Rannm Thawts Three

Just what you see here.

• Having Neil deGrasse Tyson host a Cosmos reboot is a stroke of genius. I was actually wondering, "How will you make Cosmos without Carl Sagan's smug unwarranted self-congratulation and laughably false hagiographic presentation of the history of science?" But Tyson fits the bill nicely.
  
  Well, except that his achievements make Sagan look like Niels Bohr. Sagan may only have contributed as much to science as the average state-university astronomy professor, but that is at least real research, and every single pebble-pusher in the trenches has a part to play. Tyson? I searched him on Google Scholar and so far haven't found a single thing authored by him that's not a glorified press release (I suppose "essay", if we're being polite) about how awesome Science™ is, or else about how some particular policy in Science™ is just the only tenable solution (e.g. RE: Pluto).
  
  Real research-papers have long, abstruse titles like "ATP sulfurylase from filamentous fungi: which sulfonucleotide is the true allosteric effector?"; Tyson's all have punchy, marketer-friendly storybook titles like "The Planet that Never Was" or "Death by Black Hole".
• In the original Gundam, Earth and Zeon are supposed to have lost half of their populations "in the war's first month alone". Now, this is one of those settings where apocryphal population apocalypses are taken at face-value, and UC 0079 is something like AD 2131, so there would be well over ten billion people on Earth (and a single O'Neill cylinder can hold up to ten million people, and each "Side" consists of several cylinders).
  
  Which raises the question, "How is the Earth still habitable?" Anything that could kill billions in a month would have to involve nukes or something comparable. Nothing else—certainly not tanks, which is all mobile suits are—could kill at anything like that rate. Even assuming Nazi-like death-camps (six, in a faction controlling 4.3% of the Earth's territory, killing at a rate of 1.5 million annually, or 250,000 each per year), and Zeon control over the entire Earth's land-area (I assume the Feddies aren't killing many of their own people), with the same amount of death-camps per unit area as the Nazis, you still only kill 5,813,953 people per year. Killing even one billion would take 172 years; half the world's current population would take 602 years. Killing 1 billion people in one month means killing 10% of the current US population, or one whole Canada or Uganda, every 24 hours. Killing 3.5 billion people in a month would involve killing off the entire French-speaking population of Africa every day, and UC 0079 Earth almost certainly has more people than 2014 Earth. Can you think of a way to do that without rendering large portions of the planet uninhabitable?
  
  Of course, the whole idea that the world lost half its population is ignored for the whole rest of the series. Very little of the Earth has been rendered uninhabitable, very few cities are shown to have been completely abandoned; people after the war do not live in squalor and technological stagnation (a certain minimum population-base is necessary for progress, because with lower populations people who might otherwise be innovating are occupied with more routine tasks). Also, nobody even suggests genociding the Zeon people or even executing their entire leadership, which is what would absolutely happen to an aggressor who lost a war that killed half the human race. Apparently nobody at Sunrise knew how close their country came to getting either treatment, and the war they were the aggressor in only killed 1.5% of the world's population (their theater of it, anyway).
• There's people coming up with makeup to foil facial-recognition software. There's people 3d printing plastic guns that don't set off metal detectors (presumably their ammo still would). There's several other petulant anti-surveillance gestures, all by people who seem to think they're actually engaged in meaningful political acts. But the net result? Massively more inconvenience and degradation, plus more expense to upgrade the equipment. You've made guns that can get through metal detectors (though they're not very good guns)? Then they're just going to have to ascertain that you're unarmed the old-fashioned way. I'm pretty sure at this point the best use for your 3d printed gun is as a dietary supplement, if you take my meaning.
  
  I mean, seriously. Most facial-recognition software is not used by automated systems. It's used by security guards, separated from the people the software checks by a Formica counter. If you have makeup that foils the software? Well, first, one of the guards nudges his co-worker, and says, "Hey, this dude's not showing up on the software." Then he comes around the Formica counter, and as everyone behind you in the line curses you for the delay you're causing, the guard approaches you. "Sir," he says, "please come with me." He proceeds to lead you toward the back room, pulling on an elbow-length latex glove as he goes.
  
  What a mighty blow for civil liberties and human dignity that was! You're a damn folk hero!
• In my setting, the oldest space-station colonies are Stanford tori (which are a specific type of Von Braun habitat ring). Later colonies, after the invention of actual topological-distortion artificial gravity, don't have a geometry derived from a need to rotate. But I had been unclear as to what shape they would have; I had rather vaguely supposed something like a Bernal sphere or O'Neill Island (which they still didn't need for their space-dwelling population by the time they invented topo-gravity), presumably with the topo-gravity making them stick to the "walls" without the thing having to spin. But that, too, is a design based around rotation, and I despise SF designs whose form does not follow their function.
  
