Valentine

here are a few other "secret" dashboards:

Posts from your "crushes"

"What you missed" (will be empty if you already visit Tumblr every day)

"Trending"

also that apparently “when you get a chance” usually means “when you take a break from the thing you’re immediately doing” and not “on a list among various other things you are doing today or tomorrow”

To the town of Digi Circa fell a jester one fine day

She spoke to folks around her, and she had a ton to say

Pomni dared to ask Jax's business, the bunny dared to make a slip

Didn't know the jester there among them had a big iron on her hip

Eberron has twelve moons. This article goes into detail as to their appearance, distance, and size, as well as their names and associations with different aspects of the world, and with dragonmarks. Their values for distance and size allow us to determine their visual size in Eberron’s sky.

Here’s a visual representation of the sizes of the moons compared to Earth’s moon:

The visual size of something is called its angular diameter, or its apparent size. The formula for calculating the angular diameter of a sphere is:

Where δ  is the angular diameter, d is the actual diameter of the object, and D is the distance to the center of the object.

Zarantyr, the first of Eberron’s moons, has a diameter of 1250 miles, or 2.0117x10^6 meters, while it has a mean distance from Eberron of 14,300 miles, or 2.3014x10^7 meters. The distance to the center of Zarantyr is then the mean distance plus half the diameter, which is 2.4019x10^7 meters. We can then plug our values into the equation.

Which gives Zarantyr an angular diameter of 0.083779 radians. However, as the apparent size of celestial objects is relatively small, it’s usually given in arcminutes. An arcminute is 1/60th of a degree, so there are 21,600 arcminutes in a full circle. The angular diameter of Zarantyr is therefore 288 arcminutes.

But what in the world does that even mean, anyway? Well, for comparison, the angular diameter of Earth’s moon is roughly 31.7 arcminutes, slightly more or less depending on where it is in its orbit. This means that Zarantyr has an apparent diameter of just over nine times that of the moon. That’s huge.

Here’s a graphical representation of the apparent sizes of Eberron’s moons, compared to Earth’s moon.

And the same information in a more numbery fashion:

When determining orbital information about a two-body system, the mass of the smaller body is irrelevant if it’s small enough, which is the case when dealing with stars and their planets, or (most) planets and their moons. Unfortunately, we won’t need to use the mass of Eberron in today’s post, but it will become very important when we start talking about moons.

The formula for determining the period of an orbit is

Where T is the period of one full orbit in seconds, a is the semi-major axis of the ellipse of the orbit in meters, G is the gravitational constant 6.67x10^-11 N*(m/kg)^2, and M is the mass of the larger body in kilograms, in this case the sun.

We know that the full orbit is exactly 336 days. The Eberron Campaign Setting 3.5e describes the Eberron calendar thusly:

“Days are 24 hours long, divided into day and night. Seven days make up a week, four weeks a month, and twelve months a year.” – ECS p. 130

This puts each month at 28 days long, and each year at 336 days long, slightly shorter than an Earth year. This creates a calendar that is far more “perfect” than any calendar on any planet ever, and feels almost artificial. That said, it’s perfect for a game of D&D where you don’t want to bother with keeping track of weeks with ten days and festivals that don’t occur on any day of the week but exist outside of the week. (I’m looking at you, Forgotten Realms. Hissssssss!) More on fantasy calendars, including Eberron (and FR, hisss!) is available here.

The sourcebook says nothing special about Eberron’s sun, so we can assume it’s largely similar to earth’s sun. To differentiate the two, we’ll be calling Earth’s sun by its proper name, Sol, and we’ll call Eberron’s sun Arrah, named after Dol Arrah, the Sovereign Host’s sun goddess. (I’m not using the obvious and delightful pun of calling it Dol, because two other gods have Dol as a first name – or maybe title? It’s not really clear.)

The mass of Sol is 1.9891x10^30 kg, and so we assume that Arrah has the same mass.

