What was wrong with the Sack of Troy?

One of those prefaces to The Odyssey is The Sack of Troy, summarised here. In antiquity, most agreed that Homer didn't write it. It tended to be attributed to fellow Milesian, Arctinus. Aristotle wasn't complaining about this one particularly when his Poetics lambasted the likes of Cypria for being Just A Bunch Of Stuff That Happened unlike Iliad, which promised a theme and, he thought, held to that theme, this-or-that chapter aside.

But even if Arctinus wasn't Homer (some today doubt Odyssey was Homer)... Hesiod wasn't Homer either. And what Proclus and others claim of The Sack of Troy is that it is in fact restricted to a single episode, after the Horse. So Aristotle shouldn't have minded... right?

Giampiero (or, Jean-Pierre) Scafoglio has an essay, "Two Ways of the Epic Genre in Late Antiquity" discussing the Homer / Aristotle reception in works such as Triphiodorus' epic about the "Capture". This epic, you can read today. And this, wikipedia is saying a lot of authors did read. Latinists of course are aware of Virgil in Aeneid Book II covering the same episode, but self-consciously a preface to the epic of Rome to come.

Triphiodorus clearly didn't think Arctinus got the job done or he'd not have bothered. I do not see where Triphiodorus chose to rewrite a "Wrath of Achilles" or "Tragedy of Hector" (there's talk he redid an Odyssey however). Our man may have been right, given that I cannot link to a full Arctinus. As of this decade the 2020s, it looks like the Sack was no longer even in the late-antique libraries (pdf)... which puts Proclus under suspicion as well.

What we can do, perhaps must do, is to compare Triphiodorus to his peers and middlemen.

Against Virgil, our man chooses Cassandra over the other prophet Laocoön. For the great tragedians, that's Aeschylus over Sophocles. As a narrative choice in a postAristotelian epic, Laocoön doesn't work here and he's also not in the two Homerics. Arctinus did note that the gods chose now to knock him out, but this episode serves mainly to get Aeneas out of the city before all the fun starts.

Triphiodorus and Virgil do seem to agree on Sinon. Also Triphiodorus agrees that Aeneas was at the sack so tacitly sides with Virgil against Arctinus here.

Ultimately, Triphiodorus feels like a writing-exercise. He seems to be showing that he can write a "Sack of Troy" as might meet Aristotle's rules, if not his approval - because personally I doubt that Aristotle liked writing-exercises, of which a lot of those elder-epics smell. Virgil on the other hand wants to bring us into the Trojan side as to see the full iniquity of the Greeks' crimes. Like Nolan this year, Virgil has a point.

Going back to Arctinus: if I was doing a writing-exercise in years B.C., I'd play up the glorious deeds of the Achaeans sacking this city. I'd tick the boxes of the Homeric heroes in Troy meeting their own ends and/or causing appropriate ends to other heroes. As to, why; because Miletus was precariously maintaining its autonomy against the Anatolian barbarians in Lycia, Caria and especially Lydia and, before that, Phrygia.

Yeah, Virgil probably wore it better.

BACKDATE 8/6

SDI's plasma-core rocket

In lieu of Cassenti's microfission-catalysis for fusion rocketry, for interplanetary missions Omira and Mourad suggest "plasma core". Interstellar is another matter (heh). So let's look at plasma-core. This is an idea from 1985 to power NERVA/NΘP.

The core is Uranium Hexafluoride, either U-235 or -233. In theory a Curium-247 hexafluoride also can be made. Anyway, UF₆ is a solid at reasonably-warm temps (<56.5°C). As a plasma the fluorine ions are likely more problematic but we're hoping to make a nuclear blast out of it so noöne cares.

In 1985 they were trying to contain a sphere of this plasma, swimming in a mutually-immiscible noble gas; and why not, in microgravity. They picked argon, probably-obviously. They measured 50km/s exhaust. We divide that latter by Earth 9.8 to make of that a ratio independent of SI or Freedom units, called Specific Impulse; 5.1 kiloseconds. (Although now it seems dependent on Earth being that frame-of-reference.)

They got it running for about two minutes. After that, they lost enough uranium that the critical-mass went subcritical. Also there won't be microgravity during the thrust phase. Before anyone could figure out how to make this practical for a space trip, after January 1986 the launch costs per kilogram hit the Challenger wall.

Spacenerd life is better now. But the middle-1980s flights of fancy have been forgotten... mostly.

Hence such fission pulse engines as in Howe two years ago, which promised 5ks specific-impulse which would have compared nicely with 1985. Or last year centrifugal NERVA... 1.8ks. They'd make it up in thrust though; so if they just wanted to push loads to Deimos or Venus rather than all the way to Jupiter, it might work.

