Stuff and Stuff IV

Material culture thoughts, mostly fictional/speculative.

• I have been misled for years! I had always thought that one tried to catch an opponent's sword with the edge of one's own, but no, you use the flat (possibly the back, if your sword is single-edged). The term in German longsword fighting (the best-documented historic style in Europe) is "mit der Flech", literally "with the flat". I had been inappropriately analogizing from how you block with your arm in unarmed fighting, but steel is much more flexible than bone...except when it's been hardened to create a cutting edge, and then, because "hard = brittle", you can actually create fractures that will spread till your blade shatters.
  
  I guess it just goes to demonstrate the cardinal rule: research, research, research. I need to go have a look through several things I've written (also make it clearer that swordsman don't so much "block" as parry, i.e. deflect, more the sort of thing associated with, say, wihng cheun rather than karate—something I have always known, but been somewhat careless about conveying).
• Why do people act like caseless ammunition is some huge sci-fi innovation? The Franco-Prussian War was fought with caseless ammunition, the Dreyse and Chassepot "needle" rifles (named for the shape of their firing pins), whose cartridges had paper wrappers that burned up when the round was fired. I don't know how well the paper burned, or if it fouled the barrel, but plainly it worked well enough "to be going on with", as the British expression goes.
  
  I imagine, however, that the paper wrapper, which didn't keep the powder dry and could probably get messed up any number of other ways, was just another variable you didn't need on the battlefield, and so they replaced it with brass. Those were also single-shot guns, you couldn't load multiple paper cartridges from a magazine.
• Was thinking of maybe redoing my story so the zledo are using handheld railguns, but there are definite physical limits to that tech. And the metric-patching guns have far more wiggle-room, we know just a skosh more about magnets than we do about using the Casimir effect to create negative-mass exotic matter and patch together stress-energy tensor metrics. Also, I don't think we (or anyone else) are ever gonna have rail-pistols, again, "definite physical limits".
  
  One idea I've seen kicked around is a one- or two-shot anti-tank railgun, basically a purely kinetic recoilless gun. One problem, though: the means by which "recoilless" was achieved for rockets probably aren't available with a railgun. The exhaust, after all, pushes the gun forward as the projectile leaves it, keeping the shooter from being knocked back (which is why it's dangerous to stand behind someone who has one, unless becoming a demonstration of the Kzinti Lesson appeals to you).
• Know what the bike-helmet of the future might well look like? A stocking cap. We're actually making them in limited numbers now, for things like snowboarding. They have a layer of shear-thickening fluid inside them. I would really like to know if the shear-thickening fluid in question, trademarked as "d3o", has to be bright orange, or if they just chose to make it bright orange because they're awesome.
  
  Another idea that I'm definitely going to add to my book (the city where most of the first and third ones take place is at its planet's equator) is refrigerated clothes. The technology we currently only use in pro-sports mascot suits and movie costumes would be quite a boon to the populace of warmer climes—not only for the sake of fashion (and not getting your legs shredded by brush or bit by snakes) but also in terms of ecology. Coolant linings, if properly disposed once they wear out, almost certainly have less ecological impact than air-conditioning a whole office building.
• In the interest of pointing out to people that giant robots are not unrealistic (though their portrayal usually is), consider the following. Titanium alloy as used in armor plating is much less dense than steel, 4.45 g/cm³ to dense steel's 8.05. A known walking robot like Asimo is 48 kg and 1.3 m tall (a human as small as Asimo would weigh 30 kg, an Asimo the size of a human would weigh 165 kg). If, for simplicity's sake, we assume that all of Asimo except the battery (6 kg) is made of automotive magnesium alloy, density 1.8 g/cm³, then replacing it all with armor-grade titanium gives us an Asimo massing 103.8 kg. Making that 10 meters tall would give a mass 455 times greater ((10/1.3)³), which comes to 47.26 megagrams, the same mass as an M60 Patton tank.
  
