The telescopes over Venus

We have many telescopes on Earth and in outer space. Probably our best 'scopes are in the deserts Down Under. The clouds don't condense in the Atacama or the Outback - much less in the Antarctic winter. There also aren't so many people around to shine night-lights. The Northern Hemisphere tends to irrigate deserts but we do own some isolated mountaintops, like Mauna Kea.

Outer space does have one disadvantage relative to Earth night: the Sun. If there's ever a Mars colony, one way it can add value is to use Martian night - perhaps on Olympus. At certain spans in the Mars-Earth synodic year, Mars and Earth are on opposite sides of the Sun, so Mars can see what Earth and her satellites can't.

Earth and Venus share their own synodic - and that's what this blog is for.

Most will laugh at the thought of Venus-stationed telescopes: landside and cloudlevel both, like Dante's Inferno, won't ever see the stars. (UPDATE 2/2/2020: but now consider L2's line-of-sight.) And Koski & Grcevich (pp. 89-90) had left upper-deck mechanics to others. So: cue, those others. You're at the home of the Forever Flotilla. They never see a cloud overhead. 'Tis true that it is always 11 AM up here... until it's not. (Leaving aside the infrared.)

Venus-based astronomers won't start out flying a nuclear station forever on the night side, as the sky-port does in daylight. We generally book time in advance when we need to train a telescope somewhere; I expect similar over Venus.

Tom Benedict's essay "Realistic Astronomy" in Koboldt's book should be kept in mind, that the actual astronomers will be resting in (relative) comfort in a faculty-lounge somewhere. The ship will be piloted by telescope-operators, who may or may not know anything about what they're observing. Even the operators will be using remote control on account that telescopes like darkness, and humans in flight insist on at least a lighted console. Although the ops're going to want a line-of-sight with the drone.

When the telescope-operator has a time and a direction, that 'scope-bearing drone and the operators' plane get unmoored from the flotilla, and drift back into night. At night the drone vessel rolls back its shade and its telescope spends three Earth days observing what it must observe. The operators, in their more-standard plane, keep a line-of-sight to the drone.

Pilot career-path

In Koboldt's book, Sylvia Wrigley the aviation journo has a good chapter on "Realistic Space Flight". Relevant to Perma-Venus Flight, she teaches that bad pilots over Earth do this thing called the Graveyard Spiral, when they are blinded and can't (or won't) read their instruments. Here is what others say of this.

Over Venus, such a Darwin nominee would be a new pilot in the acid cloudbanks (probably dealing with the floating farms), or such a one up in the flotilla if separated therefrom and drifting into night.

Venus assures that pilots both in flotilla and transport be trained for these eventualities. Both get night training at least; in the internship, as copilots.

Arguably if flotilla pilots should fall into the clouds, they are screwed anyway. So piloting flotilla is a prerequisite for piloting transport.

Stir crazy

Over Venus, as in any enclosed system, humans must consider boredom and interpersonal strain. [UPDATE 1/15] They'll have to figure this out even before anybody wants to go there. [3/20] And the best-case scenario runs into Ibn Khaldun's three-generation-rule.

The floating farms, I hope, will be larger than the site of that 1990s-era "Biosphere Two" experiment. I've been expecting that the permanent flotilla will limit liveable space. Both will do some interpersonal harpoon crossover between vessels - a lifesaver for the flotilla. And all the vessels get new arrivals every 584-day synodic year. These newbies can't all be boring.

I have also insisted on cultural options for Venus' floating citizens: among them, waterfront, safari, and the Maya bubbles. As a last resort as doesn't involve other consenting human adults, we have more Internet now than the Biosphereans had. Venus' vessels will enjoy something similar, beamed across planes or bubbles. The better vessels shall even bear cables inbetwixt.

I expect social conditions here, at their worst (read: the eight "Advent" weeks following Conjunction... and at night), will affect people like Antarctic stations do, especially winter. Still not ideal - as they've found with brain atrophy, which would necessitate a read of that "dementia" chapter in Koboldt's book - but survivable. Especially if there be exit-avenues to other bubbles.

Besides Antarctica, whose denizens are Different; for the average resident, one might also look at Whitter in Alaska.

