That's Amore

The meaning of "sarang", that is.

Watched Moon yesterday. Overall a good movie, though the premise is stupid—if you're that concerned to save money, and you can build AIs (as they plainly can), why bother sending people up at all?—but that last line, the radio voiceover that says "He's either a wacko or an illegal immigrant, and either way he should be locked up. Line 2!"

Dude, seriously, what are you, Dr. Strangelove? Your movie was already left-wing enough with its utterly improbable corporate villainy, you didn't need to add "And talk radio is in on it!" Really, though, no corporation would do this: even a marginally competent cost-benefit analysis would reveal that purely robotic mining is an assload cheaper than mass cloning, especially since they can already afford to send weak AI-solutions up. Therefore the only reason they would've gone with this, is to try and be just as evil as they damn well can. Corporations only do the evil thing when it's cheaper.

Thank You for that Opinion, Who the Hell Are You Again?

So this site Gigwise has a list of the 15 greatest scifi movies of all time up—I'd link you, but the ads on that page are satanically annoying, so just Google it. Anyway, the rundown:

1. Inception
2. The Empire Strikes Back
3. Terminator 2:Judgment Day
4. Alien
5. Back to the Future
6. Metropolis
7. 2001: A Space Odyssey
8. Blade Runner
9. Star Trek (2009)
10. Planet of the Apes
11. Moon
12. E.T.
13. Avatar
14. Wall-E
15. District 9

Notice anything? Yeah, other than ridiculously recent stuff, it's just the stuff that's best known. Well, that, and Inception is basically not sci-fi, even in the relaxed movie definition thereof.

Especially egregious is Star Trek: the '09 reboot isn't as good as Wrath of Khan or Journey Home, sorry. Likewise, Aliens is better than Alien (neither is any good, of course), and I personally think the first Terminator is the best of the only two that exist, because there certainly weren't any others made after that. Granting for the moment that ridiculous vitalism doesn't forbid it being classed as scifi (why not just say "there was a mass limit, and the Terminators are Skynet's most dangerous weapon that fit"?).

Was pleasantly surprised Serenity wasn't on the list, but what about Enemy Mine? Total Recall? Last Starfighter? Predator? Gattaca? Minority Report? At least one version of Dune? I can think of plenty of good scifi flicks, cricket-porn and otherwise, that the people who wrote that list probably never heard of. It may be that they're making a distinction between "great" and "good", since they themselves said Avatar is bad but still great, but the things on the list contradict that explanation: Aliens is the flagship of that series, not Alien, and District 9, the '09 Trek, and arguably Inception, are blips.

I think it's just "great=notable/influential", and the reason I think that, is Metropolis is on the list. Metropolis is not a great movie, but it is a famous movie, and it's always listed as an influence, even by people who can't make much of a case for themselves (Blade Runner, on the above list, definitely can—and it also deserves to be on that list).

I suppose it's like if I were gonna list "15 greatest NASCAR drivers"—actually, that'd be "greatest NASCAR driver", because the only one I can name is Dale Earnhart, alav haShalom. But you see what I'm getting at.

Uncorrelated, Not Uncaused II

Random thoughts.

• In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, vampires don't have souls. Now, I could see if they were simply reanimated by demons (which would presumably have access to the memories in the physical brains, to pass for their old selves), but they appear to actually retain their old identity, since that lets them angst.
  
  Joss, Joss, Joss. Get out the crayons and construction paper, I need you to try to explain what you think the word "soul" means. 'Cause, body-self dualism is bad enough: but soul-self dualism is just...it's just awful.
  
  God what a hack.


• Did you know Cortana's voice actress does the voice of Princess Peach in English? Yeah. Which, uh...remember that part in Halo 3, when you think you've rescued her, but then it's just a recording? Ahem: "Thank you Mario! But our princess is in another castle!"
  
  Also: Halo 4 trailer at E3! Wooo! Combat Evolved re-release with the Reach engine! Wooo! The Flood portrayed with Reach's graphics engine! Uh, I'm not so sure I like that idea.


