Grrl Power #1376 – I spy with my little satellite…
Max isn’t actually all that offended by “guy scoping out slightly drunk chicks.” She knows how the world works. Nothing wrong with a little willful social self-lubrication. Now, if he’d said “blackout drunk chicks,” that’d be a different story. She’s also not a huge fan of referring to women as “chicks,” either, but at least it’s better than “broads,” “slags,” or many other terms in a series of rapidly diminishing respect.
Yes, Cora and crew have “raised money for the orphanage,” like a Three Stooges plot, and while it’s more of a Robin Hood style transaction, there is usually a lot of hitting. You know, the stealth mission that devolves into a huge firefight just because that one guard was actually doing his job competently.
I was so tempted to draw stars above the Earth there, but I know that’s not how it works. The human eye has too limited of a dynamic dynamic range for that. You know, come to think of it, it’s almost a little weird that more of our senses don’t have a dynamic range slider, like how the iris adjusts the amount of light coming through. Like it’s kind of odd that our ears don’t automatically close up when there are loud sounds. I guess that means we’d have “earlids,” which is… really disturbing now that I think about it. Still, eyes have lids and irises, so couldn’t ears have earlids and also a thing that makes us attune to high pitched sounds at the expense of low hertz sounds and vice versa? I’m sure our non-eye senses do have some brain-based slider to mitigate some of the more extremes? Maybe? But… I don’t know, maybe it doesn’t. Like, if you get into a slap fight, the 5th slap might not hurt as much as the 1st, assuming they all hit in different places and aren’t stacking. But then, if someone is tickling your cheek with a feather, then you get slapped in the face, that first slap will probably register much more strongly than if you know the slap is coming. But that’s due to adrenaline, not sensory dynamic range.
Anyway, so yeah, there’s an alien spy satellite floating somewhere above Archon HQ.
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Actually, the tympanic membrane does tense in response to loud sounds, it’s just limited in its ability to protect the hearing.
It’s in response to expected loud sounds, with most of that happening by control of muscles in the middle ear. Unexpected loud sounds don’t give the brain enough time to prevent hearing damage.
It’s not like this is the only place evolution has let us down.
Adrenaline – nature’s dynamic range dial.
May not work as desired.
It takes something like half a second for sound impulses to get through the outer, middle and inner ear, stimulate the cochlea, and then traverse the auditory nerve to the sensory cortex of the brain. There are high-speed nerve fibres that warn of over-loud sounds, reducing the response of the entire chain. That’s why, when you hear a sudden loud sound (like nearby gunfire) everything goes quite to you a fraction of a second *before* you hear the triggering sound.
We als have dynamic senses of smell as we can acclimate to scent over time.
To be really precise, we actually have several mechanisms to prevent or at least diminish the effects of loud sounds.
At first wie have the musculus stapedius, a small muscle attached to the anvil-bone in the middle ear, which has one of the fastest response times in the human body. If it is triggered by _sudden_ loud sounds, it will contract and cause the stapes to “miss” the ovl window, which results in much less transferred energy to the inner ear.
Secondly within the inner ear we have outer hair cells, or more precise, stereocilia on the tips of our outer hair cells, that can contract and “stiffen” in case of high pressure and thus further reduce transferred energy.
These features only work for short timespans, and as for the musculus stapedius, are really only there for sudden loud noises. We have something that is called “temporary threshold shift” in case of prolonged exposure to loud sounds, but that is not really a protective mechanism.
In summary, we DO have automated responses to protect our hearing. They are just not designed for extremly loud sounds (above 100dB) or prolonged exposure (beyond a couple of seconds).
Actually! We do have dynamic range for hearing! It’s just a lot more binary than our irises are! We have the tensor tympanic and stapedius muscle (I think, I don’t trust Google ai but it’s 5 in the morning and I need to be in bed), which pull back the various bits and bobs in the ear that let us pick up loud noises in order to protect the delicate nerves that die when you get hit with too loud a noise!
That, and you can also get the same effect by drawing a vacuum using your eustachian tube. (That’s basically how you know it’s time to equalize while diving: Things get ‘quiet’.)