At night when the plants don't work

Philip Kramer in Koboldt's book has pointed out that wherever and whenever a habitat loses sufficient daylight, any plants shall, then, quit taking in water and carbon dioxide... and start putting it back out, like we animals do. That riddle “what do they breathe at night” has meaning for plants! ... as a joke, its setup is usually broken.

In the Venus flotilla, for drifters, I have proposed a night of [UPDATE 5/6] two Earth days. In the cloud-layer over Ishtar, plain physics imposes two days of night .

In space the Sun is right out there. Such holds in Venus' orbit especially if offset from occultation. We might even raise plants in near-permanent daylight over the Venus clouds [7/26/2020 poles, 8/17 stations]. Such plants never lose daylight.

Drifting vessels could keep plants working by artificial lamps. But for the flotilla, drifting planes' first priority for the energy they have stored is the turbine.

The perma-planes will deem best to scrub the CO₂ and to keep the water. Over Venus, to remove that stuff, "activated carbon" seems like the ticket (or maybe fluorine?). We can un-scrub the scrubbers in four more days when the sun and the rest of the flotilla come into view.

The shards of Narsil

One fine scene in Jackson's The Fellowship of the Ring, which I think is in the second book in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings hexology, brings Strider and Boromir together at the shrine in Rivendell to those who fell against Sauron. Among the relics there is Elendil's sword Narsil - what is left of it.

Recently (thank you to the gifters!) I acquired Putting the Science in Fiction, which one Dan Koboldt edited and published 2018. Overall it is good, albeit playing it Deep-State safe on Global Warming. I do wish to take issue with Gwen Katz (the chemist)'s essay on the aging process, as applicable to ... what she's assuming is natural iron. She was annoyed with Narsil. She thought a three-thousand-year-old sword shouldn't exist in Rivendell's seasonally-warm and always-humid air. This by the way applies to all the "magic" swords in the story, including Orcrist and even humble Sting.

Katz's complaint says more about Katz than it says about Tolkien. Or about Jackson.

I don't actually know the extent of Tolkien's or Jackson's knowledge of chemistry. I am pretty sure that both were aware that normal iron doesn't last this long. Orcrist and Sting came from First Age Gondolin, according to The Hobbit. We mortal brutes use words like "magic" but that's not getting into Tolkien's mind here. He would say those two were crafted by Noldor exiles from Valinor who still recalled the light of the Two Trees. 'Tis true that the Noldor had fallen from grace by then. But if so, Narsil could well be holier; on account it was crafted for warriors in a state of grace - for the Faithful of Numenor.

These weapons of righteousness aren't of this world. They are not chemical; they are celestial. The dark powers were able to break Narsil - for which they needed the Ring (which by the way demonstrates the brute-power aspect of that particular bane). I assume that the dark powers own, also, some means to profane holy steel. It is just that with Narsil, the dark powers haven't done that. Narsil was used for the purpose it was intended, which was to fight evil - to fight that Ring. In this, Narsil succeeded.

To sum up, Jackson's scene and Tolkien's setup are in harmony that - in this world - Narsil remains broken yet unblemished. The authors were making exactly the opposite of a chemical point: they had made a moral point. It is right and just that a holy sword break physical laws.

And if Katz doesn't understand that, she shouldn't be reviewing Tolkien.

Unspeakable Cults

Over at Little Green Footballs, I discovered (the hard way) several means to ensure loyalty to a cult leader. One of the most important was to insist on an absurdity, unbelievable to outsiders; and to watch who else purports to believe it. I really should have paid attention to Dalrymple back in 2006; here is a repost.

Modern Catholicism has Fatima. Al-Islâm has the Preëxistent Qur'...ân [sic]. Our current-year has Transgenderism, and the Gay Equality movement generally. I am still on the fence about the extent and consequences of Global Warming; but Al Gore's 1990-2010-era extremism would count, especially now.

The Atlantic for its part would have us sign onto New York Times' "1619 Project". And Vox Day himself demands of his base that they disavow the Apollo Program and all its works.

Insurgents

The Atlantic, which I cannot tell apart from New York (nor from the New York Times' magazine), has a piece about trolls. This piece comes with a recommendation from one of the Internet's most-seasoned practitioners of weaponised-narrative.

