As far as other probes go, past and prospective:
Europa Clipper's coming, as best they can manage; but it's looking much like they won't find anything to send back. "Attempt no landing there" indeed.
The assumption was that Europa's mantle would be under similar squeezes as Io's. That would depend on how stiff those rocks are. We have a few constraints on those rocks nobody can see under so much water: the mass of the world overall, and the radius of the mantle. It turns out the mantle is likely under a lot of pressure, even given the low gravity on this moon's oceanfloor. Too much pressure to allow such cracks as we see under Earth's seafloors.
No ocean venting means no nutrients get added to the ocean. Europa has had boring 4.5 billions.
Clipper is still a good mission, despite my annoyances with the trajectory. The mission stands to refine parameter-space. There may be hope in the three Laplacian moons shifting in and out of eccentricity; in peak times maybe Europa did get a little subsurface rumblings. Also, I dunno, maybe some life has figured out how to cling to the surface ice - close enough to ingest Io's nutrients, not close enough for the radiation.
Bit of a stretch mayhap.
One grisly spectacle in English history, and for that matter in Catholic history, is the Cadaver Trial. Formosus was exhumed and draped in the Papal regalia for the "horrendous synod"; Lord Cromwell's Parliament put Charles I's corpse on display and, of course, Charles' heir would return the favour for the departed Lord. So: Papmalil in K'anwitznal.
K'anwitznal was a kingdom of of late Classic Choltal, now in that big panhandle of Guatemala upstream of Belize. The site we care about is that now called "Ucanal".
Some faction, 773-881 CE by radiocarbon, burned the king's bones - but not the king they'd replaced. Nah: these men dug the bones out of some king's tomb - decades gone - and publicly burned these bones in a 800°C holocaust. I use that term because the king's treasures went with him.
One suspect is Papmalil. He seems not to be of the Choltal, and never called himself Ahau. He took instead a title meaning something like "lord from the west". The region speaks Kekchi now with a smattering of Yucatec (Itza, Mopan, maybe Lacandon). That looks more like southwest to me but hey.
I tend to agree that Papmalil is my prime suspect, as well. There are many analogies with Cromwell, who also melted down the old royal paraphenalia.
Kurush Teipsides the Great King was named after his grandfather, whose name was Elamite. He did not rule as a Farsi nationalist - contrast Darius and Xerxes. Vridar is reminding those of us needing such reminder of Amelia Kuhrt: that Cyrus in Babylon posed as the new Ashurbanipal. That is: Cyrus was there to restore cosmic-order to Babylon; in the name of Anshar lord of the universe, to be associated with Marduk. (The midwittery would have that Cyrus venerated Ahura Mazda, as would Darius. Like Hanania, this blog tends midwit.)
Vridar points to Cyrus' heir Kambuzha = Cambyses, in Sais. Cambyses promoted Neith thence and there. I'll note that Cambyses could associate himself with the Saites, a favourite régime of Hudson. To the extent either shah "set captives free", a Hudson might add: this just means he nullified debts owed to the previous régime and its temples. Cyrus, ousting Nabunaid (note: not "Marduknaid"), would have hit the temples of Nabu and Sin, sparing Marduk.
All this means we have a contemporary context for Cyrus' propaganda. This context is not the Bible. In their own terms, Cyrus' decrees are not explicit about shifting Diversity back to whence it came. Vridar instead brings Judaeans by the Waters of Babylon (2022) that Yehud was happy "by the rivers of Babylon" and had no pressing desire for Zion. Yeb/Elephantine hints that Yehud may well have run a temple at Babylon. Ezekiel wanted Babylonian-style Temples for his people, maybe at Bethel.
Now: given the proCyrus propaganda in 2 Isaiah, and the Babylon-to-Zion stuff in Ezekiel, I actually do suspect there was a Judaean move back to Madinat Yehud. But maybe it wasn't the literate class. Maybe it was soldiers, with 2 Isaiah's cantillations ringing in their ears.
Wrath of Khan stole the Death-Star blueprint and SF fans have been dealing with that ridiculous macguffin ever since, from Space Quest's Star Generator to... to Return of the Jedi (siiigh). Anyway here's Edontigney's Rinn's Run, skipping to chapter 36.
This device speeds up the evolution of a star along the main-sequence. But... how?
In a universe of FtL, where we're (somehow) preserving causality, at least better than these servants of Chaos have managed, I guess we can envelop a small star in a bubble as ages faster than the rest of us do. That would be the opposite of the environs of a black hole wherein, of course, time slows down. I don't know how far this scales but - hey, the baddies have had time to think it through, as far as to experiment on something like TRAPPIST-1. (Assume they slipped over to Mirrond's "Discord" station.)
My issue: the experimenters are getting the results of their experiments. This means: electromagnetic waves are radiating out of this bubble. This light is, relativistically, blueshifted. But not only that, but the waves should be piling up. Say we want to age our Sun to the point where, at the end, its HZ zone runs past Earth; I think that's 500 MaD ("meganni Domini"; why not). By 250 MaD, animal life on the Pangaea is mostly-screwed anyway; but right now we're talking aliens microwaving the Sun, only.
Edontigney's MaD-scientists doesn't have to age this star to six GaD over a few weeks just to watch it go redgiant. They don't even have to age it to 500 MaD. They could probably just age it, like, by one year over those few weeks.
Here's why: pushing a star to do energy output it would normally do in 52 weeks, over 4 weeks, means: the star is thirteen times as radiative over that time. By comparison, Venus gets 1.9 times as much as we get.
