All Is Grist 2

Piensas al azar.

• Turns out I was wrong, here, when I corrected the grammar in that line in Snow Falling on Cedars. Every other criticism of that flabbergasting douchebaggery stands—like that aware means "pathos" not "beauty"—but apparently the grammar itself was not incorrect, just a bizarre idiom that I was not acquainted with till I came across mention of the Japanese book-listing SF ga yomitai! on Mike Flynn's blog.
  
  Normally the "ga" particle means nominative, but in some instances, apparently, it's used to mean a passive (without using the passive verb conjugation). I suppose it's kind of like how "se habla español" literally means "Spanish speaks itself" rather than, what it means idiomatically, "Spanish is spoken" or "one speaks Spanish".
• I know I've mentioned that the zled for "damn" is "drown it in hell", and their image (not doctrine) of hell is an infinite water-filled void you sink through forever. This was for two reasons. One, of course, was just that I wanted an alternative to the usual fiery or frozen hells of human cultures. The other was an interesting fact I came across.
  
  Do you remember in the Disney Peter Pan when Captain Hook is threatening Tiger Lily with drowning, and says "There is no path through water to the Happy Hunting Ground"? That was a real Ojibwa belief (so is Peter losing the shadow, at the beginning—J. M. Barrie seems to have got hisself a book from somewheres).
  
  What's really weird is, it was also a Náhuatl belief—Tlaloc had to construct an afterlife for those who died by water, they were barred entry to Mictlan. I think something similar shows up in a bunch of other New World cultures, as well; it's kinda a thing, here, that drowning is "a fate worse than (dry) death".
• When people, rightly objecting to political correctness, say that calling people from East Asia "Asians" rather than "Orientals" is silly, because "Asian" covers everywhere from the Middle East to Kamchatka, they actually embarrass themselves, and play into the hands of the PCniks.
  
  Because quick, what is the point furthest east that the "Orient Express" traveled to? Oh. Right. Istanbul. What state does the phrase "oriental despotism" originally refer to? Oh. Right. Ottoman Turkey. Remember, when the German Empire complained in World War I that the Allies, by allying with Russia, were binding themselves to a "semi-oriental" power, what was Chesterton's comeback? Oh. Right. That by allying with Ottoman Turkey, Germany was binding itself to a power entirely oriental.
  
  The fact, kiddies, is that "oriental" and "Asian" are entirely co-terminous terms. "Oriental" just sounds old-fashioned, which is the only reason I say "Asian" instead (well, and a slight preference for avoiding unnecessary fights with idiots).
• There's an anime this season, Charlotte, that's...well, for about eight episodes, it's pretty good. Then it decides to turn into a wan "Days of Future Past" knockoff, only with even stupider decision-making. At least they're on the run from organizations that want to use their powers, rather than the "bigotry" of people worried about guys who can topple buildings with their minds.
  
  Nevertheless, very disappointing; it develops all these characters and then ignores two-thirds of them almost completely for the last third of the series. What is it about the concept of people with superpowers that makes it so hard to get stories that involve that topic right? You could at least knock off something other than an X-Men arc that'd recently been made into a major movie.
• It's hard to be sure, because I can't get that good of a look, but I think that the Minority Report series may be continuing the movie's tradition of cutting-edge production design. Specifically, I think the soldiers here and there in the crowd scenes have a version of digi-camo that's based on a hexagons, not squares.
  
  Yeah, I know, "hexagons are high-tech" is arguably overplayed, but it's that way for a reason. Namely, it looks freaking awesome. Besides, it could well be that the hexagons are dictated not just by Rule of Cool, but could be diagetic—there could be a structure built into the uniform, perhaps making it a cloth armor, that has hexagonal cells.
  
  Should we be worried that this show's on Fox? I know I said "with robots" but it really could be that they hate good science fiction, period (which, again, has nothing to do with Firefly).
• According to "Recoil Considerations for Railguns" by Eric L. Kathe, recoil force is an order of magnitude lower than the "ballistic loads", which I think means your recoil energy is one-tenth your muzzle energy (as a rule of thumb). Which presumably means that the 1% c, 4-gram projectile (muzzle energy of 4.3 tonnes TNT) only has the recoil force of 430 kilos of TNT, which a soft recoil system reduces to 215 kilos. Still not something you really want hitting the front of your ship every time it fires its gun, though, especially not at 4,000 rounds per minute, so, still gonna go with topological inertial protections.
  
