Magic Numbers

I wonder how the societies in a fantasy setting like D&D's would be modified by magic. Would, for instance, magical healing lower the infant mortality rates to modern levels? Since we're generally assuming magic isn't a new thing, would purify food and drink being zeroth level have removed the necessity for alcohol? Civilized peoples, including to an extent in Mesoamerica, have alcohol tolerance because they would all have died of dysentery if they'd had to drink their cities' water. With the town priest able to purify water, the selection pressure for alcohol tolerance might never have arisen (they'd still make booze, of course, but they'd be more prone to alcoholism, as are the Irish, Scandinavians, Native Americans, and Russians, who were not urban enough for alcohol to be a survival mechanism until shortly before modern sanitation was invented).

A part of it depends on how common healing magic is. That article about the real-world breakdown of D&D stats, that I've mentioned before, gives 5% of the population as being "adventurer" material. Assuming an even distribution of ability scores, only 1/6 of those would be capable of casting priest spells (some paladin spells can do the same things, and they're powered by Charisma rather than Wisdom, but the other requirements make all paladins a statistical anomaly). So that gives us one person capable of casting priest spells for every 120 people, and of those, half might choose to be druids. There is, therefore, one priest per 240 people. Now, that all by itself looks like 4.2 healers per person, which is the doctor-patient ratios Italy's healthcare system gets, but remember, those people are mostly 1st-level priests, they can cure wounds and detect poison but they can't remove disease or neutralize poison, they're basically emergency room nurses.

No, to approximate modern medicine you've got to wait till 5th level, which is when clerics can cast remove disease, a 3rd-level spell. And 5th-level characters, as that article says, are Einstein or record-breaking athletes, you pretty much can't assign them a percentage. (The healers can slow poison, using delay poison, at 3rd level, since it's a 2nd-level spell.) Possibly, and in a rather modern touch, the few 5th-level healers (who are, remember, Jonas Salk) might write scrolls with remove disease, which are then distributed to major centers staffed by lesser healers, who cast the spells with a level check (since they aren't capable of casting that spell on their own), thus introducing a chance that treatment fails. Also, those healing centers might well charge 375 gp for the use of the spell, or maybe they'll be charitable and charge only the 30-120 gp that casting a 3rd-level spell would cost. Of course, all of those healers, 1st level and up, can cure wounds, so realistically the only way to die from injury or accident is to do it quickly enough that a cleric can't be brought to bear. (1 in 5 child deaths is from an accident, despite modern medicine, so that would greatly increase their survivability right there.)

Arcane spellcasters would make up twice the percentage of the population that divine do, and there's no druid-cleric split. Basically, 1 person in 60 is an arcane spellcaster, although almost all of those are only 1st-level. But they can do as much damage as a smallish siege-engine with burning hands, and as much as throwing knives (only at 3-4 times the range and 100% accuracy) with magic missile. The few 3rd-level casters can also turn invisible. The very, very few 5th-level ones can demolish entire buildings with fireball and lightning bolt. So realistically, the warfare of this setting is going to be 18th century, not 20th—even if you do have units made up of 1st-level mages, and a few 3rd-level elite agents who can escape unseen after they fulfill their missions, there's not going to be any carpet-bombing, there simply aren't enough mages capable of casting spells that do the right kind of damage. Basically mages would be grenadiers or elite riflemen, and the ballistae, battering rams, and catapults are still going to be the major siege engines. There's no issue of protecting castles against fireballs for the same reason no 19th century military worried about Nikola Tesla coming up and shooting them with lightning bolts, that's about the frequency of 5th-level characters.

So...huh. Looks like all the naysayers, myself included, were wrong. It's entirely plausible to have a setting where magic is real but that doesn't play out too differently from a real-world setting with that level of mundane tech. And actually "like the 'Middle Ages' [i.e. the Renaissance] but with better sanitation and nutrition" is pretty much the setting of most fantasy. They often even involve more alcoholism than real Europe did (because drinking problems are a convenient source of tacked-on drama the characters can angst about).

Ten Thousand Item Post

Random thoughts. A ten thousand item shop (i.e. countless items) is what they call a dollar store in China (also sometimes Japan, though "100 yen shop" is more typical nowadays).

• Remember how I once said (here) that elves' usual depiction as markedly less sexually dimorphic than humans—e.g. an average female elf in D&D 3E stands 5' and weighs 84 lbs, while a male stands the same and weighs 89—doesn't go with their depiction as free-loving hippies? Yes well I crunched the numbers on, e.g., chimps and bonobos. A male chimp averages 109 lbs, while a female averages 86 lbs; a male bonobo averages 103 lbs, while a female averages 66.
  
  Now, because elves have human proportions and chimpanzees have ape ones, we're just going to go by the cube-root of the mass ratio to get the new heights; we can just leave the mass ratios alone. And plugging in the male elf's 5'/89 lbs to chimpanzees' female-to-male ratios (79% the weight, thus 92% the height) should give us elf females who stand 4'7" and weigh 70 lbs. Plugging them into the bonobo ratio (64% the weight, thus 86% the height) should give us elf females who stand 4'4" and weigh 57 lbs.
  
  No, the canonical elf's ratios (males 106% as heavy as females) are, as I said, precisely those of jackals.
• The Maya, as previously mentioned, didn't have fractions. Oddly enough, though, the Aztecs did, sort of. They were at least groping toward the rudiments of the concept when people who had algebra showed up and rendered it moot; their conception of fractions was somewhat like what seems to be in play in Babylonian math. It's odd, in part because the Maya had genuine writing, and the Aztecs didn't, they were still at the rebus/mnemonic "you've got to already know the gist of it to understand it" proto-writing stage. Then again the Hindus invented roughly a third of our math, and their language wasn't written until sometime after the founding of Rome.
  
  Incidentally, the reason we know the Aztecs were beginning to come up with the concept of fractions, is we've got some of their land-surveying records (remember, the Spanish mostly only destroyed ritual manuals—and remember the rituals in question if you want to know why). They were top-notch geometers; the great Postclassic Mayan center, Chichen Itzá, seems to have mostly been built by artisans who weren't Mayan, but Nahuatl (Toltecs, presumably, given the time-frame). Being an artisan was fundamental to the Nahuatl civilization's self-concept, to the point where "toltecatl" means "artisanry" (as contrasted with "chichimecatl", literally "being a northern savage" and idiomatically "squalor"). It's no wonder those guys got good at surveying.
  
  Of course, since they used to have dealings with the Maya, you do wonder why they didn't say, "Wait, you're writing down, like, the actual sounds you say? Let's adapt that for our language, rather than having to play Pictionary whenever we have to read something!"
• I'm changing the orthography of the word "khàngaì" to "khângây". I'm redoing their language (or rather the one of their languages that shows up), so that instead of using tone to distinguish lexemes, it distinguishes inflections—instead of being a tonal language, the pitch of a word marks things like case, mood, or verb tense. And I thought, since the folks in question are basically wolves crossed with songbirds, that I'd have the morphology be not merely tone, but actual music.
  
  I haven't ground the kinks out yet, but I think I'm going with a sentence being in a minor key makes it declarative, and major key interrogative. Also think I'm gonna have adjectives be on the same note as their referents, and probably have verbs harmonize in some way with their subjects (maybe different harmonies for active and passive verbs?).
  
  I also know I'm gonna have one of them say that the reason that language is the one they use for interstellar trade has less to do with the nation that speaks it being somewhat dominant, than with it using pure notes rather than chords, which their vocal anatomy makes pronounceable, like birds' does (and yours doesn't, that's why so much vocal music involves group harmonies). I think one of their other languages has the verbs be chords of the notes their subjects and objects are in. The Bantu languages and a lot of Mesoamerican ones (and South Athabascan ones, which might be due to Uto-Aztecan influence, I don't know enough Tlingit or Carrier to tell) use constructions that basically work like "The boy the girl he-loves-her".
• I'm honestly the type of person who worries over whether aliens have the right anatomy for the sounds I gave their language—for instance, most things other than mammals don't have hard palates (crocodiles do, because otherwise their prey would kick them in the brain on the way down their throats). I wonder how talking birds pronounce palatalized sounds—do they maybe do vowel-glides instead? Most things other than baboons and the apes don't have uvulas (and I may actually mention that the structure in zled mouths that makes their "uvular" consonants doesn't quite look like a uvula, although it sounds close enough for our purposes).
  
  Zledo can't pronounce F or V (they render those elements in human languages as ɸ and β), and the only glottal sound they have is the stop (their H is actually a velar—IPA x—just like the J in Spanish). One can imagine that an alien race might pronounce F with the upper lip on the bottom teeth—is that a lateral labiodental?—which I'm gonna call an "underbite F". I think I might give the khângây that pronunciation. A species with a wolf-like tongue might have trouble with some of the alveolar sounds, since the tip of its tongue would be floppy; it might pronounce T as Th and D as Dh (but presumably still as stops, i.e. they'd basically have a Mexican accent in that regard).
• My whole family (well, with one exception) are getting obsessed with Death Note. And I realized what I don't like about it, something I did actually touch on in my thing about it, the 12th post on the whole blog. Namely, I'm a science fiction writer. Death Note completely ignores the implications of the existence of Kira. Not just the cosmology is unexplored—usually shinigami serve an ecological function in the cosmos, these ones are basically just cow-tipping rednecks—but even worse, the sociology.
  
