Redshifts

This blog has typically left the vagaries of the Big Bang and its cosmologic models to better bloggers. Lately we have a few hits on this topic, so I've decided to annotate them.

Key to deep cosmology is deep time. The universe expands, which by Doppler is colouring the further galaxies to the red. So the unit of time is like the unit of Marine Isotope Stages: the higher the number, here z_sys, the deeper. By the way using z means we can leave aside the vexatious Hubble Tension, as to compare stratum to stratum.

The Turtle is pointing to cosmic daybreak, a term connoting more abruptness than "dawn". At z≤15.1, we have stars and galaxies; hydrogen and helium stars, anyway. Never before/greater-than. Pace Zim.

Three galaxies, where we can better see them, are already forming "metals" at z=7.2883, 7.8 and even 9.31. There is a "reionism" event between 8 and 7, ending 5.3, which, I take it, had been obscuring our sight of such. (Damned if I'm going to use the -isation suffix like some Star Control 3 alien.)

At z=7.76, estimated 660My from the start, comes a Black Hole Sun. So that isn't at the cosmic daybreak, pace the title; it's older than the 7.29 galaxy but younger than the other two.

I think these ancient red dots could provide furnaces fit to meld all manner of heavier elements. They point to the creation of early black holes generally. Neutron stars, I'll grant, might take a mite longer to form.

From the swamps to the hills

The consensus has been that teosinte was cultivated along the Balsas about 7000 BC. Then it has gotten vague, until that backwash from the Chibcha 3600 BC. Keith Prufer et al. are delving deeper into the spread of Mesoamerican maize.

I assume Mixe-Zoque for these first farmers.

Agriculture in Mesoamerica, they say, started with squash 8000 BC. Teosinte spread from the Balsas to Panama after 6200 BC and crossed the Darien a millennium later. (That Road To The South was always nasty for us.) At the same (belated) time it reached the Peten, which the paper calls "the Maya lowlands" although I question how Maya the place then was. After 3600 BC some intrepid northern highlanders crossed the now-yummy maize corn with some hardier altiplano breeds, making something that upland peoples (Otomí?) could live off of. This trickled back to southern Mesoamerica where, I understand, were other (relative) highlands as could now farm it. This breed got to South America too.

Except that even the post-Chibchan "Maya" stuck to lowland near-marsh farming of this crop. It took until the second millennium BC before they dared the hills. Overall the impression I get is that wetlands when farmed became non-wetlands, which then had to worry about changes in rainfall. This reminds me of how the lower Iraq suffered from droughts. And indeed the 2100s BC seem drier here as there.

I don't read where the American marshes got salted in Prufer's paper. I just read that they dried out. That was less a worry in the hills which, even if they don't rain, can catch ocean breezes and fogs overnight. The hills instead worry about keeping their soil at all. Indeed, after 900ish BC, I detect terracing: to actively manage erosion through slope stabilization.

Arabe 6982

This blog has had occasion to discuss how the Malikite branch of Islam brought their Qurʾāns with them, to Spain and to Sicily. Mostly these were of Nāfiʿ d. 169/785, through the intermediary Warsh. Other codices existed, such as that of Ibn ʿĀmir. The Umayyads preferred that one; some of the earliest (canon) Qurʾāns preserve it, when/where the Umayyads yet ruled. Malik (d. mid 790s) compiled his jurisprudence in a post-Umayyad age, when Ibn ʿĀmir too was on the outs.

I am elsewhere instructed that the ʿAbbāsids were - then - settling upon Abū ʿAmr d. ~152/770. So why not Nāfiʿ, eh.

Marijn van Putten is looking at BnF Arabe 6982. This, in the process of utterly trashing a work by Ala Vahidnia (who, and whose publisher, better be more careful in future).

We agree MS 6982 isn't quite the Nāfiʿ codex as in standard publication. (Leave aside how it has come to us.) Given that Spain was an Umayyad stronghold before, later, going Maliki; mayyybe this MS is a witness to its Ibn ʿĀmir phase.

No! says van Putten, who has access to Dani's taysir (and to Corpus Coranicum, which Vahidnia should use in future). MS 6982 is indeed Nāfiʿ, but along a side branch. Mostly Qālūn. A couple of minor exceptions: one - yes - Warsh (and someone else) and one other someone-else. The script anyway looks ornamental unlike like most Umayyad work.

I don't know who's done any work on what heifer the parchment was pulled off of. They say the binding is of North African style and "recent". Qālūn remains in print in Tunisia and Algeria; Libya too when they can keep the power on. For MS 6982 I can report that a terrible job was done, as the leaves are pretty-much random here. Q. 4:54-19:83, so already so curtailed when the binder got it.

