Sur la Scène Passante III

Huh, I forgot the "e" in "Passante" in the title of the last one I called this. Oops. Oh well.

Random thoughts!

• Apparently Canada's gun laws simply outright prohibit .32 and .25 caliber. Only, uh, why? It must be that Saturday Night Special nonsense (actual studies show criminals, like everyone else, prefer the most powerful, high-caliber gun they can conveniently use); while there is .32 H&R Magnum, the only other .32 chamberings are .32 ACP, two .32 S&W cartridges, and the rounds used in the Nagant revolver. I could see banning that last one, since the Nagant is the only revolver that can be silenced, but it's weird to ban all other .32 caliber cartridges.
  
  But other than .25 ACP, there are no .25 caliber handguns, and let's all remember Jeff Cooper's Commentaries (his own random thoughts post) RE: the caliber:

  We hear of an unfortunate woman who, during a nighttime asthma attack, confused the small handgun she kept under her pillow with an asthma inhaler and proceeded to relieve her symptoms. It was not a fatal mistake, partly because she used a 25 ACP, which everyone knows is not sufficient to clear sinuses.

  And that's why we should all be careful to keep our bed-gun far away from our inhaler.


• You know the "two consenting adults" non-argument used by the Libertards to justify annihilating all of culture? Well, if they were capable of intellectual consistency (which they are not), wouldn't they be in favor of dueling? That, too, after all, involves "two consenting adults", and shouldn't Libertarians have noticed the problem with presuming the state has a monopoly on the use of force? I bet bringing back dueling would also severely cut down both on drive-bys and other gang violence, and on certain types of lawsuit.
  
  But I kid. Libertarianism is wedded in perpetuity to craven physical cowardice, and also to a blind dogma that speech and action should never be related in the slightest—therefore fighting over insults isn't wrong, to them, it is completely incoherent. Also, I've never even heard of a Libertarian, other than perhaps Jesse Ventura, who any healthy man couldn't kill with one hand. You probably wouldn't even need all five fingers to snuff out Ron Paul. You'd have to cut your hand off afterwards, though, because it had touched him.


• It's funny, though, that Libertarians refuse to acknowledge any relation whatsoever between words and actions. It's because they're monstrously insincere materialists, of course—also, again, craven physical cowards—but it's also because they don't understand a principle that I (being a huge geek) like to call the Von Neumann Architecture of Human Life. Namely, words are actions.
  
  What is said, after all, determines what is thought, and what is thought determines what is done. You don't have to believe in "True Names" or kotodama to understand the power of words; simply look around you. Abandon Heaven's favor, relinquish the Earth's advantage, but win the hearts of Men, and you will gain dominion over all three Harmonies, as Zhuge Liang said to Liu Bei.


• Shifting gears without a clutch, there's this manga called Upotte!!, about this guy who goes to teach at a school...for guns. Moe anthropomorphisms of guns. The assault rifles are in middle school, while battle rifles are high school and SMGs are elementary. The main girls are M16A4 and FNC, who are both living in the shadows of their older sisters M14 and FN FAL L1A1; M16's rivals are Galil and Rk 62, who, though Israeli and Finnish, are Kalashnikov clones. So obviously I eat it up.
  
  Of course, if they were really awesome, they'd have FAMAS, too, but they already have the L85A2, so maybe they figured one European bullpup was enough. I'm also very curious why the only Japanese gun they have is an obscure M-16 clone, not the Type 89 (living in the shadow of Type 64-sempai, one would presume). It's unusual for a manga to avoid the reflexive assumption that the Japanese one is the best (and most relatable for the audience), but it's just odd that there's no Type 64 at all.
  
  Also, 3-round-burst is not to prevent ammo waste if the soldier panics and holds down the trigger (though that's definitely a useful side-benefit). It's just a way of gaining the full functionality of full-auto, while preventing the ammo-waste that happens after muzzle jump takes the weapon off target. You might not need it if your weapon, like the An-94 or AK-107, has anti-recoil systems.