• I'm also not so sure about this Wii-You, or whatever it's called, thing. On the one hand, it's another gimmicky peripheral for the Wii (they are apparently adamant it's not a new console), and the Wii is built around a gimmicky peripheral. Yeah, there's some cool stuff in Metroid on the Wii—I could turn those switch-levers all damn day—but nevertheless you should not get tennis elbow from a video game.
  
  On the other hand, though, I do like each player having a second screen, wherein they can...do things. Most of the applications I can think of don't have much use in the kinds of games the Wii is most associated with, but if they broaden their horizons that wouldn't be so bad.


• Speaking of, why don't people understand that the optimum control scheme for almost any machine is basically a 360 or DualShock controller? Two joysticks, each with four buttons at its top and two in its front: more than enough to control anything that moves. Now, in a real machine you'd probably put the six buttons on top of the controller, like some of those joysticks from the PC gaming days, but the principle is still the same.
  
  Also, it is really long past time that NASA noticed that the "rotational hand controller" and "translational hand controller", on vehicles like the Space Shuttle, are basically the two sticks on a 360 controller. They're even on the same sides of the body (which some FPS at some point may have copied, I remember Red Faction used a similar layout). Hey, UAWs are controlled with PS2 controllers, why not spaceships?


• Which reminds me, science fiction isn't just making people's politics stupid by making global warming seem much more urgent, with the idea of terraforming. No, it also makes them stupid about UAWs and other unmanned drones.
  
  Example. I was in this one class, and, I forget why, but we were talking about how the military uses robots for a lot of things, like IED disposal (IED-EOD?). And this guy was saying that worried him, because "what if it starts attacking people?" A legitimate concern, but not borne out by the facts: I explained that they're "robots" only in the sense they aren't manned, but are remote controlled, not autonomous AIs.
  
  But science fiction, for all the love I bear it, must take the blame: it's us, mes frères, who put the idea of rogue robot rampages into this gentleman's head. Now admittedly the journalists who don't do enough to acquaint the public with the military and its practices and equipment, are probably more to blame, but SF sure didn't help.


• So I realized a good name for my political ideals: I'm a political nihilist. I don't mean I don't believe in politics, I just mean I dwell within a howling wilderness of skepticism regarding all political ideologies. And yes, your politics is an ideology, I don't care where it comes from.
  
  A peculiar effect of this political nihilism is that the right annoys me more than the left. Although the left quite vocally believes that its politics are simply civilization and common decency (a conceit shared by nearly all Westerners, especially the English-speaking ones, since roundabout the 15th century), the right just as vocally believes its politics are common sense and rationality. Which is bullshit, read Libertarian arguments about any cultural issue some time: a lot of emotivism, appeals to the camel's nose ("We allow alcohol, so why not crack?"), and other logical fallacies, in support of what is essentially an unreasoned tribal fetish, but actual reason is in short supply.


• Finally, I'm changing my comments policy to require some sort of actual ID (OpenID, I guess it's called). I've been having some intensely annoying comments—borderline trolling, though I think the person responsible really is trying to communicate ideas, not just pick a fight. Unfortunately mixed in with those ideas is a lot of offensive and unfounded accusations, based on ill-informed journalistic stereotypes. I deal with enough of that other places without needing it on my own blog. So, anyone who wants to comment will have to log in for realsies.
  
  It's too bad, I liked my old comment policy. I shall here memorialize my old comment form message:

  Commenters are kindly requested to sign some kind of a name; anonymous comments will be deleted unless their brilliance is a radiation hazard.

  I just get a kick out of that last part.

De Romanicorum Physicalium 3

Thoughts upon SF.

• So I forgot, but my ships doing 20-30 gs was one rewrite ago; now they do 8-11. Which I like, because that's much more reasonable vis-à-vis the structural integrity, but I'd still have to have people in tanks if they were gonna not have artificial-gravity based acceleration protection. After all, 9.5 gs (the average) is about twice what luge does. It's hard to set a scene on a giant luge.


