Rannm Thawts Four

Title says it all, really.

• Apparently a bunch of people, notably Christopher Hitchens, have written that characterizing North Korea as Confucian (it's certainly not orthodox Marxism) is erroneous...and they then go on to say "It's basically a Korean version of Japanese Imperial ideology." But...I thought you said it wasn't Confucian. "Confucianism" as an explicit political idea is really Neo-Confucian, and Imperial Japan was the most powerful and second longest-enduring totalitarian regime based on those principles. The second most powerful and longest enduring? The Korean kingdom whose name North Korea still bears, in Korean. "Joseon."
  
  Of course, some of the worst things about North Korea are still Marxism, not Neo-Confucianism. The Joseon Kingdom may have maintained a network of state-owned brothels staffed by slaves, for its troops (i.e. it made its own people into "comfort women", something no other East Asian regime ever did, in 2500 years of history), but it had normal agricultural methods and dealt with famines like sane people do. (It was in things like "Toyotomi Hideyoshi is at the gates, and we need the provincial governor's permission to fight" that Joseon's Neo-Confucian insanity manifested itself, and bad military policy simply doesn't come up as often as the vagaries of agriculture.) North Korea, on the other hand, has the policies that made the Great Chinese Famine the biggest single famine, by death-toll, in human history—and Red China had systematically eliminated its (Neo-) Confucian scholars.
  
  Imperial Japan had to be actively subjected to systematic carpet-bombing before the "military takes priority" thing resulted in actual hardship (rather than mere inconvenience) for its own people; pray, who's bombing North Korea?
• Looking into "bayonet connectors" and "fiber optics cables" led me to conclude zled cables probably have heads something like this. Never mind zled tech being deceptively primitive, I doubt most people looking at that who didn't see it labeled as a fiber-optic connector would know it was used for anything particularly advanced. (Apparently the "straight-tip/bayonet" connector is a fairly old way of doing it, admittedly.)
• The GOP understandably makes much of the Democrats having been the party of slavery and Jim Crow. Interestingly, though, Democrats never utter a word about Republicans having been the party of eugenics. Seriously, all the early 20th-century Eugenics Boards and legislation? Republicans. Every major American eugenics theorist? Republican. (Lots of Democrats—Wilson, FDR—had eugenic ideas, but that's not what they were known for.) Vast portions of the early eugenics movement was funded by the "charitable" foundations of robber-barons like John D. Rockefeller; the Rockefeller Foundation actually founded the "psychiatric genetics" institution in Germany that one Josef Mengele got his start at.
  
  The reason Democrats don't say a word about any of this is that those were progressive Republicans, and many of them remained darlings of the "progressive movement" after it came to be the project of only one party. One of them was Margaret Sanger, for example—if the Democrats want to get the Republicans on guilt-by-association with her, they would first have to quit their own association with her, and the organization she founded. The foundations that once funded eugenics research are now basically fundraising arms of the Democratic Party; the last prominently Republican Rockefeller (who was a Kissingerian Realpolitik junkie, big on Third World population control) died in 1979.
• Zledo, I realized, probably wouldn't use many knives in the kitchen—since they've got a "bird's beak" paring knife on the end of each finger. They just scrub their claws really well before cutting up all but the heaviest foodstuffs. (I'd been thinking for years that zled claws are less curved than felid ones, only about as much as, again, a bird's beak knife.)
  
  Similarly, I would imagine that they never invented the potato peeler, since their hands come with one built in. And, it occurs to me literally as I write this, when bored, they might well whittle with their claws. Half the world is Play-Doh if your fingers end in blades.
• Average height in the Middle Ages, in Europe, was 5'8". It started to decline sometime in the 1200s, and by 1600 was 5'5". Most European peoples are (depending which numbers you trust) only 5'9" now, give or take a half-inch or two. Now, height is partly a factor of genetics (the pygmies of Africa got that way because their neighbors took their tallest women—though being hunter-gatherers probably doesn't help), but a much bigger factor is food. A well-fed person will be markedly taller than his malnourished identical twin.
  
  The Americans who seemed like giants to the European soldiers in World War I were not genetically much different from most of the Europeans, they just had really good agriculture. The medieval Europeans were not genetically much different from the "Enlightenment" Europeans. So nutrition in most of Europe was better in the 1100s than it was in the 1800s, generally looked back on as a time of great prosperity for most of the continent (although that is through the lens of the Depression and World Wars).
• Amusing fact: I was looking up the usage of the French phrase "langage écorché" (bad language—"langage" is an old-fashioned word, something like "watch your phraseology" in The Music Man). And something like two thirds of the Google results were French analyses of the works of Rabelais. Because while Shakespeare couched his dirty jokes in double-entendre (which I always want to pronounce, in English, as "double-intender"), a couple generations earlier Rabelais was just cheerfully working blue.
• I mentioned that a USB-type cable, that supplies power as well as data-link, probably wouldn't be necessary for my setting. But, of course, that might raise the question "Why use cables for the data, then?" The answer, of course, is security. I imagine most consumer electronics are okay with wireless linkage, but with military hardware you want to hardline it. (Wireless peripherals also increase the EM "footprint" of one's forces, making them more detectable. If I'm interpreting the listed "decibel-milliwatt" strengths of various kinds of wireless signals correctly, every two to five wireless keyboards is like making a call from a cellphone. Do you know how easy cellphones are to detect?)
  