  Basically Death Note suffers from the same problem as In Time, which has a world where immortality is the medium of exchange and, instead of exploring how people change when death is no longer a certainty, they chuck hoary class-war chestnuts at us. Death Note ignores the implications of its setting in favor of police procedural and highly stylized intrigue. How does some brat setting up as a knockoff of the Spectre, and everyone knowing he did it, affect everyone? Yeah, they talk a bit about crime rates dropping, but Kira doesn't only kill criminals later on, he kills anyone who crosses him, and tries to take over the world's political system. And at that point, we discover Death Note is every bit the "all conflicts are resolved with a children's card game" setting that Yu-Gi-Oh! is, it's just that the children's card game is "the civilian police system". Probably the moment Kira killed someone overseas, definitely the moment he went after an official of another country, he ceased to be a criminal, and became a national security threat.
  
  Most of the things Light uses to hide hinge on the police system—he has sufficient plausible deniability RE: being Kira that they can't get probable cause to search him. Now, leaving to one side that Japanese cops aren't actually sticklers about that kind of thing, "probable cause" don't mean jack to people whose job is more likely to involve the phrase "extraordinary rendition", let alone the people who don't have to bother to outsource that. It would realistically take less than a week from the first time Kira made foreign officials fear for their national sovereignty to the moment when Light finds the barrel of a black-ops pistol shoved in his mouth.
• Oddly enough, Canadian English has more branches than American, even though Canada has about 11% the people. But there are four big divisions of Canadian English: Western and Central, Maritimes, Newfoundland, and Northern. Meanwhile, there are only three divisions of American: Midwest, Northeast, and everything else is Southern.
  
  Incidentally, most Canadians probably speak Western and Central, which I believe is also what TV and radio are mostly in, but there are three other divisions of Canadian English even if one of them is the dominant one. In America, our TV is in Midwestern, albeit a very deracinated variety that shades towards the western end of Southern. It's also somewhat interesting why everything that isn't Midwest or Northeast is Southern, namely that most of our western settlement was by ex-Confederates, either trying to start over after the war or trying to escape Reconstruction (postwar occupations suck to live under).
• While I stand by my assertion that the concept of shinigami existed in Japan prior to the Meiji era, because it's mentioned in an 18th century play, I do think we have to acknowledge they're not much of a god in a cultic sense. No, instead, they're basically a jinx—as are the binbôgami (poverty gods) and the ekibyôgami (pestilence gods). All three, in turn, are probably just subclasses of magatsuhi no kami, the "gods of days that bear calamity".
  
  They probably functioned something like Sapientia and Fortuna and so on, in Roman literature—most of them aren't so much actual gods as they are rhetorical personifications. If the Romans were doing a litany of all the gods (as the Japanese occasionally list the eight hundred myriad), they might list such personifications, but they didn't really have any cult except sometimes as the handmaids of gods who aren't just named after the thing they're the god of (as the magatsuhi no kami serve Izanami no Mikoto).
  
  I think a lot of the time the terms are just applied to people, rhetorically, i.e. "With the extra repairs, that klutz is our god of poverty."/"Thanks for giving me your cold, plague-god!"/"Why is every TV detective a god of death?"

Thinking About Thinking...Machines

Thoughts on robots and AI (well, one of 'em's really more about automation).

This is post 479, which is a prime. It is also a safe number (it is equal to 2p+1, where p is also a prime), the sum of nine consecutive primes (37 + 41 + 43 + 47 + 53 + 59 + 61 + 67 + 71), a Chen prime (because if you add 2 to it the sum is either prime or the product of two primes, in this case 481 = 13 × 37), and a self number (which is a number that is not equal to any other number added to the sum of its own digits, i.e. 32 is not a self number because 32 = 25 + 2 + 5).

• During one of the chick-flick terminal-patient scenes in Halo 4, Cortana says this:

  I can give you over forty thousand reasons why I know that sun isn't real. I know it because the emitter's Rayleigh effect is disproportionate to its suggested size. I know because its stellar cycle is more symmetrical than that of an actual star. But for all that, I'll never know if it looks real... if it feels real...

  Only...the way that you know it doesn't look real is that its Rayleigh effect is disproportionate and its stellar cycle is too symmetrical. If a human was sensitive enough to tell you it didn't look real, that would be what he was talking about, he just probably couldn't define it that precisely. If Cortana had a body with temperature sensors, the difference produced by that disproportionate Rayleigh effect (it would have an effect on the heat of the "sunlight") would be perceptible to those sensors; a human who reported that sensation didn't "feel real" would be reporting the same thing, they, again, just couldn't define it like that.
  
  This is key for the portrayal of AI (always assuming we suspend our disbelief about how they're logically impossible): nothing about being made of meat is special. An android might have more awareness of how he senses things than you, although the program that is his mind may be so massive that it has to run on separate hardware from those sensors, just like yours does (that's what the autonomic nervous system is, the other hardware). Fundamentally, though, he's still sensing the same things, and his experience of sensing them is comparable to yours. To, that is, the extent that any other person's experience of sense-perception is comparable to yours—just like how you can't describe color to a blind man, you have no way of knowing that anything another sighted person sees is anything like what you see, except in relation to physically quantifiable things. You can diagnose that a person can't distinguish the red wavelength from the green one; you can never be certain that his experience when he sees "blue" is anything like yours.
  
  Or to wrap it in buzzwords, there fundamentally would be no difference of "qualia" for a true AI, any more than there is for an alien or for another human being. There would only be the quantitative differences in function and sensitivity between the sensory apparatus, which exist also between humans.
• What tropers call a Logic Bomb, seen e.g. here, is silly. Most people acknowledge that. What most don't seem to do is try to figure out what it should do. Most likely the AI would deal with it the way computers deal with divide-by-zero errors. Actually, a contradiction in terms is basically the logical equivalent of a not-a-number error, if you think about it.
  
  It occurs to me, true AI would be an absolute bitch to come up with exception-handling for. One problem, for example, is that the human mind seems to prefer resumption over termination, which is apparently a bad idea with computer programs. Also our exception-handling for major things appears to take the form of mental illness (for minor things, well, that's probably what "humor" is).
• I realized, my workaround for getting "strong" AI is not just the handwave to have what I wanted in the story (even though "integrate your handwaves into the plot" is pretty much half of what science fiction is). It's also an important element of a theme that several other elements of my book also explore. Namely, science is not religion. If you thought science and religion were in conflict (rather than being engaged in a deadly game of "sea lion and squirrel"), or if you thought science now could answer questions once answered by religion, then you are guilty of what analytic philosophers call a category error.
  
  To put it one way, and use Soviet slogans to mean their opposite—always a delight—"The Earth is blue, but there is no God out there." Because space is not Heaven. 1600 years ago, St. Augustine mocked the kind of God you people think science can substitute for, and so did the Neoplatonists he learned philosophy from, 200 years before that. There's a reason every SF attempt to hijack the religious impulse is basically just a retread of Cosmism, which is just a retread of Gnosticism (as is everything in Transhumanism that's not directly copied from the Cosmists). Fundamentally they're thinking like the Manicheans (also Mormons and Scientologists), to whom "spirit" is actually ultra-rarefied matter, and who could seriously talk about spiritual "places"—and mean it literally, not just as an analogy for condition-of-being.
  
  Also, would you people please get a different set of ideas? Gnosticism is the Team Rocket of worldviews. Except Team Rocket is occasionally cool.
• The "demographic winter" currently looming over the developed world is actually less of a problem than it seems...provided the developed country in question has low immigration, anyway. Then, instead of "watch your society transform into a colony of a different one, before your very eyes", it's more a matter of "certain hiccups as the old people die off". For one thing, most of the countries where declining birthrates don't go with high immigration have relatively small welfare states—in Japan and South Korea, old people get much more of their incomes from private savings and private pensions, so there won't be nearly as much of a social-security crisis.
  
  And (in case you were wondering why I bring it up here), the other thing is, any personnel gaps created by the demographic shifts could be covered by automation. Especially because Japan is currently massively overstaffed. You ever wonder why they still do so much business on paper, or why most of their gas stations aren't self-service? (Wait, let me back up: Japan is actually weirdly low-tech in a lot of ways. They do lots of business and record-keeping on paper, often with forms filled out by hand, and the majority of their gas-stations are still full-service.) It turns out it was all in order to create lots of make-work jobs for their populace, which might have something to do with why their unemployment is 4.1% (ours is 7.5%). Thus, a lot of those jobs? Not needed; the people they were keeping out of trouble will be put to better use elsewhere.
  
  Also, while it's probably true that, as that article says, the Japanese go a bit too far in classifying any programmable industrial machinery as "robots", the fact is that that's not much broader than the definition used by the rest of the world. I've actually worked with a programmable robot arm (my high school had a cool tech program, though I didn't take much of it), and the thing was honestly not that much different from the laser-etcher at the other end of the classroom.
• I am fascinated by something that may well be the dumbest thing in all of Star Trek. Yes, guess what, that hole had a bottom. Also, it's not what you're thinking. Know what the dumbest thing is? They let Data play poker. That is, they let a being that not only doesn't show emotions, but hasn't got them, play a bluffing game. Not only does he have no tells, but he can probably hear their pulses change and see their body temperatures fluctuate when they bluff.
  