• My felinoids, I decided, perfume their clothes. Why? Because a lot of etiquette—it's a universal—involves concealing potentially offensive feelings from others, and if you've got a sense of smell like theirs, that's a problem. Plus, it can let love scenes have a peculiar nonhuman intimacy, a character putting her nose to her lover's fur and smelling his feelings.
  
  I admit, I didn't entirely come up with the idea on my own, though I'd been somewhat troubled by what role to have their sense of smell play in the story. I got this idea from Halo: adolescent Brutes' emotions are very easy for their elders to read. They learn to control those pheromones when they grow up. That last bit struck me as unlikely—can you sweat on command?—but it gave me an idea. And perfuming your clothes is not only much more plausible, it's a fun cultural-setting tidbit.


• I came across people debating 'realistic space combat' on an old forum thread, and some of them were saying you wouldn't want a long skinny ship, because of maneuverability. But they were all forgetting that what propels a decent rocket is uncorked nuclear holocaust.
  
  In reality, a realistic rocket design is, essentially, a compromise between keeping the crew at a safe distance from the engine, and decent maneuverability. And mass will of course be a factor. Since one dimension is already determined, the only way to keep the volume (and therefore the mass) within a manageable limit, is to keep the other two dimensions as small as possible. Executive summary, "long skinny ship".


• I realized, I have some kind of a grudge against science fiction tropes. Don't get me wrong, I use 'em—they represent concepts, images, ideas that I really like. But I don't use their names.
  
  I've got military parasite-spacecraft, but I never call 'em "fighters"—and the things that carry 'em are "motherships", not "carriers". I've already mentioned how I use the Asian-style non-branch-specific military ranks. I also mentioned, in passing, that I've got 3D computer displays: but I call them "volumetric displays" rather than holograms. Artificial limbs are called 'prosthetics', just like in real life, rather than "cybernetics"—cybernetics is restricted to computers (prosthetics do involve cybernetics, in the 24th century, of course). I'm torn as to whether to call people with prosthetics "cyborgs", and I'm leaning to the negative—consider how dicey a proposition it is to call people "paraplegics" or "albinos" now. Nanomachines are "nano-robots", since that's the most dignified of the names they're actually called ('nanoids'? I think not).
  
  I'm not sure why. I think a big part of it is, these tropes have become cliches, and a person who sees "cyborg" or "hologram" thinks of the cliche/trope, rather than the real concept. There are two problems there; the first is that the cliche is often, if not usually, inaccurate—compare the Wikipedia article on volumetric displays to sci-fi holograms.
  
  The second problem is a very peculiar thing, almost disgusting. Namely, SF, the very literature of wonderment, has made people jaded by these marvels. Now, the society in the book shouldn't find them any more wondrous than we find 1280x1024 flatscreen monitors or artificial legs you can play basketball with, but if some part of you, the reader, isn't saying "Gee whiz!" like a towheaded seventh grader from 1958, you ain't getting full value for your science-fiction dollar. Holograms, cyborg limbs, and nanomachine self-repair systems are not supposed to feel commonplace, and I figure changing the names might force the reader to think, at least a little, about what they are.


• I'm curious, do people understand just how bad TV science fiction is nowadays? Leave the fact Firefly and Battlestar Galactica are uncredited reboots of Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman and The West Wing, respectively; have you ever watched Eureka or Sanctuary? I think I mentioned it before, but Eureka has sub-Jimmy Neutron technobabble—also no particularly likeable characters and enough over-ripe cliches to gag a buzzard.
  
  Or take Sanctuary (please). Cryptozoology is a lousy basis for a series, especially since it, like Star Trek and Stargate, is full of mystico-magical elements dressed up in sciencey-sounding nonsense. Plus, it doesn't even stick with cryptozoology half the time. There was an episode recently with a time dilation bubble where, get this, one day outside is something like six years inside. Only, the sunlight inside comes from outside. Yeah, let's not discuss how the people survive in multiple years of perpetual daylight followed by the same number of years of unrelenting night—they collect solar energy to keep the plants alive, but what about what the temperature must be? All that heat's gotta go somewhere, folks. But it gets worse: think about it for a moment, and you'll realize the bubble would appear completely black, or else as a massive optical distortion, from outside, and the only light inside would come from internal sources. Why? Because otherwise, it would violate the conservation of mass. The only way a time dilation bubble can cause one day's worth of sunlight to give daylight for three years, would be if it also caused each and every photon to be multiplied hundreds of times over.
  
