A Few Words

Post 500. I don't have any idea of what to do to commemorate the occasion. I wanted to do a blog post on language and writing though.

• Idioms crop up in places where you least expect them, in descriptions of things you assume are straightforward. For example, if you read a lot of fan translations of manga and anime, you'll probably have come across phrases like "severed wrist" or "severed neck" (well, if you read crime manga). How do you mail someone a severed wrist or find a severed neck at a serial killer's house?
  
  Easy. Japanese expresses severed body-parts not by the name of the part, but by where it was severed. A severed head is called a neck; a severed hand is called a wrist. Pro translators tend to know that, and thus translate those things by the equivalent expression in English, but amateur fan translations are done by people who apparently never stop to ask, "Wait, 'severed wrist'? Does that mean they, like, just have the seven bones of the carpus? Maybe the distal ends of the radius and ulna?"
• I realized that the trend of my recent edits to my book, one that I think all science fiction should follow, is toward the realistic portrayal of advanced technology. I.e., very little of the gravity control, metric-patching, or other high-level tech should be available in handheld or even crew-served devices; it should all be the purview of large labs and reactors, possibly in large vehicles like airships or buses but not in anything even as small as a car.
  
  The one thing I do still have is that zled wireless communications still use topology—they send their signals as wave-form distortions in space-time. But that's actually not too far-fetched—they just have a tiny amount of exotic matter that acts as an "antenna" by making microscopic distortions. It is to gravity control or metric-patching what the Farnsworth fusor is to actual power-generating fusion. Presumably they have the distortions follow a pattern different from natural gravity fluctuations (which presumably occur from every tiny bit of mass in existence), so they're detectable despite being small.
• Which reminds me, I regularly use the expression "reinventing the wheel" to describe "science-fictional for the sake of being science-fictional" devices...and then I go and put snake-belly nanomaterial treads, on sled-like runners, on zled cars. No more; I'm changing them back to wheels.
  
  Or at least to spheres. The main advantage there is actually durability—a sphere-driven car can keep a damaged area of its wheels away from the road and still function exactly like a wheeled car—which is the kind of thing the zledo would think of; they're also neurologically much more equipped to take advantage of the increased maneuverability of spheres over wheels.
  
  It seems like "brushless direct-current" motors are the way to go with this; they have more power and durability and the trade-off, "potentially less rugged, more complex, more expensive control electronics" is a trade-off zled technology is more than able to make.
• The last season or two of Law and Order Criminal Intent went downhill sharply, quality-wise. With the exception of the Jeff Goldblum episodes, which seem to have had a wholly different writing staff, the dialogue suddenly became strangely stagey and overwritten, everybody running scared of the verb "to be" and using highfalutin' adverbs while describing grisly felonies. It sounded like rather purple novelistic narrative prose, not dialogue.
  
  Niven's most important writer-rule: "Everybody talks first draft." People don't talk the way the narrative about them does, because people are not books and their audience isn't reading what they say. That's important enough for the dialogue in a work of prose; for the dialogue in a TV show, it's absolutely vital, as vital as "make sure you don't accidentally load live rounds in the prop guns".
• I guess this counts as writing since it shows up a lot in journalism, and could well show up in fiction, but pretty much nobody is ever killed with a "high-powered" rifle round. Assault rifles are not high-powered. 5.56 NATO is .223 Remington; the AK-47's 7.62×39mm is probably the weakest .30 caliber round currently in wide use; the AK-74's 5.45×39mm is on par with the freaking .22 Hornet. In many places, if you hunt anything bigger than coyotes with the AK-74's round, or bigger than pronghorns with the M16's, you will go to jail for animal cruelty, because they are not powerful enough to reliably get humane kills. Assault rifles, in sporting terms, are varmint guns, or at best small-game (you could probably hunt smaller deer with 7.62×39mm).
  
