The Starship Cat

It's the ultimate form of the sore loser. If he can't win, he won't let anyone else, and his method is stop gameplay altogether.

As weapons have grown more and more powerful, with the potential of enormous destruction, there's been concern about an irrational actor deciding that if there were no more routes to a win for him, he'd make sure that nobody would get anything out of the conflict. The end of World War II in Europe is probably the closest to an actual historical example of such an act, and even then it was incomplete for the simple reason that many German generals and officers at lower ranks refused to fight to the death and destroy everything in the process as the madman in the bunker demanded.

With nuclear weapons and the vast arsenals that developed during the Cold War, there were concerns that a fanatic or crazy leader could decide to just nuke everything rather than let the other side win. This has been a concern with the possibility of certain nations obtaining or developing nuclear weapons, if not as large as that of the possibility of those nations using nuclear weapons to hold the world hostage.

Now there are concerns that Putin may be planning a similar gambit in near-Earth space. Russia now has several satellites in orbit that appear to be anti-satellite weapons, due to their orbital characteristics and behavior. Obviously they could be used to put out our "eyes in the sky," the Keyhole satellites that are used to monitor other nations' military capabilities and activities. If they were destroyed, tensions would go up because of increased uncertainty about what other countries might be doing.

But there's another possibility, far darker -- could Putin be creating a situation in which he could cause a collision cascade, also known as Kessler syndrome? In this scenario, the weapons would be used to destroy satellites in such as way that their debris would cause further collisions and create more debris until entire groups of critical orbits would become unusable for years or even decades. If the situation became bad enough, access to space could be denied altogether until enough of the material could undergo orbital decay and burn up in Earth's atmosphere.

There's a new vignette challenge at Sarah Hoyt's blog. My effort is from the Chongu Empire 'verse, and delves into culinary differences by species.

marycatelli has a new vignette challenge at her Dreamwidth blog. I ended up with a two-fer: the first was a time travel bit that was inspired by our dropping off a vehicle to have an issue with its shifter repaired (it sometimes doesn't detect that it's been put in park, and tells me to shift to park, so I have to click the shifter switch to clear it), and the second was another Chongu Empire 'verse bit, about constructing a park.

There's also a new writing challenge over at the Victory Girls blog. My effort is also in the Chongu Empire, in a playground, as a bully returns to one of his former victims.

Jury duty is one of those parts of civil society that we know are important, but dread to actually be called upon to perform. The right to be tried by a jury of our peers is enshrined in the Constitution -- but when the jury summons actually arrives in the mailbox, the first reaction of most people is probably not going to be oh cool, I get to play a part in the judicial branch of our government, but rather oh crud, how can I get this off my plate as quickly and painlessly as possible?.

And to be completely honest, when I saw the yellow card from the county in today's USPS Informed Delivery mailing, my response was not exactly joyful. Not just because I'd been looking forward to these two months off the convention circuit as a time to get caught up on writing projects, including some promised ones that are woefully late, but also because the assigned date is two days before an important family medical appointment.

If it were a routine appointment, another family member could take the patient (who's on medical restriction from driving). However, this appointment is a meeting to discuss the results of a treatment that will have been delivered a few weeks earlier, and what what further course of treatment will be needed. As a result, I really need to be present as a patient advocate -- which means getting put on a long trial could keep me from being able to be there.

And I think this sort of thing is why jury duty is so disliked in our society. It is an interruption imposed upon us, without any recognition of the obligations in our lives. For people who are retired, or have few obligations outside their day jobs, it might be a welcome day or two away from the office (although it might mean having to surrender your jury duty pay to your employer in order to get paid time off without having to use a vacation day). But for self-employed people and family caregivers (categories that often overlap, for obvious reasons), jury duty can be a complete upending of one's life, causing financial disruption (if you're self-employed, a non-working day is a non-earning day, but your bills don't shrink accordingly) and possibly negatively affect the health of family members dependent upon that person's care, especially if it disrupts important medical treatments or meetings with medical professionals.