  Plus, apparently these people don't own photos of Nikola Tesla.

A Tableau of Crimes and Misfortunes

That, of course, is Voltaire, on history. One questions whether he had any right to say it, since he knew absolutely none, but by an absolute coincidence he happened, by and large, to be right. This is important for the writing of future history: progress is one of the most persistent and irrational of man's superstitions—also the only superstition that originated in the Middle Ages (much like the 19th century, they had the excuse of living in an era of massive technological and scientific advances), but the superstition forbids people from acknowledging that.

Anyway, it's important, when writing future history, to decide which of the many future predictions you're going to go with. Try to find the most likely, but don't worry too much about it: the first chapter of The Napoleon of Notting Hill is an important principle to keep in mind, vis-à-vis humans and their perennial sport of "cheat the prophet".

For instance, in my setting, I go with 2140 as the date of widespread travel in the Solar System. I get that from James Strong, who, however, specifically said that would be remarkably early, and that it wouldn't happen till 2210—but they hadn't proved Bose-Einstein condensates nor invented the plasma window when he said it, so I'm going to cut humanity a little slack. I give 2194 as the date of the invention of the space-fold drive, chosen because it's 200 years after Alcubierre first proposed his warp drive idea (even though the space-fold is in many ways quite different). Prior to 2194 I have human colonies in exactly two other star systems, one at Alpha Centauri and one at Barnard's Star—you can reach them in a reasonable amount of time with slowboats, if said slowboats are Daedalus-derived ICF ships (.12c cruising speed); in honor of the concept that gets them there, both colonies (the Barnard's Star one is a station built of Solar-System parts, since that system is probably low on natural materials) are named after ICF ship proposals that targeted their respective stars. To whit, the one at Alpha Centauri is Longshot, while the one at Barnard's is Daedalus. I'm not sure what the ship that went to Barnard's is named, but I know what the original colony ship at Alpha Centauri was called: it's a Chinese ship named "Heaven-splitting crimson whorl", i.e. Tianyuántupò Gongliánluóyán.

Inventing space-fold kicks off, just like in every setting, a leap into colonization—once it's a matter of months rather than centuries, and in-system travel has already become relatively widespread, there's no reason not to. Colonization will, of course, follow the patterns established in history, people escaping persecution, people wanting to set up persecution, people escaping prosecution, etc. All the planets colonized during that era are named mythological things, and the cities usually follow suit, i.e. and e.g. there's a planet named Demeter, and its capital is Inari City, after the Japanese god of grain.

First contact with the felinoids comes in 2282, and with the evangelical Heideggerians a few years later. The war the humans start, then lose, is in the 2330s (I don't have my timeline on me to pin it down more than that), and my first book takes place in 2342. First contact between humans and the gift-economy dromaeosaurs comes in 2345; the felinoids had already known the other non-human species for centuries.

But what about the crimes and misfortunes? Well, via negativa, I'll tell you two things that won't happen, at least not in the next two millennia: massive global flooding and overpopulation die-off. Even if there is any such thing as anthropogenic climate change—which is looking more debatable every day—not only is it a phenomenon with a time-scale on the order of a myriad years, it may not actually involve warming at all. Anthropogenic or not, it's actually looking like an ice age might be in the offing. As for overpopulation, we're under-utilizing our arable land by a factor of, depending on who you ask, 8 to 40—and absent some catastrophe, that number only gets better. There's a reason the main diet hazard in the developed world—for poor people!—is obesity, not starvation; the only places experiencing famine have command economies and corrupt governments. Why do you think North Koreans are less nourished now than in the Joseon Kingdom, when they had no trucks and had to plant by hand? Communism, that's why.

