Blood and Treasure III

Speculative biology and material culture.

• A thought occurred to me: if I simply give zled males and females the same muscle-mass percentage (61%), without changing their overall mass, then their dimorphism isn't nearly as strange. Because extreme as it seems (males weighing roughly half again what females do), if it's the same percent of both male and female zled bodies, it's the same ratio of muscle mass between the sexes as humans have.
  
  It's just that male humans are 42% muscle and females are 36%, and male humans mass 69 kilos to females' 54. 42% of 69 kilos is 28.98 kilos; 36% of 54 kilos is 19.44 kilos. That's 49.1% more total muscle mass for male humans—which is also how much more muscle-mass a male zled has than a female one, now, it's just that a male zled is that much bigger than the female overall, while a male human seems closer in size to a female one.
• That incident where a Tesla-driver got killed by his self-driving mode not knowing the side of a semi from clear skies, made me think: why not put radar in self-driving cars? It doesn't have to be powerful, just ten or twenty meters range or so, and it would prevent the kinds of problems caused by image-recognition software.
  
  Another use of radar that makes perfect sense to me, is using it Halo-style to detect where people are in a building, when cops investigate it. This, apparently, has been ruled to be a violation of privacy, but...what? If the cops have sufficient grounds to be shining a flashlight inside a structure, then they have sufficient grounds to be pinging it with radar motion-detectors. It is exactly the same thing as shining a flashlight, it's just a different kind of light being used. (Okay so technically radar isn't an optical wavelength. Still "light" in the broader "all EM radiation" sense.)
  
  I get the feeling this is like those incidents where kids had porn on their iPhones, or whatever, at school. There is no need for a new school rule, there are rules that cover both phones and porn at school; at most you need to make the inspections more often. But because a new technology is in play, clearly, we need to panic.
• Incidentally, in case you wondered, the dimorphism of humans is even less pronounced in terms of muscle-mass percentage, compared to genus Pan. Bonobo males average 52% muscle, while females average 37%. A male human is only 42% muscle, to the female human's 36%. I would like to also give you numbers for chimpanzees, but apparently the muscle-mass percentage of Pan troglodytes is a secret.
• Zledo have bird-like eye anatomy, a sclerotic ring and a nictitating membrane that covers the eye, and coats it in a thicker, more viscous kind of tears than what comes from the other two eyelids. In a split from the avian model, both types of tears drain directly into the nose, like in Carnivora mammals.
  
  I think, though, that like many animals other than humans (dogs, cats, elephants), many animals on the zled homeworld shed tears when in pain. But zledo, who are more intelligent than dogs or cats and have a complex social life like humans, shed tears like humans (and perhaps elephants—the evidence is anecdotal and inconclusive) when emotionally distressed, as well as when in physical pain.
  
  I actually have a worldbuilding reason that zledo need tears.
• I forgot one of my basic tricks: use plant things in alien animals (and vice-versa). So decided, zled milk, that's liquid inside their body but solidifies in air? It's not like lanolin (an animal wax). It's like cocoa butter! Except a wax, not a pure fat. But still, cocoa butter's melting point is between 307 and 311 K, which is to say 2 Kelvin less than zled body temperature. (It's also less, at least at the low end, than human body temperature, hence the "melt in your mouth" aspect of chocolate.)
  
  Or maybe jojoba ester, which is used as a substitute for spermaceti (sperm whale wax) in many cosmetics, which melt anywhere between 288 and 343 Kelvin—except those have to be transesterified from jojoba oil. (Then again maybe I could've just used an animal model, spermaceti, in the first place. It's liquid above about 303 Kelvin, and even apparently smells like raw milk, but solidifies at lower temperatures.)
  
  I was thinking it might have to do something weird to be dissolved in water, since waxes don't, but then again neither does butter-fat, so whatever keeps Earth-milk emulsified might work on the wax-like substance dissolved in zled milk. Upon examination, I discover that the enzymes that do that on Earth are called "lipases", specifically the bile-salt dependent lipase, which is also produced in the pancreas.
• Discovered, from an 18- to 20-inch barrel, .30-06 is not particularly preferable to .308 Winchester. If you want to get the better performance, you have to go with at least 22 inches. What that means is that my Peacekeeper rifles got two inches longer—but since they're bullpup, that means the main one is only two inches longer than the M4 carbine, and the USMC-cadre one is an inch shorter.
  
  Also, didn't mention here (I did on the DeviantArt, on the story it shows up in there), but the Peacekeeper rifle, being chambered in a battle-rifle round, obviously isn't called an "assault" rifle. It's called an automatic rifle, or just a rifle. Although in German, and more importantly (globally-speaking, no offense Germany) French, the distinction between "battle rifle" and "assault rifle" does not appear to exist (and Russian calls both "automatic [rifle]", which seems to also be what Chinese does). The distinction does seem to exist in Spanish, and I don't know enough Arabic to look.
• In other news RE: my guns, decided to go back to ring-shaped grips on zled lasers. I saw Bubuki/Buranki, and fell in love with the series of circles that make up the grip and stock of Shizuru's Tsurarai. Think this means the springs load via a break-top mechanism, always my preference anyway. Also think maybe the bottom-rear portion of the ring-grip will be an accessory-rail, for attaching a stock, one that retracts into itself when the laser is on a belt.
  
  Kinda giving some thought to having the swords also have a ring-shaped hilt. Maybe with an arrangement where the hilt is a ring, then there's another ring at right angles to it forming a guard, and then a half-ring forming "sword-breaker" quillions. The ring-shaped hilt, aside from being cool, also has room to let you use it in both hands, without needing a long katana-type hilt. I don't think the leverage is quite as good but when you're as strong as a zled that doesn't matter as much.
• Can you believe I apparently (if Google is searching this blog accurately) haven't mentioned "pinkhouse" agriculture? The way that works is, you do hydroponics in big racks where plants grow stacked up, and you light them with lamps that glow bright magenta, through using a mix of red and blue LEDs (you use LEDs because they're really efficient, not only in terms of your power-bill but in terms of waste-heat, which means you can get them closer to the plants without a risk of burning them or starting a fire). This makes the plants grow better—as in 20% faster.
  
  The advantages for space-colonies are obvious. And I think I've mentioned here or there that modern zled farming is mostly under their cities? (Aside from plants, they raise colonies of a sort of termite-locust thing, except probably not anything like that destructive if it gets out.) This lets them leave most of their planet as wilderness, which allows them to hunt—a major concern for a civilization where "professional hunter" is a common job and it's taboo to domesticate any vertebrate-analogue prey animal.
  
  If it seems weird that they have lots of professional hunters, consider that we have them too, they just hunt fish.