hexarchate_rpg | Move 18 (Chapter 1.18)

(Thanks to

zuhrovet for keeping the Station Moongray Timeline updated for everyone's ease of reference.)

Year 361, Month Three, Day Seventeen (Monday), ~0515

Iawa is with Istradez in Medical. The chart indicates that Istradez (CORRECTION: "Imsayed") has mild concussion that is apparently aggravating a pre-existing head injury. Istradez moans, then his eyes open. He blinks blearily before focusing on Iawa. "This isn't the ship," he says intelligently, sounding hazy.

Next thing Iawa knows, Istradez seems to come fully alert and attempts to sit up too quickly. "My brother--!" He seems apt to scramble out of bed and after Mikodez unless prevented.

Mikodez, just outside Medical, is bearing both Fluffy the Vraselian pseudo-dragon and Crowned With Eyes (CWE for short) the newly hatched mothling. He is being confronted by Alaric, who brought four caffeinated drinks, one additionally dosed with a sleeping drug, and who is hinting strongly to Mikodez that CWE needs to be united with the adult moth on the Bumblebee. Sulen has, by chance, grabbed the sleeping-drug-enabled drink, and was not prepared for Alaric also showing up to deal with Mikodez--a command-and-control snafu, apparently; Sulen has not yet drunk the drugged beverage, although it's not clear that they have understood Alaric's attempts to warn them from doing so.

The last response in that thread, an exchange between Mikodez and Alaric:

"I know, right? I had no idea that the term was so literal either until it started chatting," Alaric said, happy both that Mikodez was being distracted and that someone else was actually enthusiastic about this. "I'm not sure exactly what it looks like because it's in its own compartment and we're communicating over a primitive text interface, but it does seem friendly enough. Mostly it wants to bring Remi's baby moths with it when we leave, and fortunately Remi wants to bring them too. So, one the one hand it's yet another bit of terrible behavior by the authorities, but on the other an exciting scientific opportunity."

Just on cue, CWE the mothling hums happily and launches itself out of the pack, followed by an angrily whistling Fluffy, who seems to think the mothling is escaping property.

Virmad has received permission from Ashari to check on Gerae. The camera has revealed that Gerae is agitated and pacing the room. He does not appear to have any weapons, although given his talent for legerdemain, this is not an absolute certainty. If Virmad enters, Gerae will prostrate himself in a frankly embarrassing fashion and beg for an update on Fluffy's status, and oh by the way is Virmad's leader Ashari really going to slit Gerae's throat and leave him for the fishes?

Sasha overhears Gerae's plaints as she makes it to environmental. Her first inspection reveals that the filters are, indeed, poorly seated. Judging from the cruft around them, they were probably messed up even before Alaric and Remi started banging around the Bumblebee making modifications. While she's busy with that, Yehan [running as NPC] messages her and says that she's done with her meeting with Ashari and is now overseeing comms.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

There is a (startled?) pause, then the moth starts humming back, a more or less in tune version of the song she's singing, albeit a couple octaves down.

Oh, this is fun! Much more fun than whiny Rahal. Sasha switches her monitoring to transcript mode, and teaches the moth a song that she learned when she was very small:

"Hey, hey, hey, the wheel is on the axle,
la, la, la, the axle spins around.
Hey, heh, hey, the babies in the axle-cart,
La, la, la, they make a squeaking sound."

If the moth catches on fast enough, they can sing it as a round.

Either all moths are musically inclined or this one is; it catches on pretty quickly and soon they're singing a round.

A few minutes later, Sasha intercepts a message from Ashari:

Alaric, can you get that creature to pipe down? Some of us need our beauty sleep.

Saint and prophet, Ashari, some people are working. Sasha cleaned three filters while she was teaching the moth nursery rhymes. Do they like breathing grime?

Sasha tries humming softly, and hopes the moth takes the hint.

The moth lowers the volume of its humming after about a measure and a half.

At least the filter-cleaning is going well?

Sasha finishes this round of the round, then says, "Grid, please send Yehan a message: 'Are you aware of Alaric's contact with our moth? Have you had a chance to analyze their diagrams?'"

There's a pause of a few minutes before Yehan gets back to her.

Alaric has been very busy, hasn't he? I've been looking at the diagrams. Either the moths' language has very similar syntax to the high language, or the moth is a quick study. I know which one I'd bet on. I would like to know more about their own native language, personally, but as long as it's happy talking to Alaric, I'm happy to analyze what he extracts from it.