Max is planning to work with Cora to bake the interstellar gambling scene but now she remembers she’s a law woman? ;P
I mean, I don’t believe Max is intending to cheat. She’s intending to show up with really strong powers – much like everyone else at the scene.
“Bake” the gambling scene?
(I could just presume it’s a typo of “break,” but it feels sooooo close to being an actual thing that’s just outside my familiarity….)
Apparently some people can’t clench the tensor tympanic muscles at will, so I don’t know if they can do it reflexively either. I know I do it consciously when there’s a loud noise, and figured out how in middle school when I had a locker outside the band room. My parents and sister didn’t believe me when I described what I was doing, so the ability might not be hereditary.
Or it at least it requires enough genes to line up like winning at slots that it clearly is not a dominant trait.
there’s nothing wrong with betting on yourself to win. Max won’t be throwing any fights.
“Anyway, so yeah, there’s an alien spy satellite floating somewhere above Archon HQ.”
I am thinking ‘not for long’. Maxima in particular and the military in general are going to be unappreciative of anything like that.
Not eliminating an enemy spy [satellite] can be a valuable tactic if you are able to feed the spy false information.
It can also be useful to deal with the matter in a way & time of your choosing rather than “the very moment that it is discovered”.
Which is NOT to mean that it’s going to be left there for months.
Yeah, eliminating the spy just means that they’ll find another way to spy on you, so you have to go to all the trouble of finding and counteracting it- rather than do something productive, like spy on the opposition yourself.
Well, they need to figure out who the “opposition” is first, and until they figure out which one of numerous extra terrestrial entities it might be, best start with counteracting and controlling what information they get
“Outside of your jurisdiction” are bold words from someone who could be vaporized by said woman with virtually zero legal repercussion.
Legal but not illegal one I’ve a doubt about maxima vs an heavy battlemech sixed weapon …
She is tougher than an elemental and had the speed of an X-15 (4,520 miles per hour (7,274 km/h) )
For me she could soak a PPC 7 tons particule canon.
But not a rapid fire 15 ton gauss canon with melon-shaped and 30cm in diameter heavy metal projectiles at relativistic speed.
It’s like a teen point non ablative armour and soft fleshy bit inside.
She is tough tougher in fact than a 1 ton battle armor who ca put astartes terminators to shame.
She is a menace on battlemech evironement quasi impervious to fire if she remains mobile – speed being a awesome armour – but if she is it by anything more deadly than an iner sphere PPC she will be toast ..
She could destroy many mech with her attacks , she is basicaly an energetic variant of an AC-20 for her attacks.
I like to think that Maxima is aware of the fact that in the ages old race between offense and defense, the later can only ever come ahead briefly. With modern weaponry briefly is measured in nanoseconds
For individual fights offense pretty much has to be able to overcome defense, or why are you using that weapon instead of a bigger one?
That doesn’t translate into victory though. The armored knight lasted for centuries, because you had to get lucky with that weapon. And a century after the first trench warfare, there’s still trench warfare going on, e.g. in Ukraine.
I’ve no doubt there are weapons in the universe that can kill Max. Whether someone can bring those to bear in a fight is another matter.
based on the firepower she demonstrated against the fel carrier – you are talking about the wrong scale of weaponry
she is operating on the naval scale, not on the battlemech scale
though it is unclear wether her durability is on that scale as well… based on her power being able to shift between different priorities, it is entirely possible that she could easily survive spaceship weapons, if she sacrifices everything else
but its also very possible that this runs into the old problem of attack scaling up faster than defense can
In battletech the Crusher Super Heavy Cannon was a 150 mm weapon firing a ten-round cassette in a ten-second period, while the ChemJet Gun was a 185 mm weapon firing a four-round cassette in the same period.
They will be awesome naval guns..
Yeah, but she’s not a short-tempered psychopath, which some commenters are all too eager to ignore
Yep, between figuring someone on Earth can make a Aetherian causeway, Archon displaying crazy power, and while stated claims of Nth tech aren’t that uncommon that several demons probably rumored after the comic shop incident, it would be a surprise if someone wasn’t trying to spy on Archon.
The mythical “Black Knight” object has been found! Huzzah!
Ok, so, what’re they looking for?
Equally important, what are they looking at?
(and can they vaporise it without repercussions?)
