Uncorrelated, Not Uncaused

Boy the letter U looks neat in that font, huh? So, random thoughts.

• Someone said "Objectivism is a kind of existentialism". Haha. No it isn't, and you owe an apology to Heidegger and Sartre—and remember, they were a Nazi and a Stalinist. But at least they knew "existence" is something different from "that which exists"; Rand said "Existence is identity", which is logically equivalent to identifying existence with that which exists. And that is logically equivalent to identifying the sky with the concept of blueness.
  
  Basically, she was to philosophy what Deepak Chopra is to quantum physics.
• Which reminds me, they took the analogy part off the SAT. I took it a long time ago (got like 1400 something), but the analogies were my favorite part. And don't you twits understand that taking out the parts the kids score low on, isn't really helping anything?
• So, read this avatar riffing. I'll wait.
  
  Back? Cool. Anyway, it's weird how in the comments the guy claims that Avatar doesn't show that people are getting dumber, and says he doesn't believe in the "lowest common denominator". But, dude, the lowest common denominator doesn't refer to some kinda anti-popular elitist thing; it just refers to going after the cheapest aspects of our common humanity. For instance, everyone struggles with their ethics and organizing their priorities, and everyone loves their children, etc. But everyone also likes hot chicks and shit blowing up. The former are rational or at least human; the latter we share with every other animal above sponges. It's a lot easier to go after the stuff that's older than your notochord.
• Did you know birds can't taste bitter, and can only taste sweet if they're frugivores? Yeah, but water defines a flavor for them, the way "salty" is defined by salt or "sour" by acid. The fact birds can't taste bitter, by the way, is usually the reason bitter fruits, like cranberries, taste that way—if birds eat them and mammals don't, their seeds get scattered farther.
  
  Yeah, birds are weird—although all the same things are true of cats, except cats can taste bitter. Still not sweet, though, and they also have a water-taste.
• Speaking of weird anatomy, I'd thought that frogs had a joint in the middle of a greatly elongated femur, and then had a shortened fibula and tibia in their "foot". Turns out, it's even weirder. They have a normal length femur, then their fibula and tibia are merged (their calf-bones have two cores), and they have two greatly elongated talus and calcaneus bones making a shape like your tibia and fibula. So when a frog walks with its "feet" partially up, and its "toes" on the ground (the way dogs or cats or hamsters do), it's not really walking digitigrade. Nope, it's walking plantigrade, but propped up on its freakishly elongated ankles.
  
  I decided to use a modified form of that for my felinoids, except the two long ankle bones cross over each other, like the bones in your forearm—they can rotate their feet, like margays and squirrels, but they use a different mechanism. They also still have 'feet', unlike frogs going right from their freakishly elongated ankles to their freakishly long 'toes'—their metatarsi and first phalanges make an arch shape, like in your foot but shorter, and then their other phalanges are shaped roughly like a cat's toes. They still have the same number of joints in their toes (3), because they have an extra row of phalanges—they have the same number of finger-joints as humans, despite having claws.
• And yes, the pads on their hands and feet are different—indeed, not only are they a different shape from a cat's pads (in some ways, they're more like a possum's or koala's), their skin is also different, with its keratin in beta-sheets rather than alpha-helices—like a lizard or a bird. Similarly, they don't have triangular wet noses, like cats; their noses are more rectangular (still slightly narrower toward the bottom) and the skin has a waxy texture. The wetness's functionality (telling them which way the wind is blowing, for smelling) is duplicated by pits with bundles of nerves, like in a wading bird's bill.
• Incidentally, what kind of keyboards do your aliens use? What, you mean you don't know? Huh. But you do have their alphabet figured out, right? Right?
  
  My dromaeosauroid gift-givers use roughly the Datahand ergonomic keyboard, modified for the fact they have 4 fingers and xygodactyl thumbs (like Elites). The felinoids usually use something similar to the Crandall typewriter from 1881:Except the keys are different, of course. Specifically, it has 51 (three rows of seventeen). Yes I figured out the layout, why?
  
  The felinoids also use the gloves on their armor as chorded keyboards, and yes, I figured out the key sequences for that, too.
• Even I think it's excessive that I've come up with ways that the different nations my felinoids have of caricaturing each other's accents. What I mean is, for instance, their "empire's" official language renders the dentals (Th sounds) as fricatives, the way English does, but a related minority language renders them as stops, like the T and D in Spanish. So, if a speaker of the first language were trying to write dialogue with the second language's accent, he'd put glottal stops after the dentals.