This leaves the only unknown variable in the equation, a. The semi-major axis of an ellipse is a bit like the “long radius.” More formally, it is half of the major axis, the line segment that runs through both foci to the perimeter of the ellipse. The semi-minor axis, or “short radius,” is irrelevant in this formula. For purposes of simplicity, we’ll assume that Eberron has a perfectly circular orbit. Virtually all orbits are at least a little bit elliptical, but considering how perfect the numbers for the calendar line up, we’re okay with making this assumption.

Image from Wikimedia Commons used under a Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 licence.

Re-arranging the equation for a gives us:

So we plug in the numbers

And solve

This gives us a semi-major axis of 1.4147x10^11m. This is roughly 140 billion meters, 140 million kilometers, 7.8 light minutes, or 0.95 AU, slightly closer to Arrah than Earth is to Sol. Depending on who you ask, this is well within the habitable zone for a Sol-like star.

The doctor scraped out a bit of earwax to have a better look inside.

I was sent a bill for $200 PER EAR for this 5 second procedure which I did not give permission for them to do.

That was key- they did not ASK me if they could do this "procedure". And, as I OWN a medical practice (it's me. The medical practice is me, sitting in my house on video calls) I knew to call them when this bill came in to be like "You did not obtain informed consent for this procedure, and it was not en emergency procedure. You had full ability to gain my consent and didn't. I'm not paying."

And the massive hospital who owned the bill said "yuh-huh you do have to pay."

And I said "I own a practice. I know these laws. I do not owe you money for this."

And they conducted an "internal review" and SURPRISE! Decided I totally owed them money and they had never done anything wrong ever.

And so I called my state's Attorney General office, and explained the situation because, as I mentioned, I know the law. The AG got in touch within a couple days to say they were taking the case and would send the massive hospital conglomerate a knock it off, guys letter.

Lo and Behold, today I have a letter where said hospital graciously has agreed to forfeit the payment.

"How not to get screwed over by companies" should be part of civics class.

Know your rights and know who to call when they're infringed on. This whole process cost me $0 and honestly less effort than I would have expected.

Civics class wouldn't help most people in this case because the AG will not take on all these cases and most people cannot afford an attorney in this instance or more importantly, the hit to their credit.

Were they going to get into a lawsuit over my $400 bill? No obviously not. But they printed up a letter on fancy letterhead to say to stop and it worked. They followed up with me the next day to be sure, and so ask how much money they had saved me.

They use dinky cases like mine to track habitual misbehavior of large scale companies to build cases they could actually go to court over.

And because people are shocked- I never spoke to the AG of my state directly. He operates mainly by overseeing a whole crew of people. And this is what those people do.

This didn’t happen because I’m special because of my tiny therapy practice.

This happened because this is what the AG office is for.

“The problem is systemic” doesn’t mean “and there’s nothing you can do”.

Then you've been trained well by "The System".

Yes, that System you say can't be fought? Where did you get that idea, huh? Who taught you that "small" acts of illegality don't matter? Who made you think that there's no point in fighting back because it will all come to nothing?

Might it be the same entities that benefit if you believe all that?

Gonna pause and let you ponder.

Never. Ever. EVER.

EVER.

Let companies or corporations or hospitals or organizations or any business big or small get away with screwing you over without a fight. Maybe you personally don't win every fight, but you lose 100% of the time you don't try. You'll win more often than you think you will. I know cuz I've done it.

So have others. Attorneys General offices bring lawsuits against businesses all the time. They do so because citizens contacted them to say "someone is doing a crime" and the crime doers did not stop when told and got into way more trouble than if they'd just stopped. FAFO. The Find Out can't happen if you don't even bother to report the Fucking Around.

On that note, as OP said, please know your rights! And, in a situation where you don't but suspect something is hinky, ask! The people of the internet can help! So can librarians! So can many others. Find out what is and is not okay for them to do. If it's not okay, report them! See something, say something.

Don't let the System win by default.

If you believe The System™️ is only for Them™️ and not you, it will only ever be so.

for a particularly strong version of this kind of replacement: the word "bear" comes from a proto-Germanic word meaning "brown one" because there was a taboo against saying the animal's actual name. the taboo is gone but it was so strong in the past that we have no record of what the proto-Germanic word for "bear" even was.