The new covenant became Torah

For Jews, MT Jeremiah 31:31-4 promises a new covenant. The Messiah will come to rule justly and install it. In a world where "sin" as we know it simply has no meaning, this Dispensationalism must apply.

The various "documentary hypotheses" problematise this notion.

We argue for the rearrangement of the Jewish Scriptures - plural - into the five books "of Moses", the epilogue to Deuteronomy (which Moses didn't write) and the book Joshua. Anchoring it all is Leviticus 19-25. This happened after the return from exile - after Jeremiah. Might Jeremiah have been laying out a programme for this, our Torah...?

Jeremiah as an oral preacher might not have intended any written law at all. (I am fairly sure of similar for Ezek 36:26-8.) One problem here, as ever for Jeremiah, is that the Greek differs. Joachim Krause (pdf) has pointed especially to v. 33. Here, is it "my torah" (Hebrew, singular) or "my nomoi" (Greek, plural)? The former implies God is going to abandon the One Torah which, in modern Judaeo-Christian agreement, equals the Masoretic edition of the Five Books (thereby assumed known to Jeremiah). The latter implies laws in these scriptures. Krause notes that the translator was loose with singular/plural elsewhere such that it might translate the singular in the basis.

I suggest that the translator, here, understood how his (yes, male) contemporaries understood tôrati here. He would have been reading this alongside Ezekiel 20:25 and Jeremiah 7:22. The former has God dismiss his own laws (explicitly plural); the latter denies that He ever sent anything during the desert wanderings (which wanderings, by Jewish consensus, did happen).

In that light, where to find these new Prophetic laws which weren't in the scribal schools? For Krause, Jeremiah is saying to trash all that stuff as to stick with Prophecy.

Long-term, that didn't happen. Maybe it couldn't. Baruch came along as Jeremiah's scribe and delivered the only version of his work we got. (And then later Jews botched the transmission but never mind all that.) And the Holiness Code scribes arranged the Hexateuch and following books into near-exactly what we got today. They could, somewhat honestly, tell us all that this is the New Covenant. It certainly has turned out to differ from the old Deuteronomic- or Priestly- content. Jeremiah had refuted the former and Ezekiel, the latter.

Jews sometimes interpret things, as I've noted, in whatever language. They sometimes say that by "new", Jeremiah meant "renewed". I'll let others answer that. I'll concede that as a rule, interpretations may be early.

I suspect some Jews continued to chafe against that their now-rewritten Bible was much improvement upon the earlier stuff but, unfortunately, we no longer have any of that earlier stuff in its own form. Thus, Paul. Thus, Muhammad.

q_rsqrt comes to the Jerk Store

Almost four years ago, I asked: how come q_rsqrt didn't force ufloat or udouble or whatever in her input. The Quake games never used this func for a negative input; this might raise a nasty native CPU error. Why not - I asked - force the positive input and crash gracefully?

Today I was watching some video on Youtube - I won't link it, it was AI - about the Year 2038 Bug. That's when the 31 bits, counting from the new year 1970, overflow. It's not 32 bits because it's a signed integer and they wanted to allow negative years, back to some time in 1901. I'm told December. Most people they cared about were born after then.

Another issue is that ye olde compilers from the earliest years of C, Ada, and Pascal were "type safe". If you had a big uint, they didn't like it when you made it an int. There was a chance you'd lop off the highest bit and make the whole thing meaningless. The compiler is your friend!

No really, he was written to be your friend. Programmers need to work with the compiler, not against him. Leave aside 2038. What could the Id Software doodz have done in the 1990s?

I'm thinking that before calling q_rsqrt, they could have sent their vectors into another function: which takes a float and squares it. "Pffft they probably did that already, x^2 or, better, x*x." Yeah, sure. And the base multiplication left the float as a float. We need a function that knows when x^[even uint] happens it sends back an unsigned value.

The problem is with the type of x. IEEE 754 didn't bother with "ufloat". There was no such thing in the 1990s. Why not? Because what "floats" is where the "point" is at, and sign is just one bit. They'd have to decide whether to add that bit to the top, or to the decimals. For the purpose of normalisation, which be taking the sum of three squares (so could be large), let's say we agreed to put it on the topside.

Now that we've decided to monkey with the structure of a hardwired type, which we can't do in software; we go to Intel HQ and we ring the doorbell with our proposal to alter their processor. It's 1994; maybe 1985 (Elite). Who's got space for that? And why does it matter so bad in, you know, a shmup game.

Blah blah blah, not worth the bother, never has been worth the bother. You know it, I (now) know it... everyone knows it (except apparently me). So why write alla'that. It's because here:

long i  = * ( long * ) &y;

This type could be unsigned. (It also happens that "long" then meant 32-bit.) I just ran this by Google AI and...

uint32_t i;
memcpy(&i, &y, sizeof(i));
i = 0x5f3759df - (i >> 1);
memcpy(&y, &i, sizeof(y));

Chew on that, Kasper Nielsen!