And I get it. Of course Our Betters in media, politics, and academia want to fight trolls. Nobody likes to be second-guessed and especially not if delivering pronouncements is how they make a living.

Trolls are just as cruel as the cult-leaders, of course. Their methods are often just as illegal. One service that trolls do provide is to deflate the powerful. Overall we may consider trolls as a fourth-generation column of insurgents - as terrorists, at the extreme. That was pretty much how Saul Alinsky saw them.

It is certainly in - say - Vox Day's rights to fight back; and if the trolls have broken laws then that's the trolls' fault, and they should pay for their crimes. When you fight, you must reckon the possibility that you may lose.

Insulation

I am not a climatologist. Where I do not understand a field, I am predisposed to look up to honest authority. That means that if I am to heed a climatologist, I should like to know that he or she is honest.

If the climatologists are working for that rape ring called "United Nations", I turn them off. If I hear that they are out to "improve the economy" or to start a "Green New Deal" or to institute a "Green Collar Economy" or to "make the world a better place" - these have nothing to do with the climate, and I turn them off. If they be at all involved in gender reassignation or other antiscientific witchcraft, like Bill Nye is: off.

Even where not compromised, many academics and mediaites are insulated. It's like an upper class Jew lecturing against White Privilege. "Some of you may die; but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make." . . .

It is in that spirit that I point to David Dubya-Dubya here. He's got a brother Benjamin, who also gets boring Coastal wisdom published in boring Coastal magazines.

Besides the nepotism, or coincidence, DWW has a sort of double insulation inasmuch as he's taking money to deliver the reports he's delivering. Although his conflict of interest seems more subtle than that of, say, a direct United Nations employee. Or of a Caribbean politician sniffing out the next Reparations shakedown.

Personally the man comes off as a Gamma, a personality-type most of us detest. He'd got squished in a one-on-one argument, so he ends this article here with a return to the Jerk Store. Now he can get the last word, in print! But D. W-W'd probably got raised by a Strong Woman and by some Beta for a dad, so we cannot blame him overmuch for his brittle psyche.

My real problem is that DWW's ending feels like projection.

He claims the Guardian figure of 197000 deaths from pollution. This - DWW assumes - should be universally attacked as Too Much. And so it is - if this fine-tuned number is even accurate, rather than "less than 200000". And if those deaths weren't also associated with daily improvements in human life, like the computers which DWW and the Guardian use to get their message to us. And if pollution wasn't being exacerbated, as it is in London and Germany, by the move away from fossil-fuels... back to wood.

But hey, maybe it's just a matter of some finely-tuned new taxes and regulations. DWW will be fine, continuing to write his pieces under his lord's patronage. I doubt DWW would care about the people deemed Klimate Kulak under a Green New Deal. They'll just lose their jobs and become homeless somewhere else. The American-Indianing of the American working class doesn't have the same obvious metrics as pollution deaths, so it's not happening.

In anything there are trade-offs. The trick is to decide which side has to lose and by how much.

And DWW would rather it was you.

BOOK 11/15/2021: He's got one.

The second fall and rise of the Otomí

Last year I noted Xaltocan, a new city which the Nahua built on top of an older city which they'd conquered. I cannot find what its natives had called it. I did find they didn't use the Nahua language. The population turnover was recent enough that regional records could remember that it had been an Otomí city.

Otomí isn't their own name for themselves. Their endonyms don't entirely agree with each other. The larger Oto-Pamean family sports a "Hñatho", called Mazahua by outsiders. So if I had to pick a name, I'd pick "Hñato".

The Spaniards found the Otomí, in 1520 AD, scattered around The Vale Now Of The Mexica. Many lived in another city, Metztitlan. Others dwelt in Tlaxcala; Camilla Townsend, in her uneven Fifth Sun, reported that this kingdom deemed them subordinate. Otompan, subsequently famed for the site of Cortes' greatest victory, was founded - literally - as Otomí Town.

The Otomí enjoyed a second lease on life under Spanish suzerainty. Many Otomí today live far from the Vale of their ancestors.

