Comentario 3

Piensas al azar. Post 473, which is 11×43 and the sum of five consecutive primes.

• It's somewhat amusing, when people try and claim knights were really just a bunch of thugs, to watch the sleight of hand they engage in. One trick is that they generally will say that the "conventional" view of knighthood is the one that comes from the literature of the High Middle Ages (1100-1300, or 1091-1348), whereas the reality...is a list of incidents from the era immediately preceding that, e.g. the exploits of Foulques the Black, 972-1040.
  
  It's an amusing sport; let's try it with other cultures! I mean, the literature of the Edo period claimed samurai were loyal to their lords, but while the warlords were jockeying for position after Nobunaga's death, samurai changed sides all the time! American literature in the 1920s assumed America was opposed to slavery, but Americans in 1860 owned slaves!
  
  I'm sorry, if your statement about a period hinges on events that didn't happen during it, you're not only a liar, you're also a thundering moron. Also? "All knights are thugs" is the conventional view, how old are you?
• If I had even less of a life than I do, I'd find it interesting to catalog the number of take-downs of Eragon that are themselves as bad as Eragon. Yes, Paolini's a hack who knocked off Tolkien, Lucas, and McCaffrey, and knows almost as little about linguistics as Karen "Uwe Boll of literature" Traviss (although she was about three times as old, when she made Mando'a, as Paolini was when he made the Ancient Language). His books are transparent adolescent fetishism and wish-fulfillment, and his protagonists are wall-to-wall Mary Sues.
  
  That doesn't legitimize your illiterate taboo on various fantasy tropes, your stupid attempts to nitpick words whose definitions you don't know (roots can indeed be "convoluted", saying so just makes you a dork), your racist tokenism (if the setting were based on Africa would you complain there were no white people?), or your getting sidetracked onto detailing your own fetishes while criticizing Paolini for regaling us with his. Seriously, you're only providing ammunition to his deluded followers; look how much work the Stalin-defending fellow travelers got out of "Hitler was anti-Communist".
• Speaking of Traviss, apparently she doesn't read fiction. Which, I mean, we suspected—she also plainly doesn't read anything on linguistics. But seriously, also, her hate for the Jedi apparently stems from her deciding, as Pommies seem to love to do totally at random, that the Jedi and Sith represented Nazi race theories (which are different from British race theories because they were written about in German). Yes, she seriously said the Jedi are a Nazi master race.
  
  Except, of course, that the Mandalorians she created fit that particular description far better than the Jedi ever did—they're probably more Nazi-esque than the freaking Empire, and, uh, just think about that for a second. The greatest thing a Mandalorian can be is a parent...i.e., a perpetuator of the Herrenvolk. They pretty much go to war solely for Lebensraum, and at one point their moral superiority to the Jedi is summed up in the Jedi not having callused hands from digging. Do I actually have to show you the Nazi pamphlets?
  
  Come to think of it I might owe Uwe Boll an apology.
• People's weird ideas about clones make me sad, and by sad I mean "homicidally annoyed". Guess what? A clone is no different from a twin, because—guess what else—a twin (an identical one anyway) is a clone. The idea that clones "might not have souls", or alternatively that cloning would somehow disprove the idea of a soul, is asinine. Again: do identical twins lack souls?
  
  Of course, then again, most people don't actually have a right to an opinion about whether anything has a soul, because they don't know what the damn word means. Newsflash, everything has a soul; all "soul" means in actual philosophy is "that which makes it what it is". Sapient beings' souls are different from those of other living things, which are different from those of inanimate objects; but if an entity is sapient, it has the exact same kind of soul as any other sapient.
• I was worried that I might need to come up with a reason why the people in my book go slogging around in armor that looks like, well, armor, rather than in light, comfy carbon-nanotube bulletproof garments. One issue I already noticed is that even if a nanotube garment prevents a bullet from penetrating, it still won't stop the force—you'll just be very tidily-bagged shattered bones and pummeled organs. The Mongols' silk shirts were more-or-less arrowproof, but there was a reason the Mongol aristocracy also wore metal armor. But then I got to thinking, and did a little research. And the major reason they don't use nanotube clothes, is price.
  
