When wheat came to China

An excellent video here on how China adapted wheat as a foodstock. We in the west, alongside the great rivers and defended by cats, have leavened our wheat and baked the result as bread. In the east, once they got wheat (and cat): they steamed it into noodles and dumplings. We store the bread; they store the grains.

The video - from "Taste of Civilization" - takes pains to point out that neither way is wrong. The West-capital-W, which includes the Taklamakan east-Turkestan, had cheap heat energy. Europe, before and after Rome, had vast forests with a low population, so wood was cheap. China's population, despite the best efforts of barbarians and tyrants, didn't crash. As for Central Asia, I guess it just got naturally hot half the time such that baking tortilla in metal over the afternoon outside could keep through the winters.

Space habitats will be jealous for water in this gravity-well. I'm thinking we'll be on the Central Asian model: baked breads, and not leavened so-much. Out on Ceres and beyond, where water is cheap and energy expensive, we'll see more noodles and dumplings. (I don't rate The Expanse as serious.)

Space data and stuff

ToughSF wets his blanket to whip us at escape-velocity. The man does use math, which is helpful. But what I see here assumes we build the stuff on Earth.

Side-schemes exist to capture rocks and bring them closer to us, so robots can build the dumber stuff like radiators up there. If we have 14kT in HEO that is 14kT we don't need to schlep from Earth. We just need to schlep a few tonnes of equipment to turn silica and metals into product.

Also: if we have a lunar base (or, better: a long L1 base), we have a lunar base. It does not only have to host a data centre. The base charges the data centre guys and whatever else is being hosted. The L1 base, when we get that, is dangling anhydrous rope to us 60 Mm altitude, further defraying costs of shifting product all up and down the highest HEO ranks.

The real draw of data centres in the GEO-to-HEO space is the sheer SPACE in that in-between. Earth has a surface area of 510,000 km², which we are not carpeting over; and some ocean depth and caves. In the shell between GEO and the end of my dangling tether (and again, I'm a weirdo who thinks we should have that tether) is from 42 Mm to 60 Mm which is a lot more in volume. Yes, LEO has to deal with space junk and rival sats. HEO does not, not at that scale or speed. It only has to consider radiation. Good lord, just sticking these sats in the space between Van Allens would get the job done even without a HEO/lunar industrial base.

Catching 2026 MF2

TransAstra wants to jump up at 2026 MF2 next November. 25m, 14 kT=Mg. To get there: an additional 2.1 km/s of ΔV after an Earth escape. Then TransAstra waits a year and applies force to take away 1 km/s. That remainder happens to match, roughly, 325 Mm semimajor speed of 1.11 km/s HEO (yay, the maths checked out). I assume we don't want it GEO or LEO. Here are the receipts.

[ELLIPSE 6/28: L1 perigee is more like 305 Mm. The orbital velocity of a circular-orbiting particle down there would be faster: 1.14 km/s. But let's say we still need more delta-V to position this thing just right, or to allow for the object's rotation, or there's some mistake; whatevs.]

This is compared with the 2.7 km/s to get from Earth escape to our Moon.

1.4E7 T m/s momentum to be decel'd over 3.156E7 seconds (in a year) comes to a constant 443.6 N... over a year. That, saith Copilot, is 5 MW; and we'd expend 460 T of propellant... for the lower ISP solution. Higher ISP runs more like 20 MW losing 240 T of propellant. So, this isn't their hektotonne tug.

Higher I_sp implies a very hot engine and I believe would constrain the propellant. Also might need to add radiators on the latter. Higher and more-expensive if you want to dip this into the midway of Van Allens, but then we'll need to dodge GEOsats.

Anyway, since it's on my mind of late: with the Spaceline, even using lame-if-elastic Kevlar on this hither end, you don't even have to escape Earth. You just have to get to HEO whence to catch the hook. The rest of it ain't ΔV; it is literally taking the lift.

Also mayyybe if this guy is in HEO it can also catch the Spaceline. For the nerds: that 14kT, even if decel'd to HEO 1.1+ km/s, is packing even more momentum for a Spaceline-rooted cable to catch.

The floating final chapters in Latin Romans

Four years back I looked into a version of Romans which lacked Paul's plans for the future 14:24f. People said Marcion did without those chapters. I said that if so, Marcion was simply following Luke, whose Acts also cuts short. The youtuber "Testify" has lately been on Acts' case if we cared.

Today Peter J. Montoro IV at Evangelical Textual Criticism has been running down some old references to a Latin tradition of Romans 1:1–14:23 followed immediately by 16:24–27. Some scholars have been prepending only; the implication being, that 14:24f wasn't there.

