Potpourri

Random thoughts, new post title, same great taste. Also less filling.

• You know what is an excellent thing to keep in mind? The Japanese word "Amaeru". It means something like "behave like a spoiled child; of a client/protégé, to presume upon the indulgence of one's patron/benefactor".
  
  Remember that concept, for instance, next time you see a denunciation of Christian ideas about the sexes, by some dumb broad who'd either be an only daughter with no first name, or wolf-food, if she lived in pagan Rome. There's a curious calming effect, when you realize the idiot you're dealing with only lives because of the very thing it is denouncing. You feel a bit like God must: an ironical, patient amusement, with the monkeys' complaints about the world that, in a very real sense, you gave them.
  
  It's just hard to get mad or defensive, when you realize that you own them. Just tell yourself, "It is only by the largesse of me and mine that the insect can buzz thus; how great our might and generosity, that we don't even ask anything in return!" It's not even a lord-tenant relationship, since both sides are necessary to that, and neither can afford to shirk its obligations. Just think of them as your house-pets.


• Speaking of obligations, you know how Libertarians like to equate taxes with armed robbery? Sigh. I'm sorry, but a rational person knows that providing law and order (you know, what governments are for?), and enabling the commercial activities Libertarians mistake for the whole of human life, entitles the government to, well, a cut. Yeah, cute, you're John Galt, sure. Where do you find the time to be so goshdarn brilliant, if someone else isn't protecting you? I mean, especially since you don't have any employees (again, Rand invalidates her own criticisms of Marx, she doesn't even know what capitalism is).
  
  Of course, the defender-class, too, has obligations—all functioning systems are based on mutual obligation. In the case of the government, it loses its right to taxes as soon as it stops providing a certain minimum of law and order (and by extension, protection from outside enemies), whether through incompetence and corruption, or through conscious implementation of bad policy. It arguably also lacks the right to use the money it collects from its dependents for purposes other than law and order.
  
  Basically, governments' legitimacy—from which comes their right to taxes—rests exclusively on subduing their people's enemies, "foreign or domestic"; they don't have the right to use taxes except toward that same end. One might extend the duty to defend the people to things like disaster relief, but the only thing governments are for is force: that's why they get to use it.


• So it is widely acknowledged that the Revised Romanization of Korean has really weird vowels—in order to avoid diacritics, they use "eo", "eu", and "ae", which, especially the first one, are pretty damn counter-intuitive.
  
  I mean, hey, how about we just restrict ourselves to the tiny number of diacritics you can write on a Mac keyboard? Let's, say, use Å for "eo" (that's the sound it is, in Scandinavian languages), Ä for "ae", and, uh, maybe Ũ, for "eu" (hey, Estonian uses Õ for the middle back unrounded vowel, and the rounded equivalent of that is O). Or hey, how about if we remap the current "o" and "u" to Ô and Û, and use O and U for "eo" and "eu"? Then we use E for "ae", and move the current "e" to Ê? Then the only diacritic we need is circumflex.
  
  Of course, usually, circumflex marks vowel length, and that is actually a phonemic feature of Korean. But then, Hangeul doesn't mark it either (reports of its linguistic perfection are greatly exaggerated—it's arguably no better than kana, since those at least know they're encoding a moraic language).


• Realized, a better description of my SF story would be "space bylina". Byliny were a form of Russian epic poetry, dating to Kievan Rus. Many of my alien characters are basically bogatyrs, and arguably the felinoids' emperor is comparable to Vladimir the Fair Sun. Well, crossed with Suoh Tamaki.
  
  
  In SPAAAAACE!
  
  Actually I don't have any felinoids like Alyosha Popovich (the guy on the right), but I got a bunch like Ilya Muromets (center) and Dobrynya Nikitich (left). In fact, arguably, the felinoid cop is Dobrynya, and his brother is Ilya.


• I don't know if I've mentioned it here, but it's interesting how many things are actually just fortunate coincidences. For instance, you know how both the major schools of Jewish theology (Kabbalah and Maimonides) are pantheist, as is the theology of Avicenna? Yeah, well, Aquinas doesn't actually get full credit for the fact Christian theology isn't. It's just that in a pantheistic cosmos, the Incarnation has no meaning; only his desire to retain orthodox Christology saved him from making the same bungle.
  
  Or the fact I mentioned above, how kana, unlike hangeul, accurately record the moraic nature of their language? Coincidence. Kobo Daishi, who invented kana, based their forms on the syllabic use of hanzi, but he based their function on Sanskrit (specifically either the Gupta or Siddham abugida). Why's that important? Sanskrit, like Latin, has a "syllable-timed" accent, which is extremely similar to morae in most contexts.


• Hey, you know all those people who think it's just awesome to expose government secrets? How has the government not realized that the obvious remedy is to publicize their Social Security numbers and home addresses? And then, when people start whining about "privacy" (or better, the "constitutional right" to privacy, which does not exist), just look right at the camera and say, "Information longs to be free, bitch."


• Once again I'm glad of the "no resemblance" disclaimer in Pumpkin Scissors, 'cause, the autoloader for the tank? Yeah, both we and the Russkies experimented with those, but we both currently load our tanks manually. Why? In a cramped tank cabin, there's a permanent danger of an autoloader attempting to feed the crew into the gun. Besides, a well-trained crew is only marginally slower.
  
  Scorpions, I think, have an interesting answer: only one driver/gunner, and an autoloader behind the cockpit (the gun being rear-mounted gives it its name), all the other functions a tank crew would perform presumably being done by computers. Which reminds me, I bet you'd prefer not putting armored Spartans in most of your vehicles, since the fact they each weigh a half-ton can't be good for your fuel economy (wonder what the UNSC uses for fuel, anyway). Similarly, Warthogs' suspension must be incredible.


• So the people who fansub the second season of Baka Test keep translating Hideyoshi's "Washi...ja" way of talking as "thou...dost". It's a valiant effort, but I don't think they really capture it. First off, "washi" isn't remotely that archaic, and second off, it's got a connotation of "old man" speech.
  
  Really, if you were gonna try to capture how odd it is that Hideyoshi talks like that, you'd have to render his speech as "grizzled old mountain man". You know Rancid Crabtree, in Patrick McManus stories? Imagine if a guy who talked like that, looked like this: