Virginia has an advantage over most Mads, in that she actually understands how Mad science works. Of course, it’s also a curse, because it tends to violate the laws of science, and that really bugs her.
I envision a percolation similar to the way penguins endure winter – the robot in back migrates to the front so every robot takes a turn in the rear rank but gets wound whenever necessary.
Or… the one in front steps aside after being wound, and allows everyone else to pass him. That way he’s not expending any energy before taking his place at the back.
I was visualizing them forming a circle and winding each other, and somehow ending up ahead. It still violates the laws of thermodynamics, but at least something makes sense.
“Why doesn’t anyone listen when I yell science?”
That should be a banner at the next climate/extinction protest, if not a T-shirt worn by scientists whenever they present their findings to congress.
The universe is closed, and warped. If you go forward enough, you end up where you started, but upside down. The robot chain becomes fully self-winding if you use enough robots to span the universe (it helps if you make them really small so they don’t get into each other’s way.)
You don’t even have to go into non-Euclidean spatial systems; just put all the wind-up robots in a circle to wind each other.
Conservation of energy’s another matter (no pun intended). They can’t self-energize forever, as energy’s being expended in other ways than circle-f self-winding. Especially if they’re gonna fight.
However, Mad Science (and life as we know it) can run on Entropy, especially if you don’t mind things heading in the direction of random chaos. (This use of Entropy is probably what gives Unity such strength and motivation.) it’s easy to make things fall apart.
Everything is ultimately powered by the Rule of Funny.Laughter is not only the best medicine, but also a clean fuel, a dessert topping, and a floor wax!
Now there’s fine example of the undependable nature of Mads. She can make a vending machine into a device that quick-clones human bodies, but she doesn’t get _digestion_.
(Which is why you don’t ask a Mad for help with your digestive troubles, or you might get a stomach made of gears with external tanks of oil of vitriol attached to your spine)
And this is where my Inner Ginny starts screaming about how YOU CAN’T DO THAT, because oil of vitriol (active ingredient H2SO4) is NOT an acceptable substitute for stomach acid (active ingredient HCl)… Never mind the gears and tanks and glass tubing (in corkscrews, of course); that’s just engineering and it can be as mad as you want, but you have to get the chemistry right!!
Power or energy may be understood as being available any time there is a difference. For example, when a battery is charged electrical power is available because there is a difference between the two poles of the battery. When it is completely discharged, no voltage is measurable between the two poles, so no energy/power is available. The same general idea may be applied to understanding energy available through kinetic motion. Water flows because there is a difference in altitude. That may be a large difference in a short space (such as a waterfall) or a smaller distance over a greater space (such as a meandering stream stream). That difference in altitude enables the water to flow – which then may turn a water wheel or electric generator, etc.
The power of paradox may also be a source of energy. It can’t happen but it does and the difference between the two provides the power…. simple.
What’s to object? They’re intelligent creatures. (Well, by the loose standards that operate in the Skin-Horse universe, they are.) They can see the benefit of winding each other up, probably.
(By the way, does anybody besides me see a tiny, tiny smiley-face primitive emoji down in the scrolled-down extreme lower left corner of this webpage?)
BEWARE, FOR HE OF THE ABSENT PARTITION HAS LOOKED UPON THE FORBIDDEN SIGIL, AS FORETOLD BY THE CHROMIUM MARGINALIA. MAKE READY YOUR VISUALIZATIONS, FOR THE TIME OF THE LAST RECTIFICATION IS UPON US.
You could still be hallucinating, but along with the (: at the bottom, you could be hallucinating comments to your post – kind of the cyberware equivalent of hearing voices.
Sometimes I’ve wondered if I’m someone else’s hallucination, then I realize few people have that boring an imagination.
As much fun as is the rule of funny stuff, because geek, I immediately started trying to imagine the technology that would make an army of wind-up robots at least not obviously break the first law… Without having to wind them all yourself, natch…
I figure you’d want something a bit like the Borg recharging platform, except, obviously, with lots of fun steampunk pipes and a huge flywheel. Possibly water powered. Hook up to the flywheel wrong, and hilarity ensues, where hilarity involves smaller wind-up automatons being flung off at high speeds into the upper atmosphere…
A field-transportable one you could put behind the lines of a robot war, would have to be powered by a Tokamak or something. Because mad science.