But as far as we know, these chapters were there. They just came after a doxology, like an appendix. Rudolf Schumacher, Die beiden letzten Kapitel des Römerbriefes in Neutestamentliche Abhandlungen (1929) speculated manuscripts which lacked those chapters, but the actual MSS he had in Latin all had them. Such errant MSS perhaps could have existed in Latin and even in Greek. In Italy, anyway, people were copying 1 Clement which (I think) knew of Romans 14:24f.

The mistake seems to stem from T. W. Manson, “St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans—And Others” (1948). He'd mislabeled Schumacher's conjecture as a witness to Latin MSS which Manson didn't own, neither.

We owe to Montoro some gratitude for running down this error before it infect more papers.

That said, I agree with Schumacher. Marcion did write prologues to the Epistles, which included Romans up to 14:23.

Max Planck RETRACTED

In 2011, Springer - scientific rentiers extraordinaire - took down two Max Planck papers. They had been published on Naturwissenschaften early in the 1940s; now The Science of Nature. The journal has nothing to do with this; but they seem not to own the rights to their own catalog.

One paper was "Sinn und Grenzen der exakten Wissenschaft". This was an opinion / philosophical piece which Planck was floating to other journals. Naturwissenschaften at the time didn't care. Springer, now, cares.

Didn't stop Springer from charging $40 for the retracted pdf though... the empty pdf. I suggest that Springer is running a scam. Since it's not people like me buying this stuff, the scam is more likely being foisted upon universities and big NGOs that is, on the taxpayer and the student. Oh and on independent researchers on sci-hub who can be sued for "infringing on our intellectual property".

Springer does have an appeal-and-grievance policy: detailed information about specific retractions is usually confidential and can only be shared with the relevant authors. Max Planck has so far declined to comment.

Cro-Meuse

On the heels of Stajnia: Meuse, long before the Belgica. Again, after the demic displacement.

These samples come from the late 50skBC down to the 43skBC. They form a subclade within the overall population which, as I noted, had already kicked everyone else out. But like ten millennia before so, plenty of time for further hunkering-down. Enough time that, in fact, they didn't inbreed (anymore); contrast the Altai or, indeed, certain Neolithic populations or, uh.

One throwback here is Couvin G6-0083 maybe 46kBC. This one's mum was from the "Thorin" tribe, who'd left the Grotte Mandrin 1600 remains a couple millennia either. The Couvin/Mandrin mtDNA preceded the displacement... by many tens of millennia. This suggests that the displacement wasn't total. Although yes, these ladies remained a minority population.

One point they make is that the population is so late they should have met... us. The future Cro-Mags. There is some evidence of this... in Cro-Mag graves, like Peștera cu Oase. But nowhere in Belgium. This is a contrast with (much) earlier generations where we do find some Y and Mt DNA... and in fact I understand that the Y and Mt DNA in even these Belgium samples derive from an ancient, perhaps Eemian event out of Africa which otherwise didn't take.

BACKDATE 6/26. Stuff happened the last couple days. Needed a break (also the press-release I'd found, then, was on lockdown).

The madonna/whore binary does not exist

The deep mythology of Woman is maiden/mother/crone. Many women these days, and the men around them, would rather talk madonna/whore. This is because the md/wh conversation isn't about women. It is about males - our psychology. I am male. So if you are talking md/wh, you are on my turf.

And you're wrong. Mostly.

Males don't divide women between virgins and ho's. We divide between "stay away" and "make a play". Sorry, ladies; but that's the animal kingdom. If you don't like it, try being a vegetable or a mineral - or maybe fungus, or whatever this thing was. I am unsure it runs so different for womens' views of us, on that maiden/mother boundary.

As far as male authorship of female characters, I am straining my brain to think of any entertainment in the last century as idealises the madonna. Unless the whole point is some kind of spiritual Platonism, like in Ambrose Bierce' "Haïta the Shepherd" (and if you are looking for idealism in Bierce... hoo boy).

md/wh might exist for teenaged boys who don't know anything, and maybe WANT to fall down before a holy feminine. But nobody is publishing lit from teenaged boys - at least I hope not. Other than that, uh. The lives-of-saints which the likes of Jerome and Palladius were spreading around early Christendom. But who's reading any of that in our day? (Apart from me.)

I think we have to put the md/wh stuff down to what upper-middle-class strivers want to say about our culture. These strivers should be mothers, but are still "maidens", even if they have slain their children. They feel like whores and they resent that the maidens can claim to be madonna - even if actual maidens never had any intention of this claim.

BACKDATE 6/26