Doping with thorium-oxide

Nuclear clocks help to fine-tuning location out in deep space, which is how we can improve bandwidth communications with probes. Last December we got a report about it, specifically Thorium-229. Be great if we had a lot of this. We don't, of course; it is radioactive such that it tends to be found only in uranium waste.

What we do have a lot of, is Thorium-232. This is a chemical proxy for Th-229; so suppose we ran experiments on this to see how little Thorium(-229) we actually need to make a clock. That seems to have happened: electroplating onto iron. "Stainless steel" if you like.

It wasn't a septuagint

In 2007, one Hayeon Kim earned his PhD by demonstrating the five translators of the Five Books, the Pentateuch. He then migrated off to being a pastor, as one does; getting around to publication just a few years ago. Emanuel Tov has endorsed this. Tov has earned some credibility over his decades-long career.

Jews don't like the Greek translation, historically. R. Tovia Singer calls the Psalter a "hoax". Serious Biblical scholars many Jewish (yo, "Tov"?) would rule Singer as out of line. But the Alexandrine Jewish diaspora, in fact, did get overexcited about part of it, namely the Greek Torah. That whole "Septuagint" / 72 / LXX meme came out of there. One might compare this to a targum: a harmony for the plebs in translation. But it's worse: the Samaritans' Torah was similarly expanded, fixed-up, whatever. A targum or midrash can tweak this or that - maybe they even should - but a Jew demands the Hebrew baseline stay where it is. This was not done by the Samaritans, and most agree it was not done by whoever passed a similar Bible-2.0 to the Graecophones. A rabbi would be in his rights to say that tweaking the base text for tendentious purpose is cheating. Philo didn't help by touting the translators as prophets.

If a cheat, the LXX - better, the V - Vorlage remains a very early cheat, sometimes holding onto readings where the masoretes would go on to cheat... or simply sometimes misspell some things. We're all human, even Jews. This is why we are still talking about this translation.

The consensus - if Tov be that consensus - on the five translators seems to be that they started off sharing some basic vocabulary, and then branched off. Whatever was done to bring the translations back into line, was left to future copyists. There's no real consensus on the order in which they did the work; den Hartog thinks Leviticus and Numbers were secondary, but Tov leaves this without comment to a footnote. Den Hartog also thought Deuteronomy was secondary but that seems overstated, which Tov was too polite to note.

The real problem hits in Exodus. For some reason Exodus 35-40 is shorter in Greek, excepting the usual little harmonies... and excepting Exodus 38, which has Bezalel do some metalwork. But why? and why wouldn't this Greek or protoGreek splice in a lot more content earlier, where more people would care (yo, the Exodus?).

Domitian II

Every now and again someone turns up a (base) coin from the provinces we otherwise wouldn't know about. A few years ago we got hyped about Sponsian. Another was Domitian II... except that coin, found in northwest France, was ruled a froggery. Somewhere around here is one Silbannacus, which is a funny name such that he may as well have called himself "king" and issued commands in Gaulish.

Turns out that another Domitian coin has turned up - this time in Britain. Like the suspect original, this cannot be a coin of Flavius Domitianus. It has the copper composition of a coin of the rusted age of the postSeverans, that Third Century Crisis. Our man simply didn't own the mines to strike good silver.

Given that only two coins survive (and of them the old Gaulish one is lost now) out of the many thousands of cheap third-century coins in the hoards; Domitian II likely was not emperor long. It might not have been his name in the first place. He was a pretender who had some legions and lands, but was swiftly swatted away by the competent legions of the region. "Domitian" as a name was mud among Senators of course, but the milites hardly cared for what Senators thought.

Anyway TopRomanFacts is telling us about Chalgrove.

Sheep plague

I don't quite know what "Late Neolithic Bronze Age" means, but it seems Central Asia had one: 2900-500 BC. That sure covers a lot of definitions for "bronze". They also had plague as we know. What wasn't known was if this could infect animals besides rats and humans (and fleas).

Now we do: the yersinia affected sheep, in the 1800s BC. This specie of peste seems not to have got into fleas; I am unsure that fleas even like sheep. But if it were pneumonic, or blood-transmitted directly, it might not have to jump to fleas.

BACKDATE 1/10

Continental drift started late

From Australia come some rocks 3.7Gya. These are anorthocites, like on our Moon. They start disappearing ~3.5Gya. h/t ScienceDaily finally getting around to this November release.

Some conclusions result Our Earth and our Moon share surface qualities, subsequently obscured by later Lunar impacts up there and by much continental drift down here. Later our continents - as such - start rollin' 3.5Gya. The bash which created said Moon may even have delayed the continents' formation.

