As Balzac Said of Marriage

"What a commentary on human life, that humans must associate to endure it." (As quoted by Belloc, I can't find the original but I assume it's in Physiology of Marriage.) Thoughts upon society, mostly not fictional.

• I think a huge proportion of people's folklore about the "brutality" of the Middle Ages...comes from the freaking Mongol invasions. I know the "throwing dead animals over walls to cause diseases in besieged cities" tactic was a Mongol thing, for example, and I don't know of any Europeans that used it. I don't think Europeans did that even in the Hundred Years War, and remember, that was their World War I/Vietnam.
  
  But, I mean, seriously? Isn't that kinda like saying "the Inca" persecuted Jews and brought enslaved Africans to work in silver-mines? I mean, a lot of the people involved in those activities in Peru were probably of Inca blood, but those are rightly regarded as issues for which the Spanish Empire must answer.
  
  Is it too much to ask that when forming opinions about a culture, you discuss things it actually did, and not things its enemies and conquerors did? Seems pretty basic to me, but I guess no?
• And the Mongols were nuts. In 1207, Beijing (then Zhongdu) and the surrounding area had a population of 2 million. After the Mongols sacked it in 1215, the population was 376,000. Now, some of that was probably population loss due to the Jin Emperor moving his capital (since the Mongols had already besieged Zhongdu once), but still, probably at least a million died, given that the besieged city had 100,000 defenders and a populace of 108,000 households. Remember, this was before the One Child Policy (and also before the outlawing of polygamy)—the 13th-century Chinese had very large families.
  
  That's one battle, at least a million dead, probably closer to a million and a half, all but 10% of them civilians. Meanwhile, the sack of Jerusalem in the First Crusade? 3,000-3,500 dead. Less than that at Byzantium in the Fourth Crusade. All Crusades combined, over 300 years and with most of the dead being Christians massacred by Turks (who, again, always sacked cities they took), killed about 1.5 million, as many as Genghis Khan taking one city. But somehow people actually talk about the Crusaders as remotely comparable to the brutality of the Mongols.
  
  The only theory where that makes sense is if we assume that "Abrahamic" monotheists' lives count for several hundred times as much as Chinese Buddhists'—you explain the "Three thousand dead at Jerusalem is just as bad as over a million dead at Zhongdu" analysis, otherwise!
• One canard that gets trotted out is "Oh, the Crusaders committed cannibalism at Maarat!" But, aside from the fact that I only know of one account of that that wasn't written about a decade after the fact (that of Fulcher of Chartres), that's not atrocity cannibalism; read the context it's mentioned, in Fulcher and in all the other accounts. If it happened at all (which, again, debatable), it was starvation-cannibalism. It's something that happens in sieges, to both sides when the besieged city is in a desert.
• It occurs to me that the device—I myself have employed it—of comparing death-tolls as percents of global population at the time, is flawed. It can still be useful in some circumstances, but in absolute terms it isn't a valid methodology. Namely, it is assuming "scarcity" affects the value of human life. The lives of the members of small nations are not more valuable than the lives of members of large ones; the value of human life does not diminish as the number of humans increases.
  
  Again, Japan and China lost equal proportions of their civilian populations in World War II, but the Chinese losses represent ten times as many actual deaths. That means that there were more murders and "collateral damage" inflicted on Chinese civilians than Japanese ones, it does not mean that Japan and China suffered equally. All a larger population-base means is that China also had ten times as many people to grieve the loss of friends and relatives.
• I recently decided to watch Equilibrium on Netflix. I had to turn it off after forty-seven minutes, and surprisingly, it wasn't the gun-katas that did it. No, it wasn't even the pointless inclusion of a bunch of Christian imagery for an obviously secularist, atheist ideology, nor the tin-eared failure to understand that Christian asceticism is the palate-cleanser of the oenophile, the bland preparation for sublime ecstasies. The movie does raise the question "Do these filmmakers hate Christians more than they hate their audience?", but their hatred for their audience was actually the clincher, and most noticeable in something else.
  
  It was the the basic premise. Who would be dumb enough to try to ban emotions? Leaving to one side how any drug that could do away with emotions would impede every other brain function, if history shows anything, it's that the emotions are the most efficient means of social control imaginable. And how would a culture like that possibly fail to notice that one of its enforcers has gone off his meds? They spot people in the line for trains who've gone off their meds, neither Batman nor Boromir would've made it past their own front doors in that condition. Lame excuses about "trying to optimize" wouldn't fool anyone (plus, since he wasn't doubting yet, Batman would've reported Boromir's "turning in contraband myself" excuse, and all their comrades would've been briefed on it, so he'd never have got away with using it himself).
  
  And, seriously. You do exist for the sake of your existence, that's not circular, some things are just ends in themselves. You certainly don't exist for the sake of emotions. Emotions mean nothing, they have no intrinsic value. All they are is cognitive shortcuts, a survival characteristic because it frees clock-cycles in the brain, so it doesn't have to adjust a body's operating parameters in real time. You feel to live, you do not live to feel; if you did then emotions would be worth more than life and the exquisite sensation of a razor-sharp blade separating flesh would constitute "justified homicide".
• A weird trope, seemingly out of nowhere, that shows up in Japanese works (especially though not exclusively) is the "I will make you sick of war" antihero version of the "war for the sake of peace" paradox. You see it in Lelouch Lamperouge in Code GEACPS GEASS and Treize Khushrenada in Gundam Wing. Does anyone know where that crazy-town idea came from? I suppose it has a certain appeal to a nation that in living memory shocked the conscience of Asia (and see those Mongol entries above for why that's hard to do), but I don't think even the most delusional of Japanese nationalists would seriously maintain that was what Imperialism was about.
  
  Quite honestly, Mutually Assured Destruction—the embryo of which was probably Tesla's "Peace Ray" and which is probably an outgrowth of the Blue Water School of 19th century British foreign policy—is saner than that. And Mutually Assured Destruction is much crazier than its acronym suggests, lots of really, really crazy people would still balk at "both sides explicitly take each other's civilian populace hostage". I mean, "attack me and it won't go well for your people" is always somewhat implicit in national defense, of course, but the primary reason ought to be "we will water our fields with so much of your blood you won't have enough strength left to protect yourselves"; it's actually still just a little frowned on to explicitly threaten non-combatants, and no sane man is in any hurry to change that.
• If you needed another piece of evidence that the US nuked the wrong island off the coast of Eurasia, how about the persistent habit of British people of referring to all elements of dialect that differ from their own usage as "slang"? Sorry, but "slang" is a form of jargon used for, among other things, in-group identification and as a marker of informal register. Dialect differences persist across registers and groups, when spoken in the same region—official documents in America don't abruptly start calling elevators "lifts" or trucks "lorries", now do they?
  
  For some reason the fact that "mad" means "angry" in America, specifically, is always described by British people as "slang" (it does admittedly occur more in informal speech than formal—but not all informal-register vocabulary is slang). Of course, part of it is that the British educational system is both worse than ours (an enormity one might take as some kind of eschatological omen), and somehow even more committed to unwarranted "self-esteem". The end result is a bunch of functional illiterates unaware of the distinction between "American slang" and "an Americanism" who nevertheless think themselves qualified to talk about language.
• As a general rule, by the way, anything about grammar that's different between British and American English is often a matter of German influence, more Americans being of German descent than anything but—maybe, depending on your stats—Irish. For instance, "math" vs. "maths"—in American English it's singular, in British plural (I seem to recall Canada uses both in different contexts, but don't let's get sidetracked). In German, it's "die Mathematik", with the feminine singular "die" not the plural one. Or "different than", which British people tend to think is grammatically incorrect? "Anders als" in German.
  
  Incidentally, almost every instance where American is more like German is also one where American is more like Middle English; "mathematic(k)" was the word in the late 1300s (when it replaced a word that'd probably be "tallycraft" in Modern English). "Different than" is what every other Germanic language still uses (and while we're at it, "different to", Britain, seriously? come on, we leave you alone for a couple centuries and you let the language go to seed). Ironically, given their rabid Jingoism where French is concerned, a lot of the differences between British English and American—which are also differences between Modern British English and Middle English—shift English closer to Romance usage.

A Few Words

Post 500. I don't have any idea of what to do to commemorate the occasion. I wanted to do a blog post on language and writing though.

• Idioms crop up in places where you least expect them, in descriptions of things you assume are straightforward. For example, if you read a lot of fan translations of manga and anime, you'll probably have come across phrases like "severed wrist" or "severed neck" (well, if you read crime manga). How do you mail someone a severed wrist or find a severed neck at a serial killer's house?
  
