Uncorrelated, Not Uncaused VIII

Random thoughts.

• All those science fiction writers, especially in the 80s, who liked to call a certain island chain off the coast of Asia "Nippon", and its people and language "Nipponese"—do you, uh, realize that you still call that big country next to it "China"? Come come, let's be consistent. Zhongguo^Note. and...what, Zhongguonian?...if you please, not "China" and "Chinese"—and if you're assuming the current prestige dialect will be the same in the future, it's Putonghua (Putonghuan?), not "Mandarin".
  
  Also? That peninsula bordering China at the Yalu River, and separated from Japan by a narrow sea? Anything you assume would be its name in the future is going to ipso facto involve future-history decision making. Calling it Choson or Joseon means one thing, Hanguk another. In my books, well, I call the place Korea, because I also call them "Japan" and "China", those names are both a thousand years old by the time of my setting, and whatever is supposed to be proved by using "Nippon", I have no interest in proving.
  
  But in the context of mentioning Korea's native name I call it Goryeo, because at reunification they didn't want to go with either one's name—also because there was a Buddhist revival with accompanying (partial) repudiation of Neo-Confucianism, and Goryeo was a Buddhist kingdom. (In case you wondered, it's the kingdom Marco Polo visited; Corea pronounced the Italian way is very close to 고려.)
• Apparently, the chainsaw is a lousy weapon for combat. I read a news story about a guy who, jumped by a puma, tried to fend it off with a chainsaw...and gave it a little gash ("I might as well have hit it with a hockey stick"). See, trees don't move; living creatures do. And any animal that isn't H. sapiens is going to have way tougher skin than you. (You ever notice cats'll sometimes sit so close to a heater that you can smell burning hair? Yeah, heat becomes painful to them after their fur starts combusting.)
  
  A bigger issue is that there are bones and connective tissues in animals that aren't in trees, and they can actually separate the links of a chainsaw chain (just like hitting a rock can, sawing felled trees). A broken chain on an activated saw becomes a serrated whip that'll pop out and wrap around anything nearby, including your neck—there's a reason lumberjacks have an on-the-job mortality rate comparable to taxi drivers and prostitutes.
  
  That business with chains is also why electric turkey carvers are two blades moving against each other, rather than a chain. That's probably a more likely method for a space military's powered bayonets than chainsaws; the mechanism's also got fewer moving parts.
• Relatedly, people appear to have some strange bias against swords in science fiction, but actually, why don't more SF militaries use them? I mean, half the time, they're fighting some sort of space-bug that can survive dozens of rounds of rifle fire, but dies when it's cut in half—why not give those poor SOBs something that'll cut the bugs in half?
  
  It's useless to say "they have guns", because we have guns, and we also issue combat knives, and train with 'em. Those are adequate to the creature we're generally fighting. But the zledo, in my books, use swords—because they are the size of jaguars (i.e. small tigers), and if you tell any sane person "Here, kill this jaguar/small tiger with a trench-knife", he'll swear at you.
  
  The Peacekeepers they're fighting do still only have combat knives, but that is a deliberate worldbuilding choice: the kind of bureaucrat who runs the UN is also the kind of person who thinks combat-knives will never come up. You know, just like how there hasn't been a recorded use of bayonets on a battlefield in fourteen whole months. See also all that dogfighting the Air Force is gonna stop doing annnnnnnnny day now.
• What's with people addressing, or more often, attempting to debunk, cultural phenomena like Wendigo Sickness or Ghost Sickness epidemiologically? The cultures those things are from are cultures where "medicine" is a spiritual thing; "Ghost Sickness" is a curse, incurred by being in the presence of the lingering evil of the dead, but described by a medical metaphor. Ditto Wendigo Sickness: that's a medical metaphor for the cannibal's loss of his humanity. Speaking of illness, did you know not recognizing metaphor is a symptom of schizophrenia?
  