  I mean, seriously people. You've got a better chance beating Data at chess than you have at poker, and the human vs. computer chess ship has pretty much already sailed by our time. There would probably be a sign hanging over poker tables in any setting with AI, "Senses must be set to human norms and emotional programming must be present". Failing that, you don't get to play poker. Same goes for cyborgs (no that's not discrimination, it's a game, we handicap in games—anyone who doesn't understand that probably also thinks it'd be awesome for adults to play tackle football against peewee players).
  
  Of course, you're not going to be playing poker anyway, as I said here. You're going to be playing MonHan.
• I always get weirded out when AIs/androids in things, that clearly have self-awareness, are asserted to not have souls. Now, admittedly, "soul" as commonly used is restricted to rational souls (animals, plants, and inanimate objects have "souls" as philosophers understand the concept, but not the same kind), but the AIs in question are rational. "Soul" just means "that which makes it what it is"; that which makes a rational being what it is, is, ipso facto, a rational soul.
  
  There's also, often, a lot of grandstanding about "oh, do we have the right to create intelligent beings with souls?", but, uh, apart from the fact you can do that without getting out of bed (if you know what I mean, nudge nudge wink wink), is the fact you have a multi-million dollar fertility industry mass-producing the aforementioned beings. While, by the way, destroying a very hefty proportion of the embryos it creates. And let's not even get into you people's strange idea that reproductive cloning isn't as bad as being cloned for spare parts. No, sorry; there's not a single argument against the creation of AI that doesn't go double for half the things we're already doing.
  
  As I've said before, when speculative fiction starts saying stupid things about ethics, it generally means that an intelligent discussion might step on something the writers are in favor of.
• It's debatable whether or not the "neural net" method of trying to do artificial intelligence is a good idea—is it necessary to mimic the function of a human brain rather than making an ad hoc program from the ground up on more conventional hardware? Certainly it seems just as sensible and probably simpler to just create a program designed to do what people's minds do rather than to mimic the physical means by which they do them. But let's leave that to one side. Certainly any computer you could upload your mind to would need to work like your original hardware.
  
  Assuming that neural nets are the way to go, the human brain contains 100 billion neurons, about 3 trillion glial cells, and about 125 trillion synapses. The neurons are more important than the glial cells, and the synapses are probably more important than the neurons, but we can't say that any of them are trivial. So if you assign a single bit in a computer to one of those three things, you wind up with 128.1 trillion bits, or 14.5633 terabytes (the whole Library of Congress is usually quoted as being 20 terabytes). Only...brains aren't binary; what neurotransmitter carries a "signal" appears to be at least as important as what the "signal" is. Thus one perhaps ought to treat each cell not as a bit...but as a single line of code. Microsoft Windows, the single most complex computer program mankind has ever produced, is 40 million lines of code—3.2 million times smaller than the code necessary to code for braincells.
  
  Oh, it gets worse. Any time you've got code, you get coding errors. The industry average is between 10 and 50 (I averaged the several averages I found and got 38.75) per 1000; the best we've ever done (1 in 10,000—at NASA's Software Assurance Technology Center at Goddard Space Flight Center) was in highly specialized aerospace applications, not horrendously fuzzy things like natural-language processing, and in incredibly controlled conditions.
  
  That mind-uploading that they said was just around the corner? Leaving the unbelievably bad metaphysics to one side, and even if we had any way to code for anything remotely like "3 million times as complex as Windows", you'd still have to code each mind individually. The troubleshooting for each one would cost as much as the entire Space Shuttle program, and we'd still be basically giving you a stroke as an unavoidable part of the process. Similarly, with AI proper, every one of 'em gets Fetal Alcohol Syndrome simply as a door-prize. Even without the logical impossibility, AI (and mind-uploading) is still on par with faster-than-light travel—as in, we can just barely conceive of ways to do it at all, and so far none that are feasible to our, or any conceivable future, civilization.
• How to work around this in science fiction? Well, you could have the audience's suspension of disbelief, that gets you AI, cover for the fact it's not feasible even if it weren't impossible. But personally I find that inelegant. In my book, the first AI basically did cost as much as the Space Shuttle program, although my AIs aren't built on a neural net model (the alternative, to approximate human levels of cognition, would still need to be that complex). But when it succeeded (by cheating), the AI had heaps of processing power and lots of spare time—and the company that made him wanted to make more. So they used him to code more of them, and double-check their coding.
  
  It's bizarre to me, by the bye, that people think that an AI copied from another one, or from a human (I mean the "neural-clone" type, like Cortana, not an uploaded mind), would in any sense "be" the same person. Hell, the question's actually whether an uploaded mind can really be regarded as the same person, or did you just neural-clone someone and wipe their brain at the same time? See also the metaphysical issues with Star Trek's transporters (it really is a boon neither one is possible). But I think the whole "copied from the other mind, therefore is same person" comes, oddly enough, from our lacking a belief in reincarnation. Watch an anime some time, you doofuses! (If you make an error that watching InuYasha would've prevented, it's time to take a break.) Even if one assumes reincarnation (for which one must either assume Platonic dualism or Buddhist anatman), the whole of the identity is not the same; Kagome isn't Kikyô, and Siaoran isn't Watanuki.
  
  Then again the fact there's more than one person in humanity at all is weird—Averroes really ought to be right, and we all share only one mind and soul. That Aquinas nevertheless said he was wrong, because of the observed phenomenon of human individuality, is why Aquinas' civilization invented science and Averroes' didn't. See also Buridan's response to peripatetic objections, when he said the celestial bodies were made of the same substances as the Earth and were themselves "worlds" (Aristotle says the Earth is the only world, and the celestial bodies are a radically different substance). Namely? "God can make as many worlds as he likes."

Spot Check III

Reality check and random thoughts. All, I think, mostly about the real world.

• The perp in a crime manga I was reading was trying to say "the winners write the history books", and said how America and Japan both killed people in World War II, but only Japan got charged with war-crimes. Now, the guy's an ass, and they never for a moment pretended he was doing anything but making bad excuses, but they should've laughed in his face. The reason Japan got charged with war-crimes and America didn't is because Japan committed lots and lots of war-crimes, and America committed them only sporadically.
  
  Aside from Unit 731 and Nanking and the comfort women and so on, is the fact that China lost the same percentage of its population in that war as Japan did—but, aside from the fact China's losses represent ten times as much actual killing (being a much more populous country), Japan's deaths were only 29% civilian, while China's were 70%. Korea lost a slightly lower percentage, and roughly 2/3 the raw numbers, compared to Japan's...but Korea had no military, it was a Japanese vassal. The Philippines lost probably the exact same number of civilians as Japan, but that outnumbers their military losses 13 to 1.
  
  Interestingly, if it were a European crime-comic and the guy were a Neo-Nazi, he could've asked why the Nazis got charged with war-crimes and the Soviets didn't, and would've been quite unanswerable—the only answer is, "Because the Soviets won," they were every inch as bad as the Nazis, in some ways worse. But no way no how is European media ever going to admit that Communism, as an ideology, produces the exact same results Nazism does (actually the average German soldier was nowhere near as bad as the average Russian one, in that war).
• Men's rights weenies have a term for men who, pretty much, remotely acknowledge that there is any unfairness to women in our society, or deny that this is a Dave Sim straw matriarchy set up entirely to benefit women. They call it "white knighting", because much like the undergrad identity-studies courses their entire discourse is copied from, they use nouns as verbs ("'damseled' women").
  
  But, uh, dudes? (I was going to say "gentlemen", but, I mean, come on.) Watch a damn movie sometime. If you use comparisons to chivalric fiction as a pejorative, you are not the good guy. I don't care how much repurposed Marxist gender-feminism you dress it up in, the fact is you're whining that the girls have it easier—like a six-year-old boy. Perfect fairness and equality is not possible in a cosmos made of matter; while, obviously, gross injustices should be corrected, the only society where men don't have a harder time than women is one where women have a harder time than men.
  
  If you were actually worthy to call yourselves men, this wouldn't need to be explained. Man up.
• The colloquial Cantonese for white people is gwáilóu, literally "monster uncle" (as in Japanese, "uncle" is the common Cantonese word for a middle-aged man). Several other Chinese languages, among other languages, refer to white people by words involving ghosts, fairies, or other spooky things. Know why? Because we're damn weird-looking, that's why.
  
  I mean, consider. When every other human being you have ever seen has black or gray hair, and black eyes, and then you meet people with yellow hair and blue eyes, or orange hair and green eyes? That's freaky. There seems to be no compelling reason that it couldn't just as well have been blue hair with yellow eyes or green hair with orange eyes.
• I am ordinarily against spelling reform, but only because it is usually meaningless pedantry that doesn't understand that phonetic spellings date. It is permissable if it removes an ambiguity (ambiguity is actually one of my reasons for opposing phonetic spelling). And if it still preserves the etymology (another thing phoneticist fetishism blithely, not to say blitheringly, ignores), so much the better.
  
  This is occasioned by people using "lead", pronounced "lεd", to mean the past tense of "lead", pronounced "li:d". If it's spelled like that but pronounced "lεd", it means "mildly neurotoxic heavy metal". So plainly, the solution is to spell the present tense as "lede", like the beginning paragraph of a newspaper article, since that means the same thing (it is in fact the same word, respelled precisely in order to avoid this ambiguity). Then its past becomes "led" again, most naturally.
  
