Sierra Foxtrot 10

SF thoughts. 40 minutes to get it in this month!

• They caused skin cells to become stem cells and then turned those stem-cells into ova, without causing massive tumors this time (or at least so they say; I wouldn't be surprised if the science-journalists are glossing over a lot of messy detail). If this breakthrough applies to humans—which it might not, the experiment was mice and human ova are notoriously delicate—on the one hand it means artificial reproductive technology doesn't need to strip women's ovary-follicles anymore, which is perhaps a good thing (in the sense that improving the conditions for your slaves is a good thing...except they're still slaves, which is not dissimilar to the Build-A-Bairn Workshop that is artificial reproductive technology).
  
  But now I have to retool something in my book, because now I can't have muggers harvesting ovaries from their victims, which kicked off a major plotline in my third book. It's actually genuinely difficult to come up with street-crime in a cashless society, you can't mug people for things that require their biometrics to work and in a 24th century society smartphones are no longer very valuable (they also almost already have systems that make it hard to re-sell them, so by then they'll almost certainly be that way). One thing I might do, since it would require the least re-writing, is have them be regular muggers; the person they're attacking is an investigative journalist, so she might have a reason to be flashing around precious metals.
  
  (Incidentally a bunch of articles, about the effect on crime of going cashless, seem to think you'd put drug-dealers out of business. Sweet innocents, black markets would just switch to doing business in gold and similar precious substances; one peculiar effect of a switch to a cashless economy would be to bring back the gold-standard, and not in the "convertible to bullion" sense, in the "English colonists using Spanish pieces-of-eight" sense.)
• Turns out I was wrong when I said English sometimes uses its present progressive for a semelfactive aspect. It uses it for a seriative, or something like it (semelfactive is one instance of a repeated series, seriative is one of a series of distinct acts). If I'm reading the description right; it's always iffy explaining verb-aspects to people whose grammar doesn't mark them explicitly.
• One's research into the future of warfare would be a lot easier if journalists were literate, and would take the trouble to actually understand the things they themselves write.
  
  Take for instance all these journalists claiming the Army doesn't want its tanks, and thinks they're useless, so the contracts to keep manufacturing them are scandalous boondoggles. But actually, when you read all the quotes that the writers themselves cite, all the Army ever seems to be saying is that they don't need more tanks, and the contracts to expand the tank "fleet" may constitute a boondoggle.
  
  But, of course, "Army's tank-needs being met, questions need for further tank procurement" doesn't cater to anybody's fantasy about "push-button war" the way "tanks are obsolete" does. And that's always at least the subtext—all too often the text; it is frequently about two paragraphs before armchair generals start in with the "spend the money that goes to tanks on drones" ritualistic chanting.
• The khângây languages inflect their words by pronouncing them to different tunes. The ones they don't bother teaching to aliens have phonemic chording (they don't teach them to aliens because most people cannot produce a chord with their voice-box), with verbs being pronounced as a chord of the notes their subject and object are on. (Maybe the ones aliens do learn mark gender/number/etc. agreement by having the words all in the same key?)
  
  But I discovered, there's actually a conlang that does something similar (to the one without chording, of course). It's called Solresol, and its words are composed entirely of seven phonemes (plus pauses between words): do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, and ti. Words, therefore, have many syllables, while khângây words have relatively few, since they use notes for inflections and distinguish actual words themselves by the same system as other languages, vowels and consonants. Maybe the one that doesn't have phonemic chording has a whole bunch of key-changes within a sentence that the others don't, the way Chinese has far fewer possible syllables than English but has to make up the difference with tone?
  
  It also occurs to me that maybe the khângây languages are written something like Byzantine hymns, with the notes of a word being expressed above or below the consonant-and-vowel line. Of course unlike Byzantine notation, theirs would be absolute instead of relative, because Byzantine notation's relative method seems like a pain in the butt.
• I don't think I've mentioned it before but the thing about all those projections of drastically increased human lifespans, is they are generalizing from data that basically doesn't exist. See, we're not living longer because we've found anything like a way to push back the actual potential lifespan of the human animal. We're only living longer, on average , because fewer of us are dying young.
  
  Living into one's eighties, nineties, or even over a hundred was never unheard-of; it's just that more of us do it now than before. And, incidentally, the current life-expectancy? Still just over half the projected physiological maximum of this kind of animal. Get the average up to more than c. 8/15ths of the way there, before you start worrying about pushing it past that point.
• If you wondered, St. Barbara and St. Maximilian Kolbe might be patron saints of rocket-scientists (okay so Kolbe isn't official but he should be), but St. Joseph Cupertino is the patron saint of astronauts, because his levitation looks an awful lot like weightlessness. St. Nicholas is the patron saint of cosmonauts, I think, because he's patron saint of pretty much everything Russians do (think the Guadalupana for Mexicans).
  
  I'm not sure who should be patron saint of space-colonization; really anybody involved in a colonial effort anywhere would do, or St. George who is among other things patron saint of explorers. Mary Help of Christians is patron saint of Australia, while of course the Guadalupana is patron of the New World (as are Innocent of Alaska and Herman of Alaska, on the Orthodox side of things).
• Mob Psycho 100 is a breath of fresh air, so good I can actually tolerate its art. Why? Its theme. "You're not special, superpowers won't make you happy, and we are all commoners." Or in other words, "Everybody's special. Which means that no one is." The thing should be required viewing for everybody who writes that kind of story. (Ironically a lot of the fan discussion is whining about how "conformist" it is. Congratulations on being, like Claw's 7th Division, "middle-schoolers who never grew up".)
• I don't know how I managed to miss the TALOS (Tactical Assault Light Operator Suit) exoskeleton. Projected for 2018, it's intended for people who have to kick in doors; rather than issuing one to everybody, you issue one to the point-man and the more lightly armored guys come in after.
  
  Interestingly, it, like the Big Dog, sidesteps problems with batteries by getting its power from good ol' internal combustion, specifically one using a "high efficiency hybrid cycle" that's 60-75% efficient and quiet, to boot. (Technically it uses the engine to charge a battery but the same is true of lots of other things that still don't count as battery-powered.)