Rannm Thawts Tew

ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin.

• There's an ammunition essentially identical to 9 mm Luger, but with a case 2 mm longer—9×21 IMI. It exists pretty much solely because, in Italy and Mexico, and I think other places, it's illegal for civilians to own military-derived ammunitions and firearms chambered in them. I think those bans may be motivated by a desire to curtail soldiers selling equipment on the black market. Please consider Italy and Mexico for a moment—see my point?
  
  If that's not the reason, then the bans are as fundamentally wrongheaded as our own "assault weapons" ban, which bans guns that are functionally identical to other guns that it doesn't ban, but which look like military weapons. (Also, remember: this is an assault weapon, any other use of the phrase is simply incorrect.)
• In Upotte, should H&K G3 really be called "Jiisuri-chan"? "Jiisuri" is as close as Japanese can get to "G-three", but...the G3's a German gun. So shouldn't she be called "Geidorai" ("G-drei"—in German, all Gs are hard)?
  
  Speaking of that weird-ass series, M16A4-chan is pretty much the single finest representative of the American national character in fiction. That she's basically a goodhearted version of Tomo from Azumanga Daioh is doubtless something we as a nation should reflect upon.
• The fact that German always has hard Gs reminds me, Arabic is weird. Many modern "dialects of Arabic"—i.e. independent languages which stand to Classical Arabic roughly as the Early Modern Romance languages stand to Vulgate Latin—have turned their "Gs" into "dzh", as happened at some point between Classical and Vulgate Latin, although I don't think it depends on the following vowel, in Arabic. Admittedly, the pronunciation of the original "gim" in Classical Arabic is debatable, with some reconstructing it as a palatalized G (a hard G followed by a Y), and others as the "gy" from Hungarian (something like a D followed by a Y sound, shading into a "dzh" J sound).
  
  A lot of languages undergo that G->J and K->Ch change, seen in Vulgate and Italian when followed by E and I (I wonder if there's some connection to the fact those are the vowels Celtic languages class as "slender"—Latin and Celtic are closest to each other, among Indo-European languages). Chinese, for instance—compare modern Mandarin qì 氣 and quán 拳 (the Q in Mandarin is pronounced, roughly, "Tchhy") to their Middle Chinese pronunciations, khi and gwen, respectively.
• And seriously, "Arabic" does not exist, save as a religious and literary language. The "dialects" of Egypt, Lebanon, and Arabia are no more intelligible to each other's speakers than 16th-century French was to a Spaniard. When Arabs want to understand each other, they switch to Classical (Quranic) or Modern Literary Arabic, just like 16th-century Europeans switched to Church or Humanist Latin. The latter was the major literary language of Europe until the late 18th century, precisely paralleling the status of the form of Arabic used in most Arab-world literature.
• I referred to the Anasazi, a few posts back, as the ones who developed irrigation because they lived in a desert, but no, that was the Hohokam. The Anasazi had other achievements, mostly in architecture and logistics—look at Chaco, and you tell me how you'd keep a community that size alive with stone-age tools, no draft animals (except maybe dogs), no wheels, and no writing.
  
  The theory, by the way, is that the Hohokam (which, by the way, is O'odham for, basically, "ruins", not "the ancient ones" as it's often translated) were the ancestors of the O'odham. The Anasazi ("enemy/foreign ancestors" in Navajo) were the ancestors of the Hopi and possibly some of the Pai or Ute peoples. And the Mogollon (Spanish for...well it was a prominent family in Extremadura, I don't know what the name means; the culture's named after mountains named after an 18th-century Spanish governor of New Mexico) are probably the ancestor of the Zuñi, whose language is scary. Actually not that scary (not compared to Hopi or Navajo); language isolates just weird me out.
• Apparently the theory, which is probably as old as people noticing Basque is odd, that the Basques represent the original population of Europe (or one of them), has some genetic evidence. Namely, Sardinians, as in on that island off Italy, share a genetic profile with the Basques, who are otherwise unique in Europe.
  
  Of course, Basque may not actually be a language isolate, but just the only extant member of its group, Vasconic. At least one of the other, now-extinct, languages of the Iberian Peninsula may've been related to it, going by the phonetic rules some of them seem to have followed.
• There are "genetic bottlenecks" in human populations, produced when people are forced to crowd together into refugia during Ice Ages. Basically all human beings are descended from about ten groups of refugees, all of them in Europe, Asia, or North Africa. Interestingly one of them was in Japan, which was very nearly a peninsula, Hokkaido being linked to Siberia by glaciers and most of the island chain being linked by the lowered seas.
  
  Another was in the Bering Strait, and from them, it's thought, all Native Americans (and possibly some Siberians) descend. Interestingly, a lot of Native American mythologies have an idea of emerging from holes or valleys into a new world; one wonders if it's not a mythologized memory of that Ice Age refugium.
• I have elsewhere pointed out that the few actual scientists in the New Atheism are biologists, and generally not in the most rigorous branches of biology. But it's interesting and rather telling that that's the case, because a major aspect of the New Atheism is what you might call Darwinian Mythology. What I mean is, these people believe evolution is an adequate account of the universe—not just life, not just our current conditions, but the universe.
  
  Or in other words, "When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail—including scalp acne, hence your obvious head injury." The cosmos pre-exists anything that could undergo evolution by billions of years. And it itself isn't evolving, either. Only living things evolve. Last I checked, supposedly hard-nosed supposed rationalists should not start talking hylozoism.
• I confess to a certain somewhat bitter amusement at the expense of the people who consider elected power intrinsically good, and inherited power intrinsically bad. The ability to buy advertisements in an election year doesn't seem inherently superior to bloodline as a basis for societal rank, to me, does it seem that way to you?
  
  Also, though, while there are mechanisms to ensure that those who are elected to their positions—that is, again, who have the best ad campaigns—fulfill their duties, they tend to be rather dissociated and esoteric. Whereas in inherited rank, the incentive to fulfill one's duties is inherent to the mechanism by which power is gained, and is pretty much the most natural of all human ethical impulses. Namely, filial piety.