And worst of all, when you're up for jury duty, you have no idea what kind of trial you might be put on. Maybe it's a short one, a day or two at most, a minimal disruption in your life. But it could be a long one, weeks or even months taken out of your life -- and if it's a high-profile one, you might well end up sequestered, unable to go home to your family throughout that period.

I honestly don't know how the process of calling potential jurors could be made less painful, and thus less resentment-inducing. But just recognizing how much of a disruption it is for many people, particularly self-employed persons and unpaid family caregivers, might help pave the way to possible solutions.

Not political parties, but social gatherings.

A major survey of American habits has shown that people are throwing and going to fewer parties every year. This is especially true of younger people, who used to be the mainstay of party life. Fewer children's birthday parties, fewer collegiate gatherings, and fewer young workers getting together after work.

There seem to be several factors involved. People are working longer hours and often juggling multiple jobs, leaving less time to get together with friends. Families are smaller, resulting in closer parental supervision and more structured social activities rather than kids hanging out together. And of course there's the digital revolution leading to more electronic socializing and less in-person gathering.

It's suggested that the last one is resulting in closer bonds with family and the development of what had once been at best a very tenuous connection (one's followers on various platforms), but an erosion of that middle distance of people whose relationship is primarily defined by physical proximity: neighbors, classmates, colleagues, etc.

The vicuna is a small wild camelid that lives high in the Andes. Its wool is very soft and fine, and as a result the vicuna has been extensively hunted, to the point of having been near extinction.

However, a few villages still remember and practice an ancient tradition for capturing and shearing live vicuna, then releasing the animals to grow another coat of wool, which can be harvested in an endless cycle.

Money from these annual shearings help pay for guards to protect the vicuna from poaching, and to support these very poor villagers, many of whom don't even speak Spanish, instead retaining the ancient Quechua language, once the language of the Inca Empire.

In the past two decades, as the genome of the domestic cat was sequenced, we've learned a lot about the genes behind the many different colors and markings of our feline friends -- including discovering that some things we thought to be true were actually wrong (in particular, the actual mechanism behind why calico and tortoiseshell cats are almost invariably female).

But it turns out that cats still have some surprises for us. In Finland, cats have appeared with a startling new coat color, called salmiak, which means "salted licorice" in Finnish. It's a salt-and-pepper pattern caused by hairs being darkly pigmented at the root and progressively more lightly toward the tip, which is white.

Geneticists assumed this was a new way of expressing the "dilution" gene (which creates paler versions of familiar cat colors) -- but when they sequenced the genome of two of these cats, they didn't find it. Instead, they discovered a significant deletion -- a sequence of genes missing altogether from these cats' genome, right beside a gene known to regulate the appearance of white hairs in a cat's coat.

This trait is recessive, appearing only if both of a kitten's parents have the deletion. Understanding how it works allows us to understand a little more about how the wide variation of coat colors and patterns in the domestic cat have developed over the millennia in which cats have lived alongside humans, and may help cat fanciers preserve this unique color pattern in future generations.

This week's Odd Prompts writing challenge at More Odds than Ends is from AC Young: The landing spaces are too small for my pegasus.

It suggested a light, whimsical story. With the extra word prompt of ROBOT and the image prompt of a bunch of space-suited figures looking up at UFO's, I decided to go for a setting reminiscent of The Jetsons.

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Pegasus Landing


It was just another ordinary day for Robo-Rita TS257-F. At 6AM she undocked from her charging station, collected her data package with her prescribed route and updates on parking regulations throughout Intellidyne City, and headed out.

The first three hours of her shift went smoothly. Most private vehicles had enough onboard intelligence to know when they were being directed to put down in a place where they could not legally park, and would move accordingly. Thus the bulk of her work was dealing with the multitude of dockless rental bikes, scooters and hoverboards that got left at inappropriate places when their users were finished with them.

Already she'd tagged a bike, three scooters and a dozen hoverboards that had been left in front of emergency exits or in fire lanes. Although renters were getting better about leaving their rentals in appropriate places, some still acted like it was the old days when they could abandon their rides wherever with impunity.

