Cofnas' most questionable take

Everyone hates Nathan Cofnas. The far Right can't stand that Cofnas read Kevin MacDonald and engaged with his work. High academia calls Nate-Dogg a "racist". Here, perhaps, is the biggest hit on him: he's no biologist, rather a philosopher, so prone to just so stories.

There is an "iron constant" in sociology, involving standard-deviations, usually one-sigma. Suffice that when prior generations wanted, basically, any African American presence in a skilled profession, they set a quota. (Alternatively you can skim the cream from Africa or the Caribbean; but the Caribbean - being an island chain - swiftly runs out of cream. There also exist those Rachel Dolezal types who play off the one-drop rule but these tend not to be the cream of any race.)

Cofnas was impolite-enough to state that this wasn't a mistake; you must do this. John Derbyshire said similar. You're not supposed to say this. You're just supposed to act on this, and babble excuses maybe sometimes citing Jared Diamond. During Obama's second term, Equity started to kick in and everyone had to act on this but turbo.

Cofnas continued, though: that West Africans are jungle / savannah tribes who can't into Neolithic. Uh.

Going back to @Evolving_Moloch and Alexander Gusev, they point out that although jungles and their tribals do exist in West Africa (e.g. that Liberian coast ain't great for permanent structures), such tribals weren't the Africans targeted for the various slave-trades. It was found in the Americas that when a hunter-gatherer was nabbed, he proved a poor worker in the fields, as in the crop-fields. It was found along the western Indian Ocean that sugar needed a force who could swing a machete. The phenomenon may well have been noted in Carthage before them all; Hanno seemed unclear on any differences between a chimp, a "gorilla", and a pygmy. A plantation, in short, needs farmers - Iron-Age farmers at that.

The Zanj was eastern Africa; we've handled that elsewhere. On our side and in our more-recent times: along the Atlantic, the Bantus... Expanded. Farmers, all. In fact a lot of the problems in Africa today are problems between herders, who usually adopted herding after their vast experience in hunting; and farmers, overwhelmingly Bantu or at least generally Niger-Congo. The "Black" peoples now in the Americas are generally Niger-Congo; I suspect Brasil being further south and hooked into likewise-Portuguese Angola, as Bantu-skewed.

Farming happens in the savannah as well because the upper-Niger part of that duo allows for irrigation, like the Nile. These more fed the Saharan trade than the Atlantic. As Gusev notes: that side of Cofnas' argument is simply irrelevant. The Atlantic trade wasn't taking the savannah's herders. If anything the savannah's herders were taking the savannah's farmers and shifting the latter, northward.

Interestingly Jared Diamond himself pondered if hunter-gatherers like he'd seen in New Guinea might be of intelligence superior over ... whites, like him, also the product of farms. But hey.

Personally I think Gusev is at least as big of a prick, to use Gregory Cochran's term; since Gusev sideswipes Cofnas as a sland'rer, where that "slander" is about David Reich's lab blowing off Davide Piffer and generally dabbing on other rivals (like Watson) for specious "racism" despite repro'ing all their results. Reich was a social-climber in 2018 and he remains a social-climber today. Reich doesn't want to suffer Cofnas' career. Cofnas, by contrast, doesn't want to be Reich, with all his ethical compromises. I doubt Cofnas wants to be Gusev, that pick-me, either. Anymore than Cochran wants to associate with anysuch "pricks".

None of this is to confirm or deny the existence of the Iron Constant. Nobody seems brave enough to confront Cofnas on this. (Or Gregory Cochran. Or Charles Murray or Nicholas Wade or...)

I will say Gusev is right on this much: if Cofnas wants to step onto palaeo-sociologic turf, he needs to learn the history of that turf.

The abortion jab (or not)

The COVID-19 jab was an abortion jab, say Ron Johnson and Katie Pavlich. Now Ace of Spades, whose motto may as well be "True If Big".

'Cause it ain't true. It was debunked last year.

