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.

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 kilotonne 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.

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

1 Thess 2:14-16 as an abrogate text

Among the contested, un-PC verses in the Pauline corpus is 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16. We've handled that a couple years ago; basically accepting Richard Carrier that it doesn't belong. John Nichols at the so-called "Liberty" University (it's accreditted as a university; leaving aside its boomerslop name) has a critique (pdf).

The boomers will likely NOT approve Nichols.

The proCarrier side might flag that we don't see later antiJewish writers citing this part of 1 Thessalonians. Some writers, like the Johannines and Barnabas, simply don't engage much with Paul; but Mark does, with the Synoptics following, and I don't think Mark touches 2:14-16. Maybe Matthew and Luke touch it but they are known to be late. "Peter" and then Ignatius, Melito, and Justin assume parallel sermons, at least; but by then we are VERY late (and they don't say "according to Paul..." here).

Nichols knows that the whole Thessalonians corpus is rife with textual issues, especially the whole second book. Some have pondered if even the first book is Pauline; if not, then our passage can be dismissed with it.

Nichols points out that the passage is of a piece with the letter's overall style, as a thorough echo of its own 1:2-10. Also Paul is going to repeat this letter's themes, such as God's wrath, in other letters. Only the antiJewish polemic goes missing therein those letters.

Nichols instead holds that this letter to the Thessalonians sketches out Paul's ideas earlier in his ministry. One may compare with how Paul floats early ideas to the Galatians, before our man is to take more care to the Romans.

It would, then, mean Paul has offhandedly blasted "the Judaei" from a parallel perch, like John's Gospel does from - perhaps - a Samaritan perch.

Paul's disciples themselves seem to have agreed upon a single-volume core with Galatians, 1-2 Corinthians, and Romans; with the rest left to the real fanboys to copy. Also-early Philippians didn't make that cut. Nor did the lachrymophoric letter - and there, we might have a reason, because 1 Clement was doing its work.

So, if I were to play the philosemite (which, as a partial Semite... why not): I could argue that Paul said a lot of things, and let's allow he said this one thing in this one letter to Thessalonica; but it doesn't represent Paul's finished thought. 1 Thess 2:14-16, for Paul, became an abrogatum.

K2-18 at home

As study continues for K2-18's planet, and for TOI-270's planet d (the third): models improve for the Neptune-mass planets we got at Sol h and Sol i. I'm halfway afraid to name Sol h.

The story here, which Edward D. Young, Sarah P. Marcum, Aaron Werlen, and Paula N. Wulff tell, is that the Solar System formed with a carbon-monoxide snow line somewhere further out in the Kuiper Belt than we now find Pluto, which is a nitrogen / water iceworld mostly devoid of CO. Also our seventh and eighth planets lack ammonia... like the extrasolars just noted. Compare 59 Virginis b (or B).

This points to a magma ocean making up most of both our "ice" giants. The magma has dissolved high-pressure volatiles. This magma is about half the radius: more for Neptune, less for Uranus. Over that, the atmosphere - mostly hydrogen and helium - extends for the rest. This convects (hydrogen is a decent conductor), to the surface which then radiates infrared which the JWST can spot.

The model may be tentative, because as you know we've only sent flybys to either, but ... so were the "ice giant" models.