In the authors comments above, “Anyway, so yeah, there’s an alien spy satellite floating somewhere above Archon HQ.”
Based on that information, my guess is that’s an alien spy satellite floating somewhere above Archon HQ.
Upboat! WHERE IS THE UPBOAT BUTTON?!?!?!?! I NEED MY UPBOAT BUTTON!!!
THIS COMMENT MUST GO BINTED!!
You know – a woman that really gets me.
Very interested to see which way this plays out. If it’s destroyed, the parties involved in placing it are likely to continue spying using alternative methods, if they aren’t already. Could be an interesting angle for Arc-Dark to do some le Carre hijinks, but that might take the story on a political bent that might not be too fun.
Couple of questions that have been bugging me for awhile, & I realize that there probably won’t be a ‘good page’ come up to ask them any time soon, so I’mma just ask:
1 – What happened to Concretia? Last we heard her body had been rescued by Cora & Sydney, several pages after Sydney had extended a suggested offer to possibly be included in Archon’s ranks. I’m genuinely curious because I rather like Concretia’s design.
2 – When are we going to see Cooter/Vyrmil again? Been a long time since that story arc was left hanging.
3 – Back on Page #811, Dabbler had a tail briefly. We never did get an explanation for that (at least not a direct explanation, though the revelation that she’s part Doppelganger could explain the ‘how’, not the ‘why’).
Cooter/Vymil was killed very gruesome and visible by Sconia.
Concretia was deemed to have acted under duress, so she is probably watering her plants somewhere until she is forced into.supering for the third time.(she should get personal guards)
Dabs is a demon and has the Succubus ability to.take any form as long it’s pleasing to one observing eye.
The.list of reasons is probably all of the above.
“Dabs!” That’s so obvious! Why didn’t I realize she had such a cute nickname waiting in the wings?!
Cooter/Wyrmil was still talking to themselves while lying on the ground in pieces, and the next page appears to suggest that they slithered down a storm drain. I very much doubt that they’re dead.
The author explained the tail in a very obscure comment. I’m a little surprised it hasn’t been answered in the comic yet, even though Sydney asked about it.
“Like it’s kind of odd that our ears don’t automatically close up when there are loud sounds.”
Our eyes need that, because the light changes from “blinding” to “nothing” on a 24 hour cycle.
And we don’t have the option to run away from it, because all our food and predators are all outside of caves.
The only loud things in nature are screaming animals (run away), thunder (hide from rain and wind), waterfalls (only be there if you need to).
Everything that causes inconvenient touch, smell or taste sensation, usually wants us to GTFO. So it is easily avoided as well.
I’ve occasionally thought it would be useful if humans had the ability to move their earlobes like cats can to help focus in on sounds or pull in the little flap of earlobe in front of the ear hole so that it would act like an earlid to shut out annoying noises.
We’re visual diurnal types. Hearing is a secondary sense. There’s not as much selection involved, since having bad hearing isn’t as much of a problem as bad eyesight.
Yes, it would be useful. If we ever get to the point of being able to improve on our bodies that may be one of the more popular items requested. Though it does have the downside of making your ears much more prominent – this may be seen as making you better looking or not.
Cora and crew have “raised money for the orphanage,…”
More like they are privateers and opportunists but they don’t punch down on those struggling.
They profit from the rich(those with excess resources); strangely enough pirate lords and syndicate bosses tend be that.
Very young babies have the ability to fold their ears by reflex, effectively closing it.
And now, a completely random observation. Is that a tiny hula girl dashboard ornament on Sylv’s console?
Yes, and it looks like a tiny Cora!
He’s an Alien Toyboy maxima, he’s not versed in human behaviour…
great english tho
I think not being able to hear would be a distinct evolutionary disadvantage. It would mean that you couldn’t hear threats coming towards you.
We do have the ability to “tune out” voices we’re not interested in to “tune in” voices we’re trying to listen to. It’s like you have a hundred band graphic equalizer in your head, selectively raising and lowering the sensitivity on SPECIFIC frequency ranges to catch the voice of the person you’re talking to, in a crowded room.
If a smell persists too long, you get, as the air freshener commercial puts it, “nose blind” to that particular odor, so you can pick up any OTHER odors it might be masking. I suspect this might happen in the brain, too, but it’s also possible it works by saturating the chemosensors in the nose. I’d have to ask.
‘We do have the ability to “tune out” voices we’re not interested in to “tune in” voices we’re trying to listen to.’
Unless you have ADHD and this is not possible. It is almost impossible for me to have a conversation in an area with lots of background noise (restaurant, crowd) or to watch a TV show/movie with people talking around me.
For most of my life I thought I had bad hearing, saying “What?? Say that again?” more times than I can count. Then it turns out I have excellent hearing but my brain can’t focus on specific sound sources.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_processing_disorder
“A subtype is known as King-Kopetzky syndrome or auditory disability with normal hearing (ADN), characterised by difficulty in hearing speech in the presence of background noise. This is essentially a failure or impairment of the cocktail party effect (selective hearing) found in most people.”
I’m much the same — can often hear sounds other people don’t seem to notice, but struggle to understand words if a tap’s running nearby.
Close, but I’m actually ok in the case of “white” background noise like a running tap, or fan, or wind, or driving in a car. Mine is specifically the lack of ability to concentrate on one conversation when I can hear multiple.
I would make the world’s worst spy because I cannot eavesdrop in public. Crowded areas are just a cacophony of sound to me.
In recent years, the notch in human hearing at 15,750 Hz has been going away as CRT based raster scanned television sets have been being phased out. Magnetostriction of the yoke and flyback core caused low level audible noise at that frequency.
Very young babies can fold their ears by reflex, same with noses
Hmmm. I first thought Deus not alien.
So fun fact there are laws about things in orbit like they can’t be armed or shot at. I suspect there are also laws saying you need to let people know they are there so passing superheroes don’t assume they’re space junk and clean them away before they crash into anything.
Once upon a time my classified balliwick was tracking satellites, intercepting, recording and analyzing their signals and telemetry emissions and using an ancient SDS-920 computer to calculate their ephemeris data. That alien spy sat does not appear to be in a geostationary orbit at around 23,000 Miles give or take. It looks to be in low earth orbit hovering over ARC HQ. That said, it would be expending an enormous amount of energy to do so. For a lot of reasons it should show up on NORAD’s sensors and not just optics. So, okay, I get it, alien super science cloaking technology.
Still, knowing what I know about our sensor tech, I’d like to think that some Space Force Guardian at his/her monitor was all “That’s odd, what’s this thing that just started emitting this signal in LEO and is holding a stationary position? That’s not right.” NORAD would be all WTF and send a TS/SCI report that would wind up at ARC resulting in Max borrowing that spacesuit to take a peek.
Humans in space can absolutely see stars!!!
It’s actually easier than from the planet because of the lack of obscuring atmosphere and light pollution, which is why our best photos of galaxies and such in the visible range of light come from orbiting space telescopes like Hubble and James Webb.
We can see the stars just fine, we just can’t do it when there’s also a sunlit Earth taking up a large part of the field of view.
Nope! humans CAN see stars in space: you think otherwise because most pictures of the earth from space are taken with a short exposure (the photographers are often moving, and cameras struggle with motion blur more than human eyes do). Human eyes actually have better dynamic range than short-exposure photographs.
Only putting the sun in your FOV will truly drown out the stars, but Maxima isn’t looking at the sun.
You can test this yourself! Go out on a night where you can see the moon and some stars at the same time (I hope you live somewhere where you can see stars…it’s kind of sad how much light pollution suffusing the atmosphere obscures stars in or near cities). Now, take a quick photograph of that view, focused on the moon (the rough equivalent of the photographs of sunlit earth/astronauts from space). It won’t pick up as many stars as you can see, if any.
Re: humans CAN see stars in space: you think otherwise because most pictures of the earth from space are taken with a short exposure (the photographers are often moving, and cameras struggle with motion blur more than human eyes do). Human eyes actually have better dynamic range than short-exposure photographs.
Only putting the sun in your FOV will truly drown out the stars, but Maxima isn’t looking at the sun.