Gerald Marsh seems unhappy with Howe and, more so, with that lumbering 1.8ks solution.

Marsh proposes to revive Ronnie Raygun's tech: with magnetic confinement, in a spheromak. Marsh seems an expert in magnets, working on them in 1996. Marsh must however conclude that one (not he) must also find a way to generate the plasma with the field configuration chosen, maintain thermal stability, and find a way to turn the rocket engine off; opining these are non-trivial engineering problems.

I counter that turning the rocket off is the least of this rocket's problems. What you do here is to calculate the cooloff of the rocket and let the spacecraft reduce its acceleration naturally. It all gets tested in the field like SpaceX tests its Starship. If you're asking after an abort sequence then whatever, just separate your craft from the engine and push the still-running engine to the side as it makes its own merry way to the outer AU fringe.

BACKDATE 8/5

A proposal for the House of Representatives

Cambridge University is, presently, a disgrace and one excellent reason for its disgrace is politics. So, sigh, let's listen to Cambridge on politics.

Britain (not part of the EU) runs on the DSA system. It has a Parliament. The majority of Parliament votes for a Prime Minister, even if the people didn't want it. Margaret Thatcher was the Prime Minister throughout the 1980s. To her, is attributed the comment "we have an elected dictatorship". However you think of Thatcher or, if you're DSA, Burnham: I don't think Thatcher ever cracked 50% of the popular vote and we jolly know Burnham hasn't.

Similar has happened to Denmark. Frederik Ravn Klausen, who sounds like a Scandinavian, nonetheless works out of Cambridge (he should leave); he has teamed with Sebastian Tim Holdum in Copenhagen. They propose instead "geographically ranked guaranteed proportionality". Buroughs / ridings / precincts / parishes still exist. But the election winners are chosen by popular vote. So if your Albertan ridings (screw it, let's be Canadian) voted for the Tory, and everyone north and east of the Lakes voted for the Grit; the Grit votes override most of you. Some of your Tories will get through however. From the truest-blue ridings.

As they note, regionality is here sacrificed. It rather has to be, because someone Federal (or Royal) is going to have to guard the ballots wherever the score stands to be run-up. Historically the cities.

An expressly-regional second chamber would counter this. Americans have such a body: the Senate, wired into State boundaries and once-upon-a-time appointed by State legislatures. This is why Americans deserve to take Klausen-Holdum seriously where, frankly, I would never recommend the above system for any unicameral state. Fer cryin'-out-loud, Denmark is made of islands (and a peninsula).

Drawing up the constituencies is still up to the States I guess. On the plus side, if their constituencies might get overridden by their neighbo(u)rs anyway, gerrymandering might not be as hot an issue.

The issue wot I see as hot is if these States' voters are overridden by other States' voters. They already have to suck it up when Senators from Delaware and North Dakota dab on 'em.

Pekah, Shalish of Israel

Pulu wrested the throne of Ashur in 745 BC, from a "Shalmaneser V" whom Pulu's family then disavowed. Perhaps similar breaks of memory were had in Israel at the time. So: Carl Lederer, and now youtuber "Dig."

The eretz-Israel had been a united land under Jeroboam II, but as all men do he died. His heir Zechariah was ousted in a coup and that coup - under Shallum - collapsed. Menahem and Pekah picked up the pieces. The Bible says Menahem ruled for ten years and Pekah for twenty.

The maths don't add up under scrutiny from Assyria however. Menahem gave tribute to "Pul"; that emperor claimed he'd had it from Pekah as well. Luckily, we have a local report: from Hosea the northern prophet. His sermons made a point of the twin iniquities of his land. Hosea didn't consider Judah in this calculus, despite that it was starting to matter again; Hosea's twinland was Ephraim-and-Israel.

According to Lederer's reading, Pekah had a base in Gilead and simply slipped over there, keeping that base. The face-saving fiction was that Pekah would hold the title "Shalish" and not "king of Israel". In practice, yeah, Pekah was sulṭan across the water, as it were.

I must inject here that per Rendsburg (pdf), Amos especially Amos 6 is also writ in a nonJehudi Hebrew to be considered northern. Amos didn't preach about Israel/Ephraim's twinship for the simple reason he preached under Jeroboam II when that kingdom was one. His kingdom likely included Judah then; maybe then Edom (so I'm not getting into which "Tekoa" here). So for Amos, Jeroboam's court was the court which mattered.

Pekah would eventually switch to being an ally of Damascus and make a bid to take Judah. Ahaz squealed to Assyria who then attacked and got all of it. Israel, from Samaria, would end up a rump and tributary Assyrian vassal, under Hoshea.

