(TFT) "Are you ready for the summer?"

["maou_tsaou1@netzero.net" <maou_tsaou1@netzero.net>]

THE WAY OF THE KNIFE; (and what the 'Little People' showed me)

No, no, no, it isn't a story of bravery and conflict; it's a story of stupidity and haplessness.
Here's what went down; afterwards I'll try and share what I've learned (so far) from the "experience".

So I've been harping on the "define" the statistics and other data points of TFT.
It was my thought that by THIS point Jay would have access to some data-gathering devices that would help me with my arguments.
Yet again I learn about "plans".
Just making one is half the battle IMO because at least you have an idea of what won't happen.
< grins >
So Jay took matters into his own hands.
Literally.

I was using sheet-rock scrap and a replica katana along with a bathroom scale to attempt to better establish force for damage.
The old 'Where is my torch-wrench' solution.
I broke a mechanical and a digital until I got this new digital model, rated between 33 and 397lbs.
Now it's time for some ballistics-gel and a few bones.

Long story short, Jay tried a thrust to my left side through three thicknesses of sheet-rock (having already pierced two) and my hand slipped.
The result was my pinkie and 3rd finger cut down to the bone (about a quarter of an inch deep, and half an inch in length.)

I was divinely inspired with exactly the right words for such an anti-auspicious occasion.

After uttering such I stomped into the kitchen, grabbed a beer (I was NOT drinking during this experiment), and contemplated my options.
Having enough booze for "pain killing" purposes, I chose to forego medical assistance.
Being a "grown little man" I decided to look on my wussying out of using "super glue" for stitches as a "macho" move on my part.
Being a guitar player I was able to keep both fingers closed for a week.
That's a "mind trick" and not nearly as easy as it sounds.
It SO helped what that I'm right-handed.
No bandage, but no "treatment" either; no 'Neosporin' or hydrogen peroxide stuff.
I washed it a few times.
Saturday was two weeks and I tried some weight/flex then.
I can still play guitar.
It took a week for typing.
It's a tad stiff and the bone (/) feels sore as of the 15th.

The result of all this has been some interesting information on healing.
Oh yeah, "Sports Science" and my bathroom-scale agree, about a hundred pounds of force to get through a quarter inch of flesh/cartilage with a blade/teeth (line damage.)
I've got 600ish pounds from "Mythbusters" to pop a femur.
A katana (real) ought to cleave a peasant from shoulder to opposite hip; a distance of around two feet.
Uhhh, 100lbs through a quarter inch of flesh and half-again through bone?
A half-assed look at the reference stuff I've got says around 1/6th of the distance is bone.
(What about cartilage or sniew?)
I'm gonna call such a "peasant cleave" on the order of 250 points of damage.
I'll call what happened to my fingers 2.5 points of damage (1/4 inch deep by 3/4 inch in length).
Bleeding was negligible (except for slippery weapon grip), and the nerves are a "tad" numb, but that's all.
I'll give a fuller report on this in it's own post, cc's of blood, healing rates and etc.

So I got a camera for my birthday last year, a Cannon PowerShot A580.
Well I actually read the manual.
I can adjust the shutter from 1/2000 of a second (~150km per second @ light in vacume) to 15:1 (3 turns.)
I can also set the thing on a tripod and take 'continuous' pictures by the expedient of simply holding down the 'button'.
I've got film of the whole thing.

HELLO family people.
I "KNOW" that y'all got cameras.
You can PROVE ME WRONG!
Allow me to put it this way; I'm pretty sure that I saw Paul Barrack (sp?) on the "Modern Marvels" episode on knifes.
I should film HIM, not ME doing kata's or what have you.
I'm going to Portland next week and will get some 'fencing' "pic's".
Jay isn't "hero" enough.
My current guess is 1/20th of a second reaction times is in the comic book hero realm.
Just saw a Sports Science that clocked a pro boxer at 5 punches a second with a hand speed on the order of 30fps.



Research into north Atlantic currents suggests to me that the buoy probably came north through the Norwegian or Barents, across the Arctic, and down into the Bering where the Cali-current bobs her straight to me.
Pack ice trends west southwest at about 10 to 20 miles a day, sometimes much faster.



I was tickled to learn that my materials choices for testing large scale planetary impacts are the same as the NASA boys are using, right down to the plaster in the sand and the glass beads.
Of course I can't get their velocities (no vacume and I'm firing with black powder) but I got this potters wheel last week.
Fun with orbits...

OH YEAH!

The "Little People!"