More: this is all blueshifted. We're not getting 13 times the infrared - if I'm correctly reading the "solar spectrum by wavelength" graphs we might be getting "only" six times that. Also the infrared is shifted to visible light, making that 13 times what used to be had from the infrared (oh and some of that gets absorbed by particles in the atmosphere and clouds, heating all that up). Again: maybe "only", like, eight times what used to be had from visible light. Here's the real problem: we are getting more - much more - than 13 times the usual ultraviolet. That's what used to be in the visible spectrum, which is what our sun concentrates on.
I ... don't think life on Earth or in any normal space-station is rated to take a UV spike of, I'm guessing, thirty times normal, in four weeks. If Lunar and Martian colonies are in lavatubes then, ehh, maybe; and aquatic species (and bases) should be fine. As far as ozone goes, that might depend on how far we blueshift (here's where my physics desert me), since past UV-B we get UV-C to build the ozone back up; but either way brute force 30 times the UV of any sort is not what a land animal wants.
That may be a problem I have with death rays overall: they're too big. If Lucas wants Exterminatus on Alderaan, it's enough that the Death Star has tractor-beams; big rocks will pummel Alderaan back into the early Palaeocene quite nicely (yes I know, "rocks aren't free" either). Or maybe the Death Star can spare some neutronium, which it obviously has to keep up its gravity, as to inject into Alderaan's mantle like that "red matter" from over in Abrams' other space dreck (you don't need the full black hole to ruin Alderaan's crustal stability).
Aging a star to billions of years is... overkill.
I was pondering lately, paratext. Take our Bible. It's a translation but never mind that for now. Even in translation it would be a difficult read, let's say. We put each "book" in this text in its own section. We also have chapter and verse numerations. We agree in which order to present these books. In Christendom these arrangements can get pretty involved - like those Marcionite and antiMarcionite prologues, or like the Eusebian apparatus. Judaism meanwhile has Chumash, wherein lections of Torah might get a Haftorah from elsewhere. Paratext, in short, is well on its way to commentary.
Start with the Psalter. Several psalms helpfully point to scenes in (say) David's life when that psalm was uttered, like Psalm 3 in MT, when David fled Absalom. Psalm 18 entered 2 Samuel/Reigns 22, but Psalm 3 stayed in the Psalter alone.
I've been getting the impression that cantillated haftorah has moved from lections, like (lately) the Chumash, into paratext, yea even unto text. We could cite here those songs of Moses in Exodus and Deuteronomy. Also Hannah's song and the Lament Of The Bow in the Samuel-Saul-David cycle - perhaps back when these books were Scripture, when "Torah" was not yet the Jews' first text (because its form and use were different).
Sometimes Israel had inherited a song that these authors simply couldn't fit anywhere. The song of Deborah (who was not of Judah!) was homeless in narrative and couldn't be used in early Psalters. in such cases, narratives were writ to provide the context. Thus: Judges 4, to introduce our Judges 5.
As prose goes I am also pondering introductory phrases. The obvious one is amara YHWH, usually translated "thus saith the LORD" but - to my overly-Arabic mind - 'mr connotates more "command" or at least "decree" than simple speech (wouldn't that be q'l? or נְאֻ֤ם?) Psalm 2 drops this on us in v. 7; Psalm 2 thereby becomes a prophetic oracle. For narratives, here-and-there I see אֵ֣לֶּה תֹּלְד֣וֹת in Genesis 37:2 and Numbers 3:1, "this is the account of -" Jacob and Aaron/Moses. For poems, the famous Psalm 110 נְאֻ֤ם יְהֹוָ֨ה לַֽאדֹנִ֗י.
My father held much respect for Daniel Dennett; and so - still - does Pixy Misa. Dennett has gone to whatever afterlife will have him. Various Christians are now dancing on his grave, anticipating the afterlife as will have them. Personally I couldn't finish Darwin's Dangerous Idea; nowadays the greatest satan is Bart Ehrman. I have read Ehrman... and I am Catholic. How do we request of an Ehrman reader that Catholicism is worth the, er, candle?
Christians have composed multitudinous apologetic against secular text-criticism; mostly it's silly Protestants on this beat, but not all. The smarter Catholics don't fall into the trap of citing Protestants - so some have mooted their own brand. In my day we had The Real Jesus; nowadays we got Brant Pitre.
These serve the purpose of affirming lay Catholics (or Christians generally) that it's been Handled, that Ehrman's been Refuted. Same as Darwin's been Handled, and Refuted ("epicycles"!). Just read this book bro'.
But the skeptic is not a lay Catholic anymore. He is examining the texts and the Tradition. What if he finds that Pitre skirts around the questions the skeptic has? (This isn't opinion - this is fact, that Pitre ducks and dodges.) Also: what if he decides that, yeah, Ehrman's got some problems here and there but that those problems are better solved by Carrier? and/or by Godfrey? This isn't a question about Ehrman, a brilliant man but just a man; it's a question about "2 Peter", whose author was a liar. And about all the dupes - or even poltroons, like Pitre, whom I suspect of knowing better, more quietly than I - who've continued to flout such Church Fathers as used to warn against "2 Peter".
What I'd say to the skeptic is that it's okay to harbour some misgivings about this canon. But: I affirm a greater canon, of saints, which saints include Ignatius and Clement.
As for Dennett, I get the feeling that those smirking about him being in Hell will be suffering a worse fate down there than is Dennett.
