The Q-Day may come sooner

I haven't much looked at quantum algos lately, since I flat haven't done those [meta]maths, except on occasion to chuckle at those who've accidentally done my maths. Sabine has lately alerted us that perhaps we should start paying attention.

Again, even the old maths are having trouble in the security sphere. AI has been uncovering Vulnerabilities. Anthropic's Claude Mythos has been making headlines, to which I suggest a cool head.

Presently we've been patting quantum computer engineers on their heads as they build four- or eighteen- or even eighty-qubit monster machines being supercooled with helium. The assumption had been that the Cold Equations, cruel to some, rested upon qubits not reaching the necessary bulk until the 2030s even '40s. As with interplanetary probes, advancement can happen in midjourney... but so can politics.

To Campbell's own 1954 Cold Equations, Quentyn Quinn long ago pantsed the premise (which author/critic Ralph Hayes da-Deuce has since taken offline). It may be we should pants the early-2000s premise of Quantum Forever Tomorrow.

We might not need myriads of qubits to mess up all encryption. We might just need the low hundreds. That-much a vicious government can certainly do. China has a vicious government.

I suggest however we don't do what Altman does, to treat all this as a means to send pensioners into the penury whither they're sending young STEM workers. I suggest research into quantum programming as does not involve breaking codes alone.

The shattered gene

I find difficult to tell when Theodore Beale is lying or not. I propose that when he lies, a larger strategy is at play.

We'll tackle the most-obvious Beale lies first. As to the Apollo missions: they happened, such that nobody has to prove it to Beale. Although just about any skepticism on this particular point is disingenuous, Beale's stands above most. The man was in Fenris Wolf who designed Moon action games in the late 1990s, perhaps not well known today but very popular sellers at the time. Beale, in short, knew full well at that time what really happened in those 1970s missions. Present-day, in this back-half of the 2020s, Beale wants his readers to waste the Clown World's time and to tie their loyalty to Beale himself.

That does not mean that Beale is all about a cult of personality. He sounds sincere on a few points. I believe he really does hate the Clown World - and Jews. I believe I even know how this happens. He is a mirror image of Yamara - or Turtle Island: the more he drives away potential friends in a group, only his enemies in that group will find him.

His Apollo denialism is a feint, to wrap up that para; Beale is lying about lying. So why do it?

The Clown World really does have some problems. Ironically, perhaps, Beale has revived Darwin; or at least devised a new Darwin / Mendel synthesis. Natural-selection alone creates a blob; genetics alone accumulates Mutation. Thus, this long essay devoid of the standard snark. It doesn't read as if Vox Day be trollin'. I'd love to read a counter-argument, if he is.

Davide Piffer may have that counter. Neanders evolved for rote-autism in a difficult and seasonal (hunting) environment, often near-solitary. Africans evolved for group dynamics which needed less brain capacity per person, as long as the larger tribe could retain lore. Tigers versus lions, methinks.

Look how everyone thinks of West Africans today; it's not pretty. As late as 2008 we had Erectus Walks Among Us doubting if the blacks were even human, as a tiger might ponder a pack of encroaching lions. Now we know better.... that people whose fellow humanity we should have been doubting were the Neanders. And maybe by 45kBC (five hundred millennia after they and we split) they dubiously were.

But now we Eurasians and, indeed, Americans like Beale did recombine with these very estranged kinfolk. Thus unfreezing the gene at a crucial time.

One does wonder what Beale would make of the Danes these days, in that light.

Missing cuneiform

Cécile Michel offers an overview of the vagaries of cuneiform preservation.

Certainly our knowledge of Assyria - and of the reception-history of older lore in Assyrian society - is badly distorted by several accidents. One is that Assyria was sacked in antiquity, with much of its fabled museum carted downriver to Babylon. Another was... modern archaeology: the French carted hundreds of crates down the same river (Tigris) which pirates then hit at Qurnah. The pirates didn't find much gold, so settled for the crates: they then dumped the artwork and any cuneiform into the swamp.

As bad as that disaster was, I don't know that those excavators were shifting that many clay tablets. Those cargoes were meant for European museums, for display more than for research. What absolutely was being shifted were inscribed objects (some claimed precious, although I doubt the pirates would have skipped them) and bas-reliefs. These latter will be monumental stelae. Think: Sargon II's propaganda, assuming he hadn't made copies elsewhere. I've suspected the earlier sackings had inflicted the bulk of the damage here.

The main reason, I think, for our gaps in this culture is the sheer multitude of fragmentary tablets, not nearly so romantic as might be on-display. We lack the number of Akkadian (mostly) readers to sift through all this stuff. The Oxyrhynchus researchers are suffering the same problem out West, in Greek and Coptic. Hence why we're still piecing together legends, yea even unto Babylon.

Khazaria, II

Keith Woods is a man of what's now on the alt- side of the Right. He has lately evaluated the Koester / Sand arguments for a Jewish Khazaria. The arguments still don't stand up.

