Cracked rock is a poor insulator

In more thermodynamic news, as of last March we know why Bennu (and Ryugu) don't hold heat well - has low thermal inertia. It's because Bennu's bigger rocks are cracked. Similar should hold for Ryugu and maybe Polana.

Apparently cracked geometry conducts heat more than just being porous. Porous rock would be analogous to cement, or to... C type meteorites, fused by the process of landing upon us.

The new cements we hope to make on Lunar bases will of course be more like S type meteorites, but the same porosity should apply. So, better sift out pebbles when making the cement.

Keyhole news

That conference last week further proposed bringing asteroid-bits into cislunar orbit. Joel Sercel has a map. I think the idea is to pull it to STL2, then yank it at the moon, which - by the Jacobi keyhole - ends up flung into a high Lunar orbit. That can touch upon various Earth-Lunar cyclers, the 3:1 being illustrated here.

This fits well with another thesis mooted a few days ago, on Galactic-Solar Lagrange; from the "space journal of Asgardia" page 72. I vaguely recall some skiffy about that maybe ten years ago. Assuming no nearby other heavy stars, our gravity meets the Galactic Core's gravity at 3.8 ly. During those periods, a slow moving body even up to Jupiter mass should be able to slide into a long-period Solar orbit. Which, if eccentric, will pose Problems.

To be sure, this is not one of those times. The Alpha Centauri system is something like twice our system's mass which means our mutual balance is a good deal within 2 ly of us, which should swamp our L's. But - stars move around all the time. Between the Scholz flyby 60skBC and 20kBC, we didn't have anything special near to us. Anything nabbed in L1 or L2 could be on its way toward us, still.

Tint

Me mum sent me this last week: Mark A Hollands, Boris T Gänsicke, Pier-Emmanuel Tremblay, Detlev Koester "Any colour you like: the diverse chromaticities of white dwarfs". This alludes to, and reverses, the famous Model T quote: most of these stars-in-retirement are white, median #F9F5FF to be precise. That would correspond to 6504 K / D65 white point.

That #FF is indeed in the B part of RGB, but they deem the blue negligible, correcting most textbooks. I take it that the blue stars are simply the brighter ones we've historically seen from further away.

Most white dwarf stars fall on a boring logarithmic-like curve by temperature, as one might expect. Sabine is saying our own Sun would be on the green side but all that yellow-to-red swamps it out.

However: outliers exist. These are metal-polluted. I don't find overlap between the two papers. Something like 080843.15 + 464028.64 should be WD J0808+4640, la?

Which is a pity. The "metals" here seem to skew toward lithium and stellar gas, not rocky planet mantles.

WD J1330+6435 is the one making the news at #DDFFB8. That #FF is in the G part of RGB. When I was a kid I asked my dad if green was possible in stars and he said that some elements look green in a fire.

Since then, uh. The Starflight game had some green stars but, by that age, I knew better. There was also Alastair Reynolds with his "green-fly" Dyson swarm, turning some stars green. Mind, both were main-sequence.

So, at last, this paper illustrates what my dad was trying to say, with an example he didn't have on-hand, because none of us did. (Green stars'd make more sense in the Starflight sequel which happens where the solar flares already happened.)

Other outliers are such as might look blue but are cooler than 6000 K. WD J2356–2054 in Draco shines only 4000 K. Here is strong Na[trium] (sodium) pollution.

Don't vote for Vivek

Mr Vivek Ramaswamy (hence, "Vivek" - because it's shorter) has mooted an advert although as far as I know not yet in television syndication, bringing Dr/Mrs Amy née-Stearns Acton's mother Donna Stearns-then-Arthur to testify against Amy.

Yeah. Her own daughter. This gon' get ugly.

Ms Laura Loomer is gung-ho on Vivek's side. Loomer is generally pro-Indian and pro-Republican, in this year's races anyway. I can understand being pro-both: seriously, despite this guy and his razixweeterz. I have long been unsure that Vivek is the right Indian or the right Republican to be daring a statewide race - anywhere, in the US or in India. But here we are discussing his opponent. Whom Vivek through surrogates down to mommy-dearest is accusing of dishonesty.

