2 Isaiah did not preach in the wilderness

It is now 10 Ab in my timezone, so to my fellow Semites I hope your fast was easy. Let's talk Shabbat Nachamu.

Pump Up The Volume (mis)cast a twentysomething Christian Slater as highschool student Mark. That is a portentious name; the evangelist we call "Mark" (and this blog holds as authentic) started his "gospel of Christ" with reference to Isaiah 40, in the form of a voice crying out in the wilderness. The Mark in that movie, we learn, is a Yankee lately transported to the "wave of mutilation" which was 1990 suburban Arizona.

R. David Freidenreich in TheTorah is arguing that the movie got it wrong. He admits in all fairness that it's not just a Christian interpretation; the Aggadah of Genesis had elided the same verse by the time of the movie. Although I'll suggest here that this text still depended upon the Christians' base.

That base was the Leontopolitan Isaiah. It was in Onias IV's interest to remove the Prophets from Zion.

2 Isaiah, like the prophet of most Isaiah 1-33, was a man of Zion. The Lord was coming to His Mountain and it was time to prepare His way - and, soon, His House which is the Temple to come. The rabbi here cites Joseph Blenkinsopp, that this passage intended the ceremonial path to the Lord's Advent. (It might further nod to the Persian highways, and to Cyrus II's call for the exiles' return; although Blenkinsopp and the rabbi dismiss both.) Zion was not, itself, a wilderness in God's sight. Either Isaiah would find absurd to build paths to a place that didn't yet exist.

Tell you what was a place of no particular value to the Lord, as of the second century BC: Leontopolis. Where Onias was stuck.

It would make sense to tweak this verse so that, in the "elder" days, the Prophet was calling from the desert that is, not Zion. The Lord is coming where He pleases and we must house Him there.

Psalm 45 as the ode for Solomon

Psalm 45 (MT) might be the Catholic core psalm. Biblical scholars love it too, usually assigning it to Athaliah's wedding upon a base of Ahab-and-Jezebel. Lately however one Yazdan Safaee suggests it is better placed with the Persians - pdf at the link.

The language turns out to be Late Biblical Hebrew, with parallels in 3 Isaiah and Esther. It may even be Templar, paralleling the Hebrew parts of Ezra. As ideology goes the king's throne is God's throne, and for him is the glory which Psalm 104 would reserve to its (sun) God. Even the most promonarchic texts of the Deuteronomist History wouldn't dare that.

Rather, this khwarrah permeates where the Chronicler (in LBH) adjusts its own base in Reigns. We know the Chronicler owned a psalter, parts of which he mainlined into the narrative. Psalm 45, as Safaee would have it, is for Solomon - like the Canticles. The messianist would say: for the new Solomon to come.

Safaee now must explain how this Psalm ended up with the songs of Qoraḥ 42-9, Elohistic redaction. For Safaee, this editor wanted to cap Psalm 44 - a song of exile - with a promise for the better future.

The verses 45:11-16 remain outstanding. I don't know if Safaee explains that as well as he could. I might suggest a "fan fiction" where the gentiles of Lebanon are marrying into Solomon's house. As, perhaps, an irony, this revives Hugo Grotius: who argued for the Psalm as the wedding song of Solomon to an Egyptian princess. Such had been accepted into the Geneva Bible also.

If we are looking at Chronicler fanfic, very little room remains for Ahab or Athaliah theorists (or, indeed, for Grotius). Such would have to argue that this Psalm somehow avoided notice until after 2 Isaiah. Unless... they can find witnesses to this Psalm before the LBH corpus. But given Psalm 104, which is considered late (and Egyptian), that is going to be difficult.

Peter McCullough is a disgrace

I'll say up front I am no biologist - but neither is CatTurd2. It may be pointless to argue with the convinced and especially not with paid partnership. What we can do, is explain Dr. Peter McCullough. The American Board of Internal Medicine last year decertified his ass.

As to why, one reason is he's a liar. Not just in the makes-inaccurate-statements sense; any one can leave sausage in the litterbox. In the, "I speak for Baylor Scott & White Health" sense; which untruth attracted that company's lawyers.

Cloth masks and social distancing - indoors - worked too by the way. Not as well as the vaxx, but enough to slow the spread.

How stiff is spacetime?

This is one of my titles ending in a question-mark, which I reserve for special occasions. Like "not having anything good to type about this evening".

Anhydrous glass, beryllium, and graphene all share a property: the Young Modulus. This stress:strain is called "stiffness". It turns out that gravity bends space. Kip Thorne in 2018 delivered the Hamilton Lecture “Exploring the Universe with Gravitational Waves” on the topic, after a lot of this bending had been measured. Someone in the audience pondered spacetime's Young Modulus; Rainer Weiss gave an answer.

Thus far, 25 minutes into Physics Explained's youtube.

Looking around, other physicists have questions, like David Izabel and A. C. Melissinos. They all agree with Weiss that spacetime has a Young.

Weiss was caught backfooted. He thought the Young depended on frequency of gravitational waves, and based on 100 Hz threw out a number: 1e+20 more than steel. Melissinos gave it a little more thought, and from "first principles" calculated 1e−9 Pascals, which is 1e-14 that of... jello. Maximum. An uncharitable soul might compare these results to Bottke and Loeb tussling over Chicxulub.

The Youtuber pulls further, I think, from Tello-Strong asking at what point the space-time... breaks. I think that question is a secondary at this point.