Oto-Pamean as diaspora

Oto-Pamean languages cluster north of The Vale Now Of The Mexica. At least two of such tribes, Pame and Jonaz, are Dog Peoples - "Chichimec" nomads of the north. Otomí tradition has it that they came from the north as well. The Nahua, likewise, are famously intruders from the north. Almost all Native Americans came from the north of course but it is unlikely that as of 1500 AD they remembered as far back as Clovis.

To be remembered: Sometimes They Come Back. The Huastec had drifted north from the Maya lands.

So we may question if the Pame (or the proto-Otomí) are originally of El Norte, as were the Nahua.

Oto-Pamean happens to reside within a larger family, Oto-Manguean, which clusters south. Actually very FAR south; the Tlapanec branch once had colonies in Nicaragua and Costa Rica. Those paraTlapanec outposts don't seem ever to have been very prominent and they have all died out now. The Mixtec / Zapotec branch, in west/east Oaxaca, has done rather better.

I wonder if the Mixtec and/or Zapotec had - at some point - attacked the Tlapanec and forced many northward.

Crimean Germanic

Caitlin Green has been floated up to The Times [of London]. Her claim is that Crimea is English.

I didn't request access past the paywall and I'm not bothering with the original article, but other blogs have a précis, so I'll use some of those. I've read enough to file it all as "speculative".

What does ring true is that the northern Black Sea littoral, from 300 AD, became Germanicised. The Goths had settled that area; the Huns and Avars, later, only conquered it. These easterners didn't impose their own languages; and although they did enable a vast Slav resettlement, that might not have affected the coasts. Coastal fishermen are good at preserving their languages - look at Cornish. For that matter look at Greek, still around today even after the Macedonians running Constantinople in the 900s AD invited a horde of Slavs to settle down there.

And the Slavs were there only a few centuries before the Norsemen came to Kiev on the Dnieper (founded it, most agree). If the Vikings found any Goths downriver, they'd have recognised each other as kinfolk; the Rus would have used them as secondary nobility. The Gothic Psalter remained current through to 900 AD, and its New Testament kept getting copied. In much the way the Slavonic Bible made Macedonian Slavic the prestige form of Slavic in Ukraine; Wulfila's Bible made Gothic the prestige form of German in Kiev. (I don't know to what extent the Romanians used a Latin Bible.)

So as of 1070 AD, it does make sense that there survived German-speaking enclaves on the western side of the Euxine. This was, of course, after Manzikert, and the Byzantines were in need of reinforcements. Moreover the Normans, the bane of the Saxon back home, were striking at Greek holdings in Italy, expelling them from the peninsula in 1071 AD. When the Greeks found themselves with Saxon warriors, it makes sense that (1) the two warrior races would find common cause and (2) for landed holdings, which mediaeval knights preferred as meed for their services, the Saxons would prefer Germans for wives and allies.

Some Crimeans continued to identify as "Anglish" (sic) for centuries later, including their language. This is more controversial. Instead a "Crimean Gothic" is attested from the 1500s to the 1700s.

Whatever this Crimean German was, all "Early Modern" sources agree that it was not widely spoken, even at home. I am reminded of coworkers and acquaintances I've met who claim to have elderly relatives back in Louisiana who speak Creole French, or in Michihuacan speaking Purempecha. Or my late Uncle Doug in Wales who "spoke Welsh" but could never figure out the "correct Welsh" being prattled about on Welsh TV. It was Phrasebook Welsh, what Doug knew; a dialectic Mischsprache mostly English, but with just enough non-English to mark him as a Welshman. And anyway the Russians were about to import many hundreds of German Germans to help them modernise. Even in the 1500s-1700s people hearing about "German" in Crimea were suspecting that it was just Yiddish.

It's generally agreed now that, although Crimean German wasn't a pure descendant of Wulfila's tongue, it also wasn't Yiddish. It was a Christian language for a start. MacDonald Stearns in Crimean Gothic. Analysis and Etymology of the Corpus (1978) thought that "Crimean Gothic" was more like "Plattdeutsch" - like Dutch or even English.

So Dr Green seems about right: the Crimea shifted from Gothic to a Gothic-influenced Anglosaxon spinoff. For analogy: look to how the Frisian dialects close to Denmark have taken influence from Low German and Danish. It may be that these communities abandoned the Gothic Bible (which may never have got completed) and redid their lectionaries in "Anglish".

Genealogy, genetics

Steve Sailer is reminding us of Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived. By way of Brit Nicholson.

A few weeks ago I ran across a somewhat Aspergery book by one Joshua Swamidass, relying upon a genealogical argument for the Biblical Adam-and-Eve duo. He pointed out that genealogy is not genetics. I am the x-th male descendant of "Y Chromosome Adam" and my mother (who bestowed her mitochondria to me) is the y-th female descendant of "Mitochondrial Eve". But there are ancestors in the chain, perhaps from Uzbekistan, whose DNA has been entirely swamped out by the time it got to either of my parents. A man's genome can hold only so much data encoded in DNA strands and, well, I'm using some of it. Those ancestors (if I can track them) remain genealogical ancestors but are no longer genetic.

From that, Swamidass abandoned "Adam" and "Eve" from the two genetic straight-line ancestors; he reserved those labels for the ancestors of everyone currently alive, to whatever degree we partake in that Adam-and-Eve's genome, or even if we don't at all.

Swamidass figured one reason for God's choosing Jesus to be the Christ was that ~5 BCE was the date at which a reasonable number of [Old World] humans could be assumed to descend from a pair of vegetarians in the terminal Palaeolithic. Over some fifteen centuries after that, Adam-and-Eve's descendants have had the opportunity to drift into the New World as well, plus across Sunda Strait.

That legacy of Adam-and-Eve opens up the newer populations to the Christian message. Which, as I've been known to say, makes no sense without the Hebrew Torah; in the same manner as the Quran is nonsense outside Late Antique Syrian Christianity.

I file Swamidass as "arguable, but pointless". I am invested in the Adam-and-Eve story only inasmuch as it grasps toward a myth about the human condition and about the nature of this universe. In this reading, Adam and Eve are symbols - mere plot devices.

Swamidass comes from a Protestant tradition of inerrancy in Torah. His argument is salvaging that. Swamidass is, unlike Josh MacDowell, honest. He seems a good deal more intelligent as well. And he might even succeed at getting his argument into Moody / Schofield Bible commentaries.

However Swamidass should have left his argument as something to be skimmed in blog-posts. It doesn't deserve to be entertained by serious Torah research.

The four fathers of the Munda

With a hat-tip to Turtle Island: some six weeks ago, Prajjval Pratap Singh uploaded a team paper (pdf) onto the arxiv, about the Munda in eastern [trans]India. (Which I'm tempted to label "Gangea".) The Munda shared male DNA and language in common. But they did not develop any of that in India.

Most Munda descend from haplogroup O2a-M95. It turns out, though, that O2a-M95 origins precede 10000 BC and the ancestor's descendants cluster southeast Asian. Indian Munda sons of O2a-M95 cluster in two separate lineages: B419 in east Bengal; B418 among the North Munda - and these didn't mix. Two others, M1284 (rare) and B426 crop up in all the Munda populations.

From Figure 2, B419 is a subset of B418. That is: a descendant, maybe even a grandson. And they all descended from ancestral M1284. Scions of M1284, most of all B426, seem to have followed their B418 and B419 cousins westward.

Also I suspect B419 (alone) did spawn off within Bengal and Chittagong. Some consider that fringe as part of India - or of "Pakistan", as the modern Indus Valley would title it. I leave that to the politicians.

Of interest - to some - is that the men imposed their Australasian language(s). Again, it is often the case that women teach the language. I could see the eastern men simply swamping whatever locals there were, up to Bengal. I find that argument weaker for B418-Munda further west. Did B418 set up a trade-network up the Ganges?

Life on the edge

Too long in low-G renders the human body difficult, or impossible, to return to Earth (or to Venus, or to 8.5+ G space-stations)... ever again. Exile to the downscale space-stations is, then, a potential punishment, for offenders on either planet, if those planets wish never to see said offenders again.

It also happens that space is large. Around Venus, space is rather larger than one might think. Venus imposes a million km gravity well (lacking a Moon to interfere), and L4 and L5 plateaux on either side of that. As the Venus region gains more orbital craft, it also gains more nooks and crannies for those on the edge of the law.