Personally I find positing future religious persecution a safe bet, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy rubbing it in the faces of the smug secularists whose "thinking" dominates SF. Aside from the persecution of Christians I've mentioned (centered on the Commonwealth and led by PMs named after Philip Pullman and Margaret Atwood), I also posit a second Holocaust. I've never seen that in anything—one suspects wishful thinking on the part of SF writers, or possibly just the delusion of "progress"—but the way modern geo-politics are going, it's not unlikely. Given the UN is unofficially-officially anti-Zionist, it's only a matter of time before someone tries to strike at Israel, but Israel proper is no pushover. Much more likely that some country, or coalition of countries, will do something nasty to their portion of the Jewish Diaspora, to "make a gesture" at Israel.

That, of course, and also a massive genocide in Africa due to overpopulation fears, are just the excuse the UN needs to seize more control, becoming a world government, albeit merely over a confederation of its member states. That's good and bad; the UN bureaucracy might be a bunch of desk-jockeying ideologues, but the UN's new power cuts down on wars—I only have two more in my history, after that point—and the demise of the "imperialist" global capitalist boogieman (which only existed because "we don't like losing out to America in trade" doesn't sound as noble) calms down a lot of cultural issues. That is, society can transition to somewhat saner and more moderate attitudes about sex, economics, speech, etc., than our current "anything goes" Russian roulette, without sixteen different kinds of academic screeching about "fascism".

That's an important issue, by the way—don't assume that policies you don't approve of wouldn't have good effects. I'd literally take arms against a UN world-state, but I'd be really surprised—if it got down to the business of governing, and wasn't just a retirement home for bilingual bureaucrats, the way it is now—if it couldn't improve life in a number of areas. Every system is a tradeoff; you fight certain systems because you don't want their particular one. Even the ones you don't want, though, still offer something, and not noticing that is what makes so many sci-fi dystopias such crap.

Ramming Speed

Ramjets!

No, I don't mean jet engines. I mean rockets: Bussard ramjets! They're less infeasible than previously thought.

So the two big problems with the design (other than having to get up to ridiculously high speeds to use 'em) are that the massive magnetic field will kill you, and that the field itself creates drag.

Only, when Bussard—and Larry Niven, who may well have been the main popularizer of the ramjet idea, and definitely is the reason we call 'em "ramscoops"—did their work, the Halbach array hadn't been invented yet. It strengthens magnetic force on one side, while virtually nullifying it on the other: that, I predict, will be important for not just ramjets, but also magnetic nozzles for all sorts of atomic rockets. Or magnetic pusher plates in the case of IC fusion rockets (which are basically Orion on steroids).

As for drag, apparently using electrostatic fields instead of electromagnetic ones means there is no drag. I'm not sure if such strong static will kill you (if it hits you all at once, e.g. lightning, it will, but I doubt even an interstellar scoop would be that strong), but there's probably a way to do with static what Halbach does with magnets. Magnetic and electric fields are neat that way.

Personally, I wouldn't use the ramjet for fusion—the original design called for, essentially, achieving fusion by shoving hydrogen into a funnel at relativistic speed. That's not only inelegant, it's unlikely to ever hit a break-even point. But you might be able to use the ramjet to achieve partial, or conceivably even full, in-flight refueling (okay, "propellant replenishment"), on ships that use more conventional methods to attain their fusion. What I mean is, with a ramjet refilling your tanks as you go, you could have, say, an effective mass-ratio of 16 or 20 despite only carrying enough tankage for a mass ratio of 5 to 9.

If you're not trying to get to a speed where gas fuses on its own, you also might not need to achieve quite as high of velocities before the ramjet works. The minimum is usually given as 1% c, but if you're not brute-force funnel-compressing it for fusion, like that, you might be able to do it at the top speed of the HOPE magnetized-target fusion rocket, which the delta-v calculator puts at .188% c, with a mass ratio of 5 (assuming you also want enough fuel to, y' know, stop).