  Easy. Japanese expresses severed body-parts not by the name of the part, but by where it was severed. A severed head is called a neck; a severed hand is called a wrist. Pro translators tend to know that, and thus translate those things by the equivalent expression in English, but amateur fan translations are done by people who apparently never stop to ask, "Wait, 'severed wrist'? Does that mean they, like, just have the seven bones of the carpus? Maybe the distal ends of the radius and ulna?"
• I realized that the trend of my recent edits to my book, one that I think all science fiction should follow, is toward the realistic portrayal of advanced technology. I.e., very little of the gravity control, metric-patching, or other high-level tech should be available in handheld or even crew-served devices; it should all be the purview of large labs and reactors, possibly in large vehicles like airships or buses but not in anything even as small as a car.
  
  The one thing I do still have is that zled wireless communications still use topology—they send their signals as wave-form distortions in space-time. But that's actually not too far-fetched—they just have a tiny amount of exotic matter that acts as an "antenna" by making microscopic distortions. It is to gravity control or metric-patching what the Farnsworth fusor is to actual power-generating fusion. Presumably they have the distortions follow a pattern different from natural gravity fluctuations (which presumably occur from every tiny bit of mass in existence), so they're detectable despite being small.
• Which reminds me, I regularly use the expression "reinventing the wheel" to describe "science-fictional for the sake of being science-fictional" devices...and then I go and put snake-belly nanomaterial treads, on sled-like runners, on zled cars. No more; I'm changing them back to wheels.
  
  Or at least to spheres. The main advantage there is actually durability—a sphere-driven car can keep a damaged area of its wheels away from the road and still function exactly like a wheeled car—which is the kind of thing the zledo would think of; they're also neurologically much more equipped to take advantage of the increased maneuverability of spheres over wheels.
  
  It seems like "brushless direct-current" motors are the way to go with this; they have more power and durability and the trade-off, "potentially less rugged, more complex, more expensive control electronics" is a trade-off zled technology is more than able to make.
• The last season or two of Law and Order Criminal Intent went downhill sharply, quality-wise. With the exception of the Jeff Goldblum episodes, which seem to have had a wholly different writing staff, the dialogue suddenly became strangely stagey and overwritten, everybody running scared of the verb "to be" and using highfalutin' adverbs while describing grisly felonies. It sounded like rather purple novelistic narrative prose, not dialogue.
  
  Niven's most important writer-rule: "Everybody talks first draft." People don't talk the way the narrative about them does, because people are not books and their audience isn't reading what they say. That's important enough for the dialogue in a work of prose; for the dialogue in a TV show, it's absolutely vital, as vital as "make sure you don't accidentally load live rounds in the prop guns".
• I guess this counts as writing since it shows up a lot in journalism, and could well show up in fiction, but pretty much nobody is ever killed with a "high-powered" rifle round. Assault rifles are not high-powered. 5.56 NATO is .223 Remington; the AK-47's 7.62×39mm is probably the weakest .30 caliber round currently in wide use; the AK-74's 5.45×39mm is on par with the freaking .22 Hornet. In many places, if you hunt anything bigger than coyotes with the AK-74's round, or bigger than pronghorns with the M16's, you will go to jail for animal cruelty, because they are not powerful enough to reliably get humane kills. Assault rifles, in sporting terms, are varmint guns, or at best small-game (you could probably hunt smaller deer with 7.62×39mm).
  
  The .308 Winchester (in the form of 7.62 NATO) does, admittedly, see some limited battlefield use as a sniper- and designated-marksman gun, but even that's more of a medium-game rifle, grossly underpowered for anything much bigger than a (typical) elk. The kinds of animals you take with "high powered" rifles properly so-called are mostly in Africa; pretty much nothing in the New World except musk-ox and the largest grizzlies and polar bears is big enough to be worth the trouble (oh, also walruses—I always forget those are big game). Because that's what a high-powered rifle is, it's basically an elephant gun, and in military terms, an anti-materiel rifle. More people have probably been murdered with staplers—not staple-guns, just staplers!—than have been shot with anti-materiel rounds, those bullets are too expensive to waste on soft meaty targets like humans.
• I was thinking about the impossibility of spacefaring libertarianism, and how a space-colonizing culture would, virtually latae sententiae, be a "water monopoly" empire. Of course, not actually based on water, nor air—hydrogen and oxygen are in abundant supply in space. Nor over some goofball nonsensoleum you can use for lame-brained petroleum allegories; superconductors, the real basis of space travel, don't actually occur naturally, and pretty much can't.
  
  No, no, the thing the "empire" has a monopoly over (other than the aforementioned superconductors, which are again not a natural resource)...would be protein. And carbohydrates. Pretty much, just like the fact that the only place you'd fight over in space are life-supporting planets, the big commodity in space would be the products of the biosphere you originated from. Even synthetic nutrients would require equipment the average asteroid miner wouldn't be able to afford, in terms of either space or money.
  
  Of course, that doesn't actually mean space colonization would have to be wholly state-controlled (nobody but an idiot or a libertarian—but I repeat myself—actually believes that anything is a dichotomous choice between "state" and "individual"). It would actually, as I think I've mentioned, be on the basis usually found in conditions where survival is hard, e.g. the mores and customs of subsistence-farming villagers, who are not a state but who are also under no obligation to help anyone who doesn't play by their rules. And their rules are the very opposite of the ones usually depicted in science fiction.
• I think the problem with a whole bunch of comic stories along the lines of "What's So Funny About Truth, Justice, and the American Way?", made into the animated movie "Superman vs. The Elite", is that they tend to be idiot plots, where Clark refuses to make his argument until it's much too late. I realize that that prevents your story from happening, but then, that's why we call it an Idiot Plot.
  
  I mean, all he has to say is, "Dude, I can rip your arm off with two fingers. A terrifying alien monster that can turn you into mist faster than your eyes can perceive, is holding himself bound by your rules. And you're bitching about it? What do you think will happen, when I give myself the right to pass judgment on those of you who don't measure up to the standard of an untiring borderline-immortal whose endocrine system is almost entirely under his conscious control?"
• Of course the other issue is, as the first seasons of the animated Batman realize but no other DC content since, heroes should say, not, "We can't kill (people like the Joker)" since at some point it pretty much becomes criminal negligence. Instead they should say, "I won't kill. That's for the courts. If you as a community decide to give the Joker the chair, the needle, or the gas-chamber, I won't shed any tears, but I'm not in the business of extrajudicial executions." (Or, "The fact we don't perform extrajudicial executions is the nice, legally-clear, liability-averting thing that separates the Justice League from any common lynch-mob.")
  
  And seriously, there is no legitimate excuse for the Joker to not get the death penalty; he's not psychotic, he didn't believe himself to be acting in self-defense. He's just freaking evil, and he's personally murdered more people than Che Guevara, without the aid of an entire totalitarian state's military and police to bring him victims. Plus? There's no reason he can't be constantly breaking out of Death Row instead of out of Arkham. Hell, coming up with ever more stringent security for him, and then ever crazier ways for him to get out anyway, is something relatively easy that adds interest automatically, like "What'll be the Riddler's clue this time?" or "What kind of constructs does this Green Lantern use in a given situation, and how and why are they different from the ones that Green Lantern would use?"

In RE: Previous

Addenda to the last one.

• I'm not going to modify the narrative much, but I have decided that zled kinship will incorporate a bunch of different birth-order terms, as well as general "sibling" terms. There'll be a slight difference, in that the specific ones mean both "elder/younger sibling" and "whichever order of child", depending on who they're used in relation to.
  
  The beta or whatever of a wolf pack, after all, is the beta to both the alpha and the gamma, with the hierarchy-terminology independent of the place of any individual member. It's like how the same person is "offspring" relative to their parents and "sibling" relative to their siblings, but is, say, first lieutenant to both their colonel and their sergeant.
  
  Late addendum (to addendum): I guess the short way to put it is that "sibling" and "parent" explicitly describe the relationship, while "alpha" and "beta" (or "colonel" and "lieutenant") only implicitly describe it.
• Realized I don't have the technical know-how to make my own laser ideas from scratch, so I'm borrowing other ideas. Part of this, since that's what my sources use, means they're near-infrared rather than mid, and thus can have much more normal lens material (probably not glass though). One thing I discovered, and which is weird, is that since they don't shoot something that's affected by gravitational pulls (but is affected by the space-time distortion that causes gravity), lasers' range actually depends, in part at least, on the target material. It's much easier to burn flesh than steel so "effective range" for a laser beam depends on the target.
  
