Barnard's necropolis

So last year, and the year before that, we were talking Proxima Ophiuchi aka Barnard. It has four planets, all with minimum masses double-to-triple Mars'. Xander Byrne and crew are pondering What It All Means.

Besides irradiated Marslikes. We already knew their sunsides were too baked. Also the UV on any of them would be too low for "abiogenesis" even for inner "d" which is the most-roasted. The latter doesn't account for seeding from any other systems this ancient star had passed-through; but if I'm a spore-shooting alien fungus, I'd not bother with Barnard.

The star is ancient, so doesn't flare much, which helps in telling that these planets were for real in the first place (this had been a problem). It is enriched in magnesium by contrast with silicon and thorium. Byrne's paper extrapolates that the planets should be ferropericlase. I don't frankly know what that mineral is, but Petrov says that this doesn't hold water well.

The four are resonant like Trappist-1... and the Jovian system. The inner planets d,b,c might be in a 4:3 MMR chain but since we have less data than what we have for - say - Trappist-1; the paper whiffs on this one.

The paper is able to use the resonance to impose upper mass limits - which is great. Even if the planets aren't great; they're all subEarths. Given the resonance they likely formed about where we see 'em. That is (well) within the soot line let alone the snow line.

So these are all low-mass. And: with more space than Jupiter's moons have. So they don't pull on each other as much. Add to that, their internal radioactive elements (which are halflived well beyond Earth's): they are internally "cool". And the outermost planet e is tidally locked which people aren't anymore saying about Trappist-1.

Knock-on effects are that the planets won't have seeped out volatiles after initial formation. Barnard is quiet... now; but these stars - M dwarf - tend to be flare stars when younger.

The paper also brings "gap complexity". Barnard's four are simple, 0.131. The paper argues that this implies no giant outer planets, but we must counterargue that our system has a lower 0.126 inward of 1.5 AU and... we have four giant outers. Of course we've been looking at this one since van de Kamp so... yea, we ain't seen nuffin'.

It is not Elon's content

People subscribe to X because they want to support X. X doesn't have a great user-interface if you're not on that system, so alternatives xcancel and nitter.net have provided that service for us. I tend to get my information from those sidechannels. At least those two sidechannels are now down due to ceaseanddesist orders.

When linking from here, I do strip out those URLs and for "x.com". In the event that the site has some other form of monetisation.

I'll say this much: without the sidechannels, X is useless to me. I'll route around it. I'll not use it. This blog here has never been an income stream; I don't know if I want it to be.

I think the C&D is a bad move. I doubt it is Elon Musk's primary income stream. Much of Musk's income comes from doing launches and that depends on goodwill from Musk's allies, especially the ally in charge of the US military. In that light X.com is an advertising channel. The sidechannels have been helping Musk present himself as a free speech advocate. Without the sidechannels, X.com is just another Facebook; and Musk is just another Zuckerberg.

Ezekiel with the rabbis

Ezekiel was a proponent of the Babylonian approach to Temple; opposed in his life to the Levi family, the latter more Egyptian. At some point the "Zadoq" faction within Levi injected themselves as an exception to Ezekiel's rules, such that the book got readily spread around the Jews. Daniel and 11QT the Temple Scroll adopt it; New Jerusalem tries to work with it.

Despite Ezekiel's vision of the dry bones, which could support Daniel, rabbis seem to have appreciated the base text a good deal less. Tova Ganzel summarises the Rabbinic (prose) tradition. I find most-dramatic how Ganzel n. 6 raises the mishnaic ruling Megillah 4:10 against bringing his content into the haftorah. I suspect that the Babylonian Prophet rarely found much welcome in the tents of meeting.

A major issue giving to the rabbis headache was, indeed, that Ezekiel did not come from the same place as the mainline Bible had come. As mutually-aware rivals, contradictions between Bavli and Masri halakha were the whole point, of both. With both in the canon, people would have to reconcile their rivalry. The Zadokites had done this, sort of, but their attempts (like 11QT, New Jerusalem, Damascus Document et al.) went out with the Temple, any Temple.