Making Chicxulub

Everyone agrees Chicxulub wasn't from here. Since February 2021 a consensus has formed is that it was a carbonaceous chondrite. These are rare down here but they do get here; 142 Polana, for instance, is in the B class of these and has spawned many a pile of dangerous rubble. But I don't think many believe that Polana dropped the bomb on me (baby).

Instead, Makhatadze's team say: the Ornans class, CO or maybe CT. They did this by measuring the nickel isotopes. A CO / CT might be, or have been, carboniferous but the harder stuff is in there, even prevalent now (see below).

As hinted, carbonaceous chondrites are diverse. Which one was it? Hence the check for nickel. This comes in five isotopes as might have halflives beyond the 4.567Gy after coalescing into CCs. Each type of CC formed in different environments with their own recipes for nickel. They say CI is special here, and that CY (which is new) groups with them. Which led them to exonerate this whole subgroup from our crater.

Previous estimates had clustered around CM. The nickel rules closer to CO. They formed around the same place, sooty 3.7 AU; they are differentiated, as it were, in time, CO forming earlier. CT is also possible but they aren't as well-constrained as yet, and as North Americans say when they hear hoofbeats, horses be more likely than zebras.

CO Chondrites are also, they say, dry - until this one splashed into shallow water that is. Previous estimates on the sulfur sent into the atmosphere had been estimated from the assumption of a sulfur-rich CM so those estimates are going to have to change. Unless the monster struck an oil field admittedly, and this is the future Gulf of America we are discussing here.

They point to Bottke 2007 as one line of evidence, on this rock coming from a 160Mya breakup. That would be the 298 Baptistina hypothesis. I know Bottke's been around awhile but I personally would not do this, except as a nod to those discredited pre-CC theories. Because it's the wrong rock (it's S) at the wrong time (80 Mya). CO rocks instead formed past the present (and CM era?) snowline although perhaps not the 2.7My-after-solar-system snowline. We are here not discussing the Grand Tack.

I have to wonder about 495 Eulalia ...

The Precambrian Asteroid Punch

800 million years ago, the Boring Billion ended as our Moon broke its nineteen-hour tidal resonance and started its gradual march outward. There was nothing naturally geological going on down here; supercontinent Rodinia had formed 100My before (supercontinents are even more dead and boring) and would last another 50My. Perhaps we might have been pushed from outside.

Bottke et al. say our moon got a surge of craters (including Copernicus); Earth too should have had still more. Keep in mind that Bottke like Loeb has a history of meddling in Chicxulub and getting it wrong, although Bottke hasn't since gone as totally stupid as far as I know.

A lot of this relies on simulation. The craters match if a swarm of loose asteroids had reached the 3:1 Jupiter resonance all of a sudden. A big impact would push fragments into 3:1J (they call it "J3:1"). So, a bunch of impacts immediately; then the Yarkovsky Effect kicks in for more of the surviving rubble, heating and outgassing the volatiles to 3:1J over the next 150My.

That resonant region, noted on this blog, includes 495 Eulalia and 142 Polana. Eulalia is currently 1:2 resonant with Mars; Polana more like that 3:1J. Polana, we know, is tossing stuff like Bennu at us. But the Bottke Boys be pointing at Eulalia because they note it broke up ... 800 Mya. Polana has probably not been where it is for long.

They also blame these inner-crossing rocks for a surge of volcanism over then-dead-already Mars. And with "shifts in the biosphere" here. At that time nonplant life here was still stolonic. Wiki points to a "Choanozoa" postfungal but not yet animal.

Back to LHS 1140

Three summers ago I got moderately excited about Gliese 3053 = LHS 1140 b - the M star's outer planet, 24.7 days. I didn't really look at later-discovered c, which I thought would be irradiated and airless. The Alfvén surface habitability criterion looked good for b however so it got attention at the time.

I started pondering underground water as might deflate the rocky part's density and raise its radius, so held off on saying much more about this unconstrained planet. I had questions needing answers about its atmospheric composition.

So: more data's come in (h/t Zim, but poorly worded). Still looking at a mass of 5.60 ±0.19 Earth masses (M_⊕) and a radius of 1.730 ±0.025 Earth radii (R_⊕). Star is just under 15 parsecs away and hasn't been flaring, and spins 131 days, so is deemed 3+Gy old. Planet b only gets 42% incoming flux but that's enough for HZ status on its sun-facing side.

The star probably used to flare which is how come c, just over Earth mass, is blasted out. The paper is going to float implications for the Cosmic Shoreline (to the extent I hadn't already). I don't believe any further planets are detected here; there might not be room below the 25 day range.

What is found here (and not down on c) is "metastable helium". That is the 2 ³𝑆₁ excited state, bumping an electron to a higher ring; as on WASP-107b. Once excited it takes around 7870 seconds to cool back down again. As Collin Cherubim et al. say in their title, Helium escaping from the atmosphere (pdf). And the helium isn't always found: it was found 2024 (when this blog was looking) but not 2025.

Also there's not much hydrogen. Although the planet is ill-lit, it should still be warm enough for low-melt methane to rise past the "cold trap" of the convective troposphere (so the paper), where it would be broken up. So no new methane is being created downbelow. Water on the other hand can form into clouds below all that helium. Venerians will pipe in that so can sulfuric acid. Good case for the Sudarsky II.