  Another thing is, lasers are basically cameras, they don't need feed mechanisms from magazines. They also don't have recoil so, while they do need some way to steady them, they don't require a full-size stock. This allows me to radically change the design of zled guns, which if you recall I'd had look like Winchester-Henry-Marlin rifles and old Smith and Wesson break-top revolvers. Now, though? I'm thinking quite a different set of guns, taking my "deceptively primitive-looking" idea, with zled tech, a step further. Namely? Matchlocks. Lasers that look kinda like Tanegashima matchlocks!
• I decided to go with moderately lower-capacity batteries for the lasers, because it makes the issue of "every battery is like a grenade" less daunting. Possibly of more significance, I didn't want to change the number of shots per load that I'd written when they were still guns. But 1.6 kJ per shot, 18 shots per battery, gives 28.8 kJ, or the equivalent of 6.34 g of TNT—the propellant load of a single round of .300 Remington Ultra Magnum. A 50-shot, same power long laser (which has increased range due to having greater depth of field) still only has 80 kJ, 17.6 g of TNT, 4 rounds of 7 mm Remington Magnum.
  
  Also, though, humans have roughly the same issue—it's hard to make all 30 rounds of our ammo go off because you've pretty much got to strike the primer to ignite the propellant. But with caseless ammo, the heat-sink of the casing is no longer there (there are other issues with that that I've gone over), and a good hit with a laser might cause the ammo to cook off in the magazine, simultaneously exploding and sending all the bullets flying at once (presumably into the weapon's wielder's arm or hand).
• My guns' caseless ammo is electronically-fired (the G11's isn't, oddly). I was wondering what the difference was between the electronic guns' batteries, and those of the zled lasers, so I did some research. The only electronically fired gun that exists just now, the Voere VEC-91, uses two 15-volt batteries (Eveready 504s, from what I can find). Given 30 volts and a current of 216 coulombs (I looked it up), those batteries have an energy of 3.24 kJ...which is the equivalent of .7 grams of TNT.
  
  Yeah, the humans' guns are in no danger from their batteries—it's the 205 kJ (45 g of TNT), plus 30 pieces of expressly-designed-to-kill-you shrapnel, in every 30-round magazine, that they have to worry about. (Or 90 g of TNT in a 60-round casket magazine.)

Sierra Foxtrot 4

Thoughts on SF.

• It occurs to me that zled kinship terms, involving compounds consisting of "relation + sex", are—entirely by accident!—essentially the notation used by ethologists in describing pack-structures. The alpha male and alpha female (note the elements involved) are the parents; the beta male and beta female are (usually) the eldest son and eldest daughter, and so on.
  
  I am torn as to whether I ought to actually change the narrative to address this. I personally dislike aliens being described primarily in ethological terms, because it tends to lead to shallow aliens that simply behave like their eco-niche, rationality secondary. On the other hand the shallow critics always get offended when your aliens are too much like humans (though that tends to involve wholly unsupported assumptions about the variability of human culture, let alone how different aliens would be).
  
  I suppose I shall have to please myself and not the critics; I don't have to live with them.
• Apparently there is an idea, I've run across it in online discussions and brushed the edge of it in the spaceship rules of various SF RPGs, that there are ships in science fiction that don't run on rockets. Which, except for the relatively few reactionless drives, is poppycock. Outside of some very technical definitions, "rocket" means anything propelled by the expulsion of a heated exhaust—if it's got glowy things on the back and they even ostensibly push it, it is a rocket. The exhaust could be pure light, but a photon rocket is still a rocket, which is probably why they call it that. The Enterprise is a rocket, using antimatter as fuel and the byproducts of matter-antimatter annihilation as a propellant (despite the fact there's no reason not to use the warp-drive as a slower-than-light drive). Every ship in Star Wars is a rocket, using ion engines in a manner widely known to be physically impossible. Every ship in Firefly is a rocket, though for some reason they can negate their rest-mass with their artificial gravity tech (but cannot use that tech directly as an engine?). The ships of the Covenant are rockets, which use exotic matter with negative mass as a propellant to impart extra exhaust velocity.
  
  Notice, two of those things, the Star Trek and Firefly ones (i.e. the two shows in the category "formulaic hackneyed children's program by an overrated vapid ideologue whose cult of personality always blames third parties for their Dear Leader's very real failings"), don't actually need rockets. It's actually much easier to use any model of warp-drive space-time you care to name as an STL drive than as an FTL one, you don't have the massive energy requirements or the "naked singularity" issues. And while artificial gravity, if you happen to be able to get it, can do a lot of things (people in my books bleed off the force of their accelerations into the surrounding space-time, while still using rockets), I know of no models of it that can actually negate rest-mass—certainly of no models that can do that that can't also be used as an engine in their own right. Any gravity-control that can negate rest-mass can almost certainly also directly induce an inertial vector. Much less rarefied models of gravity control can be used as engines, for instance the Kzin gravity planer, which pretty much just makes things "fall" in the desired direction (until it amps the "gradient" back down).
• There is a future history that made a very bold move, bold almost to the point of offensiveness, but it's seldom been either praised or blamed for it, because that move is concealed from much of its audience. Namely, there is a major science fiction franchise with a eugenicist-to-the-point-of-genocide totalitarian state...that names most of its weapons in Hebrew. We just didn't notice because "Zion", the name of this state, is usually Romanized as "Zeon"...because that's how it's pronounced in Hebrew. No, seriously, look at the names of Zeon mobile suits. "Zaku" ("Zach"), "Elmeth", "Aggai", "Z'Gok", "Zudah", "Gouf M'Quve"—all of those sound a hell of a lot like Semitic languages, and I can find Hebrew meanings for several of 'em (and I barely know how to look up Hebrew).
  
  Now, I wouldn't necessarily say this is related to the fact that Japan is the one place outside the Islamic world where "Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion" sells well. It's entirely possible that Kill 'Em All Tomino was just doing the obvious inverts-your-expectations thing, and had his Space Nazis be Jewish. Japan's Jewish population is roughly on par with its "clairvoyant albino" population (lower, if we count fiction), so Tomino wouldn't have been raised to be sensitive to the juxtaposition; to him it would probably look only about as offensive as having a black-dominated America that discriminates against whites, which was pretty much "combo platter #3" for science fiction writers in the late 70s.
• I had considered having the pistols in my SF books shoot small caliber, hard rounds, like the ones shot by the FN Five-seveN pistol (which has 20 rounds in a somewhat smallish pistol). The Five-seveN shoots the same rounds as FN's P90 PDW/SMG ("PDW" is "personal defense weapon", the kind of thing you see a lot of, for instance, helicopter crews carrying—hence probably why the Air Force SG teams in the Stargate shows use P90s), chambered in FN's in-house produced 5.7×28mm. It's got its advantages, after all, and "small caliber pistols" seem to be a trend in a lot of science fiction.
  
  But...the thing is, the Russian Serdyukov Vektor pistol holds 18 rounds, and it's chambered in 9×19 mm Luger—or in a special hardened anti-armor 9 mm round, 9×21 mm Gyurza. You're gonna see a lot more of that second thing, and its NATO equivalents, as the armies of the world start equipping all their guys with body armor (and start fighting each other, rather than terrorist brigands, again). There doesn't seem to be much reason to start using small-caliber ammo—against unarmored opponents, who would come up a lot in a law-enforcement context, 9 mm is about as small as you wanna go—and the 9×21 mm can load from most of the same magazines as standard Luger rounds (actually NATO's just gonna start making AP variants of Luger, not borrow the Russian one).
• Is it possible to have science fiction RPGs that don't take place in either a space-opera universe or one with only humans? I ask because the milieu of a lot of RPGs, regardless of genre, is basically borrowed from D&D, but the convention of that kind of setting RE: other races—the local blacksmith is a dwarf, the most popular bard in the kingdom is a half-elf, the thieves' guild is run by a halfling who has his gnome friend make all their tools—is intrinsically space-opera, if you move it out of a fantasy setting. You can't really have that kind of thing, much, when half the things on an elf's plate will poison you and your food might as well be Yuuji's Diet Coke and jellied agar for all the sustenance it'll give him.
  
  And that really is what aliens would be like. Anyone who complains about "upright quadruped" aliens, but not about the fact they can eat human food, is simply straining gnats and swallowing camels. As I said, it's an uphill battle to come up with reasons for humans and aliens to fight; it's at least as difficult to come up with reasons for them to trade. They can't eat your food. Your clothes wouldn't fit them and might be hideously allergenic. The only things I can think of are possibly related to fine handicrafts, artwork, etc., and by extension media, but monkeys have radically different taste in music from us and we diverged from them probably under 25 million years ago. There is the free exchange of ideas, but unfortunately, that exchange tends to be free as in beer as much as it is free as in speech. Plus, what would be the demand?
  