Ezekiel's imagery proved too popular for the poets to ignore. Elʿazar's anti-Roman piyyuṭ notes the throne-chariot in all her shining glory, and Copilot tells me others bring up Ezekiel 37's dry bones. If I am reading this right, Elʿazar found a dodge around Mishnah: do it in piyyuṭ.

As to the core of how Ezekiel was nonetheless allowed to be widely read even if Jews couldn't directly utter from it at the services, this surrounds Hananiah ben Hezeqiah. He was a man of the Tannaim (up to 220 CE) who did the Mishnah. Hananiah stood forth as the one rabbi who wanted to keep Ezekiel "in circulation". The question wasn't if Ezekiel would remain canon, nor booted to join Daniel in the third-rate scribblings. Much of the tradition believes that Ezekiel owned real power - in fact, so much power it was dangerous, like Raiders of the Lost Ark dangerous. Ezekiel would instead have been locked in some secure chest like the Zohar. Christians have parallel experience with the Gnostics. Ganzel must warn that these traditions are not in Mishnah nor even Tosefta; they appear first with the Amoraim = the Talmud era, mostly complete by 540 CE. Which leads to Elʿazar's era.

A deflated idea

0II∞ has a website.

Over the late 2000s they sneered at "the odd billionaire", along with governments, having a monopoly on spaaace. Their plan was to raise a balloon and launch roggets thence. A successful test was had in 2017.

Balloon-to-orbit is the only way to retrieve a crew from Venus' 55 km altitude off that hellpit back into orbit and home. So this poast comes a little late in this blog's career. Sadly it remains ahead of any real implementations here over Earth.

0II∞'s Bloostar aimed for 70-100 kg payloads launched with methalox, like what the Raptor drinks. I'd mooted maybe something like spinlaunch for such dumb cargo although spinlaunch is a lot of overhead to "bloon" up to the strato'. A strato-runway might work for jet-to-orbit. To get real counterweight in 22 km, they'd likely need rotors wired to a modular reactor; but that's a problem for later.

It seems they shifted to tourism. For odd millionaires.

Maybe the issue was that they dreamt all this up back when the Merlin engines looked sooty and unworkable. The Merlin remains sooty, but the Falcon 9 works. Cargo-to-orbit is now a lot cheaper than was then envisioned. And the Starship is coming.

Loonybins

Paul Johnson was the great Tory historian of that great reactionary decade 1980s. Everyone read Intellectuals and Modern Times. Private Eye, which was not a Left mag, read through his work and honoured him with a nickname: Loonybins.

Johnson has now been factchecked, by Claude AI. h/t Richard Hanania; Bryan Caplan relays this, against interest he'd asked after it in 2010. (If I may, this speaks well of Caplan's humility.)

Some reviewers had already hit it for instance in this review which is floated in Caplan's old comments.

Looking over the list, several of these mistakes look like typoes (like a misplaced decimal) or like an error brought over from Johnson's own sources (the 135k toll at Dresden was all over the place, I think I saw it first in Vonnegut). But there are others and they all go in Johnson's direction. It is also a pity that Loonybins did not take the time in 1991 to correct these.

Looking around, historians of the early American era don't like Loonybins either.

But hey. The selenical binface helped win the Cold War, right? Like how PizzaGate, Vox Day, and other fakenews helped push Trump in 2016! Unfortunately Johnson left behind a time-bomb. Since he's discredited, and not in the way Cofnas and Murray be "discredited" - but on his actual ethics - all nonLeft historians have to scramble that they're not like Johnson.

The great equatorial glacier

The boring-billion ended 825-765 Mya when pancontinental Rodinia split. One daughter-craton, we call "Laurentia". North America now.

