Stuff and Stuff III

Thoughts on fictional material culture. Well, tools in general, actually, writing is not, strictly speaking, material culture.

This post is #469, which is 7 × 67. You can arrange 469 dots in a hexagon.

• The big downsides of hydrogen-powered cars are that it's difficult to get hydrogen, and it leaks out of anything. Apparently, though, the answer, is to keep the hydrogen inside the passengers—specifically, in their bladders. Yes, people have developed a way to get hydrogen from urea, because it only takes 30.08% as much energy to separate hydrogen from urea as from water.
  
  So...basically, if your Warthog is low on fuel, don't pour water in the tank, pee in the tank. Gross, yes, but also awesome. The future euphemisms just write themselves—"'Scuse me, I gotta go top off the Jeep."
• Was watching Batman Beyond with my brother, and he was simply freaked out by the AI newsreaders. So I had to demonstrate to him that Ananova was a thing, and people actually thought that irksome crap was the wave of the future.
  
  Only...it's really not. It really, really is not. Not for the foreseeable future; dead tree media and TV news are on the way out but they're mostly being replaced by little glowy pixel media and podcasts, just as dependent on actual people talking as Larry King Live. Plus, we nowadays mostly associate simulated-sounding AI voices with a certain catty homicidal maniac; not the person you want reading your news.
• Research into the Maya syllabary leads me to suspect I may've been wrong, when I said that nobody would ever write something that looks like, e.g., Romulan (or Interlac). I could readily see a writing system deriving from something like the Mayan syllabary, whose characters would resemble those shapes.
  
  Of course, I still think it would be a pain to write such an alphabet in pen; Mayan is arguably more inefficient than Sino-Japanese, since Mayan syllable glyphs are not, unlike kana, markedly simpler than logogram glyphs. Compare the syllabic signs listed here to any table of hiragana or katakana—seems like a lot of work for the same information, doesn't it?
• Aside from anything that comes from your engine, the big radiation source in space (if nobody tries to nuke you) is the Van Allen belt, particularly if you use space elevators, and galactic cosmic rays, which admittedly sound totally fake. Only, good news: they're both ionizing! You can shield against ionizing radiation using superconducting magnets...which are a prerequisite to many decent rockets anyway.
  
  Also, the guy who wrote "The Hazards of Space Travel: A Tourist's Guide" seems to think radiation in space will cause spacers to have to use IVF, with gametes frozen before they ever depart, to have children safely. Only, our current standard of radiation-protection is no more indicative of what a really spacefaring civilization would consider normal, than the workshops of the Aurignacian culture represent the production capabilities of the Classic Maya. Also? Lead-lined codpieces. Or gold-lined: remember, asteroid mining makes dense metals much cheaper.
• A search of the blog doesn't seem to think so, but if I've mentioned this before, scuzați. Anyway, the handhelds in my SF setting? On watch fobs. Also wallet chains. Their handhelds, after all, are their clocks and wallets and keys, as well as their phones and personal computers.
  
  I don't know, I like watch-chains and wallet chains. Maybe I played too many JRPGs in my formative years, but chains as a fashion accessory are always good. And I happen to prefer that fashion accessories serve a purpose, and while "idiot-mittening" your phone may not be very grand, it is a purpose.
• This, speakers that go over your shoes, is a genuinely goofy idea. But at the same time, it does achieve a look very reminiscent of a lot of video game and anime characters' clothes. So...what if speaker-spats were the mark of some subculture defined by a music and dance style? We've had those before, they even made movies for them (Breakin', for example, the sequel to which is the reason every second installment of anything gets referred to as "Electric Boogaloo").
  
  Also, you know techno and electronica, various varieties of which are still major players in pop music? Yes, well, they have an older name. Namely, disco. Seriously, electronic pop is fundamentally built on the same principles it was back in the 70s; it's probably because that kind of music is A) easy to create and perform and B) easy both to dance to and to listen to if you're not dancing (volume issues to one side). Just as men's clothes haven't changed radically since the late 18th century (in some regards since the mid-17th), I think it's quite likely that certain branches of pop music will not change that much.
• Also on the handheld front, this bamboo smartphone got me to thinking, why do SF portable electronics tend to look just like those of the culture that made the series? Remember how I've said that lots of things in a space-colonizing civilization will be bamboo and silicones? Silicone can do any other polymer's job, and bamboo, if you don't happen to like its bare appearance, can be lacquered in any color.
  
  Similarly, why not have aliens encase their electronics in stone, like some Fabergé eggs, e.g. this one? The casings we make for electronics now are basically artificial stone, and we also use stone for things like handles.
• You know how artificial gravity generators and warp-drives in SF tend to look like nothing, except each other? We do actually know what those devices would look like, or at least part of them. Yo:
  This is a Casimir effect experimental apparatus. And all our remotely not-magic ideas about making artificial gravity, or any other kind of space-warping, involves the casimir effect. So your machine will have to have a part that makes it happen.