  It occurs to me they might want to upgrade the muzzle velocity, since the zled ships themselves move at 1% c. Maybe 2% c? That brings the muzzle energy to (2²=)4 × 4.3=17.18 tonnes TNT. That means you've got 1.72 tonnes TNT recoil force, only reducible to 859 kilos with a soft-recoil system, so the topological inertial protection is even more necessary. It also makes you as well-equipped to fight zled ships as someone shooting at F-35s with a Vulcan. A muzzle velocity twice the speed of your typical target is probably pretty typical for weapons in aerospace applications (although then again, the Goalkeeper CIWS does shoot rounds that are only 30 m/s faster than the missiles it shoots down).
• You can express firing-rates in Hertz. For instance, the M61 Vulcan, with a fire-rate of 6,000-6,600 rounds per minute, fires at a frequency of 100-110 Hertz. 110 Hertz is the key of A₂. The GAU-8 Avenger has a fire-rate of 4,200 rounds per minute, which is 70 hertz—just slightly higher than C#₂/D♭₂, while the GAU-12 Equalizer can fire at the same rate as the GAU-8, or, in the GAU-"22/A" on the F-35, at 3,300 rounds per minute, which is 55 Hertz, A₁.
  
  The Gryazev-Shipunov GSh-6-30 has a fire-rate of 4,000 to 6,000 RPM, which is 66 and two-thirds Hertz to 100 Hertz, just above C₂ ("low C") and a bit above G₂, respectively. The Gryazev-Shipunov GSh-6-23 has a crazy-town 9,000 to 10,000 rounds-per-minute fire-rate, 150 Hertz to 166 and two-thirds Hertz—so it fires halfway between D₃ and D#₃, or else a little above E₃.
  
  So basically all aircraft autocannons are still pretty much playing bass—which is interesting, because the guns themselves sound like buzzsaws (which might be the mechanism spinning the gun as distinct from just the firing).
• John W. Campbell apparently said, and encouraged his writers to remember, that "an alien thinks as well as a human, but not like a human". Only, one, most aliens don't, actually; the only ones I can think of who actually think as well as humans but not like humans are Cherryh's kif and atevi, and both of them are probably unrealistic (because the kif probably wouldn't become sapient and the atevi seem to often find things troublesome that are actually easily explained—given that "society" is treating unrelated conspecifics as kin, in the first place, "you guys are like my kin though we share no blood" is not something that anyone who has a society should find terribly difficult). Races like Kzinti are actually stupider than humans; many if not most aliens have blind-spots no human society ever had. And every attempt at a "really alien" alien is usually less like a character than it is like a prop (a distinction I get from John Wright).
  
  And the second point is, who told Campbell there was more than one way to think? I am at least passingly familiar with four Native American/American Indian philosophies and five Old World ones, they are not actually any different from each other—nothing in Navajo thought is not found in China or the pre-Socratics, the Sioux are Platonic hyperrealists, the Nahuatls and Hopi are almost down-the-line Chinese philosophers. Existentialism, Buddhism, Chinese thought, Aristotle, and Plato are all recognizably talking about the same things, albeit coming to different conclusions on some of the questions. Why it's almost like philosophy deals with an external reality and therefore only certain interpretations of it are actually tenable! Besides, remember, Campbell was one of the rubes who fell for Sapir-Whorf. The fact is that nobody that humans can talk with at all is going to think that differently from a human; and the only people humans can't talk with at all, are probably not remotely the same kind of thing humans are. Sure, maybe energy beings are difficult for humans to talk to (if they even talk), but another animal that evolved from some other rock's pond-scum? Give us some time, we'll figure it out.
  
  Honestly the biggest barrier might be needing some way to simulate their vocal apparatus, if their language even uses sounds—but sign-language is not fundamentally a different thing from spoken language. If the alien communicates with flashing bioluminescence, you're still going to have patterns of flashing lights you can classify as "nouns" and "verbs" (though a lot of the nouns might be verbs morphologically, and all of the adjectives might be).