All I Survey IV

Random thoughts.

• I made my AIs be in Prolog because Prolog is cool, and also because Prolog is a big deal in AI. I may have to specify, though, that they're actually in Prolog and JavaScript; Prolog is declarative-only, JavaScript is imperative.
  
  Why JavaScript, and not, say, Python? Python's not an ISO standard. JavaScript is. Why, then, not C#, which is very similar to JavaScript and is an ISO standard? There are a whole bunch of bridges between Prolog and JavaScript, many more than there are between Prolog and C#.
  
  I guess I'll be adding references to ISO 16262, then.
• That thing I harp on about people putting things in their work that are dictated by "drama" rather than "what makes sense", has made it very difficult for me to watch movies and TV. For instance, one complaint I had about Dark Matter (really about the only one) was the part when the android (that's her name, "the android", they're going for a weird minimalist approach with the whole series and somehow it doesn't piss me off) goes out on the hull of the ship to fix something, and gets knocked out by the static on the hull. Um..."tether"? The barely-Iron Age ancient Hebrews knew about that one, they tied a string around the priest's leg before he went into the Holy of Holies on Yom Kippur, so if he was struck dead by the presence of God they could get his corpse out without violating the sanctum.
  
  Or, everything in Jurassic Park (the first one) that has to do with the Velociraptors. Aside from their naked skin and sideways hands and having voice-boxes, I mean. For instance, that redshirt guy who dies at the very beginning? Well, how the hell did that happen—except that they designed their pen incredibly badly? Leaving to one side that one raptor would not be strong enough to move the car-thing, we, um, kinda have a handle on moving big, dangerous animals so your staff don't get eviscerated. A Velociraptor—even if we're pretending that's a senior synonym of Deinonychus, and was noticeably smarter than a sparrow (which it wasn't)—is not more dangerous than a Bengal tiger. It's probably a lot less dangerous. We are talking about a cassowary here, basically, those aren't even as dangerous as peccaries, let alone Bengal tigers.
• I found on the the intertubes that Kenshiro, the human-mimetic robot, uses (=is capable of outputting) five times the power its predecessor Kojiro could. And I find that the motors on Kojiro have 40 watts of output power, and there are about a hundred of them. Now, I don't know if that means 40 watts each or 40 watts total; I'll assume the former.
  
  That means Kojiro has a power requirement of 4 kilowatts—comparable to DARPA's Atlas—and therefore that Kenshiro has a requirement of 20. If true, that means over 200 times the energy requirements of an average human being (2000 kcal/24 hours=96.85 watts). That's also 78.57% more power than is used by TOPIO, but remember, Kenshiro also has (64/39=)64.1% more degrees of freedom than TOPIO (and 16/7 as many degrees as, =128.6% more degrees than, Atlas).
  
  Remember also that Kojiro and Kenshiro are barely even an "alpha"-build on human-mimetic robotics. Remember thirdly that with the average 72 kWh laptop battery, you can power a 20 kW system for 3 hours 36 minutes—and with 24% of its mass (the percent of the average human's mass that's fat) made up of polyvinyl-gel lithium-air battery (11.14 kWh/kg), you can power a 180 centimeter, 74-kilo version of Kenshiro for 9 hours 53 minutes 32.35 seconds.
• Changing the way my human ships are named. I had gone with a Chinese-style system—"Type [Number]"—which is how they name e.g. missiles, and indeed also naval ship-classes, in China, but not how they name spaceships or aircraft. So at first I went with the same system as my guns: a two-letter abbreviation of the company name (e.g. GA for General Atomics), followed by a one-letter abbreviation for the type of ship (M for mothership, E for escort ship, P for patrol ship, etc.), then a number.
  
  But then I decided to change it to the actual Russian system for naming aircraft (my gun-naming is a modification of the Russian one), with a two-letter representation of the names of companies that are single words ("Ka-27", a helicopter from Kamov), before the number, and a three-letter one for companies with two-word names ("MiG-29", the fighter plane from Mikoyan-Gurevich). "KoE-382 mothership" has a nice ring.
  