  It's very difficult to come up with a way for aliens to interact with humans in an RPG context that doesn't break the suspension of disbelief. Maybe it'd be workable if the game was more like the old World of Darkness, as written rather than as actually played, with the emphasis on intrigue rather than on shoot-and-loot.
• What's with all the far future settings—I mean like the ones set more than a millennium in the future—where everyone has our names? Not only names we recognize as being from our language, but names assigned to the same sex of bearer and applied by the same socio-economic principles? 1000 years ago a lot fewer people were named Muhammad, and just about nobody was named Mary (it was held too sacred to be given as a name, just like Jesus was—the Spanish were awarded the right to name their children Jesús as a reward for Lepanto).
  
  And yet you go to the far off year 3127, and the salt of the earth rugged individualist (who somehow has failed to note that he depends on the gubmint for his air) is still gonna be named Jed. The black dude is still gonna be named Tyrone (which is, by the way, Latin for "n00b", I suggest we retire it as a personal appellation). The corporate shark lawyer—because those, which pretty much came into being in the late 1970s, will totally still exist in the 32nd century—is still gonna be named Leonard, with the vague implication he's concealing the name Lev so as to pass for a goy. Why? Stop it! Five or six centuries is fine, people in the 15th and 16th centuries were named much like we are, but past that?
  
  If cultural shift doesn't radically alter what names you give, linguistic shift will make them sound completely different. No language now existing was recognizable as itself (and not as simply related to itself) 1000 years ago, except ones that were already dead and fossilized like Latin, Sanskrit, and Hebrew (and other than Sanskrit, nobody pronounced those like they'd been pronounced while they were still alive). English still had cases back then, and ð, ƿ, æ, and þ were part of the alphabet! Sound recording might slow linguistic change, but it doesn't stop it—and we can only with difficulty understand the transitional form between Middle and Early Modern English (which, if we assume sound recording slows drift by half, is where 1000 years puts us).
• Have you noticed how cheap anti-gravity always is, even in settings put forth by their partisans as "hard"? Mass Effect and Firefly would be the two big offenders; Firefly, as I think I've mentioned, has people cheerfully working under floating sleds as if they were propped up on tire-jacks, but, uh, if it's pushing up with enough force to make what's basically a utility trailer float, it's also pushing down with as much force as the trailer would. Mass Effect has people inducing what are canonically gravitational distortions from within their own bodies, without so much as having to eat more (like, five or six sticks of dynamite) afterwards.
  
  The fact of the matter is that anything you could do to distort space-time would, realistically, be on the order of nuclear fusion—if so convenient, since we can produce nuclear fusion very easily (in devices no bigger than a backyard barbecue), albeit not safely nor as a sustained reaction. Living tissue generally prefers to be good and far away from anything like that; aside from the risk of whatever energies are released (simply as byproducts) by whatever phenomenon you're getting your anti-grav from, is the fact most of the theoretical possibilities prefer vacuum. I suppose theoretically you might produce the Casimir effect in a Thermos bottle, but you probably couldn't manipulate much gravity with it.
• Which leads me to conclude that my metric-patching guns are an awful lot of tech for small arms; I'm taking a much more serious look at lasers. Armor will actually have some effect on them, as much as on bullets. One thing I thought was interesting is this, from the Atomic Rockets' discussion of the idea:

  Assuming a worst case of 5 kilojoules per shot and a rechargeable magazine containing 50 shots, the magazine is packing 250 kilojoules. This is the equivalent of ... 55 grams of TNT (For comparison purposes, a standard 8 inch stick of dynamite is about 208 grams and hand grenades used by the US Army have explosive charges of 56 to 226 grams of TNT).

  True, but keep in mind, a given soldier is carrying around about 45 g TNT-equivalent explosive just by picking up an M4 with a 30-round STANAG magazine—5.56 NATO rounds generally use about a gram and a half of propellant, and nitrocellulose propellant is almost exactly as explosive as TNT. Admittedly, it's harder to make all 30 go off at once, but on the other hand there's less lethal shrapnel when a laser's battery explodes.
• I figure, on zled handguns ("hand lasers"?), I'm gonna go with about 18 shots per "magazine" (i.e., battery). Long guns ("long lasers") would be stronger, of course, since they have more depth of field, and they might get more battery-life from the volume of their batteries. An interesting thing is that a laser-weapon's "barrel" is actually its optical cavity, and its "muzzle" is actually its output coupler (and it ends in a lens). Which, huh, wonder if I should add some stuff about lens caps for the lasers (I suppose being holstered, or sheathed in the case of the long ones, will protect the lens okay).
  
  I think the beam itself will be in the mid-infrared (near-infrared and near-ultraviolet can have harmful effects when they reflect; far ultraviolet prefers to only exist in vacuum; far infrared has diffraction issues). The lenses would have to be made of something like the flourides of zirconium, thorium, or barium (all of which can form glasses), since normal glass (and clear plastic) are opaque to IR. (No, that doesn't have armor applications—human flesh is opaque to red light, what happens when you shoot it with a red laser?) IR also has relatively short range, especially in atmosphere, so you don't have to worry about knocking satellites out of orbit with it.
  
  They'll definitely be pulsed lasers rather than long play-over-the-target ones. Pulsed lasers perform more like gunshots—down to producing similar wounds—which is much easier to write (and rewrite) around.

Who Are You?

(It probably helps to know that kid in the clip is an evil god who likes to toy with people before murdering them.)

This article, about how atheists almost universally argue against a God who's actually just a god, just a being rather than Being, reminded me of something a little weird and frivolous. (I wouldn't read the comments on that article unless you want to see very impolite atheists make the author's point for him.)

Namely, in Slayers (I believe it comes up in the anime but they don't go into any detail, but definitely in the books), Lina's version of the Giga Slave, based on her translation of a fragment of the Claire Bible, has the line, "混沌の海にたゆたいし 金色なりし闇の王/Konton no umi ni tayutaishi, konjiki narishi yami no Ô/Golden king of darkness drifting upon the Sea of Chaos".

But then, when she actually "reads" the Claire Bible itself—or rather is infused with the memories of the Water Dragon King, which are the Claire Bible in its original form—she modifies the invocation. Her second version says, "混沌の海よ　たゆたいし存在 金色なりし闇の王/Konton no umi, tayutaishi sonzai, konjiki narishi yami no Ô/Golden king of darkness, drifting being, Sea of Chaos"—because the Lord of Nightmares is not something that can drift upon the Sea of Chaos, she is the Sea of Chaos, because she's the Ground of Being of the setting's pantheistic cosmology, and all things, including the gods and demons as well as the Four Worlds they fight over, were brought forth from her.

How sad is it, though, that a book series whose target audience is in middle school, from a country where people go to their temples exactly once a year (plus births and funerals), has more understanding of natural theology than people who dedicate their lives to attempting to refute other people's religion? The significance of L being "Mother of All Things", as Xelloss calls her, is more or less irrelevant to Slayers, it's something I doubt 9/10 of people pick up on even when they're seen the novels as well as the show, but seriously, Kanzaka put more philosophical work into what is pretty much a MacGuffin than Anglophone atheists put into their whole worldview.

More of the Same

More random thoughts.

• It occurs to me, given the two meanings of Latin carus and its descendents (cher and caro), that caritas has the base meaning of "valuation". Carus and its reflexes mean both "beloved" and "expensive", so plainly "valuation" is the domain that caritas pertains to. And consider: what is Christian charity, if not constantly keeping before your mind the infinite value of each person, as the image of God? That is what all the "charitable" precepts, from almsgiving to forgiveness to evangelization, spring from.
  
  (And when it's asked why we value others for the image of God, and not themselves, we reply that we only value ourselves for our imaging of God—or put another way we only value ourselves because of our experience of existence. "Image of God" is the same as saying "self-awareness capable of conceiving of existence", cf. Summa Theologica Pt. I, Q. 93, Art. 6.)
• Recently watched an anime called PSYCHO-PASS. It's future dystopia police drama in a Judge Dredd-meets-Minority Report kinda way, and the whole time I'm thinking "shades of Gil Hamilton" (although organlegging ain't just the stuff of science fiction anymore).
  