  The .308 Winchester (in the form of 7.62 NATO) does, admittedly, see some limited battlefield use as a sniper- and designated-marksman gun, but even that's more of a medium-game rifle, grossly underpowered for anything much bigger than a (typical) elk. The kinds of animals you take with "high powered" rifles properly so-called are mostly in Africa; pretty much nothing in the New World except musk-ox and the largest grizzlies and polar bears is big enough to be worth the trouble (oh, also walruses—I always forget those are big game). Because that's what a high-powered rifle is, it's basically an elephant gun, and in military terms, an anti-materiel rifle. More people have probably been murdered with staplers—not staple-guns, just staplers!—than have been shot with anti-materiel rounds, those bullets are too expensive to waste on soft meaty targets like humans.
• I was thinking about the impossibility of spacefaring libertarianism, and how a space-colonizing culture would, virtually latae sententiae, be a "water monopoly" empire. Of course, not actually based on water, nor air—hydrogen and oxygen are in abundant supply in space. Nor over some goofball nonsensoleum you can use for lame-brained petroleum allegories; superconductors, the real basis of space travel, don't actually occur naturally, and pretty much can't.
  
  No, no, the thing the "empire" has a monopoly over (other than the aforementioned superconductors, which are again not a natural resource)...would be protein. And carbohydrates. Pretty much, just like the fact that the only place you'd fight over in space are life-supporting planets, the big commodity in space would be the products of the biosphere you originated from. Even synthetic nutrients would require equipment the average asteroid miner wouldn't be able to afford, in terms of either space or money.
  
  Of course, that doesn't actually mean space colonization would have to be wholly state-controlled (nobody but an idiot or a libertarian—but I repeat myself—actually believes that anything is a dichotomous choice between "state" and "individual"). It would actually, as I think I've mentioned, be on the basis usually found in conditions where survival is hard, e.g. the mores and customs of subsistence-farming villagers, who are not a state but who are also under no obligation to help anyone who doesn't play by their rules. And their rules are the very opposite of the ones usually depicted in science fiction.
• I think the problem with a whole bunch of comic stories along the lines of "What's So Funny About Truth, Justice, and the American Way?", made into the animated movie "Superman vs. The Elite", is that they tend to be idiot plots, where Clark refuses to make his argument until it's much too late. I realize that that prevents your story from happening, but then, that's why we call it an Idiot Plot.
  
  I mean, all he has to say is, "Dude, I can rip your arm off with two fingers. A terrifying alien monster that can turn you into mist faster than your eyes can perceive, is holding himself bound by your rules. And you're bitching about it? What do you think will happen, when I give myself the right to pass judgment on those of you who don't measure up to the standard of an untiring borderline-immortal whose endocrine system is almost entirely under his conscious control?"
• Of course the other issue is, as the first seasons of the animated Batman realize but no other DC content since, heroes should say, not, "We can't kill (people like the Joker)" since at some point it pretty much becomes criminal negligence. Instead they should say, "I won't kill. That's for the courts. If you as a community decide to give the Joker the chair, the needle, or the gas-chamber, I won't shed any tears, but I'm not in the business of extrajudicial executions." (Or, "The fact we don't perform extrajudicial executions is the nice, legally-clear, liability-averting thing that separates the Justice League from any common lynch-mob.")
  
  And seriously, there is no legitimate excuse for the Joker to not get the death penalty; he's not psychotic, he didn't believe himself to be acting in self-defense. He's just freaking evil, and he's personally murdered more people than Che Guevara, without the aid of an entire totalitarian state's military and police to bring him victims. Plus? There's no reason he can't be constantly breaking out of Death Row instead of out of Arkham. Hell, coming up with ever more stringent security for him, and then ever crazier ways for him to get out anyway, is something relatively easy that adds interest automatically, like "What'll be the Riddler's clue this time?" or "What kind of constructs does this Green Lantern use in a given situation, and how and why are they different from the ones that Green Lantern would use?"