Back to LHS 1140

Three summers ago I got moderately excited about Gliese 3053 = LHS 1140 b - the M star's outer planet, 24.7 days. I didn't really look at later-discovered c, which I thought would be irradiated and airless. The Alfvén surface habitability criterion looked good for b however so it got attention at the time.

I started pondering underground water as might deflate the rocky part's density and raise its radius, so held off on saying much more about this unconstrained planet. I had questions needing answers about its atmospheric composition.

So: more data's come in (h/t Zim, but poorly worded). Still looking at a mass of 5.60 ±0.19 Earth masses (M_⊕) and a radius of 1.730 ±0.025 Earth radii (R_⊕). Star is just under 15 parsecs away and hasn't been flaring, and spins 131 days, so is deemed 3+Gy old. Planet b only gets 42% incoming flux but that's enough for HZ status on its sun-facing side.

The star probably used to flare which is how come c, just over Earth mass, is blasted out. The paper is going to float implications for the Cosmic Shoreline (to the extent I hadn't already). I don't believe any further planets are detected here; there might not be room below the 25 day range.

What is found here (and not down on c) is "metastable helium". That is the 2 ³𝑆₁ excited state, bumping an electron to a higher ring; as on WASP-107b. Once excited it takes around 7870 seconds to cool back down again. As Collin Cherubim et al. say in their title, Helium escaping from the atmosphere (pdf). And the helium isn't always found: it was found 2024 (when this blog was looking) but not 2025.

Also there's not much hydrogen. Although the planet is ill-lit, it should still be warm enough for low-melt methane to rise past the "cold trap" of the convective troposphere (so the paper), where it would be broken up. So no new methane is being created downbelow. Water on the other hand can form into clouds below all that helium. Venerians will pipe in that so can sulfuric acid. Good case for the Sudarsky II.

Don't watch Emily Watson

The Odyssey was a fanfic of Homer (and, possibly, also of The Sack of Troy), and we cannot rule out that a woman composed it. Emily Watson has made the text relevant for a modern audience.

And dvorstone explains why I ain't watching Nolan's rendition of Watson's vision:

The Odyssey is not a universal story. It is not a detachable “hero’s journey” that can be stripped of its cultural origins and modernized for contemporary audiences. Its power lies in its particularity. The audience must do the work of closing the gap; the text does not come to us.
The values that animate it, xenia (reciprocal guest-friendship), oikos (the household and its obligations), mētis (cunning intelligence), kleos (glory), and timē (honor), are not interchangeable with modern liberal abstractions. They are embedded in a specific ancient Greek moral and social world.

All this, besides Claire Lehmann promoting it whom I don't trust one bit. Besides Razib Khan linking whatever this is I guess because that particular midwit had read the word "xenia" back in philosophy class once.

If we're going back to the Palatial Period, LHIII before LHIIIC, I suspect mētis won't show up much. The Linear B tablets float plenty of -klewēs names suggesting every other one of dvorstone's themes; the wanax presided over an honor-culture. Mētis however seems unhelpful to the Palace, more helpful to the peasantry (and to the slaves).

But mētis we do want to see in Odyssey. This might be a tale of a man of mētis redeemed back into the oikos. The postArchaic story. Pity Watson can't tell it and Nolan won't.

The Grand Tack, or not

Kyplanet is pulling up Franklin et al. ... from 2004. Franklin's team suggested that Jupiter captured the Hilda asteroids (those 3:2's) on a tack of 0.45 AU inward. This is a problem for the Grand Tack which predicts a much longer inward migration, pulled back by Saturn. Zheng et al. also dispute the grandness of any tack. D'Angelo and Marzari in 2012 questioned if Saturn had that force if Jupiter ever wandered within 4 AU of the nascent Sun.

At least Franklin as a 2004 paper is vulnerable to later data, especially since we've now been visiting the Jovian-region 'stroids. Vokrouhlický et al. want to know how the slow-short-tack theory of Franklin's team can account for the dispersed ...distribution of Hilda inclinations. Overall that 2004 paper is treated as a minority-report (although not yet refuted).

More trouble for Grand Tack might be that it doesn't actually explain what it was supposed to explain, namely Mars' tiny mass. Other constraints we don't got include whatever other large bodies were in this system and might have been yeeted.

The great freeze

This March I noted the great swamping of Europe from an Iberian refug(ium). At the time I'd figured it as violent... and then I found that the original Neanders didn't totally die out. Today is served a second helping of crow.

I had collapsed the earlier Neanders' fall with the demic diffusion of 63kBC - ah hell, this long ago, "65 thousand years ago" might be better. But populations of (presumably) similar tech are rarely simply stomped on; more likely, something had slashed the general Neander population before the Iberian diffusion. Tübingen brings the archaeology. The population outside Iberia had been (too) low for ten thousand years.

We may compare the Neanders from 45k-42kya (43-40kBC) who got replaced by, well, us.

So what was going on in Europe 75-65kya? This is about when most would place Toba but I don't think Toba could have dumped on 'em for ten millennia. What GoogleAI does find is MIS 4, 71-57kya. That is also incidentally about when humans (with quite a bit of Denny DNA) crossed the great Sunda into the island continent Sahul, and the hobbits died out also.