More Trappist-1 constraints

On the (excellent) assumption that Trappist-1's planets are all differentiated, Emeline Bolmont, Alex Revol et al. offer "Estimation of the tidal heating in the TRAPPIST-1 planets". They are admittedly constrained by the uncertainty of what these planets' cores actually be, that Love Number we'd noted here once.

Also they don't know the eccentricities of b or c. Frankly I doubt they're Keplerian, so they need some postLaplacian model. Eccentricity tides would bump up their estimates especially inward.

What Revol (especially) thinks he does know, are the obliquity and the libration of each planetary rotation: less than one degree, each. But Revol does not hold these planets as tidally locked: a slow drift of the substellar point, which therefore leads to a day-night cycle.

I find intriguing this space elevator design for e. However Revol argues that the rotations for all planets are slow such that day/night appears retrograde. GEO is, then, high. Where GEO extend past Hill, all space elevators must be floating tether.

Even with low eccentricity it came out that b and c are superheated like Io (if not technically lava); it's elsewhere been noted they've lost everything volatile by now and are airless like Io. Planets d, e, f get more internal heat than Earth; e, they submit, may have a crust and plate tectonics. And we hear e has air. Although I am still not hopeful for photosynthetic life.

Kleisioti et al. move on to f, g, h asking after ice shells, quite reasonable for these cold planets with, further, lower measured density. Planets f and g might have thin Enceladus-tier ice shells; h's would be thick like Europa's. They think possible for us detecting cryovolcanically generated water vapor on f (maybe g) for which we haven't looked. 20 transits should do for seeing it on f.

The patent for a supercloud server

A patent now exists for the heliosync orbit: US-12679564-B2 at ppubs.uspto.gov, for datacentres which I'd written off two years ago as "cockamamie". Various factors as of 2026 are making this less silly. Sophia Space has press-releases, linked at Zim's place.

Heliosync in theory runs 400-1000 km so, LEO. In practice they don't want drag: superfast atmo, which degrades... everything. They also don't want the congestion which reaches further, maybe to 600 km. So they're thinking 800 km. They must beam the data to a comm array anyway, which may as well be SpaceX' constellation of Starlink v2.

Heliosync around Earth gets about 1.361 kW/m² "flux", more than that most the year because of eccentricity. The patent illo assumes they can drive 1 kW/m² from the solar-cells, which they expect η=.3. They leave the material to others; maybe Perovskite. Anyway I read 400 W/m² available to the computer, not 1000. Also here are transmitters, of data.

Some of that flux is reflected (5% here); less is transmitted. Most that heat needs radiating-off, still maybe 1.3 kW/m². The good news, if they insulate the computer: the computer is wide, flat, and narrow. They think that the shaded darkness will allow "passive" radiation through the shade, into space. More good news: most office CPUs seem to run in the 45-65 W range as long as you are not gaming on them. 400 W/m² might make for a respectable server-farm.

The design is simple if they can stow the volume onto a rocket chassis. Direct 800 km looks like a Starship job.

In addition, if the Lunar south pole gets a superstructure, similar architecture might work there too. For a start. (Later we expect coolant-cycles underground.)

Loanwords in Choltian

In pictographic old Egyptian, loanwords are easy to suss. Not having any indigenous roots, such words are spelt phonetically and never otherwise. Magnus Pharao Hansen has been applying the same principle to classic Choltal inscriptions.

They have a loanglyph too: the Striking Owl. This iconography is Teotihuacano. I think everyone agrees that the Place Of Reeds knocked a lot of head down in the Petén. The empire even installed a prince to rule over Mutul ("Tikal"). But we're talking about intrusive words that haven't a contemporary Maya-family etymology.

This'll be a placeholder. (I am not a mayanist.)

Dr Hansen has been arguing that the loans are in some paraNahua dialect and that, therefore, the Place Of Reeds was, if not called anything like "Teo Huacan" at the time, also paraNahua. Mind: this depends on his ability to reconstruct what that dialect would have sounded like, a thousand years before Catholics came with a Latin alphabet. We can do it for Choltal, precisely because sometimes an author could get phonetic. But not many outsiders were using so good a system, then, for writing.

That central Vale was shared between Nahua and Otomí as of AD ~1500. It may be some sharing had happened already. One does wonder how the Purempecha interposed themselves into Michoacan in the meantime.

Anyway if you want to give Dr Hansen a hearing, try "What Happened When?: Relative Chronology and the state of pre-Nahuan in the Classic Period. Paper presented at the Relative Chronology workshop at the University of Copenhagen, June 30th, 2023".