Early writings of Jacob in Edessa

Paul Ulishney a couple years ago got Correspondence of Jacob of Edessa and Eustathius of Dara into print. Jacob, per Ulishney, was then a forty-something monk esteemed as a theologian and an interpreter of Greek work.

Complicating matters, many of these names have other names. Jacob is (in English) sometimes called James. Edessa was usually Callirhoë in those days, which somewhat has a memory today as "Şanlı'Urfa". And Eustathius seems to have been in charge of saecular affairs in Dara to Ruha's east. Because, per Ulishney, Jacob addressed him as "the petty lord (kyriosuna)". But affectionately!

Also complicating is that little Jimmy whilst in Edessa veered off-and-on between being a monk and full bishop. We do know he wrote one of our letters at the age of 42 (bald, by then) but that one ain't dated and lacks any other real markers so, maddeningly, we still don't know when our man was born.

Wikipedia still thinks AD 672 was a possible year for Jacob's installation as bishop. Ulishney's rearrangement and interpretation agrees more with (early-)684 / 995. Such is the majority view since Omert J Shrier 1991 and is so assumed in Hoyland 1997-8. Ulishney doesn't defend Best O.J. against freakin' Wiki since, why should he condescend. So I'll do it.

In the earlier 680s - AG 990s to nonbarbarians - a small schism broke out cutting the "east" from the Antioch-Edessa mainline. These will be the now-historic sees of Tikrit, Singara, and mount Alpap. The patriarch Severus wanted to be a Syrian pope like his contemporary in Egypt acted as pope, appointing bishops or at least demanding a veto. (Investiture was always a problem for churches.) Severus enlisted Jacob as secretary. Ulishney reasonably assumes they'd not force this upon a bishop, but the bishops may well call in the smartest monk in the area. And Jacob, much as it pains us dyotheletes, was a genius. His contemporary Athanasius of Balad agreed; as Athanasius II he'll get Jacob that episcopacy as one of his first acts in office. I don't hear that anyone in Edessa complained... at the time. (Read on.)

All this stuff is in the British Library, still in manuscript: "Add. 12,172". Still unedited. On the other hand, now that Ulishney has organised it better, maybe we'll get to read it soon. Put Alison Salvesen on it. Is there some Copt who can send a grant?

Eustathius will enjoy a career after these letters, as well. He was the Nicodemus of the north Christian Arabs, founding a martyrion for Muʿâdh of the Taghlib. Michael the Syrian will post that to AG 1020 which we call 708-9 (against some "Muhammad" but assuredly under al-Walîd's command), I assume based on that church's records and plaques.

In these letters Jacob also dealt with the Romans and the Nestorians, as well a Syrian Miaphysite might. Jacob as an intellectual was no enemy to Greeks as such; but he might have grown disenchanted with the imperial Romans, Latin-speaking or otherwise. Constantine IV was asserting his primacy in Constantinople (681/993-on), and preparing to throw off the Monotheletism which his father had tolerated. As for the Nestorians: Jacob and Athanasius would have to worry their rivals might be eager to embrace their wayward brethren. There's also the issue that Jacob knew the earth was round unlike some idiots over there.

Jacob will outlast his pope, but not long outlast him. Athanasius was known in his (meagre) correspondence to be a stickler for, basically, Christian halakha. For instance he forbade to consume halal (Holger Zellentin has a good book on this). The next patriarch Julian - contemporary with Justinian II - proved more lax in such ordinances. By then and for this, the Edessenes preferred Julian over their own neoRabboula. Jacob resigned in a huff and retvrned to monk-ing. And to writing manifesti.

Per Salvesen's translation, Jacob's frustrations spilled into the scholion on the edition of 1 Kings / 3 Reigns 14 he was compiling there. Also extant is a "Testamentum Domini" from this circle which may well be by Jacob himself. Dunno about that Pseudo-Methodius tho', that Sinjari seems more oecumenical.

Hot shot, part deuce

So I kinda/sorta trusted VAERS when deciding on the booster in fall 2021. I rolled those dice having taken Pfizer's original schedule that spring and then catching some yuck in June. Stayed un-boosted.

That RS means it is a reporting system for the V.A. Events. That database accumulated a lot of such reportage. Less from Pfizer than from Moderna I think, but the second jab I took had some statistical problems. And people were freaking out over - all of them, as the same "Clot Shot". Which might skew the results, like all those geezers and morons freaked out over sudden acceleration in the late-1980s Audi.

There could have been some signal-to-noise correction in how various agencies read the VAEs from the RS. The British Medical Journal est. 1840 must report on what happened.

This journal is not some Slay News fly-by-night; they are generally pro-vax, like for shingles.

The journal notes that by mid-2021 the FDA knew there was a noise problem in VAERS. It further uncovers a letter which, in September 2022, then-CDC-director Rochelle Walensky sent: Walensky was worried that it was all getting stupid over at the FDA. The FDA meanwhile was muzzling the people raising the concerns the prior year.