The whole reason the Senators are bringing this up now is to distract voters from seeing all the work they're not doing for the SAVE Act, although there's plenty of votes for illegal-amnesties in "farm bills" and for Middle Eastern wars.

MUTANTS 8/11: Cool story, ace. Sport. Champ.

On skipping Phobos

A decade ago Hoppy Price, John Baker, and Firouz Naderi wrote "A Minimal Architecture for Human Journeys to Mars", doi 10.1089/space.2015.0018. On the assumption of SLS, four launches of those could get sufficient cargo to hop to inner (6000 km) moon Phobos. This would - they said - allow for the main prize some years later which is the Martian surface. Some have of-late proposed additionally supplying Phobos from the Belt; supplying Mars from the Belt, too. This blog doesn't endorse Martian surface missions exactly, preferring outer moon Deimos, but we can allow for supplying either moon from outside.

In 2021 Drake, Rucker, and Cianciolo henceforth DRC evaluated the earlier trio (pdf). Deimos - I think - has its own merits, which aren't Martian merits. Phobos on the other hand - they think - is still looking for purpose. Inasmuch as it's being sold as a waystation to Mars, DRC say it's a cuckshed.

DRC nod to Deimos as having similar issues as the inner moon. They don't really consider it however. Perhaps because indeed it is not really a Martian waypoint (I say an interplanetary waypoint).

The issues had in both, which are not shared with Mars, include gravity 3 mm/s² (twice that for Phobos), and yes that is in millimeters. Also they are entirely airless where Mars' atmo may be compressed for CO₂, nitrogen, and argon. On Mars water may, further, be drilled and now you have most of your requirements for feeding plants and housing us animals. More: on these moons regolith cannot be shaken off gloves as it can on Mars or our Moon. So you are going to have to send over two different kinds of life-support: one for whatever moon, and one for Mars' surface. Three if we count the craft getting everything over there (one assumes, a cycler).

The 2015 architecture was proposing just to land humans on that moon and then "teleöperate" robots on the Martian surface. In that case, life-support on Mars is to be built on Mars, by those bots. The 2021 DRC review denies the point of this. Just land everything on Mars all at once, they say. Maybe get into some lavatube tunnel, aerate the place and teleöperate thence.

It is further difficult to catch Phobos from the surface, and likely harder still to catch a tether dangling thence. Here Deimos has the advantage because it's almost in areosync (martistationary at that, it's equatorial).

Overall I must agree that Phobos is the also-ran in the Mars-or-Deimos competition. I still think Deimos deserves consideration as our first port-of-call however. Although here we'll have to be serious. We'll have to build a whole city from that rock.

Tales of Canterbury

Geoffrey Chaucer composed the Tales of Canterbury and it got copied - early. Barbara Bordalejo and Peter Robinson have a URL of that name.

These two believe that their predecessors had overcomplicated the manuscript tradition. Hengwrt and Ellesmere are good MSS, they agree. To these they'd add Christ Church 152 and Bodleian 686... to pretty-much ignore the others. Because they're all dependent on the four noted (or maybe on CC152's original, but CC152 itself is good-enough here).

The title "book of the tales of Canterbury" seems almost to roll off the tongue. Was it "Cantérbury" in Chaucer's time? A few centuries before him it was "Cantwareburh" or "Cair Ceint". I can't see the accent falling on the second syllable of the former... unless we allow for some lost Latinism. But in 13th-century Latin the Normans were using variations of "Dorobern" based off a tradition of Roman "Durovernum Cantiacorum". Chaucer was self-consciously English and no Norman. I think he'd rather say Cánterbury like we say; the "book of -" preface is tacked on, by scribes, because these Tales are poems which people declaimed from memory for sport.

As to the epigones: "Canterbury Tales" is a fair reduction in my opinion, but it remains a reduction. Also some Tales got memorised to the expense of others, which may explain how later editions might be wild compared to the originals. But - say Bordalejo and Robinson - we have good-enough originals. One might compare Homer, whose two main works seem deliberately-composed such that later copies don't deviate as far as, uh, sura 11 from sura 7.

