Pesach and Matzo

For Americans the upcoming few days will be difficult such that I deem unwise (say) to drink them out. So I am taking this time to revisit the two Darius "pesach" pages. Because the Jews in Darius' fifth year, although noting Pesach, did not relate this to The Unleaven. Darius had a different holiday for that, in Nisan: the new-year holiday.

Pesach was a Psalm 91 thing, a ritual to ward off the divs (as a Persian would name them). 11Q11 will collect quite a bit of these.

Another interesting substitution - before the Ebionites and saint John would think of it - is the replacement of animal sacrifice with this bread. I read here that this was done first in Iran before the Jews, and not necessarily their Christian subsects, thought of it.

I am come to -

h/t to ZR's Carnival: Gathercole presents Jesus as Herald. That is: not as Christ.

Gathercole uses an Armenian translation of a misattributed homily. Which is all manner of problematic but too-often As Good As We Get. I'm not here to dispute Gathercole's support for its antiquity. I am come to dispute its relevance.

See what I did there? I just announced my intention to deliver a message. I didn't even claim to be an angel. You don't have to be an angel to announce the start of a message. You don't even have to be a herald.

Jesus does not have to be an angel sent from Heaven; although admittedly saint Mark - by starting his mission at the Jordan - rather implies this. But still, "I am come" presupposes that Jesus is not himself the King. Or at least has not yet revealed that He is; a skeptic would argue the Messianic Secret has not been revealed to Jesus yet.

Another skeptic may wonder if the ghost of John the Baptiser be lurking behind these accounts. The Infancy Gospel ascribed to Thomas is lately mused to be about John, but redacted to refer to Jesus.

BACKDATE 11/5

Self-healing solar

Solestial has a solar panel as will self-heal at 65° C, on up. That is good for inner-system operations where hooked to a radiator; just turn down the radiator and the panel should just ... get there. Or at least the other operations, when losing heat, can shift to using the panel as a radiator for a bit.

Flexibility will help too.

HATTIP: ToughSf 11/5.

The Goddess of Reqem

Davila has posted a 2017 report on the winged-lion temple at Reqem, called Petra. Which report we can now ignore - because Davila also links the finds. This is the smallest temple of four.

Of course the first chapter I scrolled-at was chapter 17 on the inscriptions. Here is presented a fine lapidary on how to do the temple sacrifice, assuredly the most important inscription for them and - had it survived in full - for us. This may well be the template for such inscriptions as featured once in the Jerusalem Temple, the "Temple Scroll" being a blueprint for what to incise on that Temple once the Essenes ever got back(?) in there. Unfortunately - for Nabatists - Reqem's marble is light on specifics to Reqem.

Nah. Here the best chapter is seventh chapter, R. Wenning's on Sculpture. This is where is pondered, which god(dess). But again: Manôt laughs at us mortals. We've had a lot of speculation on "al-'Uzza!!" but this is based on something called a "baetyl", which might be associated with Her elsewhere. An inscription refers to a "Goddess of Hayyân" - but Who? Those baetyls are early - and shared with a clear Isis from Egypt. So this temple hosts that sort of goddess, a royal rather than Fortuna. It turns out, in polytheism, a temple is supposed to be the home of one goddess in particular. A foreign deity can approach Her as a guest - a foreigner like Isis. We do not know Reqem's Hostess.

The shakiest platform in the solar-system

ToughSF links Erik van Helvoirt over Venus ~2013. Van Helvoirt now works at Guerrilla Games of Horizon fame. I don't think there's a game attached to this pic.

This is a balloon, dangling a station with ... panels. Probably not radiators, probably solar. For them to work consistently where the balloon itself isn't overhead this is likely a polar latitude. I wonder if that's the vortex.

ToughSF says the balloon is helium. Commenters ponder whether hydrogen could work. I suspect hydrogen would burn in sulfur-dioxide - but we might not have sufficient SO₂ way up here to spark it up. More serious is that hydrogen isn't that much more common than helium up here. Best I think would be superheated... CO₂, with a balloon reinforced against implosion. Leave the hydrogen for the colonists to sip.

With all those dangling panels, though, how are they protecting from that insane windspeed, especially polar?

The anarcho-syndicalist future

The Weinersmiths are still at it - talking communities in space. They're going with small-scale communes. If I were a Marxist (a good part of my economics is at least paraMarx) small communes would be how I'd scale it.

I suggest they trade amongst each other. Asteroid-to-asteroid, largescale cargo-transfer would work much like living on the asteroid itself. Hence why I keep harping on cyclers.

We might even have some work on microcargo over astronomical distances. Apparently no less than Paul Krugman (pdf) - back in 1978 - wrote a paper on trade over relativistic speeds. That would be microcargoes from Earth to some very distant colony; Krugman says "Trantor" but is clearly pondering Barnard's or αCen-C. One might ponder also a Kuiper colony, say on Eris. A central Federal Reserve Of Venus probably wouldn't be a thing - at least, we'd hope not.

Eccentricity timeseries

This blog has applied von Zeipel to two systems: GJ 229 and ToI 1408. I have a notion on how to apply this to others.

Say we have a two-body system of a star and a brown-dwarf maybe even red; the latter is visible to our 'scopes. These bodies define the inclination of the overall system. Introduce a[nother] planet around the main star. It is eccentric and inclined. Radial-velocity will catch its eccentricity. The inclination - relative to Earth - is unknown.

Von Zeipel suggests that we could run a time series on the eccentricity and also on the amplitude - apparent msini. As the eccentricity changes, given constant mass so should the amplitude. Constraints on the mass should be visible given better spectrometry.

It gets better: as inclination relative to us hits 90°, which I've admitted won't happen with GJ 229, we will start seeing transits. Yea even unto 1 AU from the host star. On the flipside some of our further-out transits, if they do have large outer planets, stand to shift away from transit over time. Luckily we've now had those snapshots.

Exciting as all this is for mostly-future researchers, I must warn that planets subject to ultraMilankovitch will not be habitable. They'll have ultraIceAges.