Well, it's definitely a genetic trait-- probably recessive, but I suppose it could just be rare enough (and considered undesirable enough in a prospective parent) to keep an otherwise dominant gene in check.  It runs in families, too.

I would say that it was a blending of cats and humans-- maybe to try to create a closer and more visible partnership between the groups?

To Artish's point, Alcohol mostly comes about by letting fruit juices and such spoil, and the secret to all cheese in history is cooking the stomachs of baby mammals (requires an enzyme from before they switch to solid food) which i imagine happened pretty often when they threw all the scraps into a stew-pot and notice that the cream soup stock has gone all chunky.  I could see something similar happening to make a homogeneous tofu-style protein paste, scrounging whatever scrap animal matter they could and rendering them down into Pink Slime.

But to go to all the effort to artificially sculpt realistic animal tissues for what would be essentially a cosmetic "texture" difference seems a stretch to me. Especially if animals are rare enough that they arent typically raised and slaughtered for meat, so the majority of the population wouldnt know the difference enough to warrant the extra effort.  I see it as kind of like them developing massive advanced tech to make all their meat turn purple; it's probably possible, but I just cant see how the motivation would develop.


PS  In modern times not all cheese is actually Animal stomach enzyme (animal Rennet), they have created a vegan version that is processed from a mold byproduct.  Because mold poop is somehow healthier, I guess.

And yet people (and chefs) do all sorts of crazy things to alter the texture/color/smell of food products. I guess all I'm saying is that it would not break my suspension of disbelief if over the however many years people have been living in the spires they developed variations on basic food production that allowed for vastly different-seeming products.  I'm not arguing for growing whole animals in a vat, just that whatever form the products of the vatteries ultimately take, there is likely quite a bit of development behind the method used to make them.

Ah.  And I was coming at it from a necessity-drives-development direction.  I don't read much steampunk, so I'm unfamiliar with the typical tech level. Is limited living space (and therefore different methods of food production) a theme? I just sort of jumped from 'surface is inaccessible' to 'culturing meat makes sense if they can't raise it' without a huge amount of in between.

I listened to Turn Coat recently and noticed some details I think would be helpful for the timing. The heat mentioned in the first chapter notwithstanding, Harry says that the lilacs are blooming outside his apartment building-- that generally happens in May/June.  Murphy is also wearing a jacket when she meets up with Harry after the encounter with the skinwalker at Billy's, which means that the evening temperatures are cool-- you don't generally need a jacket at any time of the day or night in full-on summer in Chicago.  (Or rather, you don't really need it in Minneapolis, and I can't imagine that Chicago is cooler, even with the lake.)

As for locating the series relative to real-world year, Circuit City is apparently still in business, as Harry mentions that he keeps getting flyers from them in his mail.  CC closed all of their physical locations in ~2009 (it was announced in January and took effect by the end of March.)  Those flyers might have been for their online business, however, which apparently continued for a while, so it's not as firm a date as I would like.

Did we ever find out the name of Deirdre's Fallen? Her angel in the coin? If not, I'd like someone to ask JB about it if they get ever the chance.

I do have a suggestion for a name, "Urumiel" taken from the name of this sword, the Urumi, which resembled her hair:

Going back to SmF, there's a Denariian called "Urumviel" (yes, I know there's an extra "v" in there) that's described as having lots of muscle and a ridge of leathery plates going down its spine.

We've got nothing on the name of Dierdre's denariian, from SmF or elsewhere, though, so Urumiel is as good as any other.

In my offline life, I am a graduate student in geology-- specifically, I study how gravel, sand and mud are transported by rivers and the oceans, and the patterns they make as they are buried (or not!) by more sand and mud and gravel.

Some of the largest deposits of this kind of stuff are river deltas, and another graduate student and I have developed a crowdsourced game where the users classify deltas by shape.  It's deliberately very freeform: we give you 5 to 13 images of river deltas and you simply drag and drop images that you believe look similar into groups. (Or, if you don't think a delta looks similar to any other, don't group them. That's also really useful information.) The criteria you use for similarity are up to you-- we're trying to develop a classification system* from your responses.  There are no wrong answers. At all. We'd love it if you added tags to the groups to let us know why you grouped them together, but it's not a requirement. 

If you're interested (or simply have five minutes to kill), please check it out at deltashuffle.umn.edu


*Honesty compels me to add that there is an existing classification system, but it runs on interpretive thinking-- "This delta is type R because it looks like a type R delta" rather than observation alone. And everyone who is professionally interested in this sort of thing has already been brainwashed into the system to the point of being unable to see deltas in any other terms.

I was a tech writer for about 20 years.  Did museum exhibits, plumbing and zoning codes, landmarks preservation law, hazmat regs, and National Register nominations. 

In all those disciplines, you have to write as if you are explaining to someone outside the field, and also be clear not to leave loopholes or ambiguities that could possibly be exploited (Plumbing code, Zoning an Preservation law.)  Hazmat regs need to be written so a fourth grader can understand them. 

What is your dissertation on?

I'm writing about the controlling factors for the shapes of (river) deltas in map view-- basically, why the Mississippi Delta has a very different shape when seen from above than the Nile than the Ganges-Brahmaputra than the Indus.  I'm trying to add numbers to a qualitative classification system that's been in use for ~40 years to help try to drag the field kicking and screaming into the new millennium.

Since this is probably only going to be read by people in my field (if at all--I am under no illusions as to the wider appeal of this project), I probably don't have to worry about leaving loopholes-- but I suppose my committee is liable to willfully misinterpret!

"Slowly and with extreme psychological discomfort" is a very apt phrase....

Well, now I *have* to take that internship......