• A GEICO ad just came on, and I'm curious, do they know "So easy a caveman can do it" parallels a Japanese camera ad from the 70s, "So easy a chon [racial slur for Koreans] can do it"? I can't conceive that they would know; hell, the person who draws Keroro Gunsô didn't know "pokopen" ('futility') was a slur for the Chinese, and he is Japanese. They changed it to "pekopon" when the anime came out.
  
  And has anyone noticed those cavemen are ridiculously metrosexual?


• I was looking for someone presenting the 3 Laws of Robotics in symbolic logic, so I could put it into Prolog for my SF book (Prolog is a Turing-complete programming language standardized under ISO 13211). I didn't find it. But I did find a bunch of people saying the movie of I, Robot is stupid and shallow, and misses the deeper point of Asimov's stories.
  
  Snerk. Or, actually, the movie is much smarter than Asimov, in knowing what the Zeroth Law—which is basically what VIKI cites as justification—would lead to. Shit, you'd think a Russian Jew would realize what might be done "to prevent greater harm to humanity itself".


• And hey, shouldn't the fact the laws include "or through inaction" mean that every robot should either devote itself to preventing violent crime, or suffer the catastrophic crash that violating the Laws causes?
  
  And if the Zeroth Law is included, you have a robot takeover every time. I mean, a robot would know which of you is better suited to run your life, and it ain't the one that risks a psychotic episode whenever it gets low on a certain monoamine.
  
  It's funny to me that people think Asimov was great at formal logic, especially considering "Philosophy" was the only Dewey category he never wrote a book in. I guess "Your Friend the Slide Rule" and "The Sensuous Dirty Old Man" took up too much of his time.


• So someone (whose forum post came up in a search I was doing) says they tell their students "There is no science fiction anymore, all the science fiction I read when I was your age, we're doing."
  
  Sir or madam, plainly, you weren't reading the right stuff, 'cause I must've missed the manned missions to Venus, the fusion torches, the Bussard ramjets, the asteroid mining, and artificial replacements for every organ, to name just the Larry Niven ideas that are fully of human origin (the hyperdrive is from the Outsiders, remember). Actually the artificial replacement organs (rendering the "organ bank problem" obsolete) might've been partly of Protector origin, but the Protector in question (Brennan) was human.


• Know what's hard? Coming up with a slang word for aliens. I'd wanted to use Echo Tangos, but that's what Halo calls 'em (awesomely). Then I thought maybe Echo Bravo Echos (Extraterrestrial Biological Entities), but that's too long to say.
  
  But then it occurred to me, it's not the fact it's extraterrestrial life that's important, but that it's intelligent. So I decided to look at the terminology SETI uses. Well, in terms of the Drake equation, F_i is the number of planets with intelligent life, and F_c is the number of them that have communicating civilizations. So how about Foxtrot Charlie or Foxtrot India? We can also call natively-inhabited planets Foxtrot Lima and habitable-zone planets November Echo. DIP (Developed Intelligent Populations) could also be used, or Delta India Papa, too.
  
  Hmm, Foxtrot Charlie (presumably "charlie" for short) would have the unfortunate side effect of sounding like Vietnam. And India's a real country (Injun, maybe?), but I do like Foxtrot India. Maybe they'll call them some racial slur for Indians (from Bharat Mata, I mean, not the New World)—possibly in some other language, like Cantonese (aajaà, for instance). Or maybe just "Sub-Charlies" and "Sub-Indias"—I think I'm leaning toward that.
  
  Fortunately the felinoids can get called a number of rude names having to do with cats.


• Finally, remember when I said Limyaeel was stupid for thinking medieval cats would be ratters? Yeah, I should've also mentioned that—if she were not a monstrous 4th-dimensional provincial—she would've known that it wasn't till after World War II that cats outpaced dogs as pets (probably because of increasing urbanization and cats being easier to keep in apartments).
  
  But also, perhaps the unlettered twerp should've looked up the concept of "barn-cat": most medievals were in agriculture, and they didn't live much more hand-to-mouth than 19th century Americans, despite what they taught her in Sunday school history class.