, which is laughable and also makes the school staff schedule even more unworkable than it already is. Whichever set of numbers you use, there's no way to square that away with only three schools in Magical Europe and Magical Britain alone is big enough to host multiple professional sports teams, a huge government bureaucracy, and two or three regular periodicals.

It turns out that her inability to do math is the least problematic thing about her, but I still wish she'd run those numbers by somebody. Anybody.

From:

conuly

For reference, Eton, which is a. Very Exclusive b. single-sex and c. doesn't cover seven years, still has both more students than Hogwarts and a lower student/teacher ratio.

From:

conuly

JKR also says that there are 1,000 students at Hogwarts.

She says a lot of things, and most of what she says has to be totally tossed out as not making any sense.

But as long as we're writing our AUs, why not write an AU in which Non-Wizarding Britain is just a little less queerphobic than in reality?

From:

conuly

Honestly, the idea of the sunrise and sunset not changing according to the season has always perplexed me, though I know that's what happens.

What's really amazing is that they change in different directions depending on where you are! I used to assume, without thinking about it, that sunrise and sunset both moved in opposite directions depending on which side of which equinox you were on, but that's not the case at all!

From:

conuly

Are you offering the quote as context or did you really forget who wrote it?

From:

adrian_turtle

Context. Now I know it's by Robert Louis Stevenson, though I initially learned it (and "I have a little shadow") as nursery rhymes without attribution. And years later with the author's name attached. And years after THAT I realized that he was from Scotland.

From:

purplecat

Yes but all these highly elite schools are quirky and variable - for instance wikipedia tells me that Gordonstoun has an enrolment of about 500.

In terms of class size, my memory is that most lessons involve two houses - given a class size of between 20 and 30 that would suggest 10-15 students in each house in each year of study.

I mean, obviously the rest of the world makes no sense. So this is all a bit moot - but I the school felt like it was intended to be small in the books (I can't speak to what J.K. Rowling may or may not have said about it since).

From:

zhelana

I don't know why you assume more than 15 seconds per kid to put a hat on their head and announce one single word.

From:

conuly

Because we’re told that several students take more than fifteen seconds. Sure, Draco Malfoy might have been done in exactly 15, including the walk to the hat and the applause after, but what about Harry or Neville, who seem to have had full conversations?

I estimated it at two minutes per student. Some of them are in and out but others just aren’t.

From:

zhelana

I imagine harry and neville are the exceptions, and most people already know what house they want to be in because all of their family is from that house or they've thought about it a bit. Also, the applause and the next kid walking can overlap. I cant imagine you need anywhere near a full minute for most kids.

From:

conuly

I think draco is more likely to be the exception, and most kids don’t have that amount of confidence. And I don’t think the applause and walking can overlap much because the kids aren’t lined up and they all have to go in a particular order, which means they have to be able to hear their names.

From:

zhelana

I don't think confidence is what matters. The kids are TEN, and probably 40/50 of them have parents who were in one of those houses. Ten year olds are going to want to be where their parents or siblings were and they're thinking about where they want to go when they put on the hat.

From:

conuly

They’re eleven. And lots of them do not have Draco Malfoys unquestioning faith that a. There is one best house b. They’re certain to get into that one best house c. They want to get into that one best house.

From:

zhelana

They don't need faith in any of that. They just have to want to follow family tradition, which, yes, eleven year olds do, too.

From:

conuly

There’s not that much evidence that most of them do have a family tradition or, again, are confident that they want to follow it.

You can sorta want to be in the same house as your mom and one older sibling and yet also sorta not want that, especially at the age of eleven. It’s an age of mixed feelings.

And consider conservation of detail. Malfoy is the only one we’re told had the hat peg him within seconds. Why bring it up at all if that’s most of them?

Edited Date: 2024-11-05 07:54 am (UTC)

From:

zhelana

I think that's where your math error is, though. And maybe mention Draco because that's what Harry noticed after his experience with him earlier? He iddnt'r really have strong opinions about anyone else. I just can't imagine it takes 2 minutes per kid to get sorted. I can even walk across my house, put a hat on, recite the lines of dialog between harry and the hat, and take the hat off in less than two minutes. And harry is noted as being one of the longer ones.