But does this moth know the voidmoth language? Sasha wonders. Or were they raised by Nirai?

Her hands are covered with clinging dust and lint, so she dictates a reply:

I just taught the moth how to hum a steppes song,
actually. Do you have any idea how to talk to them about volume of sound, or time? I would promise them we can sing more, once we leave the station, but I don't know how to draw that.

Yehan's response:

Alaric began his contact with it through numerical patterns, didn't he? I wonder how much math it knows, and whether it would respond to mathematical representations. Can you get it to understand an X-Y coordinate system and then associate the x-axis with time, the y-axis with amplitude?

[GM: OMG I AM SO NOT PREPARED TO HANDLE XENOLINGUISTICS/ETHNOMATHEMATICS WHAT WAS I THINKING]

"Grid, tell Yehan thanks," Sasha says.

There must be a way to specify spacetime coordinates, somewhere in the navigational interface, but Sasha's not going to be able to reverse-engineer it in the next ten minutes. She clicks the last filter into place, wipes her hands on a rag and then on the hem of her shirt for good measure, and goes back to engineering.

Sound amplitude's measured on a logarithmic scale. Fuck, has Alaric even done mathematical notation? Better start with ordered pairs. She starts sending the moth the sequence (10, 1), (100, 2), (1000, 3), etc.

[Let's not attempt realistic xenomathematics; we'd still be stuck on "does the moth have a concept of number?"]

The grid acknowledges.

There's a pause in the humming, which then resumes. The moth replies with (10,000, 4), (100,000, 5), etc. It goes on in this vein for a while, then pauses again and sends a bunch of coordinates that, if plotted in dot-to-dot fashion, do a rather nice job of approximating the voidmoth sigil.

[Oh man, yeah, I don't think I think enough like an alien for that. And my one book on ethnomathematics--which field was apparently pioneered by Marcia Ascher, the godmother of the brother of a college friend of mine, it turned out--perished in the flood.]

Oh, good, the moth can graph. But they don't know the notation.
Sasha sends the symbols 1 = log₁₀, 2 = log₁₀₀, and so on for ten or so entries, then the graph of log₁₀ x with just the scale labeled, then a second copy of the graph with the axes labeled as x and y [or the high language equivalent] and the function labeled as y = log₁₀ x.

[I taught a class Mayan numerals once-- it's easier to work out the base 20 part from scratch than the zero symbol-- and I had a colleague who used to teach her students how to make an Incan quipu. But I think this sort of graphing is pretty solidly, well, Cartesian.]

[Actual response forthcoming but I skipped straight ahead to Cartesian coordinates/graphing in the interests of saving time/brainspace.

Now I wonder what Chinese and Japanese math had as the equivalent of graphing, if at all, but unfortunately I haven't read enough mathematics history to know that; and my one book on Japanese temple mathematics perished in the flood, although from browsing through it my impression was that it was a lot more straight-up geometry than analytical geometry.

There's one point in Revenant Gun I think where it's mentioned or implied in passing that matrices in the hexarchate use column operations rather than row operations as an outgrowth of the vertical orientation of the writing system. I don't know how realistic that is from a worldbuilding standpoint, but it doesn't seem any weirder than anything else in the story...]

[I have a vague recollection that there's something in mathematics from India comparable to Nicole Oresme's bar graphs; it wouldn't surprise me if that sort of proto-calculus showed up other places, too.

But as far as I can tell, the first person to graph the logarithm function was Leibniz (historically, you first see tables of values and second the relation to the area under a hyperbola). There's a simplified version of his figure here, and a modern historical discussion in this book. And you can see that Leibniz' figure is very influenced by Euclidean geometry constructions.

Column operations make sense to me from a programming perspective! There are some neat algorithms for exact integer mathematics that must be very important in the hexarchate (this is the one I know about)]

Move 18 (Chapter 1.18)

interspecies ethnomusicology ahoy!

Re: interspecies ethnomusicology ahoy!

Re: interspecies ethnomusicology ahoy!

Re: interspecies ethnomusicology ahoy!

Re: interspecies ethnomusicology ahoy!

we do have a resident linguist

Re: we do have a resident linguist

Re: we do have a resident linguist

Re: we do have a resident linguist

logarithms are very practical

Re: logarithms are very practical

Re: logarithms are very practical

Re: logarithms are very practical [ethnomathematics/history of math chitchat]

Re: logarithms are very practical [ethnomathematics/history of math chitchat]