PS. One thing that's interesting is, if you fiddle with the delta-v calculator, you quickly notice that changing the mass ratio results in tiny changes in delta-v—but changing the exhaust velocity results in huge ones. It's because (in the rocket equation), the number varies with the natural logarithm of the mass ratio, but directly with the exhaust velocity.

I.e.:

(2)

Δv =

Ve×

ln

m0 m1

I just found out how to do equations in html. Cool, huh?

Fusion Haa!

Wanna see something cool? This.People working on the chamber of the National Ignition Facility (N.B.I'd had a different image here, but the caption—from a stupid newspaper, I knew I should only trust academic sites—misled me to identify an artist's conception as an actual photo).

Here's a diagram of the facility; I think that blue spherical room above is the thing at one end surrounded by all the red pipes.The NIF should be like Jerusalem for science fiction writers, and not just because it's expected to be the fusion facility that gets reactions past the break-even point (i.e., that can be used for net power generation). Also, though, the energy and temperature its facilities cope with is on par with proton-chain fusion, which is the real deal. Know what other type of apparatus uses proton-chain? It's a product line called the main sequence.

Yeah. In my book, the humans use proton-chain rockets in their starships (their interplanetary ones use lesser types of fusion). Why? Well, basically, having to spend months or years getting up to speed was a drag (even in a virtually frictionless environment [rimshot]); I gave 'em gravity-based inertia protections that bleed the forces off into the surrounding space-time geometry, and let their ships pull 20-30 gs.

It's interesting, were I writing it for the first time today, I might actually have the humans go into g-tanks during accelerations, and use rotating sections the rest of the time; indeed the felinoids might likewise use rotating sections in their ships (conveniently, their ships are spheres and don't, technically, ever accelerate, since the stress-energy tensor metric-patching they use as an engine essentially puts whatever's inside its matter shell into freefall). But, there's a limit to how much I can rewrite—I have whole scenes taking place during accelerations, and screwing up the time-frame of a book is a headache on the order of trepanning with railroad spikes. Come to think of it, I bet a felinoid wouldn't like freefall; all their self-righting instincts would go crazy.

The humans in my book can have incredibly light fusion-powered ships, not (precisely) because of "the speed of plot", but because it's the 24th damn century and they have superconductors to make the magnetic nozzle and use things like Bose-Einstein condensates as radiation shielding. Transhumanist SF writers strike me as bizarre, given they think humans can upload their minds, and other aspects of the Pre-Tribulation Rapture Kurzweil Singularity, but don't understand that humanity may not be limited to the structural characteristics of naturally occurring substances. I mean, we first made carbon nanotubes in...hang on...1976, and B-E condensates in 1995: do you guys really think we've done all we can do with materials tech?

I refer you to the first two verses of "Kansas City" from Oklahoma.

Well, actually, that nonsense is just like the "atomic everything" in some of the lesser forms of sci-fi (and the cricket bow-chicka-wow-wow is deliberate): the Computer Revolution was just too damned impressive for their puny brains, and it robbed them of their reason. There's a real Cargo Cult element in both, in that they worship whatever marvels are near at hand, merely because of the emotional impact. Oddly it's combined with two forms of self-worship—the idea that humans will take total control even of their own bodies and minds, and the idea that the greatest power in the universe is a human thing, i.e. information. Now there's some basis for that second one, as found in all the traditions of mankind: but in the real tradition, man's speech is most powerful in that it grants dominion over nature. The Kurzweil Singularity is like the Rapture in more than just being apocalyptic millennialism—it also share's the Rapturers' (Raptors'?) idea of saying, to the rest of the world, "La la la I can't hear you I'm not listening." A transhuman (or tranny, as I like to call them) is a person who's given up hope in technology as the servant of humanity, and taken refuge (a false refuge, in Buddhist terms) in the old Gnostic cop-outs, immortality-seeking and inefficacious ascetic posturing.

N.B. #2: So I realized, I was wrong again. There was this graph, see, with the energy levels of various kinds of fusion, and there was a thing way up top marked "National Ignition Facility". But what it meant—and would have said, if the person making the graph were not a wrestling-headgear wearing retard—was "National Ignition Facility Lasers". The NIF proper is no more energetic than typical inertial-confinement fusion, which is fairly chilly, for fusion.

