Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT

WCDT Strips 3461-3465 (17-21 April 2017)

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Case:

--- Quote from: pwhodges on 19 Apr 2017, 08:15 ---A sharp high-energy pulse will be broad-spectrum in any case (a point I overlooked in my earlier post).  The comment on focussing stands though, and focussing a broad-spectrum pulse is much harder than focussing a single frequency.

--- End quote ---

True - which is why I wouldn't make it handheld at all. Being sufficiently far away from the weapon when it goes off would be the way to protect yourself - smth. like an EMP-grenade. EM far-field goes with inverse square of the distance, but near-field effects are ... interesting.

Near-field means smth. like 0.16*wavelength - with a microwave pulse, wavelength can be anything from milimeters to roughly a meter.


Colleague of mine had an idea for EMP shielding: You'd want something with good electric conductivity and high thermal capacity/low thermal conductivity - what you can't change is the radiation energy Bubbles body reveives, which has to go somewhere. And electrical resistance means part of that energy is converted into heat.

Copper has good electric conductivity, but no high thermal capacity. Best would be smth. like a mesh of tubes filled with an electrolytic fluid.

TheEvilDog:

--- Quote from: JoeCovenant on 19 Apr 2017, 08:36 ---Hang on though....

How can Bubbles remember the incident... but not remember what her colleagues looked like?
Her memories are files (as has been discussed) and said files were apparently wiped?

So how can Bubbles have a selective memory of what happened without seeing the people involved in that self-same incident?
Or, indeed, memories of them prior to said incident? We can't pretend to know how AIs memories work, but we've been given a brief run down throughout the last few months... and no explanation other than them being data files has been given.

So... How?

--- End quote ---

How is it that people can remember the sound of a loved one's voice and yet unable to remember details of their face years after they have passed?
How is that we might remember with crystal clarity an embarrassing incident from decades ago, but forget the name of the person we were introduced to last month?
How is it that people can forget some memories after trauma but other obscure ones remain intact?

Memory is a funny and complex thing and though we think them to be the same as files, they aren't. A file can be deleted and later recovered near intact. A memory can be lost and though it's not always possible for it to come back, we are still left with the imprint of that memory, an echo as it were.

Bubbles might not be able to remember the faces of her squad or their time together, but there is still the imprint and echoes of that time.

Thrudd:
I think there may be an assumption on the EMP thing.
Everyone assumes it is a broad band burst when it could  just as easily be a single fixed frequency burst.
More likely a high energy data burst that overrides the normal communication channel [external or internal] and injects code that triggers the chassis deactivation system.
Such would be built into any new hardware the brass does not trust not to be commandeered and turned against them.

The more I think about it and knowing just how dysfunctional the upper echelons are in real life, the more I believe that that functionality was always there in her chassis and that she was never made aware of that feature. I am speculating that there were AI bigots who saw the opportunity to nip the AI soldier thing in the bud and didn't mind eliminating a few AI lovers in the process. This can also explain why killbot is sitting alone gathering dust in a hanger somewhere.

An asside (click to show/hide)As to the pintsize series of chassis, just chalk that one up to normal military procurement screw-ups where the root cause is the military "helping" in the design.
A good historical example is the Apple III computer built to their exacting specifications, which had a built in design flaw. Ceramic chips that didn't need mechanical cooling on a epoxy main board - different coefficients of expansion >> chips popping out of boards. Still, thanks to that snafu, the public got their first integrated desktop computer with its own dedicated hard disk drive. They were expensive but Apple sold them at cost just to get them out of their warehouse.

sitnspin:
Memories are not stored locally, they are diffused throughout the brain and are strongly linked to emotions. It is possible to forget the factual content of an experience while retaining the emotional impact it had. Encountering similar events/circumstances can then trigger that emotional reaction without the person knowing the precise source. Memories are weird. My own are either a jumbled, discordant mess or absent all together. A huge chunk of my past is a complete blank due to trauma. Other swaths of memory are completely disjointed, broken free of temporal context.

Is it cold in here?:
Bubbles talked about the nature of AI memory once. It's something more complicated and harder to edit than files on a disk.

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