Uncorrelated, Not Uncaused V

Jibun no rambun de arimasu!¹ Oh, and happy anniversary of the day when the Founding Fathers demonstrated they didn't know what "self-evident" means.

• Interestingly, you could probably use the Ugaritic cuneiform alphabet (I think it's actually an abjad) as an abugida, despite it only having three vowels. Just get a Unicode font for it, and then use some of the characters, superscript, as vowel diacritics. If you wanna use it for writing Indo-European languages, you can remap consonants that Semitic and Indo-European don't share onto vowels—historically, glottal stop onto A (though an abugida usually assumes A, so maybe glottal stop onto vowel-canceller) and voiced pharyngeal fricative onto E have been popular choices. Why do I say that? Hint, what Phoenician letters became Greek's vowels?
  
  You could also—I totally wanna do this sometime—use Egyptian logograms to represent the consonantal roots of Semitic words (since Egyptian shares most of them, e.g. Arabic Salaam, Hebrew Shalom, is Egyptian Sanab). And then maybe put Hebrew or Arabic vowel notation, a la furigana, to show the specific form being used.
  
  Why would you do either? I was thinking of doing it for a fantasy story, sorta Conan-esque, with the ancestors of various peoples (all named in proto-languages) living side-by-side, unhistorically. Come to think of it maybe it'd be better to use Old Persian cuneiform rather than Ugaritic, since (with the exception of Ethiopian), abugidas are an Indo-European, not a Semitic, thing. Or maybe use the Luwian logograms to represent the Indo-European roots, and do something else (Linear B syllabary?) to represent modifications to the root.
  
  Hey, fantasy books are for nerds anyway.
• So-so anime season so far. Sacred Seven looks all right, Blood-C is a disturbing take on the franchise (a frequently face-planting dejikko as Saya, Queen and Doom of the Chiropterans? Oooooookay.) Kamisama no Memo Chou is just trying too hard, and Ikoku Meiro no Croisee ain't bad, but the Japanese learned too much about France from the English, who've somehow managed to understand the French less than they understand the Irish (and the Japanese probably understand the Irish better).
  
  But! Mayo Chiki looks to be a less-filthy M. M. (I've read the manga—few indeed are the anime whose manga, if they exist, I haven't read before I see them). Kamisama Dolls is an interesting premise, and cool mecha designs, but someone spilled a grape soda all over the pacing and it got all gummed up. Nyanpire is on giant snow-white mountains of the drugs, at least from all appearances.
• Finally, a 2nd season of Baka Test is just what my doctor ordered (I have a chronic shortage of screwball ecchi comedy). I been re-watching the first season in preparation, and, uh, what a weird show. "Akihisa's shoulder devil giving him pitying looks" for the win!
  
  I like the returnee-chick (Minami?) more than Himeji (Himeji's cuteness is a little too one-dimensional), though, and I find I have somewhat limited patience for love triangles. Especially where nobody ever frickin' comes out and admits their feelings.
• I decided, my felinoids' internal combustion engines used biodiesel, except it (of course) wasn't discovered by someone named Diesel, so they just call it "transesterified vegetable oil". And I'd wanted them to have a reason to keep riding the giant Cape hunting dogs that're their equivalent of horses, and it occurs to me, diesel engines (I think biodiesel performs like diesel rather than like gas) are loud. While catlike hearing is accompanied by little muscles that clamp down if the ear-bones start to vibrate too much (their night vision is also accompanied by pupils that dilate vastly quicker), they still don't like loud noises.
  
  Plus, biodiesel has less carbon monoxide and more nitric oxide, and the felinoids' blood uses a reversibly oxygenated iron-sulfur protein instead of hemoglobin. Iron-sulfur proteins are dissolved by nitric oxide (though they've probably evolved some of the same resistances to it that our bacteria have)—biodiesel engines would be as dangerous to them as fossil fuel is to us. And they can still kill themselves in their garage with the fumes.
• I forget why I was looking, but two things I just found out about have now been added to my book (this is sorta turning into an SF equipment post). The first is aerogel, just in general, and also in its use as a capacitor. This stuff is incredible, and it's totally what my humans use for batteries (oh butts, now I have to change "battery" to "capacitor", even though there isn't much of a distinction).
  
  The second was these things, from Michelin, called "tweels"². Basically, instead of inflated, puncturable tires, they put flexible, shock-absorbing spokes around the wheels. Which is awesome sauce, and, again, that's what my humans use (but they just call 'em wheels, because, dude, "tweels"?). What do the felinoids use? For power generation, dilaton alternators—quantum scale waterwheels hooked to the expanding fabric of spacetime (they're effectively inexhaustible, but they don't violate thermodynamics; not only do individual units eventually wear out, they slow down the universe's expansion about as much as waterwheels lower sea-levels). And for tires, I'm not sure; I think they might use some kind of piezoelectric undulating nanomaterial, more like a cross between a tank's treads and a snake's belly than a tire properly so-called.
• Read a paper by Friedwardt Winterberg (turns out "Fredward" really is a name), on IC-fusion deuterium rockets. Apparently, you could, with such a rocket, propel a 1 gigagram spacecraft at one g...with a total delta-v budget of, get this, 9.5% c (at a mass ratio of 4.5, since the exhaust velocity is 19 mother-loving-million m/s). I mean, yeah, to you and me and other SF readers, that acceleration sounds pitiful, but we don't actually have inertia protections. And you'd realistically only use half your delta-v, so you can stop at the end, but 4.75% c ain't nothin' to sneeze at.
  
  Also, I love reading scientific papers that are written with a German accent, like using gerunds in the wrong spots and switching prepositions around. To reference a rare not-horrible Mel Brooks role (maybe 'cause he wasn't writing it), "When a German scientist says hold onto your hat, he's not just whistling Dixie. Hat! Hold! Gut!"