Sierra Foxtrot 2

Scientifiction.

• Keep in mind things like gravity, when you set things on alien worlds. The Crashlanders in Larry Niven, for instance, have an average height of seven feet (213 cm) for a male. Given the average human male (globally) is 5'8" (172 cm) tall, their planet, We Made It, must have a surface gravity only (68/84) 81% of Earth's, or about twice that of Mars (if they're all from the US, with an average height of 5'10"/178 cm, it's still 83%). I don't know how broadly the probes defined "habitable points", but that seems a bit low to me.
  
  Unfortunately, on the other hand, we don't actually know the effects of prolonged not-weightless-but-different-from-Earth's gravity exposure. We've never really had a chance to research it. Some people were planning to do some experiments to test it—it involved mouse-sized spin-gravity habitats, in zero-G—but given their domain name, marsgravity.org, is up for sale, I don't think they're around anymore.
• I was recently considering making the zled official language (and its relatives, because I've worked one of those out, because, well, yeah) ergative-absolutive. It wouldn't take too much work to do, although I've been having real trouble getting my brain around the anti-passive voice.
  
  But, researching how passive constructions worked in E-A languages (in part to find out what the hell anti-passive is), I discovered that they don't have them. They probably can't, the way agency is expressed in the verb system basically precludes it (Tibetan has things sometimes called active and passive, but that's actually because it marks verbs for volitionality, which is something different). And that was a deal-breaker, because I had a thing in zled etiquette (it's a part of honorific speech in Korean, Japanese, and several other Asian-Pacific languages) where you make someone the agent of passive constructions, and never the patient thereof, as a sign of respect.
• I'm not certain that it always holds, but, apparently, if the accretion-disk model of solar-system formation is correct, all planets in a system will revolve around the system primary in the same direction. Which means that the model I used for deriving galactic north from spin and core will also work in a solar system. Spacefaring cultures can now use galactic North (or East) for navigating in interstellar space, and stellar North/East for navigating in interplanetary.
  
  Awesome, but on the other hand, oy vey (or, more correctly given where Yiddish is from, "oj weh"). I'm gonna have to add this thing to some space-scenes, there's really no way around it. You don't come up with a concept like "stellar north" and let it go to waste.
• A commenter on a right-wing blog had an interesting point, about why science fiction writers are some of the few outspokenly right-wing writers outside the niche press—namely, the modern Left is technophobic. In contrast with the "engineering" paradigm of Marx and Lenin—that is not my framing of the concept, it was his—modern leftists are Gaia-worshiping hylozoist vitalists (that is my way of putting it). Hence probably also why politics is not something where fantasy works like science fiction, fantasy writers are politically far more in line with the rest of the litterati.
  
  Since my political views have been summed up (by me) as "both parties are unlettered skin-clad savages, but one of them doesn't go in for cannibalism", this datum is interesting in a largely impersonal way. Unlettered skin-clad savages have many intriguing folkways, after all. (And how sad is it that Firefox's spellcheck knows "folkways" but not "litterati"?)
• You know "To Serve Man", the Twilight Zone episode? The alien's played by Richard Kiel, AKA Jaws from Moonraker and Spy Who Loved Me (and AAKA Eegah, from, well, Eegah). But the thing they did with the alien language—capital vs small letters!—is goofy. There is exactly one other language with the print vs. cursive distinction (the latter is what the minuscules actually are), and that's Greek; Byzantine and Latin scriptoria worked very similarly. Arguably hiragana and katakana, too, but katakana are used as a different typeface (namely italics), not a different case.
  
  Why not have it be that the Kanamit (yes, I know the alien race's name without looking it up, I'm as disgusted as you are) writing system uses logograms, and not always in a self-evident manner. Idioms in logogram languages can get freaky, especially when they're adapted to other languages. I mean, do you know what Tenchi Muyo, as in the anime title, actually means? If you answered "No need for Heaven and Earth", you're being misled by an idiom. No, "Tenchi Muyo" means "this end up". Since it's written as "heaven, earth, no good", they don't usually write it that way anymore.
  
  See, in the sort of Classical Chinese that the idiom comes from, a "Heaven-Earth" is, in some contexts, a top-down motion (sometimes mako and kesagiri are called "heaven-earth cuts", in swordfighting), and can mean vertical generally. So "Tenchi Muyo" means, basically, "vertical inversion is no good" (if that kind of diction strikes you as bizarre, congratulations, you're having the normal human reaction to Classical Chinese's way of doing things).
• In a manga I was reading—name omitted to prevent teh spoilerz—a guy's troubled by the fact he's attracted to his older sister, who, of course, turns out not to be really his sister, and indeed not even really his conspecific, because spaceship AIs in bioroid bodies don't have families, or species for that matter. (He's her ship, she decided to raise him as a normal kid after they crashed on Earth—the bioroid body was never really explained.) Given that "not really blood-related" is how those plots usually turn out (see, e.g., Oniichan no Koto Zenzen Suki Janaindakarane), you'd think characters would start expecting it (although if you raise real siblings apart, the Westermarck Effect doesn't come into play, and icky things can happen if they meet).
  
  But also, and perhaps manga writers should reflect on the fact this actually comes up often enough to need addressing, if you turn a ship into a person, why not just tell them? People who are actually spaceships can live quite happily with the knowledge, but people who are actually spaceships and don't know it can be very dangerous when they get startled by alien monsters who show up seeking their marvelous technology. And please consider the kind of technology—specifically, the kind of power-plant—that probably goes into a spaceship that not only has a full-blown AI, but can turn itself into a bioroid body, even rendering its excess mass into a form that doesn't change the bioroid's density.
• It is by now common knowledge that the thing in that one...I wanna say James Bond...movie, with the ice bullet that melts so you can't trace it, is hogwash—the propellants would melt it. But what about if you made the bullet from a salt, that dissolved in the body's fluids? That would at least obscure any identifying marks.
  
  Of course, in reality, tracing bullets to particular guns is a hell of a lot harder than TV would like you to think. This is one of those misconceptions I'm not terribly concerned to combat, though; the likelier people think they are to get caught, the less likely they are to misbehave.
  
  And this is included here because the techno-thriller is considered a branch of SF, if you're a lumper and not a splitter. Also because io9 claims CSI, a by-the-numbers police procedural if e'er such there were, is science fiction, mostly so they can talk about the same pop-culture pablum as the rest of Gawker.
• Speaking of manga, spaceships, and bioroids, there's a manga—I think it's a tie-in to a game—called Himawari, with a girl found in a crashed UFO. I think, from the little of it that's been scanlated, that she's a navigation bioroid of some kind, because despite being sorta brain-damaged in a Chii-from-Chobits kind of way, she can plot rocket flights with her eyes closed.
  
  But I thought something interesting was, she can't drink from a cup without a straw—because if you were engineered and conditioned for zero-g, you'd never experience cups that can be "tipped" in a meaningful fashion.
• To end on a lighthearted yet meanspirited note, Oblivion, by all indications, looks to be, basically, Darker and Edgier WALL-E.