  So, I decided, the newer colonies would be, like the ships, oriented essentially like a tower. But since a space-station has no need to minimize mass, since it's not going anywhere, and one wants to maximize the area so it can fit a lot of population (and have room to breathe—long-term confinement in ship-like conditions would result in lots of crazy colonists), I figured it might be roughly saucer-shaped, or possibly mushroom-shaped, with a long shaft of various machinery (presumably a bunch of generators, for one thing) and a flat, somewhat bulbous habitat section on the "top". I imagine them looking something like the Kûkai Foundation from Xenosaga, except that I am not fond of windows on space-structures; or, come to think of it, like the Starbases in the pre-reboot Star Trek movies (which are probably the most realistic Star Trek structure).
• Remember how I said zledo can hear the auroras? Well, I found out what that would sound like. A lot of the "aurora borealis sounds" you can find, are actually how the magnetic field of an aurora is received by radio, but there are recordings of the actual sounds that are statistically correlated with auroras (although it's apparently not proved that that's their origin).
  
  Anyway, it sounds like this. The buzzing is just the air around the microphone, but that sharp, glassy *crack*? That is associated with the aurora. I imagine it makes the more high-strung among the zledo very jumpy, especially when they orbit BY Draconis variables, which have so much sunspot activity their variation in brightness is detectable from Earth. It would be like having a star with an incessant bubblegum habit.
• An old name for the Hopi is "Moqui". Now, it's usually said this cannot be a Hopi name, because in Hopi, "moqui" (or rather "mooki") means "dead", cf. "miqui" in Nahuatl. But the Hopi take their religious law—adherence to which is what makes them "rightly-ordered", hopi—from the Fire Clan, and the Fire Clan are the chosen clan of the god Masauwu, the Skeleton, god of death (and cosmic order). So it is actually possible that "dead" was once a term they applied to themselves. (Masauwu is probably the Aztec Mictlantecuhtli, "lord of the place of the dead".)
• The Urheimat of the Uto-Aztecan languages, I just had occasion to look up, is either roughly in the Sonoran Desert region (so the O'odham, for example, probably still live in the ancestral locale), or, according to the minority view, actually in Mesoamerica. The evidence for the former seems to have to do with the vocabulary relating to foraging; the latter assumes a corn-growing culture that brought its agricultural knowledge north.
  
  I'm not sure what would be the precise locale involved in the second hypothesis; my knowledge of this language group and its cultures drops off sharply between the American Southwest and the Valley of Mexico. The Corachol branch, it looks like, from the map ("Cora" and "Huichol" being the two that are listed, apparently their branch's name was formed on the same basis as tabloid celebrity-couple portmanteaux). I know precisely nothing about them! (Well, I know they probably have agglutinating grammar and mark plurals by reduplicating initial syllables, but that's just tantamount to saying "I know they're Uto-Aztecan speakers".)
• Speaking of Mesoamerican languages, there is quite a big gap between Ch'orti', spoken in Guatemala and Honduras, and the Chontal and Ch'ol languages, spoken in Tabasco and Chiapas (in Mexico), respectively—all the Mayan languages in between are in completely different branches of the language-group. Why the geographic gap? Well...Ch'orti' happens to be a direct descendant of the language we usually call Classic Mayan—so-called because it's the language used by all Mayan inscriptions (even the ones written by speakers of other kinds of Mayan, like how a lot of medieval German writing was in Latin). It sorta seems that the Tabascan and Chiapan Maya adopted the scholarly language as their own, at some point.
  
  Incidentally, the word in most of those languages for "speaker" is "yoko". The word in Chontal, specifically, for a speaker of Chontal Maya? "Yoko t'an". I think (I can't find a direct translation for "t'an") it means something like "clear speaker", i.e., we can understand these people, because they talk our language, unlike those babbling barbarians from other places. Interestingly, that's what the word "nahuatl" means, and those who don't speak Nahuatl are nonoalcah, "deaf-mutes", they can neither speak nor hear Nahuatl words. There are words like "yoko t'an" in many other Mayan languages; it may well be the closest thing to a collective term for "Mayan people" that there is ("Maya" is pretty much used only by the Yucatec and Itza'). Apparently "Yucatan" is actually an ethnonym, not a toponym, although then again "land of a particular people" is a very common way of naming places, the world over.