I don't know that our MS ever breathed the Spanish air. At a guess it was commissioned in Kairawan or even Tunis, as Malik's disciples (like Ibn Wahb) were spreading their madhhab and their texts westward circa 185/800. Then brought to wherever-it-was before Warsh had quite nailed down the Nāfiʿ tradition over there. And then botched, I must assume by a Frenchman.

Athanasius' manifesto

Athanasius' 39th Festal Letter is famous among Bible-believers, as a seminal text for their support of the present canon. It stands with the "Muratorian Fragment" here. Unfortunately like that fragment, our letter is also a fragment.

In 2015, David Brakke presented the [Sahidic] Coptic to fill in one of the missing pieces. He also published all he could find of the whole thing. More context is thereby provided. Brakke further takes time to revisit an earlier dispute against Alberto Camplani.

Athanasius' opponents are the small-g gnostics. These aren't necessarily the mystics of future Nag Hammadi. These are anyone who thought it groovy to add to the canon apocryphal - as in, supposedly secret but nonetheless true - traditions. This has been a bad habit among the Jews in particular (see here) but Christians too had inherited (among others) the Dream Visions in 1 Enoch, all 1 Enoch 1-36, and some version of Jubilees. Clement of Alexandria knew "Thomas" didn't deserve to be in the Four but cited it anyway. As late as Severus of Antioch we'll be seeing Christians draw from this well. Don't get me started on Cave of Treasures.

Athanasius raises the devastating point that the forgers knew just as well as we know that if (say) 1 Enoch 22 existed at the time of Moses, Moses would have quoted it and mandated it as a rule from the aeons. That is why the forgers have to claim apocryphism: that everyone kept this a secret. But why wouldn't the Levites want the best law for the people at the time?

For Brakke, Athanasius might boast of his clerical standing, but not of his intellectual standing. Someone like Arius or, worse, Melitius might. If their erudition comes from heaps of Oxyrhynchite garbage, that erudition is of equal value.

It's not that Athanasius was anti-intellectual. Syrians could call him malpana with the best of the Fathers. I would go further than Brakke however. Athanasius might have inspired modern Biblical (and Quranic) fundamentalists (we may assume he was a creationist himself) but I don't see that he was closing down "debate" as such. I don't see Athanasius talking up flat-earth like, oh, Lactantius. It's that Athanasius drew a thick line between real sciences (what Beale calls "scientody"), and snowing everybody with obscure hokum (see Beale for further examples).

Suppressing Chalcedon

Under weak Zeno, the Empire made its bid to smooth over the rufflings of Chalcedon AD 451. The Henotikon takes the novel course of not mentioning it. As if it were one of those councils nobody anymore remembers like Serdica.

Philip M Forness has uploaded his thesis to academia.edu; this will become his 2018 book Preaching Christology. The Aramaic script used here is Estrangel...ó. There exists a colon to title each version. The key to the thesis is Jacob/James of Serug. Pronounced "Serugh".

Jacob is a saint of longstanding with the Maronites, presently Catholic. It is through early-modern Maronites that we have most Jacob's work, and - more importantly - how Jacob's legacy got advertised to Latin Christendom as small-o orthodox, ensuring it got copied and translated out here. But in Late Antiquity, the Maronites really weren't Catholic. They sort-of affirmed Chalcedon but more-enthusiastically affirmed the Monotheletism under Heraclius. Forness stands to explain, why they jumped onto Heraclius' project.

Like other authors of dubious orthodoxy, lookin' atchyoo Ephrem, Jacob had a ready talent for the memra' form. He was able to take Zeno's Christology and translate it for a popular audience. This ensured a party, not yet a schism, of Ephesian fanatics. Of course after AD 496 under next emperor Anastasius they were simply the only recognised Roman church.

Others in this party included Zachariah of Mytilene (not yet the Pseudo- continuator, of which Forness is aware) and Symeon of Bet-Arsham. Forness brings them to illustrate how these authors used Henotic (if I may) jargon as a marker for their acceptance of Zeno's full text. Jacob used the same tropes.

At first that party also counted Philoxenos of Mabbug (Arabic Manbij). This one confronted patriarch Flavian II of Antioch, AD 509 (or AG 820), demanding miaphysitism and acceptance of the Henotikon. Two years later, Philoxenos went further than just dismissing Chalcedon; the Antiochenes would have to denounce it (one suspects, by Imperial command), and denounce pope Leo's "Tome". His ally Severus behaved similarly.

Come AD 518, Justin the Illyrian would succeed Anastasius. Justin appointed one Paul, perhaps a convert from Judaism, to be Antioch's Patriarch - under orders to reënforce Chalcedon in Syria. Their decisions led to Severus removing his bishops out of communion with Constantinople as well as just the city Rome.

Barḥadbeshabba (inconsistently-spelled, here) will claim that Narsai wrote his homilies to rival Jacob's out east. Although Forness doesn't bring Narsai himself for this.

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!