  Next I suppose you'll bring in meteorologists to talk about how whirlwinds' spin direction is not correlated with their moral character—since you like to take figurative language used by Native Americans completely literally.
• Did you see the trailer for Oblivion? The SF movie, not the game before Skyrim. Well I did, and I feel I can take a firm stance of "Cautious Optimism!" I like that they've managed to do future military hardware that isn't just knocked off from Halo. Also, Tom Cruise may be weird, but the fact is he's the second-most consistently good American actor currently working, after only Robert Downey, Jr.
  
  I have no inside information, just my geek's intuition, but I'm calling this ahead of time: the big secret everything is working toward is the aliens never existed. Let's all see if I'm right in April.
• Reading a few volumes of Sunabouzu (Desert Punk) has reminded me of something: why do Japanese people refuse to know about deserts? Sure, that one got that they get cold at night...but the thing is still the lifeless sand-waste version of a desert, a thing that does not exist. Even the Sahara has scrub vegetation, and the Gobi and the Sonoran (which my mother grew up in) are pretty much brush-covered prairies and hills.
  
  Worse, though, is this stupid, obviously political idea rampant in Japan that deserts are an unnatural thing, caused by environmental destruction. While environmental destruction can make deserts, natural phenomena, mainly rain-shadows, are generally responsible. And the people who live in the desert just north of me are currently raising hell about artificially increasing the moisture levels on one of their mountains.
  
  Incidentally, people who made Tekken? I'm talking about Indians—do yourselves a favor and stuff Michelle and Julia Chang in a big bag, and drown them in the river.
• I wonder where the crazy ideas about "sinister" meaning "spooky" coming from a prejudice against left-handed people came from? "Sinister" means "bad" because auguries were done facing east, and a flock of birds heading to one's left is traveling north. North is an unlucky direction in every geomantic system I'm acquainted with (yes, I know more than one—doesn't everyone?), and that includes augury.
  
  Speaking of, if you're writing a fantasy story with summoning, you might wanna give your summoning-circles a "safe" direction. Navajo sandpaintings—which, in their real form, are meters-wide ritual arrays painted on the ground—are bounded on three sides by a stretched figure of a god, to prevent intrusions by unwanted spirits, but the east side isn't bounded, because nothing evil can enter by the east.
• I have elsewhere made mention of the irrelevant piece of tokenism called the "Bechdel Test", which is passed when it can be said of a work that, quote, "It includes at least two women, who have at least one conversation, about something other than a man or men." It is, in other words, an irrelevant litmus test fetish, a box that can be conveniently checked, to spare us the heavy work of thinking and forming judgments based on thought.
  
  This particular standard, though, is unusually bad, because, aside from the fact most real conversations don't actually pass it, most lipstick-lesbian exploitation movies, pretty-girl anime, and jiggle-fest Aaron Spelling shows do. If your test says those things are less sexist than a work about women who are rationally concerned with their peers, at least half of whom will be male, your test is stupid and worthless, and so is anyone who took it seriously.
  
  Now get back in the lab and make me a higher-yield collectivized farm, woman.
• The Bechdel Test also ignores (as bourgeois pseudoscience) all those studies showing that women and men talk about different subjects—and hey, guess what, women talk about people (again, half of whom are male) more than men do. The question of whether that's "culturally determined" (i.e., arises from class-interest) or not is irrelevant to movies—because movies are about people as they actually exist, except when the point of the movie is asking "what if they were different?", so they'd be subject to any such "cultural determinant" forces that their real counterparts are.
• It occurs to me, the cardinal directions in the language of a primarily space-dwelling culture should be "spinward" for east and "leeward" for west (like how people often define the directions in the galaxy). Then north and south become, I don't know, "spinleft" and "spinright"? They're on your right and left, respectively, if you face east, which is the direction a planet spins toward (seriously, define "east" some other way—you have to arbitrarily pick a pole to be north).
  
  I wonder, what do you call the directions in a galaxy? Spinward and leeward, of course, and I suppose "rimward" and "coreward", but what about the third axis? And don't say there's no up or down in a galaxy; much as how one can define north as "your left when you're facing east", "up" and "down" can be defined relative to the other two axes I just mentioned—and they are objective things, like a sunrise.