Scouting around the place, the accusation against Amy Acton's stepfather came from Amy Acton's biologic father. He leveled a charge of molestation against Mr Cledith Arthur, the non-biologic. Arthur got arrested and a grand jury found this to be credible. Arthur then fled Ohio taking the missus in tow, alighting in Pennsylvania. Ohio's legal system subsequently put Amy into the custody of her biologic father.

This brouhaha has, as of poasting, united both National Review (which at heart has been a pro-immigration rag, so aligned with V.R.) and the Huffington Post.

Ohio didn't forget the Arthur family and attempted to toss some warrants into Pennsylvania in 1981 and even in 1987, they say. That Arthur remained - per Ms Loomer - never convicted and never stood trial is indeed the best kind of correct... for Arthur.

Amy Acton's brother Mr Philip Stearns (note: no "Mr Arthur") is siding with Dr Acton. Other snippets of evidence include that Acton has suffered some slips into drunkenness and anger, which most healthy women might not suffer.

This all smells like Philip and Amy have honest memories of what happened, at least that Amy suffered something horrid at a too-young age from someone. Donna failed to protect from this to the extent she lost custody. What directly caused the damage? - at the time, Mr Arthur had a low estimation of his abilities to win his case in court. Also nobody was questioning Amy's story in 2019. It follows that Philip and Amy are honestly pinpointing the culprit, specifically.

At the very least Vivek's team was extremely unwise to dig this dirt into the media. So's Loomer. Stephen "Vodkapundit" Green is simply exercising tactical cowardice, like Vivek himself. Can't speak highly of Ace. And as of now I'm seeing at least seven Instacommenters raising the false-flag (as usual, it's not, if it were, Vivek would have disavowed this by now).

If you are an Ohio conservative, and we know from election results many of these exist, I suggest going downballot but putting the Constitution candidate for governor. Like I did here in Colorado, stuck with another terrible Republican who doesn't deserve a political career.

Joel's Zionism

This blog hasn't much looked in on the prophetic oracles of Joel - directly. It is in CBH excepting six examples of the "LBH" second-Temple cant of the Chronicler. It may or may not cite 'Abd-JehovahObadiah. To this end, John Dunne may offer a helpful project, looking in on the synopsis with Amos (pdf).

Joel looks forward to a new Eden, flowing with wine, focused upon Zion and her Temple. Amos, which is an elder text, has about the same except here the focus is on David's tent. Now: Amos is assuredly a northern text with Amos 6 being in dialect. But "David" as totem shows up in the words of outside opponents: in the north (Dan stele, of Hazael) and against the north (Moab stele, of Mesha). Tents, we should note, are mobile. Also Dunne argues that Amos bears real eyewitness reports of the earthquake in Jeroboam II's time.

We're not really here for Amos. We're just placing him early. He was a popular prophet in the CBH-speaking world, Isaiah and Jeremiah both using his work as to apply to the Jerusalem area. Dunne would add to that list, Joel; as another citer of Amos.

The Old Greek order of Prophets follows that scheme, where Joel "reflects" back on Amos. The MT has rather the order Joel-Amos; so promoting Joel as the prequel, if you like. (Also the Greek merges MT Joel 2+3.) For those who deem 4 Ezra to be originally Hebrew (and based on its connexion with the Pseudo-Philo, I'm one of those): the MT order seems debatable up to Bar Kokhba.

In Old Greek also, Amos himself was interpreted, where David's tent is David's σκηνή which is "built", comparable to Moloch's σκηνή earlier in that book and also to the LXX-Torah tabernacle. In the Greek Tobit 13:10/11 also-also, the Lord has a σκηνή to be "built". I've suspected the Greek project to translate the Prophets was generally a priestly project, in Isaiah's case by exiled dissidents and in Ezekiel's case by Zadokites. Tobit had been composed in the first place by the "Aramaic Levi" crew, which stands to reason would be translated by sympathisers.

Dunne contrasts Joel, Greek-Amos, and Greek-Tobit on the one side; with the late-antique Targum on the other. On the latter side, Amos was still read as referring to David's dynasty. The Damascus Document, in the same lineage as Aramaic Levi and the Zadokite version of Ezekiel, and a citer of Joel 2, takes a third path: that David's tent is now the qahal - soon to become the Qumran yahad community. (On this much, I'll ding Dunne, because his footnote does not support that this be regal, especially given how equivocally Qumran understands "messianism".)

