Mélange II

I want to say "He who controls the random thoughts controls the universe", but if they're controlled, they're not really random.

• Here, Damien G. Walter, welfare leech pretending to be a writer (no seriously, the UK government gave him a grant to write a novel—and elsewhere on that blog, he attacks the idea of writing as a business, i.e. as a legitimate trade), complains that superhero teams are never more than 1/4 female. The implication—couched as it is in terms of "women are half the population"—is that this is unrealistic.
  
  But...police forces are 12.7% female (in terms of officers with arrest powers—a higher percentage of their total employees are female). That's 1/8. The active-duty military is 14.2% female. That's about 1/7. So actually, what's "unrealistic" is that superhero teams have too many women, not too few—out of every 200 characters in both big houses' rosters (that's probably close to the number of characters actually showing up in comics at any given time), only twenty-seven should be female!
  
  Alternatively, if we assume that superpowers cause twice as many women to enter that kind of work, then comic books are right where they should be.
• It occurs to me that an idea many people have about Japanese philosophy may be due to a mistranslation. I noticed this watching...I think Gurren Lagann?...where something like "sore wa ore no shinjitsu" was translated as "that's my truth". But...that's not what it means. Japanese has to say things like "shinjitsu", literally "belief-truth" or "belief-fact", for the very simple reason that they don't have relative constructions—"shinjitsu" means "what I believe". If one prefers a more literal translation (which in this case also captures some of the word's broader connotations), go with "credo".
• It has been remarked that Arcee, in Transformers Prime, is too damn big for her vehicle mode. It's simplest with a visual aid.
  
  See? One of her calves, maybe, being generous, one of her legs, fits inside that bike. The rest of her? Hell no.
  
  So I crunched some numbers. We can actually assume that a Cybertronian is only as dense as a human, rather than as dense as automotive alloy, since they have a lot of empty space inside for their parts to move through when they switch modes. But supposing we take a very big bike, like say a Yamaha XV1900A, the biggest bike Yamaha makes. It weighs 329 kilograms. Now, assuming that Arcee is proportioned like an average woman (which my back-of-the-envelope calculations say is, globally speaking, 160 centimeters and 56.4 kilos), we get an Arcee who stands 288 centimeters—i.e. 9 feet 5 inches, instead of probably almost 20! You want her bigger, guys, well, make her a damn car like she's always been.
  
  Incidentally, while we're on the subject, the helicopter Airachnid is obviously based on, the RAH-66 Comanche (which didn't get picked up), weighs 4,218 kilos. That means she should be 2.34 times as tall as Arcee.
• Of course, along with Arcee being too big for her vehicle mode, Starscream is too small, both in G-1 (which doesn't give a tinker's damn about scale) and in Prime (which sort of does, a little). Starscream's alt mode in Prime is an F-16 Fighting Falcon (with the VIN numbers melted off); it's 700 kilos lighter than his G-1 F-15 Eagle alt-mode. But that still means he weighs 12 megagrams. Knockout, for example, is basically an Aston Martin DB9, with a curb weight of about 1750 kilos; taking the cube root of their mass difference, Starscream should be 9.6 meters tall, 89% taller than Knockout, not "about a head" taller.
  