… for wind-ups that couldn’t make it back to the platform under their own power on time, you probably want something like those ‘start carts’ they used to start the SR-71’s engines, only all-terrain, for field restarts. Those should probably use gas turbines or something, tho’, again, because hell, we’re already doing a Tokamak.
It would seem like in some climates you could use the robot’s shell as a solar oven to self wind a metal coil spring through thermal expansion. Not super efficient or fast, but the powers ‘free’.
Perhaps you could use solar panels to power an electric motor that would wind the springs. You could store the energy in batteries until the windings reach a certain level of “unwinding”, which would then flip a switch and turn on the motor to wind it, until it reached sufficient tension to flip the switch to turn the motor off again. Yes, it still might violate the laws of thermodynamics, but it’s Mad science, so who (other than Virginia) really cares?
Well, I certainly don’t care if it violates the laws of thermodynamics. But then, I’ve always tended toward Madness myself. It’s much more fun than sanity.
Dr Lee, she’s giving you the answer. The horses wind them, of course!
A true Mad has as little concern for the Laws of Thermodynamics as the Roadrunner has for the Law of Gravity…
Virginia has an advantage over most Mads, in that she actually understands how Mad science works. Of course, it’s also a curse, because it tends to violate the laws of science, and that really bugs her.
Because this is the Narbonverse, Virginia, where science is effectively head-canon.
And a head-cannon is the product of Mad science.
But she just wants things to make sense!
Then she should discover and publish more accurate natural laws.
My new head cannon
https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/new.png
I envision a percolation similar to the way penguins endure winter – the robot in back migrates to the front so every robot takes a turn in the rear rank but gets wound whenever necessary.
Or… the one in front steps aside after being wound, and allows everyone else to pass him. That way he’s not expending any energy before taking his place at the back.
Your Kung Fu is better than mine 🙂
I was visualizing them forming a circle and winding each other, and somehow ending up ahead. It still violates the laws of thermodynamics, but at least something makes sense.
While reading your comment, the Escher staircase in Ascending and Descending came to mind. I love that place.
It’s a great place if you aren’t prone to falling down stairs.
Or falling up stairs, for that matter.
“Why doesn’t anyone listen when I yell science?”
That should be a banner at the next climate/extinction protest, if not a T-shirt worn by scientists whenever they present their findings to congress.
It got worn out over the XX/XY chromosome thing…
I could also envision that line coming from Agatha Heterodyne.
The universe is closed, and warped. If you go forward enough, you end up where you started, but upside down. The robot chain becomes fully self-winding if you use enough robots to span the universe (it helps if you make them really small so they don’t get into each other’s way.)
The Long and Möbius Road.
I think I still have that album . . .
We’ve all done that. Thanks for reminding us….
I think you just explained dark matter!
You don’t even have to go into non-Euclidean spatial systems; just put all the wind-up robots in a circle to wind each other.
Conservation of energy’s another matter (no pun intended). They can’t self-energize forever, as energy’s being expended in other ways than circle-f self-winding. Especially if they’re gonna fight.
However, Mad Science (and life as we know it) can run on Entropy, especially if you don’t mind things heading in the direction of random chaos. (This use of Entropy is probably what gives Unity such strength and motivation.) it’s easy to make things fall apart.
Everything is ultimately powered by the Rule of Funny.Laughter is not only the best medicine, but also a clean fuel, a dessert topping, and a floor wax!
It also makes an excellent lubricant.
So Tigerlily constructed not just a clockwork army, but a perpetual motion clockwork army. That’s what I call truly mad science!
Perpetual motion machines are useless in combat. They just keep going faster and faster!
Well, if you use them as Kamikazes…
Perpetual motion machines don’t necessarily go faster and faster, but they do keep going, which is very useful in combat.
“Tell me that makes sense”
Now there’s fine example of the undependable nature of Mads. She can make a vending machine into a device that quick-clones human bodies, but she doesn’t get _digestion_.
(Which is why you don’t ask a Mad for help with your digestive troubles, or you might get a stomach made of gears with external tanks of oil of vitriol attached to your spine)
And this is where my Inner Ginny starts screaming about how YOU CAN’T DO THAT, because oil of vitriol (active ingredient H2SO4) is NOT an acceptable substitute for stomach acid (active ingredient HCl)… Never mind the gears and tanks and glass tubing (in corkscrews, of course); that’s just engineering and it can be as mad as you want, but you have to get the chemistry right!!