  I really like the cultural setting and props—how, for instance, people go to offline meetups in holo-cosplay of their virtual avatars, and everyone's furniture (and, it seems, their clothes) is some basic utilitarian thing dressed up by holograms. It's especially cool in the scene where they turn the hologram on in a dead guy's house, and there's a hologram couch only half overlapping the real one...because the couch was moved. It's probably the coolest science fiction cop series I've ever seen.
  
  If the central conceit seems farfetched to you, don't worry, they do explain it. Also the ending could've been better, but it could've been a lot worse.
• It would be fun, if anyone were actually concerned with justice in the historiography of science (so, in a perfect imaginary dream-world), to rename the three laws of motion to reflect reality, rather than Isaac Newton's lies. Only the third (any body acted upon exerts an equal force on the body acting upon it) is Newton's. The second (the acceleration of a body is directly proportional to, and in the direction of, the net force acting upon it, and inversely proportional to its mass) is Descartes's—hence why Newton very carefully went over his notes and erased all reference to Descartes. And the first (in an inertial reference frame, an object is either at rest or moving at a constant velocity, unless acted upon by an external force), is Jean Buridan's, who died in probably the early 1360s.
  
  Now, Newton cleaned up a lot of the sawdust from Descartes's and Buridan's formulations of those principles, and related them to Kepler's laws of planetary motion, so that's not to say Newton was just a plagiarist. He was only occasionally a plagiarist, and he built and improved upon what he stole. Plus Descartes was probably asking for it for having ripped off his coordinate system from Buridan's student Nicol Oresme. Newton also got his Nemesis (she sees all and hears all, and men do groan beneath her righteous chains) in the form of that ugly dispute with Leibniz over calculus, although neither one could ever really establish himself as having definitively had the idea first, which may not be quite as satisfying as one having plagiarized the other and then getting credit for what he stole, as Newton did to Descartes, but the frustration they both endured is certainly a sufficiently Sisyphean fate.
• It's really weird, but a lot of people seem outright offended by the idea that marriage is primarily a sexual relationship. This came to my attention discussing gay marriage; I pointed out that strictly speaking a gay couple can never have "sexual intercourse" as biologists define the term, and the other guy freaked out and accused me of thinking marriage is just about sex. But...marriage is sex. (Seriously, the Sacrament of Matrimony? Not the wedding, bud.) Everything else about it follows from sex, it is the form "mated pair" takes for a sapient species, and what exactly is "mating"?
  
  I kinda think a lot of people don't think of sex as a biological imperative. Sure, they think they need it (and at an individual level you actually don't), but they don't think of what "biological imperative" actually means, or the reason that that particular thing is one—or indeed, it's the origin of all the others, but nobody seems to ask themselves how or why that's so. If sex was food they wouldn't even see the joke, much less get it, in that gag in Baka Test where Yuuji buys all that food for himself, then tells Akihisa he bought food for him too—diet cola, konjac jelly, and jellied agar. (Total calories: 0.)
• I think I might have to work in a reference, in my SF, to the fact that each individual function of the brain is basically an independent "weak" AI. Every single thing you do is essentially processed by a separate computer system specialized in that one area, with hundreds of times more situational-analysis capability than the very state of the art in our computer science. And that's not even bringing in cognition, which is something else entirely.
  
  The fact that the dumb lizard in charge of your fight-or-flight response is, in actual fact, a program of complexity exceeding the greatest our computer science can achieve, and that by orders of magnitude, is important perspective for the excessively sanguine predictors of mind-uploading. We can just about program situational analysis on par with a rather impaired reptilian hindbrain—can the greatest heights of human cognition be far behind?!
• The real problem with Wikipedia is not that anyone can edit it; it's that they sometimes can't. The article on medieval cuisine is currently a collection of screeds by people that would like to keep calling that era the Dark Ages—with "dark" as a euphemism for a racial slur starting with N. It's because exactly two books, by literature professors not historians, are used as the source; and any time you edit it to look less like Humberto Fontova on Castro (except Fontova is fact-checked), and more like non-polemical academic history, the change gets deleted.
  
  The other example of how Wikipedia doesn't get edited when it needs to, is, if you want the ranks and insignia of the Japanese Self-Defense Forces, yeah, you're gonna have to hunt around a bit, 'cause the Wikipedia article? It's got the English and the kanji, but romanized Japanese? Nope. The formatting for those tables is such a nightmare that that thing is pretty much never gonna get fixed. I was gonna do it myself, I opened the edit window and everything—and then ran away from a giant dense morass of weird code. I don't even think those are normal Wikipedia tables.
  
  Eventually I did find the International Encylopedia of Uniform Insignia, although finding the Air and Maritime JSDF was kinda a hassle (that link's just Ground). Fortunately, Asia doesn't have branch-specific ranks; just change "Riku" (ground) in the army ranks to "Kai" (sea) to get naval ranks and to "Kû" (sky) to get air-force.
• In my previous post I described Buddhism as having its "πάντα ῥεῖ" atomism/nominalism "closely bound up" with metempsychosis. But I understated the case. India does not have atomism "closely bound up" with metempsychosis; its atomism-nominalism is functionally identical with metempsychosis.
  
  This is another thing I realized in that fateful debate with a Hare Krishna that made a Thomist of me. See, he argued that one cannot disbelieve in reincarnation, because at every moment the mind inhabits new bodies. Much like the question "Do you ever step in the same river twice?", in his view—which is the version of atomism found throughout Indian thought—the changing traits of the body, as it is subjected to decay and regeneration, utterly annihilated the very concept of "the same body".
  
  This troubled me greatly; I found myself falling back on dimly-remembered, half-understood Thomistic formulations about essence and accidents, simply to assert that things are themselves moment by moment, no matter what their parts do. This is, by the bye, the essence of Aristotelianism, its shahada; if you're not a mitigated realist you do not follow the Philosopher.
• Finally, another anime I recently saw is (the anime of the game) Sengoku Basara. It rocks. Aside from that being what warfare in a D&D setting probably looks like (a bunch of spear-carriers and a couple lunatics with lightning bolts), it's just so damn cool. "Hot blooded" is a thing I tend to favor in a character, and Sengoku Basara has it in spades; they should've named the series "Testosterone: The Animated Series" (I guess the games should be "Testosterone: The Game"?). It's probably best if you think of the thing as taking place in Valhalla; if you try to compare it to real history you'll hurt yourself.
  
  I especially like the scene where Yukimura claims the burning of a man's soul outlasts the dissolution predicted in Buddhist cosmology—yeap, he claims to be too macho for the Three Marks of Conditioned Existence. And the part where Oda Nobunaga (played with appropriate levels of arrogance by Wakamoto Norio) introduces himself as "The darkness in men's hearts given human shape." And just anything with Date Masamune or the rest of the Date clan, really, like how they mostly don't wear helmets, except for Masamune himself, because it'd mess up their pompadours—or how Masamune's horse has handlebars on its bridle and novelty tailpipes on its stirrups.

Footwear, Navigation, Packaging, Agriculture, Monarchy, Sea Temperatures, Porcine Aviation (2)

It's that time again, the walrus said. Random thoughts.

Did you know 495 is 99×5? It's really obvious with a moment's thought. I recently chose not to put in that moment's thought, and then I felt silly. (Its prime factorization is 3²×11×5.)

• I just discovered that the thing Mugai in "Joujuu Senjin!! Mushibugyo" says several times in both the anime and the manga—太秦は神とも神と聞こえくる 常世の神を 打ち懲ますも/Uzumasa wa kamitomo kami to kikoekuru, tokoyo no kami wo uchikitamasumo/Uzumasa is famed as a god among gods, for he slew an eternal god—is from the Nihon Shoki.
  
  The "eternal god" in question is the Eternal Worm (常世虫), a strange worm-cult that seems to have been put down by Hata Uzumasa-no-kimi Sukune, first head of the Hata clan (Chinese immigrants who brought silk-worms to Japan). The Eternal Worm is the main villain at least of the Mushibugyo anime (the manga isn't translated that far).
  
  Imagine if America had TV shows with huge swaths of the plot based on the Venerable Bede, with characters quoting passages from his writing during fights. Japan...is there a definition of "Crazy Awesome" you haven't made it your goal in life to act out?
• Ironically, in a Cracked article about things being attributed to the wrong countries, the crackbabies—four of them!—said the Maya worshiped Huitzilopochtli. Not only is that true of exactly zero Mayan peoples ("Huitzilopochtli" is Nahuatl, not a Mayan language, for either "Left Hand to the South" or "Hummingbird on the Left Side"), not even all Aztecs (or rather, Mexica) worshiped him. He was specifically the tribal tutelary of the Tenochca, who elevated their patron god to the spot in the pantheon originally belonging to Nanahuatzin.
  