The Khazar Hypothesis was not, at its outset, a stupid hypothesis. Before Elhaik, we simply didn't own the data. Genetics provides data: with it, we now know the Magyars of Pannonia as a sort of Ugric Khazaria. The language of Hungary is like Finnish; the people, by ancestry, are all Slavs. Could not East European Jews, likewise, be some kind of Turk or Alan who now use Hebrew but are not at all Semitic?

We have an excellent handle on the Ashkenaz genome by now. This rules out a "Magyarism" - here, Judaism - of a gentile people of Eastern Europe. Instead, the evidence points to migration of Rheinlander Jews to the Lithuanian-Polish Commonwealth, famously polyglot, and also (at the time) tolerant. This is why Yiddish looks like mediaeval German plus loanwords (BaltoSlavic, Mishnaic Hebrew / Aramaic, and maybe Latin). I've allowed for "mediation" through Khazaria of (wildly) Oriental intrusions, like mine own. But that's not the majority.

Elhaik came too late to this party: like an Apollo skeptic today, or Erectus Walks Among Us in 2008. Jonas Alexis in his rebuttal looks like ItIsHoeMath on Erectus.

Hezeqiah's cage, II

In English we have plenty of misused cliches, like the Iceberg Tip; tonight we'll talk the Sitting Duck or the Embarrelled Fish. Davila in PaleoJudaica has linked to the Caged Bird.

Assyrians used to have their kings "hunt" lions. Woo Min Lee reports that a lot of those "hunts" were more like the Roman Circus where some wild beast was brought into an arena(!). There the king would slay the beast. Like a Spanish bullfight, or Commodus the gladiator. At some point some onlooker scoffed that this was like [fighting] a bird in a cage (kīma iṣṣur quppi). The king Ashurnasirpal II adopted this metaphor with little hint of irony as he slew hundreds of lions. And elephants: the latter which, Wiki is telling me had been introduced from India.

Metaphors of the lion hunt entered the military, Assyrians being Assyrians. The encirclement, at which Assyrians excelled, was perfect for the caged-bird metaphor. For cities this could be, and was, used for the siege. Especially once victorious.

None of this need imply that the bird/lion must be slain in such a battle. If there was a sack and pillage, the Assyrians would tell us - and illustrate it. Jerusalem under Hezeqiah did not receive this treatment. Even a hunter might decide to catch-and-release; why run out the supply.

Lee believes that the Assyrians recognised that Judah was beaten. A sack, of sorts, took place; tribute changed hands. Hezeqiah kissed the emperor's feet. Thereby Hezeqiah got to stay on that throne, if now a poorer throne. At least his shrine now enjoyed a monopoly.

Hezeqiah's successors made themselves odious in later generations as they went so far as to allow the gods of the Empire. YHWH was kissing the feet of Anshar; his angels were caged.

A Magellanic sample

Science Daily linked this horrendous agitprop from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Within it is the story, which is missing a lot of essential information. I'll deliver the story so you don't have to go to SDSS and get snowed.

SDSS J0715-7334 (those are co-ordinates) was reported as a red giant out 79,256 ly away, last October again; ScienceDaily / SDSS are reporting on its formal publication. It hosts ultra-low "metallicity", including a carbon footprint of "undetectable". This means it was formed by hydrogen and helium... only. Also its orbit is unnatural for the Milky Way today and, it seems, all those sub-galaxies which we have gobbled like the one in Exodus. SDSS and the University of Chicago conclude that it must have formed in that Large Magellanic Cloud (nebula, in Latin; galaxy, in reality) halo, back when there were no "metals". 163kly from us.

All this means this - sigh - immigrant bears a time capsule from the founding matter of the LMC.

Initial reports were claiming 2900% solar mass. I find hard to believe that 30 solar-mass primordial red giants should still exist and, yes; later interviews have ratcheted that down. Rather, a 30 sol star - which must be almost the first star ever to exist in the LMC - went Type II supernova, nearly immediately as they would. This explosion from the implosion pushed still-thick hydrogen and helium gas into the star in question. Which was still heavier than us. It went red-giant somewhere on its journey to our own galaxy.

As to how it got here, rather to our own halo (the word "back yard" is getting used): that it was a secondary formation under high wind might have pushed it across our galaxies' mutual L1.

Escapade

Awhile ago NASA launched Berkeley's stereo-vision Mars orbiters. Mars has weather, which affects surface chemistry, so data be needing retrieval. MAVEN existed but is now presumed dead. Although weather exists, its atmosphere cannot aerobrake craft as well as some other planets can. So we gotta talk trajectories.

Here's a map and summary. The orbits are I think clockwise. New Glenn launched it all last 13 November, dumping the booster as they do.

NASA posted a status 25 February, which ScienceDaily got to in mid-March. The occasion was the entry into Earth's magnetotail, also new for us.

Presently this is looping around the STL2 halo wherein live Gaia and Webb. The notion is to take what looks like a low-energy Oberth, as dives back to Earth. But instead of crashing, we hope, this payload will skirt close to ground thence boiiiong to a Mars-crossing intersection.

The launch-window for that opens November.