The Judio-Theory always smelled wrong to me on account of how apocalyptically tradcath the Admiral ended up. For those still paying attention, last weekend we got a flurry of silly on muh genetics. What we have here is failure to replicate... again.
Off to the next shiny thing I suppose.
Just a short note that, although I woke up too late to see the launch and stage-separation - both boring at this point - I did catch (heh) the retrieval of the SuperHeavy. I was not expecting it all to be so precise.
Of course Musk and Shotwell (heh heh) have had a lot of time to plot out contingencies by now. Musk in particular has had nothing better to do than to appoint himself as Troll Lord on X. That's our runaway government's fault more than it is, Musk's.
Interesting fire at the end of the booster-catch; there shouldn't really be all that much fuel for a fire, when the booster done boosted and done ... done. But that's why we test. Nobody should be expecting a big bang; the fear was a crash and broken equipment. Since they have everything else intact they'll know what to reinforce for next-time.
Zim is calling 100%. I can't argue with that. Shame on FAA and on all the other clowns for trying to stop this.
Last month I missed a speculation on K2-18's planet: that it might be hydrothermal. That is: it indeed has a water layer below the clouds (sulfur/carbon dominant); in a supercritical state. Like the carbon-dioxide defining Venus' "sea level".
Tom Mueller's been busy since losing his job with the Raptors (although he's kept that on his resume). ToughSf points to Helios.
This is a nonnuclear solution for tugging cargo from LEO (halfway-to-anywhere) to Beyond. They're going with five tons - I assume nonmetric - for LEO>GEO in 24 hours. Metricbros can point to the 67 kN spec. For the SF auteurs amongst us: here's our baseline.
One assumption is that multitonne widgets will be had in LEO for pushing off past the Van Allens. This is the SuperHeavy future; Mueller seems to be aiming at Starship-without-Raptor. Hey why not; Starship's job is to get back to Earth, not to muck around in orbit.
The "head tax" is a Persian concept, applied upon the various Aramaeans whom the Sasanians ruled. On the word they used for it: Mustafa Akyol, whose Mutazilite Islamic Moses book I've just read, really needs to quit citing Ziauddin Ahmad on some Persian etymology for "Kizyat" or whatever.
Several circumstantial problems attracted my suspicions.
For one, where both later Semitic and Iranian languages have an -ah suffix, Semitic tends to reveal that theirs came from -at. Mediaeval Iranian feminines go more to the -ag, -aj, -ak, and -aq. So I'd not expect a "kizyat" in Middle-Persian, only in mediaeval postIslamic Farsi... or in later Arabic anachronisms like in Tabari then Bal'ami.
Also, where we catch late-Antique Aramaeans mentioning the Iranian-imposed head tax, as Goldblatt cites the local Talmud: it is krg'. Take off the emphatic suffix, do some aspiration and out comes the kharaj about which we (also) hear so much under the later Umayyads. (Jews were the suckers who had to pay the thing.) Note meanwhile that -j.
Add to all this that I don't see jizya or gzitho applied to tribute (westSyriac mdatto) until, what, the Maronite Chronicle and then Theodotus of Âmid(a).
Akyol is correct on the concept but is clearly a better philosophical-historian than he is a philologist, so should be more careful when dabbling into the latter.
Living in one of North America's xeric provinces - we shouldn't dignify this one-party votefarm with the title of "state" - we are subject to fires. One cause of fires is the electric vehicle, especially large ones like cars. Apparently burned-down pine forests are greener.
Which is not to knock the technology - when it gets there. This safety leap counts as getting there. Like nonmeat food is getting there.
In last-week news I didn't quite get to, Ceres is muddy and Ryugu is CI chrondritic. I'd thought Ryugu was Cg and baked closer - so, no real retractions needed here. Seems like that middle-road between "Cereslike" and "Pallaslike".
Bennu at least can be mined for food. Ceres may well earn her name as the Demeter of our system. Pace the Expanse, she won't run out.
