Incorrélées mais pas sans cause

Boy it's hard to figure out how to say "Uncorrelated, not Uncaused" in French. Pensées au hasard!

• My search for the way to say "random thought" in French led me to the philosophical concept of chance. Apparently Aristotle distinguishes between chance and luck, chance being "automaton" and luck being "tyche". The difference is the former just happens, and the latter involves the gods.
  
  It was neat to me, since my felinoids make that same distinction—when they say "may things go well" they're basically expressing their desire that chance is to the hearer's advantage, without the superstitious invocation of luck. What's funny to me is the number of people who think luck is distinguished not from chance, but from destiny, when plainly the kind of mystical airy-fairy it-sure-is-good-she-leaves-glasses-around-the-house-because-water-burns-the-aliens kind of destiny, is luck in that sense. If that seems odd to you, it's because you're only familiar with cultures informed by Christianity.


• Still, though, to the people who think the aliens in Signs being burned by water makes it a stupid movie: dudes, when did any of the aliens say why they were there? Did they say they wanted to colonize, or do anything else that a species burned by water wouldn't do on Earth? No, all we know about them is they're here and they're hostile.
  
  Did it occur to you, maybe they're alien asshole fratboys, and going to earth and messing with the locals is their hazing? "Freak out the monsters who live on a planet covered in hydrochloric acid" sounds pretty hardcore to me, maybe it's some macho thing. Again, we don't know what the aliens are doing.


• I don't think I mentioned it, but I recently acquired a copy of "The High Frontier" by Gerard K. O'Neill, as in "Island 3" O'Neill. It's an awesome little book (is two too soon to say I collect books of this type?), but, much like Heppenheimer's "Colonies in Space", it makes too many invocations of apocryphal population apocalypses (that's their official name now, at least here; get on the bandwagon now!).
  
  Another book I've been reading recently is "The War on Population" by Jacqueline Kasun, which makes the case against the eugenics ethnic cleansing "population control" movement with, and I love this, statistics. Did you know that .3%, or three thousandths, of the earth's non-iced land surface is used by human settlement? Yeah. Add in our agriculture land and we only use 1/9, 11%. Or how about the fact that each man, woman, and child of the 1984 world population (5 billion) could live in Texas, each being given 139 square meters, or an average sized American home. Not each family: each individual. Every infant, every crone, everyone in between. Add them together and a family of five could have a 697 m², or 7500 square foot, home.
  
  Just improving world agriculture methods—not resources but just methods—to the state of the art available in 1984 (hardly Clarke's Third Law stuff by 2011 standards) would, all by itself, allow us to support 35.1 billion people at an American level of food intake. At a lower, but still first-world, level—she specifically mentions that of the Japanese—the world's agriculture resources could support, get this, 105.3 billion people.
  
  Again, remember how I said terraforming (and anthropogenic global warming alarmism) look more plausible the less you know about the scale of an atmosphere? Same goes for all this sort of talk. Planets are big things. There's a lot of room.


• Just in general, it's really fun to know statistics. A lot of the time, just switching stats from percents to fractions will blow people's minds, and it's always fun to switch a stat up by comparing relative population sizes, and being very specific with your phrasing. Seriously, anytime someone gives you a statistic, have them compare it to something else (I guess "put it in context"?). Too many people don't really understand their stats, they were just bewildered by the hieratic invocation of numbers.
  
  Speaking of, apparently dividing fractions (probably the easiest piece of arithmetic there is, I pretty much always express division by fractions if I have to work in my head) is hard for a lot of people. And people don't memorize the decimal equivalents of fractions, which is weird to me, since fractions are much easier to work with if you aren't using a calculator (and even then, if you've got parentheses keys and need to be exact). Say it with me: 1/2 is .5, 1/3 is .333333, 1/4 is .25, 1/5 is .2, 1/6 is .16666667, 1/7 doesn't matter to anyone but Bungie employees, 1/8 is .125, 1/9 is .1111111, 1/10 is .1. But did you know 1/11 is .09090909? And 2/11 is .18181818, 3/11 is .2727272727, on up to 10/11, which is .90909090, and 11/11, which is .999999999. I assume you see the pattern? Weird, huh?


• Speaking of aliens who get burned by water, the Newcomers in Alien Nation get burned by saltwater, right? I'd think living in LA, or any city anywhere near the coast, would be counter-indicated. And don't some of them have sex with humans? Now I ain't here to judge, but a fetish for severe chemical burns is taking your masochism a titch far (hint: it's "sweaty snugglebunnies"). When Dears is less far-fetched than your thing, it's officially too far-fetched.
  
  Still, their writing, that EKG looking thing, has gotta have the coolest ligatures of any fictional script ever.


• Remember the Chinese and their rocket-arrows, a state-of-the-art version of which was used by Admiral Yi Sunshin to fend off Hideyoshi's invasion of the Joseon kingdom? At least I assume you remember. Well the Chinese had that, and Admiral Yi did that. If you need any more context than that, Wikipedia exists.
  
  Well a Polonized Lithuanian, Kazimierz Siemienowicz, an artillery general of the Rzeczpospolita, came up with multistage rockets in 1650. A mere half-century after Sekigahara, and 53 after Yi's victory at Myeongnyang. But no, no, it's all right, keep repeating your quaint notions about backward Poland and the high technology of Asia.
  
  Where'd Hideyoshi get the guns that were like fricking laser-beams to the Joseon armies, again?


• Admittedly, the main reason Joseon did so badly in that war was that Neo-Confucianism is, with the possible exception of Objectivism, the worst possible basis for military preparedness in the history of man. Nobody could mobilize troops without permission from higher levels of the military hierarchy...which might be in another province...with 16th-century communications. Officer posts were given based on bloodline and exam scores (in that order), actual battlefield experience almost being considered a liability for a commander.
  
  Which, seriously, makes Admiral Yi Sunshin just that much more impressive. He'd have been impressive in any society. In the Joseon Kingdom, he's a prodigy that boggles the mind.
  
  And hey, if you're gonna base a movie about alien invasions on history, you could do a lot worse than the Imjin/Kara Iri War. All I'd ask is that Koreans not be the ones funding it.