  The Tenochca are the people you think of when we say "Aztec", the ones with the terror-state and the mass-scale human sacrifice. The other major Mexica alliance, the Tlaxcaltecah, had human sacrifice, but on a much smaller scale. Where the Tenochca had a "triple alliance" whose "three" power-centers were actually one capital (Tenochtitlan) and its de facto vassals (Texcoco and Tlacopan), Tlaxcala's four centers (Ocotelolco, Quiahuiztlan, Tepeticpac, and Tizatlan) all actually did share power in their confederacy.
• Apparently some Buddhists, or Westerners who self-identify as Buddhists, object to characterizing Buddhist non-duality as a form of Monism. But...nothing Buddhists say about non-duality is notably different from what Neoplatonists say about the Source (which is, of course, the One, Τὸ Ἕν, the Monad). Indeed, the same things are pretty much said about God by some Christians. Essentially, those Buddhists' objection is like those very simple, sheltered Christians one sometimes gets, who absolutely lose it when they discover parallels between Christianity and pagan thought (Christianity is a heathen religion, from the Buddhist point of view).
  
  The fact of the matter is that everybody inhabits the same cosmos, and there are only a limited number of ways to think about it. Especially when your ideas share a pedigree with the other ideas in question. Buddhism, an Indian school of thought, has a hell of a lot of background in common with Greek thought even if we assume Alexander the Great and Hellenism had no influence on it, and they did. Buddhism is the idea that the Problem of Universals is resolved by positing that the Universals are an illusion born of transitory epiphenomena—some of which are "awareness" of various kinds—attempting to impose order on the the underlying formlessness of πάντα ῥεῖ ("everything flows").
  
  It's different from Neoplatonism in its Heraclitean nominalist-atomism, and in that atomism being closely bound up with metempsychosis (which Indian philosophy tends to assume as a given)...and in pretty much nothing else.
• If you needed yet another reason to loathe and despise Mass Effect, how about that its FTL communicators are called "quantum entanglement communicators"? And the number of idiots, e.g. at Cracked and Kotaku, who think that you actually could get that? They all got it from Mass Effect, demonstrably, since if (like Xenosaga) they'd come by the error honestly, they would probably have said something about the EPR paradox and "spooky action at a distance", but no, only "quantum entanglement". Because they mistook Mass Effect for a science text.
  
  I realize that a major component of my being more forgiving in Xenosaga's case is that I simply like Xenosaga better, but a part of why I like Xenosaga more is that it doesn't posture as other than what it is (which is a JRPG where the collective unconscious is used as a warp drive). Mass Effect is basically Dragon Age in space, with all that that implies, only it gets treated as something more than "space opera bordering on science-fantasy" (which is what Xenosaga is, too).
• My younger sister had an interesting point about Ender's Game, namely that knowing "the point is to seize the objective, not kill all the enemy" does not make you a genius, it makes everyone else a moron. Ender is perpetually triumphing over pathetic strawmen, some of them ethnic stereotypes that were dead when the book was written, let alone when it's set ("Spanish honor", in a book written a decade after Franco died). Because, again, Ender's Game is just a Mary Sue self-insert fic vindication fantasy.
  
  At the time of these remarks, though, I'd just been binging on the Baka Test novels. And it occurred to me, when Yuuji is described as a strategist, that's because he does things like deliberately tank his grades to lure another class into attacking, then ramp his score up just before the fight, and single-handedly wipes out their assault team. You know, actual strategies. I would say that Card was more concerned with other aspects of the story than coming up with real strategies to demonstrate Ender's genius (despite Ender's genius being what the book's about), but what other aspects? The aliens that behave exactly like Hymenoptera and even have DNA? The politics we're told next to nothing of?
  
  The only thing that shows a lick of work being put into it is the elaborate moral rationalizations—like a computer programmer who put the most work into a piece of code that turned out to be a bug.
• I just saw the anime of Katanagatari. It is terrible, but you won't know that till ten episodes in—and it's a 12-episode show—so I will tell you how it's terrible so you don't waste your time. The cursed swords they're after are not cursed, they're all made with technology stolen from the future by Shikizaki Kiki's clan of fortune-tellers. Then nearly everybody dies very stupidly, pretty much just because coming up with satisfying endings is hard, and light novels are the absolute bottom of the barrel in terms of Japanese fiction. (Also because the kind of pseudo-intellectual Jakigan-kei who is the target audience of all too many fantasy light novels is, like his American cousin, still in a stage of "impacted adolescence" where plots that deliberately don't satisfy seem "honest" and "mature".)
  
  I also really, really hate Shichika's sister, she's a Villain Sue. But she gave me a very interesting idea for a scene. First you set up a "I can copy your moves by seeing them once or twice" character like her, by having them kill a bunch of sympathetic Red Shirts. Then you bring in another person (the real antagonist of the plot), probably along the lines of Kuroudo Akabane from GetBackers—or Xelloss. The move-copier starts to basically say, "It's useless, I can copy any technique I see", etc....but falls silent halfway through, as their body falls one way and their head another—and then the real antagonist clicks his sword back into its sheath. "That sounded like a cool ability," he says cheerfully, and then nods to the corpse before stepping over it and continuing on his way.
• It seems to be especially prevalent in anime, but why does anyone treat "Tepes" as a surname for vampires? Leaving to one side the "no connection except an Irish guy naming one after him 400 years later" issue, "Tepes" (the first and last letters should have commas under them) is not a surname. It is an epithet; Vlad's surname was Basarab. Romanian history refers to noblemen by epithets; aside from "Vlad of the Stakes" you have "Mihai the Brave" (Mihai Viteazul) and "Radu the Great" (Radu cel Mare) and "Vlad the Monk" (Vlad Călugărul)...all of whom were surnamed "Basarab", it was a big clan, hence the epithets.
  
  But since it shows up in anime so much, I kinda want to ask the people who do it, what if a Romanian thought Dokuganryû ("One-Eyed Dragon") or Dairokutenmaô ("Devil King of the Sixth Heaven") or Oni no Fukuchou("Ogre Vice-Head") was a heritable surname? (Of course, they might counter that Katakura Kagetsuna's nickname of "Kojûrô" was passed down in the Katakura family, but the point still stands.)
• The question, which I am sure has plagued your sleepless nights, "What Indo-European languages, other than Welsh, have the voiceless (alveolar) lateral fricative?", has an answer. That answer is, "One Tuscan dialect spoken in northern Sardinia—'Sassarese'—and three Scandinavian languages—Faroese, Icelandic, and the 'Trønder dialect' of Norwegian."
  
  Another question that doubtless keeps you from deep healing sleep is "What are two uvular consonants in the last places I expected to find them (you expect to find them among Semitic languages, what with q and all)?" And it, too, has answers (actually it has a bunch, but past a certain point it's not actually "I didn't expect that" but "I expected nothing"). The R in most dialects of French and German is a uvular fricative (sometimes it's a trill), and the "syllable-final" (actually moraic) N in Japanese is actually a uvular nasal.

Thought of the deliberately unsatisfying ending of Katanagatari reminds me of something. As in so many things, Keima says what we're all thinking.

Sierra Foxtrot 3

This is post 494, 2×13×19. More about science fiction.

• Many and various are the ills that can be laid at the door of science fiction writers. One example that's come up recently (thanks to the newly-discovered Higgs boson casting doubt upon "naturalness") is that people conflate "multiverse" with "many worlds". This is science fiction's fault, because every stupid alternate-reality story (there are no intelligent alternate reality stories except one that is mostly not one, "Cascade Point" by Timothy Zahn) is based on many-worlds, but it calls the set of many worlds "the multiverse". But "multiverse theory", though a poor name, actually refers to something totally different.
  
  See, the "multiverse" the Higgs boson may point to simply means that this "universe" is actually only the portion of space-time geometry (however many dimensions it may have) that functions by what we think of as the laws of physics, and that we can exist in. "Many worlds interpretation" is that goofball idea that every probability wave-form creates a universe for each possible result, because you're not comfortable with the Copenhagen interpretation showing that there's something special about minds. Basically, the "multiverse" vs. "many worlds" is like the difference, in Dungeons and Dragons, between the Prime Material, Astral, Ethereal, Outer, and Inner Planes—only the first of which does not intrinsically involve rules modifications—and between two different Prime Material Planes, which generally follow the same rules with only minor modifications.
  