  Also? "Read" should be spelled "rede" in the present and "redd" in the past. "Rede" currently means "advice, council", but both it and "read" have the same root—the Old English for "interpret", hence both "discern the meaning of phonetic symbols" and "determine the optimum course of action"—and are pronounced the same. Yes, I know it's mostly used by Wiccans for their ethical adage—the one they copied from Aleister Crowley, who copied it from a Rabelais satire completely out of context.
• And thought of Rabelais reminds me, because he was a Christian humanist, that humanism of any kind involves putting second things first. Man is not the measure of all things, and any attempt to make him so just results in misery. Renaissance and "Enlightenment" humanism made adult women legal minors, brought back slavery, and paved the way for the bloodiest wars in human history (until another wave of humanists topped them in the 20th century); Neo-Confucian humanism made it kinky to be in love with your wife rather than a prostitute or a teenage boy, and persecuted any religion it couldn't turn into a state propaganda-arm (it also was one of the bloodthirsty humanist ideologies of the 20th century).
  
  The fact of the matter is, when human values are subordinated to more transcendent ones, human values benefit—the medievals not only gave women unprecedented rights and abolished slavery, their biggest wars killed vastly fewer people than the wars of the "humanist" era (e.g. 300 years of Crusades combined with the Hundred Years War—which was 116 years long, we're rounding here I guess?—killed about 60% as many people as the accurately-named Thirty Years War alone)^note. Buddhism has never successfully been made the basis of civil life, but in the one serious attempt to do so (the early Goryeo era of Korea), slavery got abolished and, again, women actually had legal rights.
  
  The trouble is that human values and human aims—let alone the tiny artificially-restricted subset of them that "humanists" always work from—cannot be made the sole basis of human life, individually or in a "greatest good for the greatest number" kind of way. Human life, after all, is a thing that happens in the real world, a place that is not of human manufacture, and which does not give a damn about human aims. Maybe if instead of "humanism" we called it "marginally sapient ape-ism" you'd see the trouble?
• Seeing a dustup between a Japanese nationalist and a Korean one was amusing for me—because neither one of them was a linguist, but they were debating linguistics. And like many Cargo Cultists aping motions whose significance they cannot comprehend laymen with a smattering of half-understood theories filtered through pop culture and political ideology, the Korean was trying to claim that a language's sound-inventory is related to how "advanced" or "primitive" it is. Namely, he was trying to say that the fact Japanese is purely (C)V(n) makes it primitive compared to Korean (whose syllables are (C)V(C)(C)).
  
  Only...Japanese is only orthographically limited like that. In actual speech it has markedly more variety than Korean. The Japanese word for "like" is pronounced "ski", that is it starts with a by-God biliteral; the word for "is" is "des", i.e. it ends on a fricative. Korean words cannot end on fricatives, syllables that end with sounds that are fricative in other positions end with stops word-finally. And if we're holding languages' orthographies against them, no Korean syllable starts with a vowel, they have to use "Ng" as a null-consonant syllable-initially (all of which leaves to one side that Korean's structure is not syllabic in the first place, unlike the Chinese their linguists blindly copied, but moraic, like that of Japanese, Turkish, and Finnish).
  
  It's a silly debate anyway, though, because if having a lot of consonants makes your language "advanced", the most advanced language in the world is Georgian, which can put up to eight consonants in a row. Of course, it also has a syntactic alignment more typical of Stone Age cultures of the New World and Australia—is phonetics more or less indicative than grammar? And that's the point: in actual fact, of course, neither consonantal complexity nor ergativity means anything—all languages are as "advanced" as all the others, though some are (to borrow biological terminology) more "derived" than other, more "basal" ones. The idea that stacking consonants means you're advanced is probably a legacy of colonialist scientific racism, given Indo-European languages do it far more than those of most of the Europeans' subject peoples.

De Romanicorum Physicalium 8

Science fiction.

• The replicators in Star Trek, aside from how they should totally fill the ship with antimatter and blow it up, are the mother of all "bringing far more power to bear than the problem requires" approaches. Because while food synthesizers that are essentially 3d printers, assembling foods out of simpler components, would be a good idea, replicators form it, directly, from energy, particle by particle.
  
  The same, by the bye, is true of transporters: there is not and never could be a situation where those make more sense than landing-vehicles. The slight time savings is not—and, again, never could be—worth the amount of energy necessary to convert the mass of the average human (69.3 kg, in case you wondered) to energy. Considering that the energy equivalent of 69.3 kg is 6.2 exajoules...or the energy consumption of an entire Kardashev I civilization over 17 days, 22 hours, 33 minutes, 19 seconds.
  
  It only takes 63 megajoules per kilogram (yes, "only", welcome to space-travel physics) to propel objects to escape velocity. That means that it could be cheaper to beam a four-person away-team than to send them on a landing craft, since getting it back into space might be energy intensive...provided the landing craft masses 393,650,793,651 kilograms, or 989.6 times the canonical mass of the Enterprise D.
  
  Seriously, it's like, suppose you want to make an underwater breathing device without having to carry air. The smart way is to filter dissolved oxygen from the surrounding water, i.e. gills. The silly way is to use electricity to separate the water into hydrogen and oxygen. And the Star Trek way is to fuse the hydrogen atoms many times over, until they become oxygen.
• Many discussions of future linguistic change seem to be far too married to the idea that dialects are going to change to incomprehensibility in a few centuries—they claim we shouldn't be able to understand people from Star Trek's era. Now, aside from the fact you could've understood Shakespeare pretty much fine (he would've had a funny accent—since even Pope, born 72 years after Shakespeare died, thought "sea" and "say" were homophones—but you could've understood each other), there is a substantial body of research into how media have influenced dialect. Namely? The ability to record and broadcast sound is killing off dialects and causing a great deal of "smoothing" in the direction of the standard varieties. It started with radio, and it really took off with TV.
  
  It is not, and never was, a matter of simply hearing the standard variety; most of the people who claim that's what's being argued are fighting strawmen. Also they're often British, so for them, of course, dialect has a political component that is less present or wholly absent for other Anglophone societies. As at least one of them (the "Futurese" guy) actually said, regional dialects are the language of the home, what people grow up speaking, and thus are reverted to in a "home" environment. Only...television is people's home-life now, especially in Britain, where more children have televisions in their bedrooms than live with their biological fathers. And TV is in the standard dialect, so everybody's speech moves closer to that, unless they deliberately prevent it.
  
  Obviously, of course, dialects that get a lot of TV-exposure will be reinforced just as much as the standard one is; Osaka Japanese, Cockney British, and certain Southern American accents are likely to stick around for a while. But I'll bet you they change to conform much more closely to the media-presented versions, and dialects that don't get that exposure are likely to die off. Do they still use "ar" for "yes" in Sussex? I doubt it.
• The NASA AX-5 experimental hard suit—quite possibly the goofiest-looking spacesuit ever, and please consider some of the competition—masses between 77 and 86 kg, i.e. an average one is 81.5 kg (180 lbs). That sounds horrible, till you find out a "Newtsuit" deep-sea diving rig masses between 275 and 378 kg, and the US Navy's ADS 2000 diving suit masses 436 kg (MJOLNIR Mk. V and VI suits worn by Spartan-IIs mass 454 kg, only 18 more than the ADS 2000).
  
  Though the AX-5 looks ridiculous, it uses an interesting idea: constant-volume joints. Instead of having accordion-joints (called "convolutes"), like most spacesuits (and animals, look at a hairless cat, or the back of your fingers), where a pleated section of material unpleats when flexed, it uses stacks of rotating cuffs to bend without changing volume. How flexible is it? Apparently you can get into 95% of the positions you can get into stark naked, that's how flexible.
  
  I think it's made of fiberglass, certainly some of its AX-# predecessors were.
• The theme that plays under the Halo 4 main menu, and several versions of the main Halo theme, and several places in Battlestar Galactica, all raise an interesting question. Namely, when, exactly, did we decide the appropriate musical representation of "space" was wordless, vaguely Middle Eastern-sounding, female vocals?
  
  Seriously, what is that? Is there some intrinsic connection between "space" and "lady muezzin" that I just missed somewhere? Did someone hear people praising Yoko Kanno's music for shows like Bebop and Ghost in the Shell, and then mix her up with Yoko Ono? It's weird, is what it is, and that everyone started doing it at once is even weirder.
• Know what we should see in first-contact scenarios, but never do? I mean the ones that happen on Earth? We should see all the various global factions trying to use the aliens as weapons against their rivals. I mean, first contact is always basically Europeans from Space, and lets Hollywood have white people as their unhistoric Noble Savage Indians. But in real history, just about the first thing that happened to Europeans was the natives tried to make alliances with them to use them against their enemies.
  
  Why do you think Cortez had all those Indian allies? Everybody hated the Tenochca/Aztec Triple Alliance/the people you think of when you hear "Aztec" even though several of their enemies were the same ethnicity and that wasn't actually their name anyway^note. So they saw Cortez, and they said, "Dude, you freaking have wands that make fireballs appear when you point them at people, and our weapons shatter like the glass they are when they hit you. Anyway, we know these big jerks..."
  