Shit shit shit. I probably over-estimated the temperature the NIF's designed to handle, although inertia confinement fusion is a lot more temperature intensive than magnetic confinement. See, even though inertia confinement works at a lower temperature, the plasma isn't nearly as contained—an inertia-confinement fusion rocket would apparently be a lot like a hydrogen-bomb Orion rocket, in terms of the stresses involved.

Everything else I said still stands, though.

De Individuationis

You know, I should've pointed out how counter-intuitive it is, the fallacies relating to the One and the Many. I mean, you'd think collectivism resulted from denying the One, and individualism from denying the Many, but actually, individualists deny the One, and it's collectivists who deny the Many. The ethics that they then deduce are rather ironic; do you, to quote Snatch, know what Nemesis is?

Notice how many philosophical materialists are of Libertarian bent—every shallow reductivist skeptic debunker from here to Mythbusters makes Robert Heinlein look like a Borg drone. Meanwhile all the collectivists see is categories, like a bad bootleg of Plato. Actually because of one, namely Marx.

Incidentally, aside from her hatred of materialism being inconsistent with her fundamentally atomist anthropology, Ayn Rand was a philosophy fail in another way. Namely, Aristotelianism cannot be strongly individualist, it cannot believe that each human has a unique nature: because the only individuation a material thing has is its trait (possessed by all material things) of quantity. It is only because matter only imperfectly partakes of form, and never to the same degree twice, that there is more than one of any material substance—on the level of nature, "soul", substance, all matter is unified; there are no humans, there is no human, only Humanity. Averroes (being smarter than Rand by orders of magnitude) asserted, rather famously, that humans all share one intellect; Maimonides didn't go that far, but did essentially assert that humans revert to drops in the bucket of Humanity at death. No, only Aquinas—compelled by Christian dogma—asserted the actuality of individual existence, and he had to claim it was a miracle.

Now it's funny how, to us, "it's a miracle" looks like a copout. But Aquinas was actually demonstrating why the Scholastic system he founded would eventually found science: because he would not deny an observed phenomenon, human individuality, merely for the sake of fitting a system, hylomorphism. It's the same as when Jean Buridan dismissed Aristotelian cosmic geocentrism (Aristotle taught that the earth was the only "world", all the other bodies being made of a different, celestial substance) by simply saying, "God can make as many worlds as he likes."

Pure Wind Marching in a Movement Wholly Circular

So Bill Nye the Science Guy has forfeited his right to the title, by saying this:

Well, there’s not that many other countries that have the configuration of North America to make tornadoes. And the word “hurricane,” you know, is a word coined in the Caribbean, like, so this is a unique, unique area in that regard.

You're right—because other places call their hurricanes "typhoons"...which is spelled 颱風 and means "big wind".

As for other countries having tornadoes, while the US does have one of the widest flat spaces in the world, this map begs to differ with Nye:The orange bits are tornado regions. Notice that one of them is, well, Europe, inclusive?

And hey, as long as we're making linguistic arguments for our claim that hurricanes are unique to the Caribbean (but only because they're called typhoons in the Pacific), does Nye know Japanese has a word for tornado? Namely, "tatsumaki"? German, too, although—in typical German fashion—"Wirbelwind" is so "on the nose" you can't be sure it's not a neologism. Hungarian calls it a forgószél, and its Latin name, "turbó", is the origin of things like, y' know, turbines. But we can't expect Nye to have heard of those, it's not like they're a major feature of countless aspects of modern technology. Or anything. You know.

Uncorrelated, Not Uncaused

Boy the letter U looks neat in that font, huh? So, random thoughts.

• Someone said "Objectivism is a kind of existentialism". Haha. No it isn't, and you owe an apology to Heidegger and Sartre—and remember, they were a Nazi and a Stalinist. But at least they knew "existence" is something different from "that which exists"; Rand said "Existence is identity", which is logically equivalent to identifying existence with that which exists. And that is logically equivalent to identifying the sky with the concept of blueness.
  