  Hmm. Maybe this isn't entirely the fault of science fiction writers, but rather also the fault of scientists who read science-fiction and didn't notice that the name they borrowed from those stories already applied to a different theory.
• I often carelessly describe myself as writing hard SF, and I probably shouldn't. "Hard SF" tends to mean that the stories are about specific technical things and the way some (technically gifted) person deals with them. The Known Space stories that don't have to be Known Space stories, because they're about dudes orbiting Venus or exploring Pluto, would be examples (so is "Neutron Star", though that's avowedly Known Space thanks to having Puppeteers and General Products hulls).
  
  My science fiction is mostly about politics, and scheming therein, and the way some person whose technical expertise mostly involves killing people deals with it. I do explain my devices by reference to actual theory (rather than handwavium), including the artificial gravity and the FTL, but I also have psionics (though I only call them "psi", and deliberately subvert pseudo-science explanations for them). I think I probably sit halfway between science fiction (strictly defined, which pretty much means "hard") and space opera, without going too far into soft SF.
  
  Though I also have...other things...used as an end-around for, e.g., AI (also as the only rational source for defense from psi), I don't think it makes sense to classify my thing as "science fantasy". I am not writing fantasy stories set in a traditionally SF setting, I am writing science fiction stories set in a broader cosmos than the comfort-zone that philosophical "naturalism" made up, with no rational basis, because its adherents are afraid of ghosts.
  
  I think I write "chewy" science fiction, as I have said previously. Much of it actually has a genuinely hard crunchy shell.
• Where do people get the idea that War of the Worlds is against imperialism (something I was reading while writing this said so)? Again, as I have said before, Wells was an absolutely rabid imperialist (all Fabians were—the least imperialist British socialist was Orwell, and he was still a froth-mouthed no-Popery Jingo). By and large, and until indecently recent times, British Socialists acquired their Pink by mixing the supremacy of the White Race with painting the map Imperial Red. (Now they're just straight-up Marxists, painting the map red in service to a different, even more bloodstained and illegitimate, empire.)
  
  War of the Worlds is simple biological determinism, Social Darwinism, about as anti-imperial as Robert Heinlein's theme that humanity will continue genociding other species until some other species genocides it. That is in fact basically what it is about, the idea that races have destinies and life-spans and "appointed times", and when your time is up, go out like a gentleman. But even then—have you actually read the thing?—you may have noticed the humans still @#$%ing win in the end, by a deus ex machina no less, because Wells' Jingo heart couldn't bring itself to finish it logically.
  
  (The ending is just as illogical and deus ex machina if it's an anti-imperialist allegory, by the bye, but everything Wells said in any other context shows it isn't one.)
• I think I have elsewhere remarked on the fact that Gagarin is only the first man in space, he did not make the first manned spaceflight (because "flight", to count as successful, must involve landing, and Gagarin's craft was designed with the assumption he'd bail out partway down). But did you know Sputnik, also, is only an achievement in a very qualified sense?
  
  It's a metal beach-ball with a very primitive transmitter attached to it, and four big antennas. Its surface is polished enough to let it be seen from Earth, and it broadcasts meaningless beeps on AM radio. That's all it does. Well, that, and galvanize America into the biggest industrial gear-up since World War II, revamping an entire generation's math and science education and leading to America's victory not only in space (the Moon Landing was pretty much the end of the Space Race) but in the Cold War, since the semiconductors and microprocessors that spelled the USSR's doom were direct results of the space program.
  
  And no, the fact the Russians did much more work with space stations than we did does not affect the question of who won the Space Race. The main reason the US didn't do as much there (though Skylab stacks up favorably with the Salyuts and Mir any day of the week) is because we had much better communication satellites (see "semiconductors and microprocessors", above), which did a good 7/8 of the things you want space stations for.
• One of the several articles out there about Orientalism in Firefly notes that it lacks the idea of "Oriental despotism"—because if it did its braindead political morality-play might look racist, instead of just stupid—but it neglects to note that "Oriental despotism" mostly referred, in its actual usages, to the Ottoman Turks. And the Ottomans, on an average day, made the Qing Dynasty look like Jeffersonian democracy.
  
  Of course, then again, the writer actually thought Edward Said's take on Orientalism was valid, when it is in fact just an early example of Post-Colonialism, i.e. the Yankee myth and the Marxist myth stuffed into a blender and made even stupider. Then again a lot of people think Said originated the idea that "Orientalism" meant cultural appropriation, but really that criticism has always been implicit in many uses of the term.
• There's a Gundam series I never knew about, and I don't mean one of the more obscure UC spinoffs. "Gundam AGE" is the latest normal Gundam show with its own timeline. It's pretty decent, although it's got a middle school-age cast for the first part, and an obnoxious talking ball (Haro), the absence of which from Wing was providential, as if it'd had one I almost certainly would've hated that show (I had only recently recovered from the original Battlestar Galactica's thrice-accursed robot dog), and thence probably the whole franchise.
  
  One nitpick was the whole thing at the beginning where they're evacuating the space colony. They say they can't get to the escape craft because each only holds 100 people, and since it's an O'Neill Island 3 cylinder it can be assumed to have a population of several million, but...that's a glaring design flaw. If your craft has lifeboats, it should always carry enough for everyone, did the Titanic sinking teach you nothing? Besides, on a space-station colony, a designer would have to be stupid not to build a shelter that can double as an escape pod into every building—big ones, in bigger buildings.
• If you were collecting examples of how Doctor Who not only is not science fiction, but continuing to air it demonstrates that the British public are the sworn enemies of science, how about "TARDIS"? TARDIS is an acronym. It stands for "Time And Relative Dimension In Space". Now, aside from how that can in no way be the name of a time-machine, or any other machine, since the name does not tell you what it does...time is also a relative dimension. Or multiple relative dimensions, in some models.
  
  Even if TARDIS were originally "TARDIS machine", i.e. a time-machine but also a relative-dimension-in-space-machine, it doesn't change dimensions of anything, except possibly its own interior. The TARDIS doesn't change size or make anything else bigger, it moves. That's not change of dimensions, it's change of coordinates! (Oh, I guess Doctor Who also demonstrates the British public are the sworn enemies of geometry. That's nice to know.)
• What do I have to give you or threaten you with, O my camaradoes, to get you to knock off writing "head vs. heart" stories? Star Trek and Doctor Who have, between them, beaten that dead horse to stiff peaks. Stop it. Leaving to one side you're just rehashing the head-injury ward version of certain Protestant movements, everybody who argues against emotions always argues emotionally. "The most sentimental thing in the world is to hide your feelings; it is making too much of them. Stoicism is the direct product of sentimentalism," as Chesterton said.
  
  The fact of the matter is that emotions are cognitive macros, pre-set parameters for your nervous system, to quickly put your body in the optimum configuration for reacting to certain common situations. They are, like all macros, broad strokes, and may need to be corrected manually to avoid errors. That's it. That's their sole significance; they are nothing more nor less than that. The factory pre-sets are not considered the definitive feature of any mechanism I am aware of.
  
  Also? This.
  

De Romanicorum Theoriarum VI

Thoughts on (or at least easily relatable to) speculative fiction.

• I am very curious to know why there are basically no aliens in science fiction who are half as alien to the modern Euro-American mindset as the average African or East Asian. If there were obvious conscious worldbuilding involved—the aliens had particular movements that paralleled the history of Western thought—I wouldn't mind it. But cultures in science fiction, whether they're a eugenicist military dictatorship, effete artisans of Byzantine complexity, an all-encompassing bureacracy, a rapacious merchant culture, a Proud Warrior Race—really any of the many space-versions of Nazis, Communists, or various caricatures of the Japanese—always have, except where it would directly interfere with their "hat", the mores of 21st century First World Anglophones from the Northern Hemisphere (okay, in Farscape they're from the Southern Hemisphere).
  
  I mean, hell, the closest even Farscape ever got to "don't take things from tombs, you'll get cursed" is a goofball, mummy's curse B-plot in one episode. But that's not how the belief works. You won't be cursed because curses were laid on graves to protect them. You'll be cursed because the dead don't like being stolen from, and their wrath ruins your luck. Again: Western assumption, that someone has to do something special before the supernatural happens. Plainly the Catholic priesthood is living rent-free inside your atheo-agnostico-Protty heads. Every other person on the planet thinks that that kind of stuff just happens, getting cursed is as natural as being pregnant because you had sex (yes, yes, the Tiwi—you're only proving my point, because the Tiwi not knowing where babies come from is freaking weird).
• Logically, "demihuman" should refer to things like half-elves and half-orcs. The "demi" is the "demi" from "demitasse", it means "half". And while "demihuman" was coined in obvious imitation of "demigod", "demigod" refers to the half-divine nature of the being in question. It's also not any kind of actual mythological term, it was coined in the 16th century by Renaissance writers. The Greeks called those people "heroes"; they didn't need the divine-nature issue spelled out for them, because almost all the heroes of myth had cultic status.
  