  The same is true of India and Sub-Saharan Africa, where various chiefs and leaders tried to use Europeans against both their rival compatriots and the other colonizing influence, absent from the New World: Islam. Why does science fiction always blithely assume that the world would unite against an alien invasion, or that friendly aliens would want them united? Why does it assume that hostile aliens would manipulate humans into fighting each other? Cortez didn't want to fight the Aztecs, his Indian allies pretty much forced his hand. If they're bothering to talk at all, they can be manipulated (which would be a good justification, indeed just about the only one, for one of those "screw you, we just want you to die" alien invasions).
• It is generally true that, not having to counteract friction, spaceships' engines should only glow while they're being fired. Did you sense a "but" coming? If so, you're perceptive. Because there are exceptions. Some spaceship engines take a long time to cool down or warm up, so you wouldn't actually turn them off, you'd just turn off the propellant-flow (engines like that heat faster if you're not firing them—the whole way rockets work is that the exhaust carries energy away—so radiators are even more important than usual for ships like that). You might still see some light deep inside the nozzles of that sort of rocket.
  
  Of course, the major category of engines that don't just turn off are a thing you never see in visual-media SF, and seldom in print. Because the big one is the NERVA/ROVER nuclear thermal rocket—it cools down and heats up about as quickly (or rather as slowly) as a submarine engine, because that's basically what it is, but with a hydrogen exhaust-stream swapped in for the turbine-moving steam. They're not used in fiction because despite making our current rockets look like the toys they are, they're still boringly weak for plot purposes (they may get you to Mars three times as fast but that's still two months, and most SF settings are not assuming Age of Sail travel times). Well, that, and our flint-knapping hunter-gatherer taboo on the very concept of fission.
• So it's actually relatively common knowledge—I think Cracked writers know about it, and they generally need two tries to put sunglasses on the front of their heads—that cyborgs as portrayed in fiction would actually rip themselves apart from the strain (although a lot of fictional cyborgs actually have their whole skeletons and many tissues reinforced—like many "fiction is so inaccurate" complaints, it is itself often inaccurate). But what doesn't seem to be common knowledge is that cyborgs would be sharply limited by power requirements.
  
  It is possible to power things like Pacemakers from the body's own magnetic field, and in principle one could power things like prosthetic limbs with the same amount of energy that goes to normal ones (though I'm guessing the inefficiency of converting between the body's energy system and an electronic one would mean you'd actually have to increase your caloric intake by better than 50%, relative to the proportion of your caloric output a given limb takes up). But if your prosthetic limb has markedly greater strength than a human, you're going to need batteries.
  
  You could actually get some cool body-horror out of, say, battle-cyborgs who can no longer eat because their digestive tracts have been removed to make room for battery packs (and they get their replacement nutrients, which might include raw materials for self-repair systems, in an injection). The kind of enhancement shown in a lot of fiction, admittedly not the hardest—not therapeutic prosthetics, not even a double or even triple-strength limb (which wouldn't actually translate to doubled capabilities, thanks to the aforementioned structural issues of the rest of the body), I mean the "dozens or hundreds of times stronger" things—would require that kind of major anatomical reworking, for the remotely foreseeable future. Unless the cyborgs also carry highly-volatile batteries the size of a largish oxygen tank like an emphysema-sufferer might lug around, and that's not a liability in a battle, at all.
• It seems like, in a delicious irony, so far from space never seeing dogfighting, it might at some point become the only place it happens. We still have plane-to-plane fights, no matter how good our missiles or how fast our fighters get—it's just that nowadays "dogfights" happen at ranges of thirty kilometers. But improvements in drone tech might (along with all the other things they're ruining) finally put paid to that, because a drone can endure maneuvers that'd shred a pilot.
  
  But in space? Well, nothing on the surface of this planet is more than about .15 seconds away, for a radio signal. In space, lag kills, and anything close enough to a drone to control it is close enough to get attacked along with it (there isn't "terrain" for you to hide in, nothing on a planet's surface offers a comparison for just how exposed you are in space). There's no reason not to cut out the middleman and put the weapons that would've gone on a drone on the ship that would control the drone. Of course, the ship would still probably have a more-than-solo crew, and it wouldn't behave like a P-38 or a Sopwith Camel, but you knew that.

Tenuous Stuff from Which the World Was Made

Post on worldbuilding. Quote's from Belloc's cracked-out dedication in "On Nothing and Kindred Subjects":

...Indeed, indeed when I think what an Elixir is this Nothing I am for putting up a statue nowhere, on a pedestal that shall not exist, and for inscribing on it in letters that shall never be written:

TO NOTHING

THE HUMAN RACE IN GRATITUDE.

...

Now when [the Elohim—here deliberately mistranslated as an actual rather than an honorific plural] had got that far, and debated the Idea in detail, and with amendment and resolve, it very greatly concerned them of what so admirable a compost should be mixed. Some said of this, and some said of that, but in the long run it was decided by the narrow majority of eight in a full house that Nothing was the only proper material out of which to make this World of theirs, and out of Nothing they made it: as it says in the Ballade:

Dear, tenuous stuff, of which the world was made.

And again in the Envoi:

Prince, draw this sovereign draught in your despair,
That when your riot in that rest is laid,
You shall be merged with an Essential Air:—
Dear, tenuous stuff, of which the world was made!

Out of Nothing then did they proceed to make the world, this sweet world...

And it goes on like that. My God but that man could ramble. Anyway, again, worldbuilding.

• How come elves in things are dying off? I mean, I know the real reason—because they are in Tolkien—but in-universe, why? A human female will average 462 fertile periods in her lifetime (menarche at 12.5, menopause at 51, roughly 12 cycles a year)—minus pregnancies, and periods spent breastfeeding. Elves in most fantasy settings exhibit at least comparable fertility, relative to their life-spans. And elves have better medicine and fewer wars than humans in every setting I can think of except Dark Sun, so they'd have a much lower infant mortality rate. If the elves were as worried by humans "edging them out" as they're always portrayed, there's absolutely no reason they couldn't do something about it, except Authorial Fiat.
  
  The "elves as dying race" thing is simply a worldbuilding mistake. Tolkien got it from the Romantics who saw "faërie" retreating before modernity (Chesterton, who not being a university professor wasn't so easily fooled, saw the modern world as just another place where the unwary might get spirited away); other writers get it from Irish legend, whose fairies are mostly mythologized aborigines conflated with the Celtic equivalents of nymphs and yakshas. You won't find the fairies in Norse myth in retreat from humans, nor in any Eastern European folklore, nor in Asia (in many ways, still not in Asia—America or Western Europe could never produce the manga "Fuan no Tane"). Just the opposite: humans live on tiny little reservations in the midst of vast domains ruled by other people.
• Speaking of people blindly following unexamined precedent, what's with all the mages and thieves having guilds? Mages might have apprentices, but not on a guild basis, they're on the same basis that rabbis and pre-Trent priests trained their successors (often their sons, in the case of rabbis and non-celibate priests)—the Sorcerer's Apprentice (the poem by Goethe or the piece of music used in Fantasia) is almost certainly based on an Ashkenazi golem-legend. Thieves' guilds, on the other hand, are pretty much because of Leiber—because Lankhmar is so decadent, even its thieves (and assassins and prostitutes) have hidebound professional associations. Also, metafictionally, Lankhmar is New York, so of course everybody's union.
  
  Thieves in fantasy probably ought to learn their trade the way real thieves do: they fall in with a bad crowd and/or grow up in unpleasant circumstances, and develop their abilities either under the influence of said bad crowd, and/or as necessity to survive. They eventually graduate from petty theft to more specialized, rarefied arts like safe-cracking or the fantasy equivalent, or else move onto more lucrative versions of petty theft, like stealing cars (of course, it doesn't take three or four years to produce a car, it does take that long to produce a rideable horse...so horse-thieving is often a capital crime).
  
  Mages, meanwhile, probably ought to learn like someone else in the society the setting is analogized to. I.e., if the mages are the nobles (or a part of them) in a medievalesque setting, they should probably learn on the squire-basis used by knights. If they're the clergy, then, oddly enough, they really could have magical universities, because the original purpose of universities was training theologians. Or whatever training is appropriate—if the setting's more like China, maybe magical trials take the place of the civil-service exams. Has anyone ever had mages whose training is like that of geishas (maybe with spirits as the clients)? That idea practically writes itself; work smarter, not harder, people!
• But seriously, find an alternative to wizard schools, no matter how justifiable wizard colleges are from a worldbuilding standpoint. The idea's been done to death. It was already cliché as hell when Harry Potter did it. Then light novels and manga proceeded to beat that dead horse to stiff peaks, because they shoehorn in a school-setting whenever remotely possible, to enhance "relatability" for their audience (Japanese minors spend more time at school than in all other waking activities combined, though admittedly part of that's because their sports and other organized leisure activities are mostly through school clubs).
  
  Thieves' and mages' guilds are also overdone (see above), and what's worse, 90% of the time, wrong. They're usually portrayed as working like a combination of a trade union and an employment agency. That's not what a guild is. A guild is a professional association crossed with a credit union. First off, why don't thieves or mages have to perform "masterworks" to get full membership? Second, why do guilds seem to have leaders? The head of the AMA or the ADA are not the leaders of all doctors or dentists, they're just the chairmen of their meetings. That's what the head of a guild is.
  
  Of course, as a general rule, mages or thieves would not receive work through their guild, anymore than you contact the bar association if you need a lawyer. A guild has very little actual presence in its members' lives; they have to follow its rules (which sounds terrible until you say the magic words "unlicensed doctor"), but they don't, strictly speaking, have to pay dues, because again, not a union. While a guild often gets a cut of its members' profits, that's usually because guilds double as credit-unions for their members, and were also the main source of insurance in the premodern world. "All the members pay in" is how insurance works, you know.
• Not directly related to fantasy, but related to cultural history and anthropology (and brought to mind by the thing about how many fertile periods a woman has in her lifetime)...do you know why there's all those taboos on menstruation? Yes, blood—but there's more to it than that. In hunter-gatherer and most subsistence-agriculture societies, people married pretty much the moment they could have kids. A woman spent most of her time pregnant or nursing; hunter-gatherer and especially subsistence-agriculturist men travel little, virtually never very far without their wives, so couples pretty much spent every night together, with predictable results.
  