Who owns the Decalogue?

This may as well be theology-day.

The ten axioms ('Asherat ha-Debarîm) of the religions from Torah, often mistaken for "commandments", are now back on X because Jordan Peterson pointed out that they are Jewish; Joel Berry is saying similar. Theodore Beale says no: they were divine. Also Moses was a Levite, thus bypassing Judah which was not the best of tribes at the time.

All that stuff about God nonetheless fronting the Messianic Kingdom from Judah, which line the Gospel of Matthew will trace through Joseph of Nazareth... isn't for Beale. For Beale, the truly Messianic line goes through Mary. Judah is quite literally cucked, via Saint Joseph. As Mary replaced their Messiah; so Luke's Roman Christendom has replaced Judaism. And Luke's two books replace Matthew and Mark; Matthew is just there to illustrate the extent of mah boi Joe's cuckoldry.

I assume Beale by the satanic Babylonian religious group intends the Talmud and not, oh, Ezekiel or MT Psalm 137 or the seven day week. As for Mary, Beale doesn't venture, although her relation to the Temple points to one of those non-Judah families. (Akyol thinks it was Levi but he has to wave off Luke to get there.)

So let's look at what Biblical scholars say about whether Judah deserved this cucking. Besides Ezekiel's ancient rants; he wouldn't want Levi either.

Luke (famously) knew much less about the Judaea than about the Greek-speaking northeastern Med, from Syracuse to Antioch. That excepts where he's relaying Mark (and, Catholics add, Matthew; I'd add Peter). So I deem of interest Luke brings the Temple tradition around Mary, which you'd think would be obscure to a goy like him. It might precede Luke.

So now we're on the case of the Decalogue(s) and its/their relation to the Jewish people. Despite high regard for Moses and the arrival to Horeb, the psalmists didn't say a lot of the Law there. The Bible does of course consider the Ark of importance. The Chronicler makes a to-do about the Ark being transferred to Jerusalem. But the contemporary Samaritans rejected Chronicles but hard; still do.

As I noted here, the earlier-composed parts of the Bible rely upon a tradition in which Moses summons what one might call YHWH's Glory. The people cannot bear the fullness of this theophany; however later Moses receives... the Covenant Code (surprise!). Subsequently Deuteronomy develops this, in the course of Moses' parting testament. This is where Deuteronomy 4:13 introduces the 'Asherat ha-Debarîm, some form thereof anyway.

Overall: the Covenant-Code and Deuteronomy are both early and present a case for pan-Israelite shared lore even when the Davidide kings still reigned. But.

It was the Davidide king Josiah who raised these texts to a national canon. Thirty years ago people were talking about a "Deuteronomist Historian" who'd laid out an admittedly-whiggish theory of how their kingdom came to be and what made it work. Ezekiel himself, Babylonian enemy of the average Jew as he was, had to accept some Deuteronomic precepts.

Frankly the Samaritans owe a debt to the Jews for assembling the overall Five Books of Torah and installing that in their Temple, a task the Samaritans hadn't done at Gerizim as far as we know (their Torah is, like the Greeks', secondary). The Christians owe even more a debt, since they've canonised everything else which the Jews kept from before the Babylonians (and much else afterward).

As far as politics goes, the Trump side of the Right - and I suspect even the Vance side - sees the likes of Beale as needlessly-divisive grifters. On the Jewish side, Laura Loomer is reporting it's not helping (although Joel Berry isn't helping either).

John Esposito, antischolar

Jonathan AC Brown offers an eulogy for his mentor at Georgetown, John Esposito (not this guy). Let us venture down Memory Lane on our way to see off his skiff.

A look through the man's Wikipedia page uncovers little in the way of true research, in the way Bernard Lewis had done. His ouevre was to explain Islam to western seculars. This, the Saudis paid for, through Georgetown's "center" for Muslim-Christian Understanding.

If this dancing macaque was compromised as a scholar, he did venture to opine upon other scholars outside the prince's payroll. He ranked Lewis among the Darth Vaders of the world, and then among the devils of the netherworld. Lewis shared this distinction with Daniel Pipes (or Piepes), author of what should have been a classic work on the mawali.

If Pipes perhaps has been damned to the "Islamophobe" corner - a corner Esposito had set up - such could not be done to Lewis. Agree or disagree with Lewis overall, Lewis' work on mediaeval Islamic politics and history will live for generations to come. Esposito's memory will be for a curse.

Inasmuch as Georgetown is (still) a Catholic institution, the Church should have paid for that center instead, and called that tune.

The record from the seafloor

Anton Petrov points to an r-process event. That's neutron capture associated with the "kilonova" merger of neutron-stars. Some of the physics was fine-tuned last month.

Kilonovae be rare these days. This one happened 100-90 Mya. They can tell from the decay of Plutonium-244, actually fairly long lived, but rare here because most of our plutonium is made: for critical-mass. Kilonova should also create Curium-247 but this one has run out already.

As a side note, the Iron-60 spikes from 7 and 2 Mya are also found. And better-constrained, they say.