  In my setting, wireless is so ubiquitous that hardlining to most devices, in and of itself, bypasses most of their security—because it's pretty much only technicians who ever access hardware that way, and they're assumed to have authorizations (plus, I mean, "physically plug something in" is, always has been and always will be, much easier to prevent than "send a radio signal"). At least among humans; zledo are military-minded and their IT "guild" also places a premium on confidentiality. They can break your security if they have to (presumably mostly as part of a police investigation), but otherwise, they will only have the access you give them. (They design computers to have layers of security.) I have a worldbuilding reason for the humans' tech having that weakness—but it also makes the job of one of my characters, an infiltration android, much easier.
• Huh, just had a thought. Does wireless power equate to loss of privacy? I mean, when everything you carry is powered by wireless power-transmission, it wouldn't make sense to charge other people for your use of the power in their establishments. I suppose a lot of cafes and such do let people charge their stuff while they're using the free Wi-Fi, but A) ever wonder why your coffee is so expensive? and B) do you want your power-bill to spike because a bunch of people take up jogging through your neighborhood?
  
  The solution, it seems to me, is for the power-system to log what devices access it, and charge the accounts linked to those devices. And thus, the power-bills can be used to track people's location, because the grid has to know where it's being accessed the most as it allocates resources, and it has to know who's doing the accessing so it knows who to charge. Presumably criminals would use dummy accounts so they can't be tracked, unless they want to go to jail for utility theft à la Al Capone's taxes, but you can still track them the moment you have their dummy-accounts (like if you arrest their clients). It probably wouldn't be that big a deal; the government practically knows where you are all the time now anyway, and we trust them with our Social Security Numbers like it's no big deal.
• Come to think of it, "banking" as a "manage the money you merely have" enterprise will probably cease to exist—an all-digital "account" might well be with the treasury of your community—and people will only work with "banks" for things like loans and the kinds of "savings account" that involves investments. ...Damn it. Now I think I need to rewrite some scenes. It's become apparent that smart criminals would probably do business in precious metals, rather than fooling around with currency, given that non-physical currency is exactly the same thing as making a call from a cellphone (and indeed, fund-transfers probably involve accessing the exact same network that making calls does).
  
  What metal to use? I mean, stuff like gold and platinum are probably pretty common to a spacefaring civilization, given they can mine them from asteroids; taking payment in those would be like taking payment in copper nowadays, and that's only about $3 per pound. Maybe room-temperature superconductors, some of which, apparently, might actually be organic polymers, according to a theory mentioned in the Wikipedia article on "room-temperature" (really "above 0°C") superconductors. Or at least a "high-temperature" ("can be reached with liquid nitrogen instead of liquid helium") superconductor. One component of a lot of those, barium, apparently goes for $550 a kilogram now; though asteroid-mining will probably increase supply, fusion power and rocketry might increase demand concomitantly, if not more so. Presumably, as a medium of exchange, we're talking pure barium, probably sealed in jars of mineral oil; its most common ore, barite (BaSO₄), apparently only goes for $0.15 a kilogram.
• Couple interesting ideas as I'm hammering the kinks out of my D&D setting. E.g., the dwarves don't have arcane magic, they have psionics...but they consider their psions to be mages—"power stones" are their runestones, their psionic tattoos are runic, etc. Kobolds and troglodytes are two branches of one race, the way goblins and hobgoblins are (go look up what a kobold is in folklore if you want to see why). Because I'm going back to elk for the elves' mounts, decided to make the elves the "bigger than humans" kind instead of the "smaller than humans" kind (which are the D&D canon type, outside Faerûn).
  
  Finally, I discovered that the "Iokharic" script (Draconic) from 4th Edition is very similar to the 3rd Edition version of Espruar, which you'll recall I'm using (as a basis) for my campaign's Elvish script. And the 4th Edition "Barazhad" (Abyssal)—the name of which seems to be Breton for "churning butter"—looks an awful lot like the 4th Edition Dwarfish script, Davek. Remember, my ogres (including orcs) and goblins (including hobgoblins and bugbears) are mutant dwarves and elves, respectively. So I'm gonna use Barazhad for Ogre and Iokharic for Goblin. (Incidentally, since I'm using Eorzean for my human languages, and it's basically Roman, I've got a boatload of other fictional scripts to pick from in creating relatives for it, since everything from Daedric to Spiran is also based on Roman.)