All Is Grist

Thoughts. 'S really almost a SF-thoughts post, but a lot of it, indirectly.

• Found out I was wrong, that sound TV's Frank makes does have an IPA letter. I was just looking in the wrong place. It's not a click, it's an implosive: the voiced velar implosive, written [ɠ].
  
  The way one writes that sound Frank makes, then, is [jʌɠ^wiː]. "Cuckoo kids out for cuckoo kicks. [jʌɠ^wiː]!"
  
  (This IPA is so much more fun than the other kind, though admittedly it's not hard to be more enjoyable than a beer so over-hopped you'd be forgiven for thinking you got hold of a toxic chemical equipped with a safety-bitterant by mistake.)
• Decided one of the zled languages uses a click in some places where the other two members of its group have a stop—the dental click, the sound Americans spell "tsk" and Brits spell "tut" (and God only knows about Australians, Canadians, or South Africans; my guess is Aussies and Afrikaners write "tut" but Canada is a 50-50 chance of either).
  
  That zled language uses it to replace the alveolar stop (t) in certain words; I haven't worked out the entire rule but since it's so far only shown up as the first letter of two proper names, one of a supporting character and one of a mythological figure, I figure I'm okay. Not sure if I should change some of their other sounds too, like maybe make some of their Ds into a voiced velar implosive (I can't hear the difference between voiced and unvoiced clicks, not having been raised speaking isiZulu).
  
  I discover that human languages don't like to end syllables or words on clicks; the Khoisan languages only put them at the beginning of root-words, while Hadza, Sandawe, and the Bantu languages with clicks can also put them at the start of syllables within words. Some of my alien languages, however, end syllables on clicks; fundamentally it's not much weirder than you people ending words with aspirated voiceless stops (my dialect of American English doesn't "release" those stops at the ends of words—"bock", "bot", and "bop" are hard for speakers of other dialects to tell apart, when we say them).
• Re-doing my pistol round. The bullet is still 9 millimeters diameter, 16 millimeters long, but I realized that .357 SIG is weak—its resemblance to .357 magnum is greatly exaggerated. Decided to go with actual .357 magnum. 1 gram, even, of nitrocellulose will move a 12-gram bullet at 430 m/s (giving a muzzle energy of about 1.1 kilojoules). It'd take 420 milligrams of octanitrocubane to achieve the same thing, which has a volume of 203.883 cubic millimeters.
  
  Going with the 10.77 casing diameter of .357 SIG means the "casing" is 13.4 millimeters long, and goes 12.1 millimeters up up the side (so only a quarter of the bullet sticks out past the top—a lot of these caseless rounds are practically telescoped). Thus, the round becomes 9×13 millimeter—two whole centimeters shorter than the CIP designation for .357 magnum. (Overall length is less than half that of .357 magnum, 17.35 millimeters as opposed to 40.)
• Thought I'd go a bit into depth on my PK armor. Decided, the standard Peacekeeper armor is a sheer-thickening fluid undersuit, which might also contain the power-assist exosuit (not in the same systems, they'd interfere with each other), under a breastplate that's harder. Might also wear shoulder, elbow, and knee plates, but like now, those are optional. The helmets come with or without faceplates.
  
  Remember the Australian lady in the short story there on my DeviantArt? And how she says most special forces don't do heavy armor? The special forces guys—Peacekeeper Special Purpose Forces, to give them their full name—wear only the flexible undersuits, without the breastplate or any of the other rigid parts. Their helmets always have the faceplates. Due to their clothes being less bulky, I imagine they get referred to by other Peacekeepers as things like "longjohns" or "union suits".
• In another entry under the heading "even Cracked knows that's stupid", we have the guy in Jurassic World who wants to weaponize raptors. See also the xenomorphs in Alien, and the idiotic plot of straw corporation Weyland-Yutani to weaponize those.
  
  Aside from what that article points out, about living things making lousy weapons—xenomorphs made a little sense, at least, for the Engineers, since they had no future plans for Earth—is the ugly hypocrisy and Freudian projection involved in this leftist trope. Go look up who made the closest thing to a doomsday weapon ever. It wasn't a corporation. It was two leftist darlings working in tandem: the government and academia, i.e. the War Department and a bunch of physicists.
  
  Incidentally, what's with this idea you sometimes see, that the Manhattan Project guys were dupes? Who, pray, in the US military, is supposed to have bamboozled Einstein and Oppenheimer into building a fission-bomb without their realizing it? How's that supposed to work? "Gasp! You monster! Those equations we keep having to explain in layman's terms for you—their implications! You knew all along—about this concept some of us personally created about half the theoretical underpinnings of!"
• Partly for xenobiology purposes, partly for my own interest, I've been looking into the transition from lobe-finned fish to tetrapods. Some cool stuff. Apparently our spines being shaped the way they are, rather than like those of fish, is one of the features in question. Another one? That so many land animals taste like chicken, and not like fish, the "fishy" taste being something to do with substances produced by the death of aquatic animals' tissues.
  
  Of course the limbs are the big change. The fins of lobe-finned fish are kind of like horse forearms, just a stack of joints, up to a point, where they start dividing. You can identify one of the divisions as the precursor of the radius and ulna. The transition from the bunch of bones that makes up the fin, to tetrapod digits, is kinda vague; we can point to some bones toward the end that became the carpals and metacarpals, but how exactly the phalanges show up is sketchy.
  
  Oddly, lobe-finned fish have bones in their limbs that aren't connected to the rest of the skeleton. The two halves of the pelvic girdle were once just the ends of the "leg"; they fused to each other and to the spine I think some time during the fish-to-tetrapod transition. The shoulder, of course, is still only held on by the clavicle and muscles. I think some of the ancient lobe-finned fish (not coelacanths or lungfish) had ribs; those are fairly obviously modified vertebral processes.
• The interesting thing about coilguns and railguns is that they don't seem to work differently from regular guns—not in some of the ways you might expect. Like, you might be surprised by railguns with muzzle flash and smoke almost indistinguishable from a firearm, but that's the plasma. I don't know if they make quite the same "cork popping" sound as guns, but they have the precise same sonic boom, if they fire at supersonic velocity.
  
  Which reminds me, it's probably not accurate to say that lasers make a gunshot noise from the wound. They almost certainly do make a "pow" sound, but, not being contained and pressurized like a gun barrel, it's probably not as loud. Probably more like popping a potato in the microwave or a soda can in the freezer—which probably solves the "no suppressing a laser" problem , since that's about the sound-level a suppressed firearm does.