De Romanicorum Physicalium 7

Just what it says.

• I don't know if I mentioned it, but I think if you were going to have a realistic space-combat game, you'd need some way to approximate rocket accelerations. Basically, I think, your best bet would be to treat the rocket's motion as ballistic—with its old heading as its momentum, and the new one as gravity.
  
  I still have no idea how one would approximate that on something like a hex-grid, though; I assume you could work out a rough conversion of hexes of momentum/hex-sides you can turn/new number of hexes you slide next turn, etc., depending on a given ship's acceleration and heading, but I bet the math is a beast. This is why I don't make games.
• In a similar vein, I'm pretty sure I'm doing my travel times, delta-v, and so on, a bit off. E.g., I don't know how to calculate the precise delta-v to slow back down after accelerating to cruising speed, so I just say "half the tank to get going, half to stop". Isn't that, at some level, correct?
  
  And again, fiction; as long as people who were said to be traveling at a speed between two points of stated distance apart, arrive at the appropriate times, it's fine. How much historical fiction keeps track of how long horse-travel takes? (Although Lewis was being a whiny-baby complaining about Tolkien, Shadowfax is not a normal horse.)
• Incidentally, you may wish to peruse Wiktionary's glossary of atmospheric entry jargon. I found out, the things I usually call "landers" hereabouts should be called "entry vehicles". Which are not to be confused with "reentry vehicles", which are what the layman usually calls "nuclear warheads", in their submunition-fired-from-ICBM form. (Yes, ICBMs nowadays have multiple warheads and can strike multiple targets—they're basically evil motherships.)
  
  Speaking of reentry, Yuri Gagarin has an asterisk next to his record, according to the International Aeronautic Federation (yes, the Space Race was refereed by an international aerial-sports body). See, to count as a successful manned spaceflight, you've got to land in your craft. The Soviets couldn't figure out how to do that safely yet, so Gagarin parachuted down while his craft crashed. To this day, the FAI (the acronym is in French) only acknowledges Gagarin as the first human in outer space—"first manned spaceflight" is John Glenn. (Seem unfair? Do you consider any other experimental flight successful if the pilot has to bail—because his craft wasn't designed to land? The only aircraft I know of that aren't designed to land are kamikaze planes.)
• In all fairness to Maxine Waters' "170 million jobs lost" gaffe, I, too, have made errors of a factor of 1000 (assuming the number she wanted was 170,000). I bring it up here because my own gaffe involved rocket calculations. In my defense, some of the numbers I was working with were in metric tons, others in kilograms; Waters cannot claim some similar confusion RE: a "kilocapita" unit for counting people (which totally should exist, though).
  
  Also, though, I eventually caught my error, because I noticed the numbers were too high. Did Rep. Waters at no point notice that—given the US workforce is only 134 million people—she was talking about 127% unemployment? She never looked at her "jobs lost" number and thought "and that would bring unemployment to...?" I don't know, it seems like the sort of thing you'd consider, since shouting unemployment percentages has long been a great way to gin up the voters.
• You know my thing about how a scholarly people like the Chinese—moreso in the ultra-scholarly Classical form—have a very isolating, analytical language, while warlike peoples like the Apache and Zulu have very "complex" (in layman's terms) synthetical languages? And how that's the reverse of the naïve expectations of most writers, who clutter up otherwise good science fiction with Sapir-Whorf stupidity? I think it's not entirely the writers' fault.
  
  See, the scholarly prestige-languages of the Western world—Latin and Greek—and those that Westerners were most likely to be familiar with from other cultures—Sanskrit and Classical Arabic—are all of them synthetical and highly-inflected. Thus, the Westerner assumes, scholars just naturally talk that way. Unfortunately he does not pause to consider...why is Classical Arabic a prestige language? Why do people who pray in Sanskrit have control over such a broad swath of territory? What was the reason all the scholars used Latin and Greek?
  
  Notice the trend there? The Arabs, the Romans, Alexander's Greeks, the ancient Hindus: all of those languages are used by scholars because they were imposed on such wide territories by force of arms. That is not the case for Chinese; Korea and Japan adopted Chinese writing purely from the desire for the advantages enjoyed by Chinese civilization. While the Han did impose a common culture on their neighbors within China, for the most part it was so long ago as to have become legend; within historic times (and up until Communism) the only people who had Chinese culture systematically imposed on them were the Yue, and even the southern portion of them (Vietnam) didn't actually start speaking Chinese, but only adopted Chinese writing.
• Speaking of Sapir-Whorf, a perennial idea used by SW-besotted provincial-honky science fiction writers is the idea, e.g. in Samuel Delaney's Babel-17 or Ayn Rand's Anthem, that lacking a first-person pronoun will destroy one's ability to distinguish reality from one's perceptions, or otherwise interfere with knowledge of the self.
  
  Only...it sure doesn't seem to have hurt the Japanese any—"the self" and "reality vs. perception" are just a little important in Zen, you know? Japanese hasn't got any personal pronouns, not technically; they're all actually nouns or demonstratives. Instead of saying "I talk to him", you say "this person talks to that person," or something equivalent. And they are not noticeably egoless—this is the homeland of Oda Nobunaga and Uesugi Kenshin we're talking about here.
  
  Basically, linguistic speculations by people who only speak English (or some other modern European language) are, at best, laughably bad. At worst they usually involve a lot of risible, effectively-racist Jingo cheerleader self-congratulation, right out of Oswald Spengler.
• The business with that bolide in Russia—in the province the Russian general in Metal Gear Solid is from, Chelyabinsk—has of course brought much speculation RE: asteroid moving. And sadly, nobody ever says a word about Project Orion. I mean, you people always complain about how we've got these nuclear arsenals with no use—well there's a use.
  
  Seriously, even the 1st-gen 1959 version of Orion could get 80 MN from a single 1.7 gigagram engine—which my math says is enough to push a 6500 ton asteroid at one G. 1700 metric tons sounds like a lot, but most of it's the pusher-plate...and please remember the world's nuclear arsenal is 17,000-odd bombs. Reverse Nobel-dynamite made-for-peaceful-purposes-used-for-war thingy, really, if you think about it.
  
  Huh. What'd Nobel make dynamite for, anyway—did you ever wonder, what peaceful purpose you invent explosives for? Presumably construction or land-clearing, I guess.
• That thing above about how the differences in Japanese thought from that of Indo-European speakers do not map one-to-one onto the differences of Japanese from Indo-European languages—the concept "ego" is not unknown to them, despite the fact they have no personal pronouns—is the fundamental weakness of Sapir-Whorf.
  
  Namely, languages that lack a syntactic structure still have the idea. Japanese and Chinese lack a grammatical plural—yet they are entirely capable of expressing the idea "more than one member of the same class" (albeit that is not what their plural-like structure actually expresses). English verbs are very data-poor compared to the verbs in Navajo—Navajo can say in a single word what English has to express by "he used to carry each of the two thin stiff things along"—yet I just conveyed that concept, didn't I?
  
  Any language can say anything, because the external reality, from which the concepts expressed by words are abstracted, is universal. Only fundamentally muddleheaded philosophy could ever have made so many people believe what may be the second stupidest form of nominalism ever.