De romanicorum physicalium 11

SF thoughts.

• It is, I realized, not entirely accurate to say English uses its simple present for a frequentive (or usitative). I mean, it does; but that's not the only thing it does. It also, in the presence of expressions referring to the future, uses it as a "non-past", the condition where a language inflects the past tense and uses the same form for present and future, distinguishing them by words like "tomorrow". "Tomorrow we die", for the obvious example.
  
  Japanese is probably the best-known "past/non-past" language (that's recognized as such). There are also "future/non-future" languages, where the future is marked and then the past and present are distinguished by words like "yesterday". One of them? Hopi. Ironically. You know, the language with no constructions referring to time, according to Benjamin Whorf. Except for explicitly marked future tense, I guess? (Also, again, seriously, these are subsistence agriculturalists with an annual rain-dance whose rituals mostly take place after sundown. Pretty sure they have a concept of "time".)
• The concept of "hypergamy", much beloved of Men's Rights weenies, is just one of many examples of how their understanding of ethology is shallow Lysenkoism. Because the thing is, in neither the ape mating-systems fools think humans have, nor the canid-like one they actually have, are females' and males' status comparable. In both systems, the hierarchies are mostly separate; you're trying to find the distance between points on two different graphs.
  
  The only interaction male and female dominance has in ape mating-systems is that females rebuff the advances of less-dominant males—but the thing is, they do so largely independent of their position within the female hierarchy. Because for male apes, "dominance" and "access to females" are two aspects of the same thing. (Things are a bit more complicated among some New World monkeys where females are more aggressive just in general, the higher up in the hierarchy they are, but that doesn't really change the basic point.) And there isn't even that element in canid hierarchies, because in those, the "alpha pair" are usually the parents of all the other group-members, the rest of whom are each other's siblings. And the "alpha female" (mother) enforces the female hierarchy, e.g. for feeding precedence, while the "alpha male" (father) enforces the male one; and while "never the twain shall meet" is probably putting it a bit strong, seldom indeed dae the tane meet the ither nor the tither meet the ane.
  
  And to the extent their argument is anthropological/sociological rather than ethological, they're still missing the biological fact that males compete for access to females, not the other way around. That's why female hypergamy, in sociological terms, is infinitely more common than male, in almost all societies—though then again part of that is that matrilocal societies generally have fairly "flat" social hierarchies. But just like the feminists they claim to disagree with, the idea that males and females are actually different is deeply, deeply offensive to them, as is the fact humans are animals that happen to know it, rather than angels wearing suits. (See also their whining about things like the draft and "women and children first", which are "Bateman's Principle", one, and two, something even Heinlein understood. When Heinlein understands something about human sexuality, and you don't, just...damn.)
• More than once I've seen a vegan try to attack the idea humans are omnivores with a series of pictures, usually "picture of tiger's mouth, labeled 'carnivore'; picture of bear's mouth, labeled 'omnivore'; picture of horse's mouth, labeled 'herbivore'"—and then "which one is most like human teeth?". Very cute...but complete nonsense. Because know what other mouth we can put in there? This one. This one is labeled "herbivore". Note the canines and incisors, indistinguishable from those of a(nother) bear; the changes are in the molars and premolars, and you need to be a zoologist to reliably tell the modifications that have occurred to support the primarily vegetable diet.
  
  Bears' teeth look the way they do because they're members of the order Carnivora; whether they eat a mix of forage and meat like most bears or nothing but grass like pandas, they're still not going to be all that different from the jackal- or weasel-like thing they evolved from. (Come to think of it, the polar bear is a hypercarnivore.) The most modified teeth of any carnivoran, other than maybe the walrus (and those are still just really big canines), are those of what is technically an obligate carnivore: the aardwolf, a member of the hyena family. It mostly eats bugs, but that's still animals.
  
