Uncorrelated, Not Uncaused III

Wow, I forgot to mention it, but the last one was my 250th post. Quarter thousand!

Anyway, random thoughts.

• Went to see X-Men First Class. Am I the only one who wants to know where Xavier and Erik got M4 carbines in 1962, during that scene where they raid the Russians, considering the M16 hadn't even been adopted yet? And were those genes Xavier refers to named like that yet? Apparently the full nomenclature guidelines weren't published till the late 70s.
  
  Plus, an SR-71 is basically all fuel tank, it has no room for anyone other than the pilot and bombardier ("Fire control officer"). Finally, all those scenes where Shaw's standing in the same room as the reactor, with those four blue-glowing rods? Yeah well maybe, with his power, he can survive the Cherenkov radiation, but it totally would've killed White Queen.
  
  My dad wants you to know that Magneto's attempt to lift the sub while standing on the Blackbird would've just resulted in the Blackbird being pulled into the sub.
  
  Other than those nitpicks, it was a thoroughly solid production—though I would've put real Angel, Warren Worthington III, in. They could've just made him an heiress instead, if they'd wanted a chick.


• I decided my felinoids' sewers are actually, apart from storm drains, pneumatic. I remember being intrigued aeons ago, when I first read the Egyptian Book of the Dead, by the fact "polluting water" was a taboo for them (you have to list the taboos you've kept, remember?). My felinoids similarly developed their civilization in a desert-ish locale, so for most of their history, I guess they'd probably have used latrine holes and cesspits. Then when they had their shift to urbanization, I guess they'd put in pneumatic sewers, taking waste to septic tanks, which they'd probably keep separate from their drinking water.
  
  Incidentally, apparently garbage is collected pneumatically in many European cities. Usually the "oh-so-civilized Europeans" thing is bunk, but here I must tip my hat. Gentlemen, well done.


• Similarly, they have a taboo on domesticating prey animals, except for "fish" and, as I mentioned before, bugs. This has two interesting effects: first off, their farmers are actually people who run bug- and fish-farms, apart from orchards and some other small scale agriculture (they do still eat a few vegetables, check the ingredients in cat food some time).
  
  Second, they skip the herdsman stage of cultural development. That's the path the New World generally took, from hunter-gatherer right to farmer with no herder in between. It's debatable whether certain institutions of Indo-European life would've arisen without the cattle raids, but perhaps raiding one's neighbors' hunting-territory (professional hunters still being important after the switch to agriculture), can have the same function. It's the cattle raids, after all, that solidified certain Indo-European concepts of battle-honor.


• The utter howling nonsense in Ann Coulter's new book, whenever it mentions the French Revolution, has revealed something interesting to me. Namely, the Mob (as in the masses, not the Mafia) is to the right what the Man (who's keeping us down, man) is to the left. Namely, it is a mythological figure whose vagaries and cruelties must be inveighed against—and certainly not a valid description of any reality, anywhere, anytime.
  
  Still, she's dead on about how Libertarians are crazy people.


• I commented on this over on the Ane-ue's blog, since she's talking about eReaders and their e-ink (gee, how retro, everything having an "e" in front of it—very 1998). But she was talking about how e-ink is intrinsically opaque, so doing the color kind is a technical challenge. And I said perhaps they could lay the different inks (cyan, magenta, yellow, you know the drill) next to each other, and then combine them optically, perhaps with a prism? I think some sort of tiny prism is involved in the 3DS's method of tricking your eyes into thinking parallax is happening.
  
  And I, inspired to geek out by her geeking out (it's dangerous to get our kind together), was saying how magenta does not actually exist, but is an optical overlay of purple and red. And I realized, as I was writing it, what the problem is: we usually think of magenta as a color between red and purple, but those colors are actually on opposite ends of the spectrum, and what's "between" them is actually orange, yellow, green, and blue. So to get magenta, what actually happens is an object reflects both red and purple, and the two wavelengths partially interfere with each other, which our eye interprets as that other color.
  
  Hey guys who are working on color e-ink, feel free to use my idea if you think it'd work. And if you actually do get the idea from me, it'd be cool to get a shout-out or something.


• Hey, talk of e-ink and ereaders reminds me, in my book, all the civilizations are paperless—their computer storage is secure enough that it's not a problem. They probably just write all the files to some non-volatile medium periodically, and call that a "hard copy".
  
  Ah, but, and here's where I'm quite proud of myself, it'd be silly to call it "paperwork" if it isn't. No indeed: now they call it "formwork". Which currently refers to concrete pouring, sensibly enough. They still do call it "signing in", even though it usually involves various types of biometric ID, but "ID in" sounds clunky and stupid.
  
  Hmm, actually, it doesn't sound that bad. Lemme think about this here thing a little.