That's a spicy meatball

Lucas Beveridge is talking about something he and Sam Piper did for Atomos Nuclear and Space. Suppose we only shipped one reactor to a HEO. That reactor hands over neutrons to some neutral metal... which then becomes radioactive, including in the gamma spectrum - one per mission. This transfers "enthalpy": energy to tungsten plates. The plate then delivers those joules over time, in kilowatts. I hear beryllium too.

Here's how it was tested; here's what was tested.

At HEO - as in, GEO or higher - is way too high up for Earthlings to care. You can fuel up a lot of space tuggery. Take Tory Bruno's Blue Ring, which needs one tonne of xenon for four of payload. That reactor looks like it would in fact deliver the 5.5 kW needed to propel to Gateway's lunar NRHO. To get a mission rolling "for weeks or months", Beveridge prescribes Scandium-46 with its low 84-hour halflife. Maybe tugs; maybe Venus injection. Sc-46 is allowed to deorbit after three years.

The test used Manganese-56 which decays in 2.6 hours. This can deorbit rather sooner. Maybe use the Mn-56 for high-thrust tugs between HEOs and be done with it. Like if you just want to hit the Spaceline cable at the 80 Mm this blog has promised.

Various enthalphy-rockets have been recommended for station-keeping. Further: with this much power in a small package, we could go up to Martian landers. Solar flybys with Oberth?

For longer missions, he's talking Cobalt-60 at its 5.27 year halflife. We might not want this in Earth orbit... ever. Beveridge is suggesting this for a Uranus orbiter, or series of orbiters. First it has to get there but we can probably do that with a Starship. And/or with a fusion-driven ship launching off Deimos. This one burning constantly might also do without radiators, since this whole setup is the radiator.

The asteroid/Martian economy

Mark Thompson last April relayed a Swiss(?) study by EPFL on how to deliver materiel to Mars (to its well, anyway).

Serena Suriano, Shamil Biktimirov, Dmitry Pritykin, Anton Ivanov seem to be picking up where Zubrin left off; they're not stopping at Deimos (like I'd stop). Except, Zubrin wanted Martians to mine the 'stroids and these three Russians (and one Sicilian) are asking the Belters to do it themselves and sell to the Martians.

To read the article, they want to deliver the goods to a Low Mars Orbit 500 km. Phobos, for reference, is at 6000 km. Why not just send it all to Phobos? Gravity there is higher than Deimos' and this place should be able to dangle a tether to 500 km. Our authors are already aware of the doi-10.1089/space.2015.0018 mission architecture which targets, exactly, Phobos.

On the Earth side, all this assumes a depot at STL2. That's "ST", not "TL". Somehow they have to stationkeep that.

The 'stroids they want are metallic, like 332 Siri. Guess they want the tungsten... or Beryllium. That one sails out 2.7 AU where Mars is, what, 1.6 and Vesta 2.36.

But... isn't Mars literally littered with meteorites of all sorts? If it's volatiles you want, just drill for the ice. And if we're staying at Deimos (or Phobos), it's probably mafic such that there should be a few iron and siderophiles right there. Or anyway sicila fit for anhydrous glass fibre.

NASA's new tungsten mine

There is, today-announced, a vast tungsten reserve in Nevada. Tungsten as you know comes with other essential elements like boron and lithium. Some of the land however overlaps with 17 square miles of NASA. NASA say they need the land.

My suggestion is for NASA to earmark a tax on the land they've inherited. Materials from that part of the land go to NASA as first-choice customer, for NASA's own use.

Meanwhile I guess NASA should calibrate its satellites elsewhere; the Feds can scout around for other parts of its enormous Southwestern lands for anything likely. Southern Cali? Utah?

BAqDAyT 8/7 from Stephen "Vodka" Green.