  That means that for most women in prehistory, when all our taboos were actually forming, menstruation was a weird and unusual thing. And given it involves blood coming from one's privates, it's pretty weird even when it's not unusual. While menstruation would become less shocking in a more advanced society (societies whose agriculture could produce surpluses tended to held off marriage at least to the late teens, meaning a typical girl would probably have a couple years of monthly periods), the taboos would already be in place.
• Don't assume, however, that you understand a purity code without reference to its actual content. Some dumbshit Scandinavian scholar (who really should've known better—except of course for ideology-blindness), cited on a Wikipedia article, claimed that the fact the Norse had a god of childbirth indicated that they didn't regard menstruation as unclean. Leaving to one side that childbirth != menstruation, I'm sure that reasoning would come as a surprise to Korean shamans, who have a goddess of childbirth and yet will throw women out of rituals if they're menstruating.
  
  And yet, while death is a pollution, and Asian religions have several taboos about, for instance, visiting a household that's in mourning (it's common decency to visit to offer condolences, but it's also common sense to take ritual precautions), the dead themselves are not a pollution in Korean shamanism. The opposite: shamans are the only people who can deal with ancestor-spirits safely, outside the framework of Confucian ancestor-worship. You see how you have to actually examine the traditions? Assuming will just cause confusion.
• Remember how I was worrying about having a carriage in a quasi-12th century setting? That's the kind of thing I get up to. But as a general rule, consider what technologies you take for granted, in fantasy (also in science fiction though it's less urgent there). Know why Rome burned, Nero-provided soundtrack optional? Their houses were wood and stone chimneys weren't invented till the early Middle Ages, that's why. Seriously, watch a Japanese period drama: notice what you got in the middle of rooms? Fire-pits. Asia didn't get the chimney till Westernization. Most Japanese houses still don't have central heating, hence the prominence of the kotatsu, a heated table with a quilt-skirt that you sit at to stay warm. (While we're on the subject, hey Bethesda, smithies with wooden overhangs connected to wooden houses? Seriously? Stop that, Skyrim's blacksmiths are more of a fire-hazard than the dragons ever were.)
  
  Or hey, know what the Maya didn't have (besides the wheel or the arch)? Multiplication and division. They did math the way computers do, they added or subtracted a whole lot. They also didn't have fractions (mathematically; they did have the linguistic concepts of half and quarter)—those ultra-accurate calculations of theirs were solely achieved by direct observation, with no extrapolation. They measured the time it took for the sun to appear at the same spots relative to their observatory windows—specifically that it took 182,621 days for it to appear at the same precise spot 500 times, which is an error of only 17 seconds—but, lacking fractions and division, they could not express that as "a year is 182,621/500 days long". That the Maya had calculated the length of a year as being 365.242 days long is something we can say about them; that "182,621 days is exactly 500 years" automatically tells you the length of a single year was not something they were directly able to express—again, they lacked the concepts of division and fractions.
  
  Any math teacher will tell you, the conceptual leap involved there is not automatic.
• Another thing one ought to do is study etiquette. Go look up the Japanese tea ceremony, or for that matter the etiquette surrounding consumption of Tibetan butter tea. That former case is full of possibilities for fantasy writers. For instance, you're supposed to make a soft slurping noise when you drink (only a soft one). Now, that's probably a parallel of the fact it's also proper to make a certain amount of noise when eating (only a little—eating loudly is still rude in Japan). Mainly it shows eagerness and appetite, a hearty acceptance of the food offered. Remember, Pacific islanders: food is important to them.
  
  There might, however, be another element. A lot of the ideas in the tea ceremony presuppose that the participants are strangers, hence all its adages about making single meetings as good as a lifetime (i.e., you wouldn't want someone to find you unpleasant your whole life, so don't make their single meeting with you unpleasant, either). Them being strangers, it is entirely possible that the slight noise upon sipping the tea is to show the others that you're drinking the tea: and thus haven't drugged it. Slavers were an issue in remote areas during the Edo period, and also, well, there was a reason Japanese women used pseudonyms well into the Meiji era. Namely? Witches.
  
  Sounds crazy to you, but anyone who knows any Navajo customs will tell you, they don't traditionally let strangers anywhere near their food or the areas to prepare it. Lots of people's word for witch means "poisoner", and almost everybody's witches made scary potions that could be slipped into drinks. I don't know if "I haven't put anything in this tea, see, I'm drinking it" was a factor in tea-ceremony, but in a fantasy setting? That would make perfect sense as a part of etiquette.

Quenderin

Title's Quenya, idiomatically means "elvish" but literally means "pertaining to speakers". Have you seen this? It's Ardalambion ("About the Languages of Middle-earth"), a huge ol' site about Tolkien's languages. Some of the pages use weird colors, so...y'all consider your eyeballs to have been warned.

Apparently the appendix in Return of the King RE: Westron is kind of perfunctory. It implies, by saying that it changed masculine -a endings to our masculine -o, for instance, that Bilbo and Frodo are named Bilba and Froda, when in fact they were named Bilba and Maura. I assumed on the basis of Boffin=Bophîn that Baggins=Baghîn, when in fact the original of Baggins is Labingi (and Bag End is Laban-neg, "laban" means "sack"). The Shire is called Sûzat, not Sûza (which is just "a shire")—Westron, like Romanian and the Scandinavian languages, makes its definite article with a suffix, and hasn't got an indefinite (well, Romanian has one, but I don't think any of the Scandinavians do, and if they do, it's probably borrowed from West Germanic).

There are also entire poems—one about the fall of Númenor—in Adûnaic (Númenorean), which is the ancestor of Westron. I actually think there might be sufficient corpus, with a few creative additions, to fulfill my (mad) dream of a production of Lord of the Rings that is entirely in constructed languages.

For instance, the dwarves (nargi, s. narag) that Bilbo Baggins (Bilba Labingi) entertains at Bag End (Laban-neg):

1. Thorin Oakenshield, from Norse Þorinn Eikinskjaldi; Þorinn probably means "the Thunder" (and "Oakenshield" is probably also somehow Thor-related, that being his sacred tree). Westron doesn't have an attested word for "thunder", Quenya does, Funda—>Hunda. How about Hundat Darûndirn, built from Elvish roots (which Westron also has lots of), which would feel more prestigious to Westron speakers (as befits the Heir of Durin)?
2. Dori means "borer" or "driller" in Old Norse, so how about "Phura", from the same root as Phurunargian (the Dwarrowdelf)?
3. Nori supposedly means "little bit", so "Miya", from Adûnaic miyi, "small".
4. Ori means "violent", how about "Azgara", from the Adûnaic for "wage war"?
5. Óin comes from Old Norse Óinn, "the shy"; the closest I can get is Hampa, Quenya for "restrained".
6. Glóin comes from something like "the glowing one", so it could be Kalima, which is the Quenya word for "bright" and also probably related to Merry's real name. It might, in other words, mean "cheerful".
7. Kili means "wedge-user", so I say Felka, from Dwarvish felak "chisel"—Dwarves may use Dwarvish-derived "outer names" while still keeping their "inner names" secret, like how King Azaghâl probably isn't his real name.
8. Fili means "file-user", so let's go with Mula, from Quenya mul- "grind".
9. Bifur means "beaver" and by extension "hard worker", so Mota, from Quenya móta, "labor".
10. Bofur comes from Bofurr, with a nasalized "O", but apparently nobody knows what it means.
11. Bombur probably comes from "swollen", so Tuya, from Quenya tiuya, "to swell".
12. Balin is theorized to come from "the burning one", which could give us Urat via Quenya "urya" and "urwa".
13. Dwalin comes, undisputably, from "the sleeping one", so it could be Humat, from Quenya's word for "sleep".

Of course, there's one more dwarf-name involved in The Hobbit:

14. Gandalf, the "wand elf", which in Westron would be something like Olunnimir, from Quenya "olwen" for "wand" and Adûnaic "nimir" for "elf".

How weird is that business with Óin and Glóin and Ori and Dwalin? I wonder if Disney got the names for the Seven Dwarfs from the Voluspa's dwarf-list (the Dvergatal), same as Tolkien did.

De Romanicorum Theoriarum V

Fantasy, science fiction, writing.

• This dissection of the Super Mario Bros movie is an interesting look back at the first of the "let's pith a brand for the name recognition and toss away the content as a useless husk" movies. But one thing I thought was funny was that the writer gives that movie too much credit, or rather ignores what the movie says about things she does credit. She describes Jurassic Park (which came out at the same time and, well, didn't suck) as "an auteur-driven, smartly conceived demographic buster". But read the article: that's exactly what they were trying to have Super Mario Bros be. Admittedly each of the writers they brought in thought he was the auteur, which brings up proverbs about cooks and broth (and reminds one of the David Lynch Dune), but what motive is there to make Super Mario Bros another Blade Runner—yes, that idea actually informed their adaptation—apart from the desire to see your film described as "smartly conceived"?
  