By noise, BMJ means the FDA simply ignored myocarditis, pericarditis, or tinnitus as not-counting as a real vaccine adverse event. The "-card-" root means cardio - the heart.

The FDA honcho during this time was Peter Marks. He'd been a big force in "Operation Warp Speed" in May 2020. Robert Kennedy demanded Marks' resignation 28 March 2025. You can now find Marks at Eli Lilly in DC.

Starshot v Starfire: the race to Sedna

Given the ongoing investments into sunsail and Direct Fusion, outer system missions are coming into view. In one case, the outer system is coming to us: Sedna. We have until 2075 when this visitor from the Oort gets into perihelion (76 AU). Last year, Elena Ancona, Roman Ya. Kezerashvili, Savino Longo compared the two methods.

Other methods had earlier been mooted such as VASIMR (perhaps-foremost), but these run in the timeframes of decades. Democracies don't build cathedrals.

Other important constraints include that the mission requires a power source that isn't solar, that far away. It also needs communication with Earth. These techs were last refined in New Horizons - a flyby.

This DFD, which is assumed Princeton's Starfire, would be running 1.6 MW under its own power. This is to extend the lifetime of the superconductor over ten years; the ceiling would be thirteen.

With as much time as they have, either could (and should) borrow Jupiter for gravity-assist, probably Venus too. Dunno about outer planets. The DFD would further be able to flip-n'-burn and inject into the planetoid's orbit. That would however add some years onto the trip.

One-way sunsail would get out there in seven years; the Starfire in ten. There is no reason that exploration-agencies cannot do both, given that a sunsail might be cheaper. Especially given that other missions will be bidding against Princeton for its 300g of He-3.

On-board variable propulsion

Ion drives like VASIMR, and adjustable NERVA like the shockwave rotor, can squeeze more efficiency from their drives by feeding in energy and/or adjusting the exhaust throat. It occurs to me that this means recalculating the rocket equation in real time. As in: on the rocket, not outsourced to orbital data. That drinks more energy for compute, which then must be controlled somehow; probably by radiating out.

These are exponent and logarithm equations. If we were using a TSR-80 extended BASIC processor, welcome to Taylor series.

Needless to say, that is some bull-tish. Don't we have some tricks to turn a float into a 32?bit long(ish)int? Just shift the integer over bro. *(long*), subtract some magic number, then <<= bro. Like when the exponent was -1/2.

That'd be great if the ratios were all integers. They... probably aren't. Because they aren't, this method requires to poll the ratio until it reaches an integer and then run the calc.

We'd hope to force integers on all four values of the Tsiolkovsky to some cromulent unit-length, like millimeters and grams. We'll see. Instead of exp(dv/ve) it's exp(dv) × root-ve(e). One multiplication operation. Gotta be better than Taylor(8). Ln(m0/mf) meanwhile is [lb(m0) - lb(mf)] × ln(2). Now we have to ponder overflow: 32-bit integers go only to 2³¹. So, no; these are going to be km/s maybe even Mm/s which we have to rescale after the calc.

Depending on the unit-lengths I might even consider storing the exponent-powers and the e-roots in tables. Data got corrupted on Voyager but I suspect our triage is better today; so's our shielding. On arrival at the destination our need to punch the engine shouldn't be as dire, so the memory used in the tables can be wiped, for reüse in the actual mission.

This was imprecise for q_rsqrt and will be imprecise now. Those 1990s gamers applied Newton's method upon that approx "y", thus: y * ( 1.5F - ( x * 0.5F * y * y ) ). Lotsa multiplications, here. And that's second-order because this was just a square. And, to remind: we're talking about high exponents and high roots. May as well devolve to Taylor.

Kasper Nielsen's cheat-sheet of "float tricks" may offer an out. We have NVIDIA's "piecewise linear approximation" which shouldn't overflow. Ian Stephenson does one better for Pow2 which "approximates the error with a quadratic".

There are other unsafe-code solutions in the roster, some just straight assembler with no overflow checks. Good news: I doubt we need 'em for the floating fractions. The mass ratio as wet/dry[-er] even at some Apolloesque 96 isn't going to have ln(x) all that high (4.6ish here), and this is going down as we drive. The velocity ratio working with inner-system delta-V and as-good exhaust as they'll allow us (like, 14 km/s) should also be low, enough for exp[x] anyway.

MEMORY COPY 9/19: If you know we're on positives.

Types... deletes... and stuff

Sydney Sweeney should not be supporting gambling in sports. This support is a failure of character on her part.

I recall when Instapundit lambasted Busey for appearing in the Turkish film Valley of the Wolves. I recall he called Busey a "whore". Euphoria, I propose, was just as disgusting a project. So it is not like Sweeney hasn't already telegraphed that she, like Busey, was willing to appear in whatever paid.

If you think I am being cheap: some of the shots which Insta is levelling at her detractors are cheap. (And if we must Go There, the lady northwest would probably look about as good as 30-year-old Sweeney sans makeup and airbrush. I've personally dated northeast.)

I might further ask, from the support of Instapundit and others, to what degree they have been bought off too.