Thomas M. Gernon and five coauthors argue that the split caused a rift. Rifting might dip a deep valley below but it also raises a highland escarpment at the rim. They have inherited the term Cordillerian, for a rim of (later) sedimentary fallout in the Ediacaran era. That forms the northern rim of the escarpment, which escarpment they propose bent south at its western edge following the then-new continent.

Between 765 Mya and the Ediacaran, at 717 Mya came a Snowball Earth episode: the Sturtian event of "Cryogenian". The paper says the escarpment had by then risen eight kilometers. Maybe this occidental himalaya averaged "only" seven above present sealevel but that still would be a great place to collect ocean moisture (tides were higher then too). This water froze up there, glaciating just about all Laurentia and lowering the ocean. Most the uplifted rock got scoured down to the "Vishnu Supercyst" laid down long before 1.6 Gya; although some intervening rock survives in gaps. New sediment won't be laid down to stay, until the narrow Cordillerian; the Grand Canyon region must wait longer, for the "Tonto" known to Brits as Cambrian. Thus, the Unconformity. (We're not missing much, we're assured.)

For those pondering if glaciers might end up halting their flow and ceasing erosion, allow me to supplement: the Sturtian was never a uniform freeze and it formally melted 660 Mya. The paper doesn't name the Sturtian but it does know the Marinoan when the glaciers returned 650-635 Mya. These climate shifts might not have mattered in higher latitudes but they assuredly mattered near the equator.

The ghost of this super-escarpment seems to have held. The Old Rocky Mountains perhaps guarded our flank in the Permian, although we don't get a map. We do get a map of postapocalyptic 65 Mya. By that point everything here is rotated and, of course, wholly northern. Here the then-new Rocky Mountains butt up against that once-north-now-west boundary, and the Mexican Peninsula's altiplano from the now-south. (Central America, then, was an archipelago, like the Greater Antilles; both also-then-new.)

The king of Ebion

I am still on the case of the piyyuṭ genre. The Cairo Genizah unearthed hundreds of these, among them works by one Elʿazar, called haQallir or son-of-Qallir. Penguin's book of Hebrew verse translates one of them, in the form perhaps of a call-and-response.

By tradition this one contrasts the king Elyon who is, you know, G-d; with Melek Ebyon. On its face that's the poor king. But the Ebioni kings whom the poem mocks seem to fear Elyon's judgement. That could be the Persian shah - were it not for the insistence on the Semitic. Here I must note that several Gospels consider their audience to be "the poor". This title - in Hebrew - drifted over to the Ebionite sect.

In the Greek-speaking side, the official Church deemed Ebionites as a heresy or close-enough. Among the Semites however I wonder. They had a few petty despots who took the title mlk - in Aramaic or Arabic, not Hebrew - generally bowing either to the emperor or to the shah. Heraclius called himself basileus though, and how better to mock any post-476-CE emperor than to tag him as a petty rex.

Eleazar could easily have contrasted his Lord to sulṭans or Commanders (amir?) but, here, did not. Overall our man seems not to have used much Arabic. In reverse, sura 5 might react to Elʿazar elsewhere. As a result his works tend to be dated before the Arab conquests which we know as "Islam". Maybe this is why the poem gets dated to an admittedly-wide band around 600 CE (wider, if like me you view this sura as postMuhammadan). "AG 900", for postSeleucid Syrians.

So far, so the present limits of my knowledge of piyyuṭ, which as I've warned you is less than a week old. Google's AI is pointing to more-direct satires of Christian rule although I lack direct access to much of that (I'm pointed to Yosef Yahalom and Ezra Fleischer). It seems Elʿazar appreciated Obadiah 1:15 as you have done, it shall be done to you. Obadiah then intended Edom; but as we all know as of 600 CE this tagged Christendom.

A brutal retaliation was coming upon Palaestinian Christians, once the shah seized Jerusalem. In Elʿazar's life, I suspect this had not happened yet.