  The "almost" implication may, perhaps, be viewed as insulting. A lot of stupid manga translators render the Japanese equivalent of "demihuman", ajin, as "subhuman" (the "A", 亜, means "second, next, after"...also "Asia")—it's probably related to that "subspecies" thing—and "demigods" are less than full gods. So how about "perihumans"? "Peri-" just means "close to, around", no direction specified; the Japanese equivalent would be "kinjin" or "konjin", written 近人 (unfortunately that is also the Chinese for "neighbor", but given the Japanese for "daughter" means "mother" in Chinese, and "OK" means "man of honor", I don't think we're setting any dangerous precedents here).
• I realized, Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones is just an unusual lag-time on mid-90s Darker and Edgier. The first book came out the year before Spawn got a live action movie and the same year that Rob Liefeld was hired to "re-envision" a number of iconic Marvel heroes, the year after the first Sin City trade came out, and during Mark Millar's run on Swamp Thing.
  
  So plainly, the pay-cable miniseries was not the way to go—though admittedly pay-cable soft-porn was a big 90s thing. But to truly capture the spirit of Martin's opus (it's really more a Bill the Cat), it should be a graphic novel from Image Comics (or Liefeld's other label, Awesome Comics, no really), written by Millar and drawn by Liefeld. Todd MacFarlane could make the action figures.
• Saw the new Judge Dredd movie. It is much more like the comics, but that is not a point in its favor. Except everything and everyone in the comics was 80s-90s Comic Book Punk, a design movement also seen in Lobo, Dark Knight Returns, and Tank Girl. The movie? Only the Judges are not simply wearing our clothes, using our appliances, and driving our cars. And given even the Judges just wear the helmet, gun, and badge from the comics over off-the-rack biker safety-gear, it seems like the production designer (I checked, they actually did have one, Mark Digby) should've had a lot of free time to design future stuff. They also pretty much just took Phoenix or LA and Photoshopped a few slightly bigger buildings here and there. Uh...this, you should really have just blindly copied the comics on. Because Mega-City One is a claustrophobic urban hell where the ground is more or less invisible from where most of the action happens—your version is less claustrophobic than modern New York. The Stallone version actually did it pretty good. Or Coruscant in Star Wars.
  
  Also, the only reason to make a movie that graphically violent is if you think it's going to impress the eighth graders, maybe get them to let you sit with them at the big-kid table. And if you must have extremely detailed shots of people being blown apart, it might behoove you to study the differences between humans and nematodes. I refer to the fact that people have bones—even if you reduce someone to the consistency of peanut butter, it's going to be crunchy-style. (Also, Slo-Mo was basically Red Eye (or Bloody Eye), from the very first episode of Cowboy Bebop, and, given its particular neurologial effects, it should not be primarily a recreational drug but a performance-enhancing one, and thus could've made for a much better final confrontation.)
• I wonder if I should actually have a paragraph explaining that the translators in my books combine rules-based with statistical corpus-analysis? We can't do that yet—checking our rules against a corpus or our statistical against rules—because of hardware constraints, but 24th century technology is just a bit more capable.
  
  Google Translate uses a statistical algorithm rather than rules-based, and while rules-based breaks down with long sentences, Google Translate generally can't even do a single, one-clause Chinese or Japanese sentence without spitting out gibberish. Half the time when it does Chinese, it would've done better with a literal word-for-word translation—many English-based creoles (Jamaican Patois, for instance) work almost exactly like literally-translated Chinese, and most English speakers have only occasional difficulties understanding those when they're not spelled phonetically.
  
  When your translator's algorithm yields a worse result than literal word-for-word, your algorithm is broken. Sorry.
• I was thinking about the fact that ideas are not bound by the limits of material commodities. Analyzed in those terms, the "marketplace of ideas" (to use a phrase that should be banned) is roughly a post-scarcity economy. And that made me realize why post-scarcity economies don't and can't actually exist, and why so many of the people who think they could also fall for the Glazier's Fallacy. The issue is opportunity costs. Even ideas have those, in a way: if you think one thing is true, you can no longer think that of its contradictions. If you fix broken windows, that's time you can't use making new windows.
  
  Of course, most of the idiots who prattle about post-scarcity economies also think immortality is achievable through technology. The less stupid of them think it will be by mind-uploading, and I've talked about the problems with that. The more stupid think it can be achieved by medicine, only for some reason they always imagine it as a one-time deal, rather than perpetually needing to re-apply (probably quite invasive) anti-aging treatments. Think vampires, not Olympian gods—"You'll never grow old, Michael, and you'll never die. But you must feed ." Just like how, though cars and planes have essentially ended food-scarcity (except in places with Communist or nonexistent governments), once-worthless petroleum is now the foundation of entire national economies. Every elimination of scarcity brings a new scarcity, connected to the means by which the old one was eliminated.
• I have elsewhere talked about "alpha males", which properly means "married men with children", but I haven't mentioned "beta males". You know what's funny about it? In 9/10 of your interactions, the most dominant person is the beta, and cannot aspire to anything higher. A beta, in a wolf-pack (where the idea comes from) is the eldest or otherwise most dominant child (beta males are eldest sons, beta females eldest daughters). It's usually an adult from a previous litter of the alpha pair. It tends to its younger siblings, and gets to eat before they do.
  
  Now, as I've said, "society" is just a peace-treaty between families not to kill each other over territory. This peace is maintained by treating unrelated conspecifics, who are not being sought as mates, as kin. And since in the vast majority of such interactions, nobody stands to you as a father or a child, the only relationship is siblings (again, "spirit of brotherhood" is entirely accurate). The beta is the most dominant sibling, so properly, a person who dominates socially without becoming a father figure should not be called an alpha (fe)male, but a beta.
  
  Interestingly, the Chinese word for "Mister", that gives us "sensei" in Japanese, literally means "eldest brother".
• On the subject of "put some damn work into your xenobiology", have you seen the more recent reconstructions of pterosaurs? The main length of their forelegs (which were only wings when they took off, which they apparently did by jumping) was their metacarpals! Seriously, they have a fairly short upper arm, then a short forearm, and then the bones of their hands make up at least the same length as the previous two joints combined.
  
  This, of course, looks freakish, like their forelimbs are backwards dog-legs with the toes on backwards. The load-bearing part of their foreleg was just the first three fingers (the fourth being the one that supports the wing), and they had a weird little bone that might be a modified hand- or wrist-bone or might be something pterosaurs evolved all on their own, probably with help from shoggoths. The weird thing is, while their wrists were so freaky long? Their hind feet were plantigrade. Lovecraftian giraffe-crocodile in the front, black bear in the back, like some twisted walking mullet.
  
  The reason this is important, of course, is we never thought an animal would use its metacarpals the way dogs use their metatarsals. Think of possible modifications to the basic "four limbs, head full of sensory-organs" that's very likely for alien life, at least when designing alien animals if not for designing aliens themselves.
• But hey, what about, say, trilateral or pentilateral or n-lateral symmetries, for aliens? I confess to being doubtful. A very few animals, almost none of them with anything you'd really call a brain, and some plants, have that kind of rotational symmetry.
  
  Pretty much nothing but cnidarians, things we used to think were the same as cnidarians, and echinoderms has rotational symmetry, and the echinoderms have bilateral as larvae. I think it might have to do with gravity; "up" and "down" are the same for every animal on the planet, and most echinoderms, cnidarians, and ctenophores, like plants, largely orient toward up and down motion (think how jellyfish or sea cucumbers move). Other animals move forward and back, instead, but still inside a gravity well, so four of their dimensions are determined for them, hence bilateral symmetry. Maybe it's a rule that organisms are symmetrical only across an axis that isn't determined for them by motion (gravity is motion)?
  
  And I think if a creature is not going to be a flying mushroom (seriously, think about what jellyfish actually do—and sea anemones aren't even moving mushrooms), it's unlikely to orient toward vertical motion (the orientation of vegetation), and thus unlikely to develop radial symmetry. And if it does have a lifestyle where being shaped like a mushroom is helpful, why's it develop brains?

Finally Fresh Enough

I've looked and looked and looked and could never find video of Herbert West's most quintessential speech, the one from Bride of Re-Animator that I quoted before. Now I did.
I also found out it is possible to include an end-time in an embedded Youtube link.

This, incidentally, is why Jeffrey Combs is the best mad scientist ever.