We are in the midst of winter, and the holidays loom on the horizon, offering portents of fun times to come and the social obligation of procuring gifts for the loved ones in your life! Don’t worry. We’re here to give you book recommendations to help you take care of the second part, so you can get right to the holiday snacking and relaxing!
Take the quiz. Discover your perfect bookly gift.
My friend got roughly three minutes for the abominable snowman attack. Good luck.
My spouse and I calculated 4.9 minutes to abominable snowman impact, assuming it started at 8448 FASL (most mountains do not rise directly from sea level, so this seemed like a safe assumption) and aims to smash through the cabin without decelerating. Unfortunately it took us 55 minutes to calculate this, so we had 0 minutes to prepare and now lie dead in the wreckage of our cozy cabin.
I got 31.045 minutes for the snowman, which is probably close enough, but I would rather have 2 extra minutes rather than 2 fewer minutes. Did not take the FASL into account, but unless the snowman is gaining speed rapidly or having to navigate treacherous hilly terrain we can assume it’s not important. The math is on my Tumblr 🙂
I assumed the FASL told you the altitude change (so delta_z), and the distance was as the bird flies, so delta_x, and the actual distance travelled was the hypotenuse. Apparently it makes very little difference, and I get the same as you if I replace my altitude change with 0.
Also got this! Figured if he can get to max speed in ~10 sec, then treacherous terrain be damned.
31.7 minutes. So roughly 32 minutes. Pedantic? Maybe.
Whoops, meant 31.6.
My answers resulted in a book I’d be very unlikely to read although we do have two Subarus.
Whoa! My quiz resulted in recommending one of my FAVORITE books of all time – Legends and Lattes. Obviously a highly sensitive tool for choosing book recommendations.
I think I’m the one with the closest abominable snowman time so far– I got 33.25 minutes! I assumed that the snowman’s lair was at the same elevation at my cabin, and that the base of the isosceles-triangle mountain took up the whole 42 miles. I then split the triangle in half vertically so I could find the hypotenuse using (42mi/2) and (50688ft-8448ft) as my A and B values in the Pythagorean Theorem. This gave me a total distance-as-the-yeti-runs of 72402 metres. I then calculated the time it took for the yeti to accelerate to max speed and added that to the time it took to travel the remaining distance at max speed, and got 33 minutes! Nicely done, tor.com not-mathematicians 🙂
(As I mentioned on my Tumblr in conversation with commenter AR, I did not account for acceleration due to gravity, on the optimistic hope that if the yeti goes faster than 131km/h for any reason it will stumble and fall.)
I think some of the confusion in this comments section is related to the slightly ambiguous phrasing of the question– would it be worth it to clarify where the snowman’s lair actually is in relation to the mountain, elevation, etc?
Aha, I interpreted it as the yeti was at the mountain peak, but I see your interpretation as well. I also did not account for gravitational acceleration. I get 33.215 minutes plugging in your assumptions.
So it’s a fairly impressive grade (>22 deg), and thus taking into account gravity (assuming the yeti starts by running up the mountain), the acceleration slows to near zero. I’m pretty sure the way the question is worded is meant to imply that that avg 3.5 m/s^2 accel is independent of the grade (or perhaps specific to this grade), and I should not consider it, and full speed is an absolute.
Yeah, that was my interpretation too– too bad, or we’d have much more time to prepare! Thanks for doing the trigonometry I did not want to do 😆
To whoever created this quiz, I’ve never wanted to be friends with someone more in my life.
My answers got me to legends and lattes which i had already read and enjoyed. Got any further reads like this?
Search “cozy fantasy” for recommendations; here’s one roundup: https://www.mikesignor.com/post/the-cozy-fantasy-movement
Only four possible options for recommendations? That doesn’t allow covering a truly wide range, although I’ll admit it’s a fairly good distribution of tone: from Neon Yang’s tale, with battles, of trying to escape an oppressive system; to Olivie Blake’s scheming rivals with YA levels of emotional drama; to Mary Robinette Kowal’s urbane comedy of manners; to Travis Baldree’s found-family and setting-down-roots story. How did Tor choose which few of their extensive 2022 list they wanted to promote this way?
It is not the “midst” of Winter.