So it goes like this.
They take me up and "out", in the manner of Mr. A. Square of Flatland via the efforts of Mr. A. Cube of Thickland.
It was starting to resolve, at one time looking like a firework, then again having the galaxies act as pixels starting to form an image.
For some reason I looked at my watch.
Only my third 4d visual ever and I look at my watch.
OUCH!
Screw my fingers, THAT broke my brain.
Free our nano-bot slaves!
That sorta thing.

Hummm, can I explain it yet?

Uhh, not without a ton of math.
Suffice to say that I can now put a Universe in my "basement" just like Mr. Rucker screwed my head up with.
Then it's just a matter of reading the thing virtually.
An "ultra" high-speed, high-definition camera and a good computer ought to do.
How fast can I take a tunneling scope pic?


Finally, I've been on something of a roll writing web-pages.
Here are the formats I think, although I'd appreciate comments or more efficient suggestions but else if...

Rules will be written in the format of 'Treatise on the Fugue' by Gedalge.
This is the same format Hofstadler uses in 'Godel, Esher, Bach an eternal golden braid'.
Advantages for rules are that the format was designed for study and reference, as well as being written from simplest to most complex, including examples.
As the actual game rules could theoretically be altered via some "I punch through my universe to get to yours" type spell, GM's allowing players to sit on the Council (play Nomic with the rules), etc. this allows for ease of editing.



"Monsters/critters/etc." are being listed in the basic format of 'Ducks, Geese and Swans of North America' the Bellrose edit.

COMMON NAME
Scientific Name
Other common names

Vital Statistics (Joe Average of total pop)
ST
DX
IQ
MA
Size - height, length, width (average cell d ~1/1000th inch)
Weight

Identification

Population Status - age ratios, sex ratios, mortality

Distribution (across time as well as geography)

Breeding

Feeding

Habits (migration, hibernation, etc.)

Legend and Lore (Samson and the Lion, "out of the strong came fourth sweetness" referring to the legend of bees being created from the corpses of large animals, except the "bees" are actually hoverflys.)

Reference information ('The Ghost in the Darkness' on the Lion page, or Tatiana clearing the pit on the Tiger page)


Places as so.
I'm working on a serial number system based on square degrees that I treat as cellular automa for the purposes of large or long scale actions.
The thing can technically be reduced to BattleMap sized hexes (or smaller), but as a planetary hexgrid is only useful for issues like continental drift, desertification, ice ages, and similar deep time changes that can occur between ages of time I expect that small of cells to be of more computer use. 
The largest hex comes in at 16 square degrees.
41,252.96ish square degrees on a sphere makes for about 2578ish SD-hexes to cover a sphere.
About 76,397ish square miles in area per square degree on Earth, or roughly 69.2 miles across 1 square degree.
Also, 69.2ish miles across an Earth SD-hex is about 17.3 STR-hexes (each square = 1 square mile{@ sea level a six foot tall human can see all the way to the edge of this hex and can travel it's circumference in a normal days travel or 5 STR-hexes per day average straight line, etc.}).

With a page for each hex it's 860ish pages for land, 1720 as water, with each of the 16 hex squares acting as a kind of pixel group for higher level scales imaging.
Each of these may be dissected down to BM-hexes or smaller (nano-tech wars, disease, Aziamov stories, etc.)

I'd like to keep the "serial" numbers small enough to be readable but large enough to carry automa information about the hex itself.
More on this later, it's mainly for computer browsing anyway, sorta a crude attempt at 3d pages.



Enough for the moment, I am having to make a gallon of invert a day I have so many humming birds at this point, I've never seen anything like it.
Well over a dozen per feeder, possibly as many as 50 birds feeding primarily outta my yard, I've casual pics of a half dozen species that I've id-ed and a bakers dozen I'm unsure about.
I'm running outta spiders...
I'll get a nest count outta the camellia bush (~10' by 10' by 10') that seems to be the main nest site in my yard, but I've watched the pattern include birds from at least another bush across the street and can hear the traffic through the backyard so I don't expect most of them to actually reside at my place, but how do you check a 120ft Douglas fir?
Also, if there are truly as many species hanging together as I think I ought to be able to encourage my own genera at least.
At something like 300 plus Trochilidae's I could conceivably pull pics of a tenth of the whole family just by bothering to feed them and my favorite alpha-boy is ruby throated what flashes gold in the sun.
Not LSU Tiger yellow-gold, honest to goodness metal gold.

So if there's SOOOO much time in a moment the problem is I don't have enough moments the way I figure it.
Limits.
Maybe the Kosmo-boy-s  can't fathom inflation cause they don't allow that that was how big the "firework" was before the PM lit the fuse.
 
Oh yeah, there's the stuff on a martial wizards rig and the experience/astrology/Jay's Day Thing (Dao Te Ching) to get to.

SOOO much time, so little...


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