  Consider. It takes 180,000 feet of silk thread to make one yard (square) of silk fabric; it takes about two square yards of fabric just to make a t-shirt. And nanotubes, at about 70 nanometers thick, are 143 times thinner than silk fibers. So a single nanotube t-shirt would take 51,480,000 feet of nanotube fiber, or 15,691 km. A space elevator is 35,786 km long, so every 2.28 nanotube t-shirts would cost as much as the cable for a space-elevator. It would take the equivalent of 86,000 space elevators to outfit just the current Marine Corps active-duty numbers; imagine outfitting a combined force recruited from every country on Earth!
• A number of the criticisms leveled at Superman comics are fundamentally wrongheaded—the people making them generally being largely unacquainted with the last decade or three of the comics' continuity. You know how Superman catching people should snap their spines? Yeah, well, that might be a valid criticism of Spider-man, but not our boy Kal. Similarly, how he should just slam through the hull of an aircraft, rather than catching it? Nope again. See, Kryptonians under the effects of a yellow sun aren't actually super-strong. They're telekinetic. Superman proper has to manipulate objects with his hands, but some other Kryptonians have learned to dissociate the effect from physical handling, and can just make things float.
  
  Similarly, those explosions Kal survives, up to and including low-grade nukes? Yeah, Kryptonians aren't just indomitable mountains of muscle, either. They're basically only tenuously matter; they can just as easily be regarded as not-very-versatile energy beings. Incidentally the same is true of Maltusians (better known as Guardians of Oa) and Martians and Czarnians, although Czarnians are somewhat more vulnerable, having deliberately engineered the effect rather than achieving it on their own. (Lobo isn't an energy-being so much as he is a nanomachine swarm—he's even been used as a Gray Goo weapon on occasion.)
  
  Humans were going to achieve the same powers as Kryptonians and Martians (they're related to both in some way), but they were sabotaged by the White Martians, who didn't want the competition. The Martians' own fear of fire is the result of similar sabotage, brainwashed into them by the Guardians to keep them from overrunning the rest of the cosmos.
• This DeviantArt article is an example of why, I think, people need to stop arguing that the population at large knows reality from fantasy. Because read those comments: a substantial majority are by people who think drones are autonomous robots, probably nearly half predicated on the assumption that we can actually make AI. In other words, these people judged an issue in real politics based on what they've seen in movies. And not only because movies influenced their perceptions of right and wrong: they not only assumed the movies showed that correctly, they assumed the movies showed facts—current conditions—correctly.
  
  Just so we're all on the same page, drones are remote controlled. They have no autonomy whatsoever; forget AI, they don't so much as correct for turbulence without operator input. And there are no new legal issues raised by their use against terrorist targets, trials or no, American citizens or no. Terrorists are not citizens of any country, their official legal status is "enemy of the human race". No sane person disputes that it is permissible to send in special forces to assassinate them—so it is also permissible to kill them with remote-controlled airplanes. Technology does not change morals, if it's moral to kill you with a stone axe or a steel sword than it's moral to kill you with a tungsten-carbide kinetic-energy penetrator dropped from an orbiting platform.
• Pretty good anime season this spring. Dansai Bunri no Crime Edge ("Crime Edge of Cutting and Severing"), the cutest manga about serial killers ever written, has an anime out, and it's excellent. Mushibugyô, about people hunting giant demon insects in the Edo Period, was a decent manga (all three times it was rebooted), and it's got an anime. Karneval's a neat, weird little josei manga, along the lines of Tripeace but for a female audience and minus the transvestitery. Hentai Ôji to Warawanai Neko (The Perverted Prince and the Unsmiling Cat) was a weird, kinda dumb manga, but it's getting an anime, although I haven't seen it yet. Date A Live is a tolerable light novel (most light novels are tolerable at best, with only a few standouts like Baka Test and Slayers), it's got an anime that I haven't bothered to watch.
  
  There's three mecha series this season, all of them worth a look. Suisei no Gargantia, which no way no how means "Gargantia of the Verdurous Planet" ("verdurous" means "with flourishing vegetation", and the planet in question is nothing but ocean), is excellent science fiction. Ginga Kikôtai Majestic Prince is pretty neat, albeit it's in the generic Sunrise anime style (see also S-Cry-Ed and Gundam SEED), and half the jokes only make sense if you're familiar with the conventions of tokusatsu shows. Kakumeiki Valvrave is all right, albeit a bit Jingoistic—plus a series where people who live in a Dyson sphere behave exactly like contemporary Japanese high-schoolers, though par for the course, is a little hard to take running at the same time as Gargantia, with its genuine worldbuilding.