  Knockout and Bumblebee are also probably too big; the mass ratio of an Aston Martin or a new Camaro to a human gives a height of 5 meters; they're both more like 8. Optimus, too, is sized weird—given that a Peterbilt 379 masses about 8,200 kilos (depending on engine and a couple other variables), he ought to be 70% taller than a car-bot—8.45 meters—but that's 12% shorter than Starscream. Megatron probably can't be the same size as Optimus, because he has to be bigger than Starscream. Maybe give him a Hind attack helicopter vehicle mode, half again as heavy as Starscream? That'd make him 16% taller than his Air Commander (31.7% taller than Optimus), at 11.1 meters.
• Are we married to Optimus being a Peterbilt? 'Cause as a Mack Titan, he could go up to 48 megagrams, which lets him be the same size as a Megatron that turns into a JGSDF Type 10 main battle tank (both of them would be 15.2 meters tall, 58.7% taller than Starscream and triple the height of car-bots). While we're at it, Jetfire ought to be 13.1 meters, 37% taller than Starscream, assuming that Jetfire is an SR-71 Blackbird—which is the one aspect of Michael Bay's Jetfire that isn't blasphemy. Then again, given Jetfire carries other Autobots and is associated with space, the An-225 Mriya (biggest plane ever flown) might be a better choice—that makes him 27.6 meters tall, fully 2.87 times as tall as Starscream and 1.81 times as tall as a Mack Titan Optimus or Type 10 MBT Megatron. (An F-22 Raptor Starscream would be 11.3 m tall, 2.24 times as tall as Knockout or Bumblebee, and only 26% shorter than MBT Megatron and Mack Titan Optimus. An An-225 Mriya Jetfire would be 2.43 times his height, while an SR-71 Blackbird Jetfire would only be 16% taller than him.)
• To compute the necessary mass for a comfortable little spaceship, suppose we look at passenger trains? An Amtrak Superliner car weighs 67,132 kilos. Obviously we can knock off the weight of the bogies (the wheels); I can't find numbers for this specific type of car's wheels but the numbers I can find on British cars say about 6.8 megagrams each (and there's two per car, one at each end), so that brings the weight down to 53,732 kilos. Treating the whole thing as made of (low-alloy high-strength) stainless steel, but substituting aerospace aluminum alloy for that steel (because a spacefaring civilization could probably reduce all the other associated weights of furniture, etc., by a similar proportion), we wind up with a mass of 18,875 kilos. Knocking off half of that gives us a "train" with only five bedrooms (only the upper sleeper floor) and a dining capacity of eight tables and a small kitchen (also only the upper diner floor) that masses only 9,437.5 megagrams. That could be taken to Low Earth Orbit by a Delta Clipper-like SSTO ship—which might there rendezvous with a starship equipped with a big engine and a space-fold drive.^note
• I wonder if the way English's appositional phrases and relative constructions work, is related to the fact that older Indo-European languages were much more "right-branching" than English is today. Indo-European languages used to put adjectives after nouns, the way English still puts adverbs after verbs (of course, most of the Romance languages and Celtic languages still usually put adjectives after nouns, as do Slavic ones when the adjectives are genitive noun-derivations; and all the Scandinavian languages, and Romanian, use a suffix for the definite article). Putting anything but numbers and prepositions before nouns is an innovative structure, in Indo-European, and most things still actually work the other way.
  
  Japanese, on the other hand, puts its appositives and relative clauses (to the extent it's got the latter, which it's often said not to) before the thing they modify—because Japanese has never put adjectives, or anything else that modifies a noun except postpositions and case-particles, after the nouns they modify, unlike Indo-European languages. It also marks them with a genitive, instead of a relative pronoun, hence why they're described as not having "relative" constructions. (Tibetan forms its "relative clauses"—which are sometimes referred to as such by grammarians of Tibetan—the same way as Japanese, by marking a whole phrase with a genitive particle; it's not "the man that saw the bear" but "the man of having seen the bear".)
• Has anyone noticed that the elephant in the room, in every discussion of "mind uploading", is that—leaving to one side the issues of the Lucas-Penrose Argument and what it says about the limits of machine logic—any device you can upload your mind to, would have to constantly emulate your original hardware? And seriously, know what the biggest difficulty in any emulation is? "When the exact behavior of the system to be emulated is not documented and has to be deduced through reverse engineering." That's from the Wikipedia article on emulation. It goes on to say, "if the emulator does not perform as quickly as the original hardware, the emulated software may run much more slowly than it would have on the original hardware, possibly triggering time interrupts that alter performance". Do you want those to happen to your mind?
  
  The whole dream of mind-uploading is about transcending the limits of your flesh (because, again, Transhumanism's just a new flavor of the same age-old Gnostic angelist millennarianism). But the human brain carries out trillions of operations every second; the rate of neuronal firing is estimated by neuroscientist Astra Bryant to be in the range "86 billion to 17.2 trillion" (gee, our knowledge of the brain's operation is so precise, mind-uploading can't be far off now!), while the rate of synaptic firing is in the range "100 trillion to 20 quadrillion" (for those playing along at home, that's a range 19.9 quadrillion wide). Pretending that one neuron or synapse firing is comparable to a single floating-point operation of a microprocessor (and it isn't), we're talking about 10.058643 petaFLOPS, which is pretty much at the limit of our technological capability. On average. The maximum—and remember, these are ball-park figures, the brain probably goes significantly higher when it has to, remember how many synapses there are, and the fact we haven't even gotten into glial cells—is 20.0172 petaflops, which is more than all but exactly one supercomputer, ever built, is capable of.
  
  And oh, by the way, that's just "floating point operations". It is, again, probably more realistic to map every cell and synapse as a single line of code—and there can be thousands, occasionally millions, of floating point operations in a single line of code. The very cutting edge of our technology is just barely adequate to the absolute most minimalistic representation of our brains; it falls stupefyingly short of more realistic modeling.