  Basically, she was to philosophy what Deepak Chopra is to quantum physics.
• Which reminds me, they took the analogy part off the SAT. I took it a long time ago (got like 1400 something), but the analogies were my favorite part. And don't you twits understand that taking out the parts the kids score low on, isn't really helping anything?
• So, read this avatar riffing. I'll wait.
  
  Back? Cool. Anyway, it's weird how in the comments the guy claims that Avatar doesn't show that people are getting dumber, and says he doesn't believe in the "lowest common denominator". But, dude, the lowest common denominator doesn't refer to some kinda anti-popular elitist thing; it just refers to going after the cheapest aspects of our common humanity. For instance, everyone struggles with their ethics and organizing their priorities, and everyone loves their children, etc. But everyone also likes hot chicks and shit blowing up. The former are rational or at least human; the latter we share with every other animal above sponges. It's a lot easier to go after the stuff that's older than your notochord.
• Did you know birds can't taste bitter, and can only taste sweet if they're frugivores? Yeah, but water defines a flavor for them, the way "salty" is defined by salt or "sour" by acid. The fact birds can't taste bitter, by the way, is usually the reason bitter fruits, like cranberries, taste that way—if birds eat them and mammals don't, their seeds get scattered farther.
  
  Yeah, birds are weird—although all the same things are true of cats, except cats can taste bitter. Still not sweet, though, and they also have a water-taste.
• Speaking of weird anatomy, I'd thought that frogs had a joint in the middle of a greatly elongated femur, and then had a shortened fibula and tibia in their "foot". Turns out, it's even weirder. They have a normal length femur, then their fibula and tibia are merged (their calf-bones have two cores), and they have two greatly elongated talus and calcaneus bones making a shape like your tibia and fibula. So when a frog walks with its "feet" partially up, and its "toes" on the ground (the way dogs or cats or hamsters do), it's not really walking digitigrade. Nope, it's walking plantigrade, but propped up on its freakishly elongated ankles.
  
  I decided to use a modified form of that for my felinoids, except the two long ankle bones cross over each other, like the bones in your forearm—they can rotate their feet, like margays and squirrels, but they use a different mechanism. They also still have 'feet', unlike frogs going right from their freakishly elongated ankles to their freakishly long 'toes'—their metatarsi and first phalanges make an arch shape, like in your foot but shorter, and then their other phalanges are shaped roughly like a cat's toes. They still have the same number of joints in their toes (3), because they have an extra row of phalanges—they have the same number of finger-joints as humans, despite having claws.
• And yes, the pads on their hands and feet are different—indeed, not only are they a different shape from a cat's pads (in some ways, they're more like a possum's or koala's), their skin is also different, with its keratin in beta-sheets rather than alpha-helices—like a lizard or a bird. Similarly, they don't have triangular wet noses, like cats; their noses are more rectangular (still slightly narrower toward the bottom) and the skin has a waxy texture. The wetness's functionality (telling them which way the wind is blowing, for smelling) is duplicated by pits with bundles of nerves, like in a wading bird's bill.
• Incidentally, what kind of keyboards do your aliens use? What, you mean you don't know? Huh. But you do have their alphabet figured out, right? Right?
  
  My dromaeosauroid gift-givers use roughly the Datahand ergonomic keyboard, modified for the fact they have 4 fingers and xygodactyl thumbs (like Elites). The felinoids usually use something similar to the Crandall typewriter from 1881:Except the keys are different, of course. Specifically, it has 51 (three rows of seventeen). Yes I figured out the layout, why?
  
  The felinoids also use the gloves on their armor as chorded keyboards, and yes, I figured out the key sequences for that, too.
• Even I think it's excessive that I've come up with ways that the different nations my felinoids have of caricaturing each other's accents. What I mean is, for instance, their "empire's" official language renders the dentals (Th sounds) as fricatives, the way English does, but a related minority language renders them as stops, like the T and D in Spanish. So, if a speaker of the first language were trying to write dialogue with the second language's accent, he'd put glottal stops after the dentals.