Re: humans CAN see stars in space while also having daylit earth in field of view, but most cameras can’t:
You can test this yourself! Go out on a night where you can see the moon and some stars at the same time (I hope you live somewhere where you can see stars…it’s kind of sad how much light pollution suffusing the atmosphere obscures stars in or near cities). Now, take a quick photograph of that view, focused on the moon (the rough equivalent of the photographs of sunlit earth/astronauts from space). It won’t pick up as many stars as you can see, if any.
TLDR: good on you for getting reference images instead of just assuming, but in this case, add at least a few of the brighter stars :)
Ever notice how you can carry on a conversation in a crowded room? That’s your filtering with wetware what the hardware can’t.
You’ve got to keep in mind that in nature there are bright environments and dark environments, and which one you’re in rarely changes unexpectedly. If you sit in a field in the middle of the day, your environment is well-lit and will continue to be well-lit until it slowly transitions to dark as the sun sets. If you go into a dense stand of trees or a cave you can get faster transitions between light and dark, but there’s still a transitional area, and you’re unlikely to suddenly find yourself involuntarily outside the cave. Thus an adjustment to visual sensitivity that partially happens on the order of seconds and partially happens on the order of minutes works well, at least until you invent high-powered portable light sources and can temporarily blind someone by suddenly shining a flashlight in their face.
Nature is much less prone to loud and quiet environments, or smelly and odorless environments, or touchy and untouching environments, and when such high-stimulus environments are found the normal response is to ignore them. The important strong sounds and smells tend to be sudden and unpredictable, so you can’t adjust your range to prepare for them.
And I don’t even know what a high-flavor or high-proprioception environment would really mean.
High flavor: This would normally be natural poisons that taste really bad, or spoiled food; you want your body to raise the alarm so you can spit it out, not get used to it.
But like with bright artificial lights, humans managed to invent a need for rapid transition that affects Sydney specifically. We choose to ingest plants with high capsaicin content, even artificially breeding plants with higher and higher levels.
Of course the aliens have deep probing equipment. And on a sexy spacesuit no less. I feel vindicated and ashamed in equal measure.
humans have a decent amount of dynamic range by effectively adjusting exposure as they scan their eyes, but there is a lot of light reflecting off the earth
https://yotuu.be/fyvE_B9RxgQ
Probe-u-lator-6000 – definitely need a ship load of those. Going to get my butt probed in a couple of hours, have NOT enjoyed the 3 days of NASA diet then the clean out stuff. Urgh!
I, too, hate when people call babes names like chicks, broads, or slags. Them dames and honeys need respect, as should any skirt expect when a man is talking to a foxy mamacita.
There are 2 types of stealth. Silent and Loud. One no one know you where even there. the other……. Well no one can Tell anyone you where there
there’s a third type, but we aren’t allowed to talk about it.
you never saw this message.
Our other senses do, in fact, have dynamic ranges, just not as physical.
ESPECIALLY hearing, but touch as well.
One cause of temporary tinnitus is literally just your ears getting too sensitive temporarily and hearing the sounds your body makes. Another is it effectively your brain boosting the gain of your ears way too much, going “Why can’t I hear anything?” and then coming up with something to fill it in with. (My understanding, in addition to hearing damage, this is in fact part of why your ears ring temporarily on hearing a loud noise. They’re adjusted to hear the loud noise and then freak out while they hear nothing while it goes back into “normal” range.)
This is also why people with migraines and on the spectrum become temporarily sensitive to loud noises.
Hmmm. Bet that spy satalite has some form of FTL communcation; which can presumably be tapped for that “space phone” required to by Faulk. Also, nice to confirm that we are being watched.
When regular stealth fails, there is always… percussive stealth.
I’m a little offended by the term ‘alien spy satellite’. Let’s just call it a non-terrestrial data collection device. It may be scanning for forest fires, or floods, or lost puppies.
I find myself wondering if you are familiar with two specific forms of mass media: A TV series called “Sentinel” and a book by Spider Robinson titled “Telempath”
In “Sentinel” one of the two main characters has enhanced senses that he has to mentally control via biofeedback. In “Telempath” the Earth gets exposed to the Hyperosmic Virus which gives EVERYONE an extremely heightened sense of smell, something like a hundred times that of a wolf or bloodhound.
Just think of how either of those would react to ARCSwat.
Still getting 403’d