Uncorrelated, Not Uncaused VII

Random thoughts, natch.

• Do you think a part of the big 19th century Atlantis-stuff boom was because of Heinrich Schliemann discovering the ruins of Troy in 1876? I mean, if that legend was true, mightn't Atlantis have been? Mightn't, therefore, the Mayan lost continent that didn't really exist (Mu being based on a misreading of texts that were actually about astrology)? Of course, leaving to one side that we only have Plato's word on Atlantis being legendary, which it probably wasn't (through no fault of his own—he was actually concerned to talk about political science, and couched it in a framed narrative involving wise sages, by an accepted convention of his society).
  
  Turns out, by the way, that Lemuria is a real legend, if we accept the 19th-century identification of the Tamil legend of the lost continent of Kumari Kandam with the theorized lost continent whose unsubmerged end is Madagascar (they needed to explain the weird fauna of Madagascar, and lacked continental drift as an idea).
• I noticed an interesting thing, prompted by a comment by the purveyor of Swords and Space. Namely, it is amusing how George Martin portrays medieval warrior aristocracy (or what he thinks is medieval—he claims to be basing his books on the War of the Roses, which began two years after the Fall of Constantinople, and ended the year Cortes was born, which is to say it was all Renaissance). It's amusing because the person who most resembles the kill-crazed treacherous scum who inhabit his books...is Che Guevara, a man who Martin shares at least 75% of his worldview with, and who certainly can't be called a medieval nobleman. Admittedly, Guevara was an aristocrat, and given, by the bye, to sexually exploiting his servants (also, later, to bumming off older women in exchange for being their boy-toy).
  
  Amusingly, the main class of people Che Guevara unleashed his "paroxysms of hate" on, were...peasants. The main enemies of the Cuban Revolution were not, of course, wealthy planters or an industrial bourgeoisie, but small farmers—and these, Guevara personally murdered hundreds of, mainly by pistol but also by means of shovels to the skull. When, on the other hand, he was faced by actual soldiers, he rather infamously threw down a fully-loaded rifle and cried out, "I'm Che Guevara! I'm worth more to you alive than dead!" No definitive word on whether he was wetting his pants, but I think it's fairly likely.
  
  Leftist baby-boomers don't get to talk that particular kind of smack, Martin, especially if they don't even know when the Middle Ages were.
• They also don't get to call other eras misogynistic, when easily half their plots are dictated by a rape-fetish. Did you think I was kidding when I said A Waste of Ink and Paper was basically a FATAL tie-in novel? The Song of Ice and Fire RPG is the only other tabletop RPG of which I am aware with a canonical game-mechanic for rape.
  
  I'm sorely tempted to ask people who think these books are realistic if they have actually compared the stats on medieval wars to, e.g., Warring States era Japan. I have. The medievals, I assure you, come out the better in that comparison—as also when compared to the Turks, Persians, most of Indian history (which gets a Peace of God movement in the 18th century), or their own Classical ancestors or Renaissance descendants.
• Just one example? I was looking up the Armenian genocide, in a different context, and I notice something: its death toll was the same as that of the entire Crusades. And of course, that genocide, like all the other (many) atrocities of the Ottoman Empire, would never have happened if the Crusades had been successful. Leaving to one side that more than half the death-toll in the Crusades were Christians killed by Muslims, all of the deaths were in wartime (admittedly some of them civilians—mostly at the hands of Turks), the Armenian genocide was in peacetime.
  
  Even had all the deaths from the Crusades been Muslims killed by Christians, which they weren't, they still number roughly 1/10 the number of Hindus killed by the Mughals and other Muslim invaders of India, starting right around the time of the Crusades—12.7 million being the most reasonable estimate I've seen (Hindu nationalism being what it is, the number 80 million is often bandied about—but even over 5 centuries, that would require a degree of control over the Indian populace that the Raj, which far outdid most Muslim rule in that regard, could never dream of).
• On to happier subjects. Is...uh...anyone else aware how damned hard it is to come up with maps for fantasy? I had been using Jame's Churchward's map of Mu, the one where the Polynesian islands are all mountains (which is awesome), but that was back when I was also using mutated Japanese for Elvish. It's just not going to cut it now.
  
  One cool idea I had—which necessarily complicates things—is that, if I'm doing the math right, an Ice Age causes the amount of a planet covered by ocean to shift almost 7%. As in, in our last one, 64% of the surface was ocean, rather than our current 71%. And I thought it'd be cool to show the shift of coastlines, and maybe have the last remnant of the civilization that fell when the Ice Age happened (remember, the elves and dwarves caused it for precisely that reason) be surprised and horrified that what used to be two continents is now linked by a land-bridge.
  
  Yes, I realize that's going to make it even harder to map the thing. Maybe I'll just bite the bullet, research it, and do it proper-like by hand (I'd been looking for images I could trace, and fooling around with the good ol' fractal world-generator). Now, I have fair-to-middlin' drawing skills at best—here's a picture I did back in 2001, of my Sesheyan Alternity character (back when I was still using the base setting)—and maps have always been something I was bad at. Then again, I used to find it hard to come up with alphabets, and I hammered out both the one for my fantasy book, and this current RPG-setting's elvish and dwarfish alphabets, in an afternoon apiece.
• Which reminds me, no idea what to do RE: human writing. Might have them use one of the other races' writing, perhaps written by different calligraphic principles—this and this are two alphabets, the former using a combination of European Blackletter and South Asian abugida principles, the latter using roughly the same principles as the Mongolian abugida (which, if it is not in your top 10 favorite scripts, along with its ancestors Tibetan and Phags-pa, there is something wrong with you)...and both based on Germanic runes.
  
  Hmm. Maybe some adaptation of Dwarfish (with, perhaps,a few Elvish loan-characters, possibly based on the pre-cursive forms of the Elvish letters, for the sounds Elvish and the human language have but Dwarfish doesn't). Maybe I'll study things like Roman cursive (!!), and the Insular, Visigoth, and Carolingian scripts. After all, the Latin letters' basic forms aren't that different from the rune-type writing I did for Dwarfish; you could definitely write the thing in a script that, e.g., writes a rune shaped like H as "h".
• Just a quick note: when someone says women, or anyone else for that matter, were illiterate in the Middle Ages, stop them and ask if they are aware how many book-orders and private correspondences we have from medieval people of both sexes and virtually all walks of life. Then ask them if they are aware "unlettered" and its equivalents meant "lacking a classical education", not "unable to read or write", in many medieval usages.
• It occurs to me, I have been slightly imprecise, when I attribute anatomically modern humans' decreasing sexual size-difference to monogamy. It could, of course, be accounted for by promiscuity, as it is among chimpanzees and bonobos.
  
  However, there is a piece of evidence that militates against the hypothesis that humans' sexes grew closer in size due to promiscuity. Namely, our testicles are only slightly larger than gorillas' (admittedly, relative to our mass, they're quite noticeably larger). But a chimpanzee's testicles are huge, over three times the mass of a gorilla's—even bigger, relatively speaking, considering how much smaller a chimp is than a gorilla—because each male chimp, having so many competitors for each female's time, has to get as much sperm into each mating as he can. Our testicles are far smaller than would be indicated by promiscuity. (Also, even chimpanzees have a size-difference between their sexes that's greater than ours.)
• Did you know the Inquisitions killed c. 5% of those they convicted? Yep. Another 11% got imprisoned. All the other 84% of those convicted—and please recall the acquittal rate was huge—had to...wear special clothes for a while, or go on pilgrimages.