Stuff and Stuff II

This is post 449. It's a prime. You can tell because when you write it in base-6, you get 2025₆—and all primes besides 2 and 3 in base-6 end in a 5 or a 1. Cool, huh?

Random thoughts, likely to be preoccupied with fictional accoutrements.

• It occurs to me, armed mecha would be a major advantage in war. Why? Because mobility is an important issue for modern artillery, that's why we invented train guns and various kinds of motorized artillery (including guns mounted on heavily-armored tractors, AKA "tanks"). And since wheeled or tracked vehicles are incapable of going on some 40% of the land-space—did you know modern Special Forces go on horseback in much of Afghanistan?—having artillery that can walk means you very nearly double the terrain that has to be searched before you can blow up someone's guns. And in that time, they're moving. It would just suck to fight those, I'm sorry.
  
  And again, remember, they're not walking everywhere; where the terrain is good, they'd roll on treads in their feet. People who have evidently not watched mecha anime are really not allowed to comment on how realistic or not those anime are—and people who have watched mecha anime, and still think the mecha walk everywhere, aren't allowed to comment because they've demonstrated themselves to be stupid.
• You know how "a pint's a pound the world around"? It also works in metric—one cubic centimeter (or milliliter) of water weighs one gram. I recalled this fact while making Minute Rice with a 14-oz, by weight, can of broth in place of the water—since rice takes equal volumes of rice and water, you just fill your measuring cup with rice up to the 400 mL line of its metric side (14 oz is 396 g).
• Did you know that Google's calculator does unit conversions, e.g. you can do a search for "45 kg in lb"? It also has a currency converter, which, while having the expected disclaimers about not relying on it as a definitive source, is still damn useful, especially if you read as much foreign literature as I do.
  
  Oh, and it gets better. You can even convert prices and units together. And I'm guessing one reason Japanese people are so much thinner than Americans is that over there, chicken (e.g.) costs $4.53/lb (¥89/100 g), while here, it seldom exceeds $3/lb (¥59/100 g), and can get much cheaper. Let's not even go into what beef costs in Japan, and I don't just mean that ridiculous novelty-act Matsuzaka or Kobe stuff, either.
• Speaking of Japanese beef, did you know that lots of Japanese people think there's mad cow disease in American beef? Funny thing, there's been exactly one case of mad cow in the US, and it was in a dairy animal (in California), not a beef one. Mad cow was a UK and Australia problem, not an American one. I think it was only a minor problem in Canada.
  
  So what's up? Simple, protectionism. Japanese industry is notorious for claiming that foreign products are dangerous or won't work there—because they don't want the competition. Up through the mid-90s it was even common to claim foreign electronics had to be completely overhauled to work with Japan's electrical systems. In reality, of course, they don't even have to convert the plugs to use American stuff.
• I know I've talked before about how the real significance of red, psychologically, has to do with berries, not blood—and the fact that only non-strepsirrhine primates can see it (plants grow red berries so that birds, not mammals that find food by sight, will eat their fruit—that's also why some berries are so bitter, a flavor birds have no receptor for). Consider: only primates use red in social signaling, with large, hairless red buttocks. Only primates use bared teeth as a submissive posture—it's also, in non-human primates, baring the gums, which are red. And only one kind of primate blushes when emotionally excited.
  
  This idea has potential for science fiction, e.g. "What colors are important to alien psychology?" The zledo, for instance, don't have a color as significant as red; their military wears the color of their blood for the same reason the Roman one did, to symbolize that the uniform takes on the "blood-guilt" of their fighting, and thus they become "pure" again simply by putting on civilian clothes (it was taboo to wear military uniform within the precincts of Rome, the Praetorian Guard wore togas while on duty). The zled religion no longer truly has the idea of blood-guilt (they actually call it marrow-guilt, bones being more significant in their thought than blood; nevertheless marrow looks a lot like blood), but the tradition of how soldiers dress hasn't changed.
• On a somewhat related note, since both involve evolutionary psychology, is the fact that "a spirit of brotherhood", as used in the context of international peace, is the most inadvertently apt phrase ever invented. Considering what a human's family structure is, "to treat someone as a brother" means, evolutionarily speaking, "to regard a conspecific as non-hostile". In a pack, the only conspecific who isn't your enemy is a member of your own family (i.e., of the same pack). And other members of your pack are either your parent or child, your mate, or a sibling. Analogies to parents, children, and mating have unfortunate implications in terms of international relations, so siblings are the only option left.
  
  The same, by the bye, is true not only of humans' relations to each other, but of our relations with nonhuman animals. Dogs and cats both become "domesticated" by tricking them into regarding humans as siblings. In the cats' case, domestication has been accompanied by a long train of selective breeding for psychological neoteny (emotional arrested development), since an adult cat cannot regard any conspecific other than as an enemy, except while mating (and just barely even then). That's also why cats are kinda nuts, by the way, arrested development tends to involve other funny wiring along the way.
• Turns out I was wrong: there is an element—for a given value of "element"—with zero protons in its nucleus. Only, it's not called Element Zero, it's called positronium, and it doesn't give you antigravity, telekinesis, or warp drive, it gives you gamma rays. Because it consists of a positron and an electron in the quantum equivalent of a Trojan orbit (what Pluto and Charon have), held together by their opposite charges, and they annihilate each other as soon as their respective spin-states let them.
  
  You can use it for gamma-ray lasers, though, which is awesome. Those lasers would be quite helpful in producing fusion, but I doubt very much you'd ever get more power out of fusion than it took to make positronium in the first place (which is relevant to power-generation fusion, not so much to propulsion fusion). How does fusion get to what fission reactors call critical (the point where the reaction is self-sustaining), anyway (outside of a star, I mean)? I suppose if we knew that, we'd be doing it.
• I was a titsch irked, I think I was reading Cracked (and it wasn't a David "why hasn't that unfunny self-righteous ass been fired yet?" Wong article, either), by the complaint that the cool computers in Minority Report didn't have any kind of wireless networking.
  
  On the one hand, A, that movie came out in 2002, wireless networking was just barely a thing then, but also B, you really think they're going to trust something as sensitive as Pre-Crime data to wireless security? No. It's doubtful the Pre-Crime computer would even have network access, period, let alone wirelessly.
• I know I mentioned people in my SF setting use their handhelds for all the things we do, plus wallets, but did I also mention they use them for their keys? You turn on your car with your handheld, you get into your house with your handheld--you remotely unlock your car or garage with your handheld. All it takes is some biometrics on the handheld to make it so only you can do that, and you can still let people use your handheld if, e.g., yours has a capability theirs doesn't—only some functions would be biometrically locked.
  
  Of course, handhelds being so important, I think (though I haven't found a spot to stick it in) that you'd see a little something come back into fashion: watch fobs. I don't know why we don't keep our cellphones on them now, it seems pretty obvious to me, especially since there's already a fashion for wallet chains. I especially can't conceive of why no enterprising steampunk has done it, it seems like it'd be right up their alley.
• Isn't it sorta odd, considering the Transhumanist leanings of the cyberpunk fanbase, that all those cyberpunk RPGs have those rules where cybernetic enhancements screw with your empathy? I mean, I could see if some of the brain ones did, but cyberlimbs? Seriously? Even though we aren't sticking guns in our artificial limbs—yet—I'm fairly sure the idea that having prostheses makes you inhuman is offensive. You jerks can go tell the folks over at Wounded Warrior Project you think so.
  
  It's especially jarring given that the amount of cyborg-stuff you can have is generally linked to Constitution, or the local equivalent, in those games. So why not just have it be that having too much hardware wired into your nervous system is, you know, bad for you? Since, you know, it probably would be, and all.