Sierra and Two Foxtrots II

SF and fantasy thoughts.

• Decided that instead of wargs (which D&D likes to misspell as "worg" even though the Old Norse is vargr and the Old English is, well, warg), my goblins ride amphicyonids—the goblin-goblins something like one of the Daphoenodon species, the hobgoblins and bugbears something more like Ischyrocyon, probably I. gidleyi.
  
  Both they and the elves train the prehistoric beasts they ride to give signals, the "goblin hounds" by howling, and the Homotherium "blood cats" by roaring (yes, both Homotherium and the other machaerodontids—sabertooths—could roar, we know because the degree of ossification in their vocal anatomy is discernible in fossils). This is of course assuming that amphicyonids were social and had the howling behavior to go with it, for which there is no evidence one way or another, but these are actually magical creatures based on them so whatever.
  
  Both roaring and howling carry 5-6 miles; I've seen things saying 10 miles for howling but given 6 miles is a little under 10 kilometers, that can probably be attributed to a unit mix-up.
• Occurred to me, zledo, and people fighting zledo, are probably going to need anechoic linings in their clothes, probably based on acoustic metamaterials, like in that article. Ambient noise, especially in places with electric current in the walls, might prevent the "can hear your heartbeat from 25 meters" issues, but they're still going to be a lot harder to sneak up on, without help.
  
  You especially want to sound-proof the actuators of a power-lifting exosuit, which of course would let you wear the kinds of heavier clothes that a sound-proofed lining would probably require. (And maybe some kind of refrigerated lining like in mascot suits.) Then again in the equatorial region where my first and third books take place, you probably wear refrigerated clothes anyway.
• I was looking up how much people can "shoulder press" (lift over their heads), and found two interesting points, when I put in the average weights of male and female humans as given in the 3e Player's Handbook.
  
  One is that the average male's median lift was 145 pounds, while the average female's median was 73. I.e., the average male is just about exactly twice as strong as the average female, in this particular (purely upper-body) exercise.
  
  The other interesting thing is the mean of those two values is 109 pounds...which is almost exactly between the "lift overhead" (=maximum carried weight) numbers for Strength 10 and Strength 11, in the PHB's encumbrance table. Remember The Alexandrian on "casual realism"?
• Doing the same test with the average male and female weights globally, gives a median lift-weight for the average (69 kilo) male of 57 kilos, and for the average (54 kilo) female of 29.5 kilos. Which is interesting because the gap is only slightly smaller: males can basically shoulder-press twice as much as females, if both are the average weight of their sex. (Remember how the average male has 50% more muscle-mass than the average female? It's also more concentrated in the upper body.)
• It's odd that nobody noticed in this "political climate", and I really don't want to throw any fuel on those (witch-burning) fires, but you know what characters just objectively, unquestionably, got "white-washed"? The Lord-of-Admirals, and the rest of the human characters in the flashbacks to before the Forerunner-Flood War. They should all be a lot darker.
  
  Light skin doesn't appear in genus Homo till well after 100,000 years ago, specifically 30,000 to 18,000 years ago. The Neanderthals (who may have passed it onto some Eurasian populations but not, directly, the ones we associate with light skin) might've had it a bit sooner, by 40,000 years ago, but that's still less than 100,000.
  
  Apparently the weird hair-colors in Europeans and Levantines are because they have a small percentage of Neanderthal blood (you probably heard about that), though other Eurasians also have that small percent of Neanderthal blood, or more, and yet have black hair. Blond Polynesians and Australian Aborigines seem to have gotten their blond hair by autochthonous mutations, by the bye.
• Googling le blogue suggests I haven't mentioned it, but the music of the After Colony timeline of Gundam is, inexplicably, almost uniformly better than that of the Universal Century timeline. There's some good music in some of the other timelines, but other than one or two songs in The 08th MS Team, none of the UC timeline's music comes close.
  
  One factor, I think, is that there's a unifying "theme" to Gundam Wing music, a sort of "she wore a yellow ribbon" vibe that's very suitable to military science fiction. You obviously can't hold crappy 1970s music, or the fact Kill-'Em-All Tomino was initially pretending it was a kids' show, against the original Gundam, but that doesn't explain why every UC installment after that also has thoroughly forgettable music.
• Whenever people talk about "representation" in fantasy, I always want to quote them Penny Arcade: "A universe of possibilities, and you're fixated on the local flavor." And also, from the newspost of that same strip, "Boring, terrestrial, and (quite frankly) myopic." You understand that your fantasy humans did not have the same history as our humans did? You understand that that means you can mix and match phenotypes and cultures to your heart's content? Unless you are very concerned about having your fantasy filmed (and why on Earth would you actually waste time filming actors when animation is preferable in exactly every way?), you are in no way constrained by what is found in the real world.
  
  The main human ethnic group in my D&D setting, for instance is blond- to black-haired; black-, brown-, or blue-eyed; pink-, tan-, olive-, or dusky-skinned, and has hair-texture and facial features like Asians; one of the three main cultures usually has lighter skin but darker hair and eyes than one of the others, while the third has the full gamut of skin color, darker hair, but lighter eyes. There's another human group, mostly assimilated with the other cultures but sometimes without much genetic mixing (plus some rumored enclaves of its original culture), which has green eyes, red hair, ivory to terra cotta skin, and the facial features and hair-texture of Sub-Saharan Africans. Your word for the day is Mukokuseki.
• Apparently the ancestral condition of vertebrates was to have a parietal ("third") eye, although nowadays it only exists as a light-sensitive organ in tuataras and some lizards and snakes, and the amphibians. Lampreys have one with an actual socket; so, apparently, did both the jawed and jawless armored fish, and some early sarcopterygians (lobe-finned fish). The parietal bone in mammals (and birds) derives from a structure that was between the eyes in fish and basal amphibians, and is still pretty far forward in modern amphibians and "lower" reptiles.