January 1865

As I'm writing this, some whites are disillusioned with blacks who've paid toward murderer Karmelo Anthony... and have retaliated by shifting money to some blonde racist Shiloh something-or-other. The father of that kid who got stabbed, meanwhile, hasn't gotten anything but contempt. Also Mississippi has been distancing itself from the Northern Virginia flag, you know which one. So I figure: let's look at how we got here.

The Archaeology roundup, which Jessica Saraceni used to run, has pointed to a mass murder in Kentucky. As of January 1865, ol' Dixie could count on another four years of President Lincoln and a more-radical Congress just elected. The Confederate States weren't winning the war and everyone knew it. The article claims Kentucky was "neutral" but if so, that neutrality is to be read as Sihanouk's during South Vietnam's later struggle to exist. The CSA's army had earlier invaded Kentucky ensuring that nonCSA State's angry politicians, by 1865, would allow USA bases in its territory. Which included free black Union soldiers. Did anyone ask the Kentuck farmers? LOL.

Adding to the ugliness of that January was Sherman's March the month before, through Georgia. Atlanta had already been ruralised, as defeated cities are. Following that election, it was Union policy that the CSA had no civilians. If a city supported the CSA, it deserved fire. Sherman delivered that fire from Atlanta to Savannah.

It was hard for Dixie sympathisers that year to deny the Union that to the extent the CSA ever existed, it was dead. The North Virginia Flag, however, was spreading north. Rural Southerners knew that a Reconstruction was coming. They shifted to what Spaniards called the "guerrilla" - to terror. "Redemption", they'd call it.

This mass murder in Kentucky was an initial blow, to thin out the troops which Southerners predicted would be enforcing the coming Reconstruction. And I suspect black soldiers remembered this atrocity; or, if not this one, then just a general atmosphere in all the "prostrate states" where their soldiers were subject to getting picked-off. They would enact some brutal retaliations for instance in Galveston, once Texas ran out of cash and surrendered.

Hyper-Catalan

This might be the biggest news in arithmetic computation in my lifetime: N. J. Wildberger and Dean Rubine, "A Hyper-Catalan Series Solution to Polynomial Equations, and the Geode". It's all over the place, like ScienceDaily.

Polynomial equations are ax^2+bx+c=y; the notion is, y=0 solve for x. This here was a "second order" equation, since up to some x²; n=2. For such, exist up to n solutions. For the second-orders, called "quadratic": Sargon of Akkad might not have known, but Hammurabi sure did. That's how old it is. The solution of x^2-2=0 could be shorthanded as its "radical", root-two here; the Greeks found that was as good as they could do, since it couldn't be expressed as a fraction (or a decimal, which is just x/10^n you know). The Greeks then found that no equation could encompass π; it wasn't algebraic.

It took until the gunpowder-and-caravel age, but then some Italians came up with good equations to dig out x in third- and fourth-order polynomials, called "cubics" and "quartics". Those solutions could be expressed as radicals like ol' root-2. There was actually something of a rivalry in Italy between cities as could solve these secret equations and those as hoped to. Nobody, however, could suss out quintics beyond "up to five solutions, real or complex", barring blatantly artificial concoctions like x^5-2=0. The Newton-Raphson method and maybe some others can approximate solutions but they're algorithmic. (Remember that π was already off this table, these mathematicians didn't bother with that.)

Abel, Ruffini, and Galois in the late date of 1822 finally proved that radicals cannot always be found to express an algebraic number. However in 1844, Gotthold Eisenstein floated x^5+x-t=0; although the x quintet of solutions ain't radical, such can at least be expressed - as a timeseries. If the decimal numbers trail off into infinity who cares; same holds for the two-radical (squareroot) of two.

That is where Wildberger and Rubine step in, two centuries later. They are expanding Eisenstein's nonradical expressions to cover the whole plane of polynomial solutions. No more Newton-Raphson: want the solution? just go crunch.

That could be big for repetitive calculations in 3D graphics and astronomy. We'll see.

The godless monothelete

Last year I got wind of Michel Foucault. Foucault's life work was in demonstrating the interdependence of Power and Truth. The Power defines health, to which any deviation is sickness. What I didn't add, is that Foucault died early - of the GRID.

"I demonstrate it thus", indeed.

I mentioned earlier that maybe Foucault's readers be better off reading Girard. In this case I suspect Достоевский would have aided Foucault more. Foucault based himself, whether he admitted it or no, upon Monotheletism. The monothelete, once he relieves G-d from duty, is left with only Power. His morality becomes ... whatever he can get away with. Dostoevsky - an Orthodox in Russia - saw the same phenomenon among his more-secular peers. The ensuing events in Slavic Orthodoxy proved Dostoevsky right.

Khalid the Hasanist

For the Shiites and moderate skeptics in my audience, Torsten Hylén of Uppsala has now published The Karbala Story and Early Shi'ite Identity through Norse colony Edinburgh. I somewhat wish I'd had it earlier because I have Editorial Comments. My largest nit may as well get a picking, here.

Hylén's book deals with Karbala and then with the Tawwab "penitents". I am no expert on either. My research in that 60s/680s decade went more into what Muslims consider their aftermath, the Zubayrid Fitna which I handled a decade ago in House of War. That entailed some disentanglement... which (I think) Hylén is leaving entangled.