  The number after the prefix is "years since 1945 that it was introduced", because they're Peacekeeper ships and the UN was founded in 1945. The aforementioned KoE-382 was introduced in 2327. (That's also where I get the numbers for the guns.)
• Revising that classificatory scheme gave me an idea for the zledo: so now, instead of collating things by letter and number, they collate them by the periodic table. So, e.g, instead of "Variant C" or "Model 14", they say "Lithium Variant" or "Silicon Model". (Still think they add sub-versions numerically, but ordinally—"Oxygen Model, third variant" would be our "Model 8, version 3".)
• I think that the idea of rugged individualism on the American frontier, which as I have pointed out has no reference to reality, may have been born of literary romanticism. No, I don't mean dime-novel Westerns, as much as those did distort the popular conception of the pioneer phenomenon.
  
  I mean the Transcendentalists, who, after all, were the big thing in American literary and intellectual life just before the pioneering enterprise really kicked into high gear. Sure, the fact is that nobody was really self-reliant out here, except some half-demented hermits; sure, the "pioneers" were people who jailed you for cussing and hanged you for stealing livestock. But the idea of getting away from society and its supposed corrupting influence, living a "self-reliant" life in a state of nature more unrealistically idealized than any two "Noble Savage" theorists, was a powerful influence on the popular conception of the frontier.
  
  Transcendentalism covers the period from about 1836 up into the 1870s or even 1880s, though it lost influence starting around 1850. That pretty much is the "frontier era". And they were huge; the American branch of Romanticism is almost inseparable from Transcendentalism.
• Apparently it's hard to make lithium-air batteries rechargeable...and lithium reacts violently with water, kinda a big deal for robots that have to live in environments humans do. Not to worry, though, silicon-air batteries are, according to Wikipedia, more efficient, theoretically (they're just as hard to recharge but my thing's set in the 24th century, they've had time to work on it). The new number given for silicon-air (a new study, maybe?) is 14.23 kWh/kg; that lets a 74-kilo, 180-centimeter Kenshiro-clone that's 24% battery operate for 12 hours 38 minutes 10.46 seconds.
  
  I'm keeping the gel itself as a subcutaneous layer of polymer. It's subcutaneous not to supply all the body with power (most of the power is supplied by wiring), but to evenly distribute the "like a three-year-old" weight of the battery. It's also brightly colored (dyed), because it looks cool, but also because you want to be able to know when your robot has been punctured. I'd said it was polyvinyl, but that turns out to only mean PVC (polyvinyl chloride), and apparently the main polymers used in batteries are things like PAN (polyacrylonitrile). It has a number of properties to recommend it.
  
  They don't really need to cause the liquid PAN to solidify when exposed to air under conditions other than the oxidation of the silicon suspended in it—i.e. clotting, to keep them from bleeding to death—because my androids normally have a small amount of limited-lifespan nano-bot goo, for self-repair. In an emergency where the nano-bots weren't working fast enough, they could probably spray something on the wound to harden the "blood" around it.
• My setting has something called "toothpaste", but it's actually mouthwash. Mouthwash with non-replicating nano-bots suspended in it, that activate when inside a mouth, and seek out and destroy plaque and germs. "Paste", you see, as distinct from "goo", is the term for non-replicating nano-bots.
  
  They also have programmable nano-bot hair-gel, because of course they do (it can also act as dye—dye that can be removed at a moment's notice). People wear shirts powered by their bioelectric fields that have slogans in light-emitting polymers; I think some people might wear programmable images and patterns on their clothes.
  
  Nobody has moving images on their shirts, though, because that would be freaking annoying. "I'm a walking animated Flash-ad"—that's not a sentence that would ever be spoken by a mouth with all its teeth.