  Another kind of animal that has the dentition it does purely because of its taxonomy: primates. To my knowledge, the most reduced canines among the primates (or at least the great apes) are "chimp, bonobo, human", in ascending order. But, guess what are the most actively predatory great apes? "Chimp, bonobo, human"—again, in that order. (Bonobos in particular appear to have a taste for meat that's still alive when they start eating it.) The only obligate-carnivore primates, the tarsiers, have a very weird dentition, one that further demonstrates the vacuousness of the appeal to dentition. A tarsier's incisors, enlarged into something vaguely reminiscent of glire buck-teeth, seeming to be their main "killing" teeth. Unless those are a very odd tooth-comb?
• It occurred to me that the defect gun the zledo use as the main cannon on their big ships doesn't quite work like a beam-weapon. First because what it shoots is intrinsically curved; cosmic strings (behave as if they) are completely massless if they're straight, but they acquire mass (kind of) if they curve. I suppose that just makes it more like a ballistic weapon than a beam one, except the curve isn't determined by the location of the nearest gravity well.
  
  The other thing, though, is that unlike a beam, a cosmic string-based weapon is still connected to what it issues from, like hitting a heavy hard thing with a metal bat and you being the one who gets hurt. They can still probably use it to smash things far out of their own weight class, the way that mere bone can bite through steel if it has to, but there is an upward limit; they can dig a bunker out of its hole, but they can't crack a planet in half.
• BMW made a self-stabilizing motorcycle. They allege it's accident-proof and you can ride it without a helmet, but you can still fall off it because of something you do, and cars might still hit you. Still, quite a bit less of a death-trap.
  
  There's an unbreakable LED that looks like an actual light-bulb. (Which they don't always, even though a key way to integrate a new technology is to match it to people's pre-existing expectations.) I wonder if they fixed the "one light of a multi-light fixture randomly turns off" problem?
  
  Production design, people. It's absolutely key to science fiction as a genre.
• Interstellar, Arrival (not to be confused with The Arrival), there are probably others (Passengers, maybe?)—please stop making science fiction movies about the Power of Love™. That trope worked well in exactly one place, Macross, because the Zentraedi being engineered soldiers with their sexual behavior partially repressed made it work. It won't work anywhere else. And even in Macross, all "love" does is change the behavior of people, it doesn't bend time and space.
  
  "Of course! Love," Elsa says, in the tone of someone remembering where she left her keys. (Also.)
• While we're at it, please stop with the completely forgettable, semi-interchangeable post-apocalyptic societies like in The 100 or Wayward Pines. And the evil future corporations, like in Dark Matter (which is actually good) and Incorporated (which certainly isn't)—both of which air on a network owned by General Freaking Electric.
  
  Other than a few mining companies and some third-world manufacturers, no corporations are as brutal in protection of their bottom line as Hollywood (or electronics megacorporations that also own movie/television studios), or treat their employees as badly. (I don't watch most of these shows—have they had "making weapons is evil" yet? You know, on a network owned by the people who brought you the Vulcan cannon and its relatives.)
  
  Come to think of it, didn't Matt Damon basically rip off Elysium for Incorporated? The only difference is you took out the space colonies—which all by itself makes you subject to summary execution for crimes against science fiction, space-colonies being an absolute good in themselves where remotely plausible. Maybe the people behind Elysium figure getting ripped off is just karma?
• I actually realized this researching my D&D setting, but strictly speaking I probably shouldn't be calling what the plants have on Lhãsai "flowers". They're as much cones as they are flowers, see, because an alien planet's autotrophs are not actually plants in our biological sense (though they're likely to be analogous and are "plants" in the conversational and philosophical sense). An alien world is unlikely to have the gymnosperm-angiosperm divide, though it might have something comparable.
  
  Technically also the "fruit" of alien plants might be called arils...but if it comes to that, why not just call arils fruit? While conifers' seed-apparatus tend more to the "nut" end than the "berry" end most of the time, yews, junipers, and podocarps all have fruit analogous to those of angiosperms. (And, again, nuts are fruits: so why aren't the edible, hard, fleshy seeds of plants like piñon pine? Hell, if it comes to that "nut" is more a culinary than a botanical term, that's why peanuts really are nuts even though they're a legume.)