BACKDATE 1/10

Samuel's poetry

In the early twentieth century of our era, Hirschberg and Cheiko published editions - "diwans", to use the Persian - of Samuel's poetry. Both editors thought the poems were preIslamic. Hirschberg thought they were Jewish; Cheikho, Christian (as usual for him). Either would be interesting if true. The second poem is probably the most famous to Orientalists, canon in Aṣmaʿiyat #20 thus ending up - via Wellhausen 1913 - in What The Koran Really Says.

Since 1913 we know better. BSAOS 1931 dismissed that argument with reference to a rebuttal by George Levi della Vida in Revisti degli Studi Orientali 13, 53-72; which is online, sorta.

The other sendero

My sister in law let me borrow The Other Path, in its 2002 paperback. This is the delightfully-named Hernando de Soto's neoliberal Bible for Latin America. If you took International Studies 'neath the elms in dear old TrinCol, CT; this was the Satanic Bible.

I haven't finished this book yet. I can for now offer some basic philology.

The title deliberately confronts the luminoso of Guzman, graduate of Peru's version of Trinity College. Beyond that: I see some translation-decisions which may or may not distract the reader. I, as a reader, accepted such decisions, as easing me into the alien world of 1980s Perú. "Popular" is here to be understood as the Roman populares, that is the street-merchants of Rome. Also-latinate "violent" and "invasion" don't have the valence, in Peruvian Spanish, as an American might understand.

Perú, I need hardly mention, had a nasty history. To bring this blog's readers up to speed: after Bolivar, the criollos took over. No longer could the "indíos" appeal to the Crown over their masters' heads. Here was imposed an apartheid, avant la lettre, if I may code-switch. Lima, the capital, was to remain Spanish, or at least not indio (think, Cape Town; or, Mérida up here norte); any investment in the Quechua and other hinterlanders was to be directed toward keeping those "peasants" (per de Soto) on their farm.

Problem: the farm boys didn't want an eternity of peasant-heid. Why should they? They were "liberated".

So the farm boys "invaded". They flocked to the cities, especially Lima - tried to, anyway. Lima, as Mérida-de-Sul, resisted, off-and-on. In the 1940s the Lima élite tried what Trujillo and others were trying, to BLEACH the locals by inviting Europeans; where Trujillo wanted Jews, the Limans wanted "Scandinavians" (Argentines can pipe up, anytime). Peru simply had too many Quechua for that BLEACH to work.

Then the political establishment pretty much gave up. Peru got a series of Left-elected governments and military takeovers who also promoted Left ideals, up to 1978ish. De Soto doesn't mention any Yanqui interventions; it's possible that the doodle dandy simply wasn't much involved, seeing Peru (correctly) as a mess.

Under this sloppy post-criollo Leftism from the 1950s to the 1970s, Peru looked the other way when the countryfolk... invaded. It wasn't legal for them to squat in Peru-owned land, but they did it anyway and - trapped by ideology - Peru's "leaders" couldn't lead. Some politicians exploited this mess. Some were "Marxist", or at least claimed as much. For de Soto, the "mess" was just the free market in a failure of institutions; a lot of the squatters / "invaders" accepted the protection of Marxists/Marxians despite being entrepreneurial because nobody else was helping. This "informal" regime in Lima made it a lawless slum - if less actively dangerous than (say) Detroit or Jo'burg, if you weren't in the way. De Soto's glossary has a "slum" as different from an "informal": the former being in private land, the latter Peruvian-government land; but I don't see the difference.

De Soto's book, then, exists as a counter-manifesto for the invaders. De Soto was on the side of the entrepreneur, or at least got out into the (illegal) markets to listen to such.

De Soto reminds me of William Lind in his "fourth generation warfare" book. "Non Violent Resistance" comes up when people on the outs attract media attention, making a moral crusade out of a land grab. And then we can bring "Moldbug" Yarvin: 4GW tactics like the "nonviolent" (de Soto: "violent") landgrab be possible only where the government is complicit. Yarvin wasn't (probably isn't) on the side of the grabbers. Lind ... well, it's not his land being grabbed. De Soto to his credit accepts that "nonviolent" is newspeak for violence, but bends over for the violation.

In 1978, a Moldbugger took Lima, with a mandate to crack those squalid sidewalk vendors and squatters. By then, the latter had a generations-long tradition of existence, to themselves and to the community at large. Here's about when Guzman shows up. Whose Path is not the urban Marxian path.