Dangit, I think way too much like Ms. Lee…
Look, Dr. Lee, at the quantum level, energy seems to spring from nothing.
And then go back to nothing. You can’t make use of it for macroscopic periods of time.
Unless you actually use the springs.
So THAT’S how she does it.
Except for evaporating Black Holes. If it can do that then it’s probably just a bit of mad engineering to use it for other things.
Power or energy may be understood as being available any time there is a difference. For example, when a battery is charged electrical power is available because there is a difference between the two poles of the battery. When it is completely discharged, no voltage is measurable between the two poles, so no energy/power is available. The same general idea may be applied to understanding energy available through kinetic motion. Water flows because there is a difference in altitude. That may be a large difference in a short space (such as a waterfall) or a smaller distance over a greater space (such as a meandering stream stream). That difference in altitude enables the water to flow – which then may turn a water wheel or electric generator, etc.
The power of paradox may also be a source of energy. It can’t happen but it does and the difference between the two provides the power…. simple.
So magic is powered by the distance between personal belief and consensus reality… Hm.
That’s literally what the circles are for.
The outside is different from the inside.
What’s to object? They’re intelligent creatures. (Well, by the loose standards that operate in the Skin-Horse universe, they are.) They can see the benefit of winding each other up, probably.
(By the way, does anybody besides me see a tiny, tiny smiley-face primitive emoji down in the scrolled-down extreme lower left corner of this webpage?)
Now that you mention it, yes, I do.
Good. I thought I was hallucinating.
BEWARE, FOR HE OF THE ABSENT PARTITION HAS LOOKED UPON THE FORBIDDEN SIGIL, AS FORETOLD BY THE CHROMIUM MARGINALIA. MAKE READY YOUR VISUALIZATIONS, FOR THE TIME OF THE LAST RECTIFICATION IS UPON US.
You could still be hallucinating, but along with the (: at the bottom, you could be hallucinating comments to your post – kind of the cyberware equivalent of hearing voices.
Sometimes I’ve wondered if I’m someone else’s hallucination, then I realize few people have that boring an imagination.
Looking at the page source, it appears that it’s an image used by a wordpress plugin to track page hits.
Wow, such a whimsical easter egg turned out to be somewhat sinister.
It’s okay! It’s just being used for advertising purposes!
You know, all those ad banners you’re constantly seeing for robot parts and fashion gowns!
As much fun as is the rule of funny stuff, because geek, I immediately started trying to imagine the technology that would make an army of wind-up robots at least not obviously break the first law… Without having to wind them all yourself, natch…
I figure you’d want something a bit like the Borg recharging platform, except, obviously, with lots of fun steampunk pipes and a huge flywheel. Possibly water powered. Hook up to the flywheel wrong, and hilarity ensues, where hilarity involves smaller wind-up automatons being flung off at high speeds into the upper atmosphere…
A field-transportable one you could put behind the lines of a robot war, would have to be powered by a Tokamak or something. Because mad science.
… for wind-ups that couldn’t make it back to the platform under their own power on time, you probably want something like those ‘start carts’ they used to start the SR-71’s engines, only all-terrain, for field restarts. Those should probably use gas turbines or something, tho’, again, because hell, we’re already doing a Tokamak.
All they really need to do is harness the energy of the Earth’s rotation.
Or the differential potential of fast vs slow molecules ala Maxwell’s demon.
It would seem like in some climates you could use the robot’s shell as a solar oven to self wind a metal coil spring through thermal expansion. Not super efficient or fast, but the powers ‘free’.
Perhaps you could use solar panels to power an electric motor that would wind the springs. You could store the energy in batteries until the windings reach a certain level of “unwinding”, which would then flip a switch and turn on the motor to wind it, until it reached sufficient tension to flip the switch to turn the motor off again. Yes, it still might violate the laws of thermodynamics, but it’s Mad science, so who (other than Virginia) really cares?
You mean, besides us?
Well, I certainly don’t care if it violates the laws of thermodynamics. But then, I’ve always tended toward Madness myself. It’s much more fun than sanity.
Proof positive that Dr. Lee isn’t actually Mad, despite her talent for adapting mad science.