  Of course, no actual military hardware is made entirely of armor; even most tanks are made, in many of their components, of the aforementioned automotive magnesium alloy, with only a relatively thin shell of armor. It's entirely realistic for a mecha to be 10 meters tall and mass 25-30 tons. Given that automotive alloy is only 70% denser than a human body (1.06 g/cm³), it may well be more realistic to model a walking robot as a man in a suit of armor. A human being averages 70 kg and 1.73 meters tall; a man made of automotive alloy would mass 119 kg. A suit of full plate armor made of titanium alloy would mass 11 kg (steel armor is 20 kg), bringing an armored magnesium man's mass to 130 kg. Making him 10 meters tall increases his mass 193 times, to 25.11 megagrams, the mass of a Bradley (which is a light-to-medium tank in everything but treads and lacking a big main cannon).
• So...a bunch of people think we're going to 3D-print our clothes in the future. I doubt it, since 3D-printers are never going to be "one in every household" affairs, any more than laser-etchers or lathes are, and there is more to fashion than "personal expression" (actually, "personal expression" is virtually nonexistent in fashion, the only thing fashion generally "expresses" is in-group identification). Remember how, parallel with electronic books, we were all going to get paper books printed to-order at bookstores? Yeah, that didn't happen either.
  
  Which is not to say no garments will come out of 3D printers. Custom clothes will probably expand well outside their current tiny market share, being so much simpler now. A certain amount of self-indulgence is probably likely at some point—all of society now being in the position of aristocrats with tailors on retainer. We may be looking forward to fashion-movements as weird as the ones that France had just after the Terror, like the Muscadins and the Incroyables, only probably without the political element.
  
  Also? We might print underwear, or more to the point bras—I have two sisters, do you my fellow dudes know what a hassle bras are? Apparently they are sized on somewhat the same basis as Eastern Bloc computer parts, only without the uniformity, and even the alleged authorities disagree with each other over how much to round a given measurement ("nearest inch? or two inches?" being apparently a hotly debated point). Plus manufacturers appear not to believe that certain size combinations exist, much like how in my youth I could never find pants that were long enough that weren't too loose at the waist.
• This article pretty much speaks for itself, and is extremely interesting. I know I unconsciously incorporated most of that "gestural vocabulary" when my characters interact with volumetric displays—even the alien ones. I'm a little ashamed of myself for not having consciously designed a gestural interface, but then again I probably would've gone with most of the same ideas anyway. I mean, how is an alien going to dismiss something, if he's using his hands (or hand-analogues)? Well, he's going to wave it off, dogs understand that gesture.
  
  Of course, when people complain that aliens have the same gestures as humans, it's almost completely beside the point to ask them if they know that a particular gesture is only found in a particular culture, or is unique to humans. Of course they don't, learning about other cultures and animal behavior is hard, and sometimes involves discovering that some things are universal. It's much easier to congratulate themselves on "knowing" that everything about their culture is only found in their culture, and everyone else's culture is completely different. That's why to this day nobody from Europe has even been able to gesticulate his meaning to a Korean, Zulu, or Zuñi, nor vice-versa, let alone actually learn each other's languages. Right?
• It looks like we're not going to be getting away from silicon as an information-storage material any time soon. Mostly because the next gen of optical storage, probably never be replaced, involves laser-etching nanostructural changes into quartz. And quartz, as we all know, is silicon dioxide (little pieces of it are called "sand").
  
  I kinda want to stab every single journalist who reported on this, as well as whoever decided to call it "superman memory crystal". A lot of stabbing to get through, I realize. But dammit, it's made of quartz, that doesn't mean it looks like a freaking trigonal crystal, so why did every single media outlet (and again, seemingly the scientists themselves) go out of their way to make the public picture the Fortress of Freaking Solitude?
  
  Besides, everyone knows that's Kryptonian sunstone, not quartz.