For Dunne, Joel should be read alongside this Greek priestly translation project before the Damascus Document. Dunne would stick this composition before all of that. Since here he doesn't argue the point, I'll give it a go: it was not "back-"translated from Greek to Hebrew, and it's low in the "LBH". Early second-Temple seems safest, like 2 Isaiah.

Queerying Harry Tanner's book

Dr Harry Tanner published something in a London press, on hate versus love. Tanner is on the side of love (just ask him); if you disagree that homosexuality counts, you are hate.

Lest you think I am being harsh: here is (or, yesterday... was) a published review, from one Eleni Avdoulou at the University of Pisa. That reviewer is on Tanner's side such that I really can't see her misinterpreting Tanner's point. Avdoulou's publisher? - Bryn Mawr, an semi-femme university in the US (they bundle up with Haverford). I see today the whole site is down, so uh. I'll be adding links to other reviews.

I find failures up and down this entire asânid chain. Tanner has a bias, against basic biology and the need for a society - British in his case - to propagate itself. His publisher Bloomsbury did not call him on this bias. His reviewer Avdoulou didn't either; and by extension neither did Bryn Mawr. So now we gotta do it.

Just look at all this cant from the review: The chapter concludes by arguing that Cleon’s anti-gay agenda and the increasingly homophobic climate in Athens prompted prominent queers such as Euripides and Agathon to seek refuge.... We can accept this from, oh, Bent Spines (or from Lobo or whatever). From a purported university press all three words need flagging as ingroup-jargon. Especially since Tanner trades on his PhD.

More: 'phobia medicalises an opposition likely political in nature (even then). As Donald Kagan reports, Cleon was a leader of Athens (we'll leave aside how effective for now). It is likely that Cleon from 450 BC to his death in battle had specific targets in mind. And Cleon wasn't acting alone, given that Pericles was hardly a "queer" (Tanner and Avdoulou demand we use this term) himself.

Tanner is a midwit who does not understand, say, Judaism outside his Christian filter. I suspect his dim view of Cleon likewise depends upon university (read: midwit) acceptance of Thucydides in the canon. Thucydides - writing after the war, as something of a revisionist - made Cleon out as the great villain. It happens that after Pericles' death, Thucydides and Cleon fell into rival factions. Even then I don't see Thucydides objecting to Cleon's social programme; only to his military grand-strategy (Kagan would interject here, Cleon was winning until his death). Neither, I think, did Pericles object.

Tanner and Avdoulou read like Christian apologists finding a figure that their caste hates because their professor told them they need to be hated. For Tapscott it's Darwin; for Ravi Zacharias it was Nietzsche. This makes further difficult to take Tanner seriously that opposition to homosexuality be an outgrowth of the Gini Coëfficient. Tanner doesn't buck the midwit wisdom that Greek homosexuality was an aristocratic pastime with clear Top and Bottom roles - rather undercutting that chapter of his thesis. I doubt that Tanner even knows what Gini is.

Tanner, I get. He wants to keep chasing after cute young boys like when he was a young boy (the Kirkus reviewer makes this clear... citing Tanner's own book). Avdoulou seems less like a natural ally than like a university drone. Can't risk tenure.

Offworld Resources Workshop, 4

Space Twitter is dribbling out the results of a "workshop" last week at the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, CA. The fourth such held by that Agency.

Some releases are out, like this one from Pulsar Helium (perhaps distinct from the Sunbird guys). It's restricted, although I don't know how. Nor - since the interdicted regions include Australia and Japan - why. (South Africa, I could grok.)

The report notes the supply / demand curve for Helium-3. Demand is set to spike due to quantum computing, operating at the centiKelvins; even leaving aside the Sunbird roggets. Presently the supply is decay of tritium which is had at the DoE's Savannah River. It turns out He-3 can also be extracted from certain natural-gas deposits. Most-accessible to Americans is one "Topaz" field in rocky Minnesota, the "Jetstream #1" well. We just haven't much tried said extraxion, by this point. I expect the Australians and South Africans, owning Minnesota-like geology, would love so to try.

Another company, Lunar He-3 Mining, has a technology for extracting this gas. Despite the name, the tech isn't just for the moon.