Hylén for Karbala sees three basic strands, which entered Tabarî thence Mas'ûdî (without crediting Tabarî, as Hylén complains). Tabarî's main source was Ibn al-Kalbî < Abû Mikhnaf Lot, which he supplemented by "imam Bâqir" (I'll get to him) and one other guy who wasn't Shiite. Hylén argues for their mutual independence.

I think that's a tough call. If the imamate - often a shadow caliphate - had a Story, Abû Mikhnaf and Ibn al-Kalbî between them should have ferreted it out, like Tabarî will. Also I'd think the Shi'a should have transmitted Bâqir's account through, say, his son Ja'far and even Reza. Where's that? Tabarî doesn't bother; he relates from some Khâlid who'd claimed Duhnî (d. AD 750). Mas'ûdî aside this can be crosschecked, for which Hylén brings Abû'l-Faraj Isfahânî.

Per Hylén page 72: In summary, I would place the origin of the version ascribed to al-Bāqir in Medina at the turn of the second/the first decades of the eighth century. That is, that al-Bâqir really said all this. Let's investigate.

Duhnî would have seen the deaths of Bâqir 735 and then of his brother and supposed successor Zayd 740, followed by the 'Abbâsî takeover of the Iraq 747. I don't read these tropes in what Tabarî gives us. I see other tropes, though. Those are interesting - because they're not Shi'a.

In Khâlid's account, Husayn took refuge in Mecca from the devil Yazîd. This actually has a contemporary historical valence: but it was the Zubayrids who'd claimed that sanctuary. Abû Mikhnaf couldn't avoid this and, to his credit, did not; he says that Husayn and Ibn al-Zubayr did this together. ... Really?

Couple of points, here. First: Abû Mikhnaf knew Bâqir's tradition, as Khâlid taught it. Second: Khâlid has taken the Zubayrid tropes to apply to a Shi'ite figure. You know who else did this? Muhammad the Hasani called Nafs al-Zakiya. He rebelled AH 145/AD 762, after Duhnî was long gone. There's a whole scholarly literature on how his propagandists appropriated the Zubayrid biography. (Independent of Mehdy Shaddel: House of War has an appendix.)

The apocalypse(s) as had the Hasani follow the Zubayrid template annoyed the Shi'a, who by now could recall what Musab had done to the Mukhtâr in al-Kufa; and the mainline Shi'a far-as-I-know didn't transmit these. I propose that Khâlid transmitted such a Karbala account as would make of Husayn Martyr a prefigure, instead, of the Hasani. Not ~110/730; more like 140/760.

Stac Fada

Stac Fada is a formation from some impact punctuating our Boring-Billion. Curtin U has redated its zirconia: 990 Mya. Some, the impact had morphed into "reidites" - a word I hadn't seen. Sounds more Norn than Scotch. Anyway - as they put it - the impact reset their internal atomic-clocks.

They haven't found the crater itself. They seem confident it's close-enough the Scottish Highlands, maybe offshore, that it hasn't been buried and/or gobbled by the last 990 My of geology.

The new(er) date would, they say, abut the arrival of eukaryotes to freshwater. Although the article implies these were the ancestors to all eukaryotes - which means, for one, chloroplasts weren't had yet. Maybe chloroplasts are being redated too?

The machine stops

The Hispania is relearning the value of warehousing power. Ed Conway is pointing us back to his 2023 thread on (rotational) Inertia; we can also read this 2021 warning (pdf). A few years ago the ridiculous fakers running Texas had switched to wind and when their blades didn't spin, their power went out. Apparently they don't speak Mexican in Spain. The accent I suppose.

To their credit, some of the Just-Stop-Oil guys have been aware that a muh-renewables grid is an Agile, J-I-T grid. Hence Casey Handmer's insistence on batteries of capacitors and power-cells. The old steampunk way was just to store this in big heavy spinning things - like turbines, which is kinda how coal works. Nuclear is also, infamously, a power source you have to keep running once you start or else. The spin can't go below 49.5 Hz in Europe or most of Japan, or - Nightfall.

What I didn't know, and Conway teaches, is that some grids even have turbines as run as a strategic-reserve. Top up energy from time to time; extract if there's a Problem.

The Emperor protects

Last year, Nathan Israel Smolin wrote Christ the Emperor. It's been reviewed at Bryn Mawr and it looks like some outfit called "The European Conservative" reviewed it too. The latter review is the easier read.

This concerns the Eunomian turn in the Constantinian Empire, which Smolin starts at "Oration to the Saints" AD 327 - very soon after Nicaea. On the deaths of the autocrat and then of one of his sons as he didn't murder, namely Constantine II d. 340, the empire was divided. In 350 Constantius II inherited the pieces and then put down a revolt.

Smolin probably doesn't read here but agrees with my thesis that theology is cover for the struggle between Power and Truth. As Michel Foucault teaches, these are interconnected; although neither can defeat Math. Bayes counts as Math.

Constantine already had to put down clerics as didn't agree with his Patriarchy, like Donatus; this book notes Marcellus closer home in Ancyra, deposed AD 336. The dynasty had little trouble finding allies like Philostorgius and the Eusebii, and Eustathius somehow survived unpurged. Constantius II's problems were Hilary of Poitiers and a man of Cagliari called, uh, Lucifer. In the council of Milan AD 355, the emperor had both exiled. Hilary is famous; Lucifer is not, anymore, which Smolin hopes to rectify.