There had been a huge fight a few years ago between the City management and the companies that operated those rentals. The City wanted rental information so they could go after the renters who'd violated parking regulations, and the companies howled about privacy – so the City levied the fines on the companies and told them to sort things out with their customers.

Her pathway took her up to the rooftop flitter landing spaces. Flitter licensing was stringent enough that most pilots wouldn't dare risk a citation. But you always had a few who couldn't be bothered, usually the scions of the wealthy and powerful, for whom a fine was effectively a fee for doing as they pleased.

As she emerged, she was astonished to see a most highly improbable event. If her visual processing module wasn't glitching on her, that was a a winged horse, with someone riding on it.

The flying horse backwinged and put down in one of the flitter spaces, its flight feathers brushing against the flitters parked on either side. It snorted in disgust as it folded its wings, and its rider dismounted.

Although at a distance he looked human enough, Robo-Rita could now see how his ears rose to delicate points, how his figure was a bit more gracile than a human's. An elven prince straight out of one or another fantasy novel, somehow come to life?

“I must protest.” His voice was ringing, musical, at once both beautiful and inhuman, straining the ability of a robot's microphone to fully apprehend it. “The landing spaces are too small for my pegasus to put down properly.”

“They are designed for a standard personal flitter.” The speaker behind Robo-Rita's mouth grille carefully modulated her voice to sound deferential without crossing the line to servility. “If you wish to lodge a complaint, you may do so at the Office of Public Parking, Level 22, Seventh Diagonal.”

The elven prince blinked, took a closer look at Robo-Rita. “What is this place? How far is it from Eorallyon?”

“This is Intellidyne City. I have no location reference for Eorallyon.”

The elven prince's expression went from haughty annoyance to alarm. His stride was not quite a run, but he wasted no time getting back to his steed and into the saddle. “Aloft, Coriyon. We had best be away from this place.”

Somehow the flying horse managed the initial downstrokes to take off without striking the flitters on either side of him. As swiftly as he'd come, he was gone, leaving only a pile of brownish lumps as proof that he had been real, and not a glitch of her optical and auditory processing systems.

Nothing to do but put in a call for a litter removal robot to clean up the mess. It was unlikely their elven prince would be back, so a ticket for littering would be unfeasable.

Right now, she had other work to do.

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As always, if you'd like to participate in Odd Prompts, just send your prompt in to oddprompts@gmail.com to be assigned a prompt of your own. Or if you're not up to the commitment of trading prompts, you can always check out the spare prompts and see if any of them tickle your creativity.

In the meantime, keep writing.

Sarah Hoyt has a new vignette challenge on her blog. My effort is from the Chongu Empire 'verse, as a nutritionist discusses the problems of feeding a multi-species society.

marycatelli has a new vignette challenge at her Dreamwidth blog. My effort is from Okeanos, as a diplomat considers cultural differences.

There's also a new writing challenge at the Victory Girls blog. My effort is from the Grissom Timeline, and I think it's another installment in the story of Brenda Redmond remembering the passing of her great-grandmother. However, I'm not sure that the chronology fits with other bits. So it could be someone else from that 'verse, maybe one of her siblings.

To be completely honest, it was a mixed bag. Slow sales and tech woes, but opportunities to see a bunch of people I never see otherwise. Some fascinating panels, and some real struggles in the vendor hall when things got difficult.

I'm tired, but it's an honest sort of tired, of having put a lot of work into things, both in the retail business and in my panel participation. There were some really thoughtful questions raised in those panels, including the question of whether the enormous wealth of new materials in several major media franchises is resulted in overwhelmed audiences and saturated markets.

As I was hanging out at the dead dog party, after struggling to get all our merchandise loaded out into our van even as storm clouds were on the horizon, I was feeling strangely bummed that the convention was over. It was so very much work -- yet I really wished it could've lasted just a little longer, that I didn't have to go back home to mundania so soon.