  And let's be frank: Jurassic Park is a monster movie. Yes, it's got interesting ideas about hubris and technological overreach. So does Frankenstein; so does The Fly. Still a monster movie. If people had noticed that the important thing about Mario is that it is about a guy who saves a princess from a giant fire-breathing turtle—no social commentary, no satire, just "rescue the girl"—they might well have made an intelligent movie (though it might've helped if anyone involved had even heard the name "Miyamoto Shigeru"). Legend of Zelda uses the same basic premise as Mario, and they've been doing the best work in fantasy, bar absolutely nothing, for 25 years. Hell, most of Skyward Sword was about a guy who rides a pelican saving a girl from a giant flaming pangolin; that doesn't change the fact it was better than all fantasy produced in the West since, oh, 1998, combined.
• I haven't read "On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society"—which comes up a lot in discussions of military science fiction, hence why I bring it up here—but the people who reference it lead me to suspect it's not all it's cracked up to be. Several of them, for instance, discussing the average soldier's reluctance to kill, cite the thousands of rounds expelled in modern wars for every enemy casualty inflicted. But those don't demonstrate that soldiers are deliberately missing (which is the implied claim); they demonstrate that laying down machinegun suppression-fire uses a lot of ammunition.
  
  Now, again, I have not read the book. It may be that the people who cite it put forth that stat on their own, as evidence for the book's argument, without the book itself doing so. And the argument is fundamentally sound—most people are hesitant to kill. It takes discipline and/or brainwashing to get people able to kill when the need arises, that's why both honor-codes and propaganda are permanent fixtures of war, even among stone-age hunter-gatherers. That's also why specialized warrior-classes are the norm, not the exception, among cultures with any division of labor beyond "men hunt, women cook".
  
  But nevertheless, I think, the book does suffer from being recommended by people who commit that "cum hoc ergo propter hoc" fallacy. And I think its main claims about hesitancy to kill are somewhat culturally biased, since it mainly deals with post-Baby Boom Americans. The attitude about killing in our culture is colored at least as much by suburban middle-class affluence and security as it is by violent media and popular culture.
• I like the wizard-spell system in D&D, except that I don't like the "you forget the spell once you cast it". Jack Vance needed a limit on his wizards in the Dying Earth stories, so he had them only able to force their brains to take a few spells. Vance's weird gimmick was borrowed by Gary Gygax because he realized MP are a pain in the ass in a tabletop game. Only, why do you forget your spells? For that matter, why is memorizing spells how they're prepared? Instead, you can have that the wizard, rather than memorizing the spells from his book, performs rituals beforehand that he can complete later to cast the spells. Once he uses 'em up he has to rest and perform new rituals.
  
  Sorcerers, of course, would be people who essentially perform a ritual once, and can cast it and any of the other rituals they've performed ad hoc—though only some per day, and then they have to rest. Really, of course, the sorcerer-class was a way to make Charisma no longer the universal dump-stat, and to essentially introduce the versatility of MP-like spellcasting without having to screw with MP. Why they cast their spells from Charisma makes next to no sense (same goes for paladins, who cast from Charisma rather than Wisdom in 3e, mostly to make them easier to roll up), unless we're going with an obsolete sense of Charisma as "divine favor" (which makes some sense in the case of paladins, actually, since they cast priest-spells, but who the hell are sorcerers impressing to get their spells?).
  
  And while the "have to rest after they've cast all their spells" mechanic is often used as justification for that optional rule where bonus spells/day is determined by Constitution rather than Intelligence or Charisma, I don't think it has to be. People who are smarter or more charismatic may find their spells less draining, after all, because their power doesn't derive from their body's endurance, although it affects it.
• Saw most of the pilot of Defiance. It's really, really dumb, obviously trying—far too hard—to ape little bits of Game of Thrones and Firefly and Mass Effect. Like Firefly, it's got glamorized prostitution and utterly lackluster garage-sale production design. Like Game of Thrones, it's got gratuitous politicking and conniving. Like Mass Effect, it's got interspecies sex as anatomically and chemically possible, only even worse, it's interfertile, which I don't think even Mass Effect was stupid enough to think made sense.
  
  Most of it is just puerile TV-science fiction crap we've come to expect from the Syphilis Channel—that crap-factory seems to get the same results whether they're trying way too hard or not trying at all—but the brothel needs a moment more examination. When Whedon created Inara, he demolished not only his claim that there was no racism/orientalism in Firefly, but also his far more publicized claim to be a feminist. Because prostitution is, pretty much always, at least de facto slavery. The exceptions are in the most decadent phases of extremely patriarchal societies, like late Imperial Rome and a certain part of the Edo Period in Japan, when women's normal lives are so bad that prostitution actually looks like a step up. Is that the society Defiance takes place in? Because I don't root for societies like that. I want them annihilated with all convenient speed, I don't think that's usually what you're going for with a protagonist-culture.
  
  And don't say "it's going to happen anyway, we need to be able to regulate it", as is so often said by self-proclaimed feminists and libertarians who have probably called someone else a hypocrite at some point in their lives, which is just plain wrong. Guess what, organized crime is going to assassinate people anyway, does that mean we need to make it legal so we can license hitmen? And assassination can be done far more honorably than is possible with pimping. Merely because we cannot eliminate an evil action completely is not grounds for legalizing it, you quitters, you do realize the same argument goes for all crimes?
• I recently finally saw the Peter Jackson Hobbit. He did a better job with it than with the Lord of the Rings, but I still have complaints (you shoulda seen that coming). First off, is that Thorin's companions are not supposed to be crude, belching, Scottish- or Welsh-accented dwarves. This is Tolkien, not Warcraft. Tolkien Dwarves are Semitic, not Norse; the Germanic names are the result of the translation convention that also calls Razanur "Peregrine" and Karningul "Rivendell", and aren't their real ones anyway. The Dwarves in the book are explicitly said to have very good manners, apart from a certain gruffness (and their messing with Bilbo's head RE: his dishes). I would dearly love to ask Peter Jackson where he gets his penchant for treating the Dwarves as comic relief, because they really, really are not. Read the Silmarillion sometime: at the Battle of Unnumbered Tears, King Azaghâl wounded Glaurung the Black (the most powerful of all dragons) so badly he had to retreat, though Azaghâl died doing it. His followers bore him from the field singing a dirge, and not even Balrogs tried to stop them.
  
  The other issue, though, is that even Thorin isn't that paranoid. For one thing his grudge would be with Thranduil, a Sindar lord ruling over one part of the remnant of Thingol's domain of Doriath (I believe the other part is Celeborn's domain of Lothlórien); he would only have a typical dwarf's coolness to outsiders, or towards Elves, for Elrond, the lord of the last Noldor remaining in Middle-Earth. Also? If Thorin did have any such issue, it's entirely likely that Elrond would say, essentially, "You do realize that I and the other major Noldor noble, my mother-in-law Galadriel, both speak your secret language? We visited Khazâd-Dûm all the time before Durin's Bane awoke. Do you really think you have secrets we're interested in?"
  
  Actually there's one other thing: while Thror might have become greedy (presumably his ownership of one of the Seven would place him under the resurgent power of Sauron at Dol Goldur—increasing their greed is the only thing the Seven do to their wearers, because Dwarves are less easily-moved than Men), he would not have taken the finding of the Arkenstone as a sign he ruled by divine right. As the head of the clan of Durin, greatest of the seven Dwarf-lords personally crafted by Aulë the Smith, of course he ruled by divine right. He doesn't need some shiny rock to tell him that.
• It seems my endorsement of the New 52 was as premature as the condemnations of it. The Lantern-family of books are all pretty good, but some of the other series? Not so much. Justice League doesn't have J'onn in it; instead he's in this BS "Stormwatch" thing, apparently the source of "The Authority", which is basically the answer to the question "what if Mark Millar had created X-Factor?"; it's a grievous waste of probably my favorite or second-favorite DC character. The new Superman? Garbage. They One More Day-ed Clark's marriage to Lois (which admittedly doesn't exist in every continuity anyway, e.g. All-Star Superman), put in some perfunctorily-veiled Fox News-bashing...it was just bad. On the plus side, Kal's new suit looks pretty boss: no underwear on the outside!
  
  On the other hand, the new Supergirl is pretty good, not least because it's mostly about stuff relating to Krypton. The Worldkillers are neat (they're all female because, come on, they're fighting Kara, you figure it out). This version is probably the cutest Kara in many ways (character-development wise, I mean, she's been drawn better though this one is more convincingly a teenager than many), and I like the whole she-remembers-Kal-as-a-baby-but-now-he's-older-than-her thing. It's never wrong to go with a twin paradox if you can ever afford it. I don't know if I approve of making "quite obviously a cheap knockoff Lex Luthor" the villain, although I do like the plot developments that actually happened around him. Also, "Simon Tycho" is a cool name for a bad guy.

Comentario 3

Piensas al azar. Post 473, which is 11×43 and the sum of five consecutive primes.

• It's somewhat amusing, when people try and claim knights were really just a bunch of thugs, to watch the sleight of hand they engage in. One trick is that they generally will say that the "conventional" view of knighthood is the one that comes from the literature of the High Middle Ages (1100-1300, or 1091-1348), whereas the reality...is a list of incidents from the era immediately preceding that, e.g. the exploits of Foulques the Black, 972-1040.
  
  It's an amusing sport; let's try it with other cultures! I mean, the literature of the Edo period claimed samurai were loyal to their lords, but while the warlords were jockeying for position after Nobunaga's death, samurai changed sides all the time! American literature in the 1920s assumed America was opposed to slavery, but Americans in 1860 owned slaves!
  
  I'm sorry, if your statement about a period hinges on events that didn't happen during it, you're not only a liar, you're also a thundering moron. Also? "All knights are thugs" is the conventional view, how old are you?
• If I had even less of a life than I do, I'd find it interesting to catalog the number of take-downs of Eragon that are themselves as bad as Eragon. Yes, Paolini's a hack who knocked off Tolkien, Lucas, and McCaffrey, and knows almost as little about linguistics as Karen "Uwe Boll of literature" Traviss (although she was about three times as old, when she made Mando'a, as Paolini was when he made the Ancient Language). His books are transparent adolescent fetishism and wish-fulfillment, and his protagonists are wall-to-wall Mary Sues.
  
  That doesn't legitimize your illiterate taboo on various fantasy tropes, your stupid attempts to nitpick words whose definitions you don't know (roots can indeed be "convoluted", saying so just makes you a dork), your racist tokenism (if the setting were based on Africa would you complain there were no white people?), or your getting sidetracked onto detailing your own fetishes while criticizing Paolini for regaling us with his. Seriously, you're only providing ammunition to his deluded followers; look how much work the Stalin-defending fellow travelers got out of "Hitler was anti-Communist".
• Speaking of Traviss, apparently she doesn't read fiction. Which, I mean, we suspected—she also plainly doesn't read anything on linguistics. But seriously, also, her hate for the Jedi apparently stems from her deciding, as Pommies seem to love to do totally at random, that the Jedi and Sith represented Nazi race theories (which are different from British race theories because they were written about in German). Yes, she seriously said the Jedi are a Nazi master race.
  
  Except, of course, that the Mandalorians she created fit that particular description far better than the Jedi ever did—they're probably more Nazi-esque than the freaking Empire, and, uh, just think about that for a second. The greatest thing a Mandalorian can be is a parent...i.e., a perpetuator of the Herrenvolk. They pretty much go to war solely for Lebensraum, and at one point their moral superiority to the Jedi is summed up in the Jedi not having callused hands from digging. Do I actually have to show you the Nazi pamphlets?
  
  Come to think of it I might owe Uwe Boll an apology.
• People's weird ideas about clones make me sad, and by sad I mean "homicidally annoyed". Guess what? A clone is no different from a twin, because—guess what else—a twin (an identical one anyway) is a clone. The idea that clones "might not have souls", or alternatively that cloning would somehow disprove the idea of a soul, is asinine. Again: do identical twins lack souls?
  
  Of course, then again, most people don't actually have a right to an opinion about whether anything has a soul, because they don't know what the damn word means. Newsflash, everything has a soul; all "soul" means in actual philosophy is "that which makes it what it is". Sapient beings' souls are different from those of other living things, which are different from those of inanimate objects; but if an entity is sapient, it has the exact same kind of soul as any other sapient.
• I was worried that I might need to come up with a reason why the people in my book go slogging around in armor that looks like, well, armor, rather than in light, comfy carbon-nanotube bulletproof garments. One issue I already noticed is that even if a nanotube garment prevents a bullet from penetrating, it still won't stop the force—you'll just be very tidily-bagged shattered bones and pummeled organs. The Mongols' silk shirts were more-or-less arrowproof, but there was a reason the Mongol aristocracy also wore metal armor. But then I got to thinking, and did a little research. And the major reason they don't use nanotube clothes, is price.
  
  Consider. It takes 180,000 feet of silk thread to make one yard (square) of silk fabric; it takes about two square yards of fabric just to make a t-shirt. And nanotubes, at about 70 nanometers thick, are 143 times thinner than silk fibers. So a single nanotube t-shirt would take 51,480,000 feet of nanotube fiber, or 15,691 km. A space elevator is 35,786 km long, so every 2.28 nanotube t-shirts would cost as much as the cable for a space-elevator. It would take the equivalent of 86,000 space elevators to outfit just the current Marine Corps active-duty numbers; imagine outfitting a combined force recruited from every country on Earth!
• A number of the criticisms leveled at Superman comics are fundamentally wrongheaded—the people making them generally being largely unacquainted with the last decade or three of the comics' continuity. You know how Superman catching people should snap their spines? Yeah, well, that might be a valid criticism of Spider-man, but not our boy Kal. Similarly, how he should just slam through the hull of an aircraft, rather than catching it? Nope again. See, Kryptonians under the effects of a yellow sun aren't actually super-strong. They're telekinetic. Superman proper has to manipulate objects with his hands, but some other Kryptonians have learned to dissociate the effect from physical handling, and can just make things float.
  
  Similarly, those explosions Kal survives, up to and including low-grade nukes? Yeah, Kryptonians aren't just indomitable mountains of muscle, either. They're basically only tenuously matter; they can just as easily be regarded as not-very-versatile energy beings. Incidentally the same is true of Maltusians (better known as Guardians of Oa) and Martians and Czarnians, although Czarnians are somewhat more vulnerable, having deliberately engineered the effect rather than achieving it on their own. (Lobo isn't an energy-being so much as he is a nanomachine swarm—he's even been used as a Gray Goo weapon on occasion.)
  
  Humans were going to achieve the same powers as Kryptonians and Martians (they're related to both in some way), but they were sabotaged by the White Martians, who didn't want the competition. The Martians' own fear of fire is the result of similar sabotage, brainwashed into them by the Guardians to keep them from overrunning the rest of the cosmos.
• This DeviantArt article is an example of why, I think, people need to stop arguing that the population at large knows reality from fantasy. Because read those comments: a substantial majority are by people who think drones are autonomous robots, probably nearly half predicated on the assumption that we can actually make AI. In other words, these people judged an issue in real politics based on what they've seen in movies. And not only because movies influenced their perceptions of right and wrong: they not only assumed the movies showed that correctly, they assumed the movies showed facts—current conditions—correctly.
  
  Just so we're all on the same page, drones are remote controlled. They have no autonomy whatsoever; forget AI, they don't so much as correct for turbulence without operator input. And there are no new legal issues raised by their use against terrorist targets, trials or no, American citizens or no. Terrorists are not citizens of any country, their official legal status is "enemy of the human race". No sane person disputes that it is permissible to send in special forces to assassinate them—so it is also permissible to kill them with remote-controlled airplanes. Technology does not change morals, if it's moral to kill you with a stone axe or a steel sword than it's moral to kill you with a tungsten-carbide kinetic-energy penetrator dropped from an orbiting platform.
• Pretty good anime season this spring. Dansai Bunri no Crime Edge ("Crime Edge of Cutting and Severing"), the cutest manga about serial killers ever written, has an anime out, and it's excellent. Mushibugyô, about people hunting giant demon insects in the Edo Period, was a decent manga (all three times it was rebooted), and it's got an anime. Karneval's a neat, weird little josei manga, along the lines of Tripeace but for a female audience and minus the transvestitery. Hentai Ôji to Warawanai Neko (The Perverted Prince and the Unsmiling Cat) was a weird, kinda dumb manga, but it's getting an anime, although I haven't seen it yet. Date A Live is a tolerable light novel (most light novels are tolerable at best, with only a few standouts like Baka Test and Slayers), it's got an anime that I haven't bothered to watch.
  
  There's three mecha series this season, all of them worth a look. Suisei no Gargantia, which no way no how means "Gargantia of the Verdurous Planet" ("verdurous" means "with flourishing vegetation", and the planet in question is nothing but ocean), is excellent science fiction. Ginga Kikôtai Majestic Prince is pretty neat, albeit it's in the generic Sunrise anime style (see also S-Cry-Ed and Gundam SEED), and half the jokes only make sense if you're familiar with the conventions of tokusatsu shows. Kakumeiki Valvrave is all right, albeit a bit Jingoistic—plus a series where people who live in a Dyson sphere behave exactly like contemporary Japanese high-schoolers, though par for the course, is a little hard to take running at the same time as Gargantia, with its genuine worldbuilding.

They Are All Nifty

Last Samurai reference, Sluggified.

I just spent probably the last week doing an archive binge of Sluggy Freelance, which is probably the best webcomic ever. It's consistently funny, yet manages to also be very dramatic, without giving either quality short-shrift. It's got some genuinely interesting ideas, like the fate-spider, the Ocean Unmoving, and the zombies that can only regenerate tissue-types they eat (i.e., if one of those zombies wants to keep from becoming mindless, it has to eat brains).

And it has Bun-bun, who is pretty much the best use of the "psychopath hero" ever, or at least in the top three with Lina Inverse and Lobo (his later characterization even talks like Lina, e.g. here, except macho). His fights are often genuinely excellent action sequences, with some of the best fight dialogue in fiction—and they're also all automatically hilarious, because he's a tiny little rabbit. With a switchblade.

The writing and art are consistently good. The fights, especially Oasis', are genuinely interesting comic art on par with any achievement in the field that you care to name; the girls are cute without being too fan-servicey. The writing manages to have characterization without losing comedy, and the plots resolve satisfyingly while leaving enough loose ends for later. Also, the conclusion of the 4U City arc reveals an important principle in writing: you can have any Deus Ex Machina you want, if you pull it off cool enough.

I am, however, really glad I saw Rise of the Guardians before I read the Holiday Wars arc; I wouldn't have been able to watch that movie without making Black Ops Elves jokes.