And the region is a difficult region. People working in low-G often drift into a semilegal lifestyle. Criminals sent thither simply blend in. Gangs and mafias are rife.

Even criminals share some taboos: in orbit, no projectile / ballistic weapons. Space junk is a scourge at orbital velocities. Venus' orbital circumference is not short enough for its spacefaring inhabitants to ignore it.

Upload #184: Shaykh Yerbûtî

I started on sura 8 maybe thirteen years ago. I got stuck in a tangle between pretty much all suwar 4-8; and we can throw in sura 59. But now, I believe I can show that sura 8 relied upon sura 3 (dovetailed it, in fact); and also on sura 6. "The Booty from God's War", this project is.

Madrassa.

The backup generator

Long-term flights demand I don't carry fuel to expend; that I fly an electric Cessna. Let's fly it just hard enough against the Venerean equatorial wind to stay aloft. That means, my plane will drift a bit - back into the shadow.

Say I fly so the wind against me is only 50 ms^-1. My "450" constant thus becomes 112.5. My 300 m² plane shall experience 506.25 N of drag; demanding only about ten kW to push against this wind. This wattage can use solar in daylight. As for night - I will be spending some nighttime for every four day stretches. Up to forty-eight hours, if it's a maintenance weekend.

Koski & Grcevich (p. 83) note that this looks like a ticket to a "blistering death". My Cessna would need batteries to keep up through the long night. Perhaps a fallback into the clouds, to raise the air-pressure.

The worse news: my plane even at thrust can carry only 16875 kN. This amounts to almost two tonnes up here. Increasing wingspan improves that but also raises drag, so energy-cost. Say 2100 m²; I am prepared to go up to 70 kW, and carry fourteen tonnes.

At the final pinch: hydrogen air-bags (note: these cannot be trusted to be HOT air, at night). Here we bring in Philip Kramer the biomedical expert in Koboldt's book (and before him, Neal Stephenson). They would warn against "enclosed ecosystems" against overheat - even without sunlight.

The flotilla's ambience up in 70 km is cold. But this air is also thin. Convection won't work like it would on the surface - or in the more human-friendly cloud-layer. 'Tis more like space.

If I am radiating the heat from within, I expect to be running that heat into conductive (metallic) plates on the underside of the plane. Retracting the wings for night-fly mode will reduce radiation. But at night, that's a feature and not a bug.

I recommend the drift option to anyone with days to burn around the day of the city-visit. A plane so designed should work for a minor-offence gaol. Also telescopes. And we shouldn't rule out lower-income permanent-resident flotilla employees who don't need to be using the central reactor's fuel, themselves, all the time - that is, commuters. [3/25 - 5/6 2020] Put 'em on hibernation.

More seriously, there might be some emergency preventing full power to the non-nuclear planes. An unladen plane can work at lower thrust and its own power for as long as mechanics need to work on it. Here, then: The Backup Generator.

BOOST 12/21 - originally posted last night 5:15 PMish; figured I could think this one over on this slow weekend day. ADDITION 12/30 - retracting wings at night is good for other reasons.

TEST FLIGHT 8/6/2020: the battery Cessna, May 2020.

J1 and J2

Sandra Rimmer on the Near East: J1 and J2. J1 is ancestrally transEuphratean; J2, Canaani.

Like R1a and R1b, the J Bros ended up with very similar languages. J1 ended up Akkadian, Aramaean, and Arabic in succession (Quraysh are J1c3d). J2 spread to Carthage. Recall that the Aramaean language actually is a Canaani language in its Middle Bronze origin. I suspect that the Near Eastern Orient was Sumerian and Elamite, subsequently Semitised.

The Kohens are ambiguous: some J1 M267, others J2a. The Babylonian Exile may account for this.

North Africa, besides J1 and J2, doesn't seem to have changed much. Rather like these and like R1a and R1b, here there is E-M81 and E-M78. E-M78 looks like Garamantes and Imazighen. E-M81 looks like Kabyle and other pre-Latin "Berber". But their languages are recognisably related, even in antiquity.

One question I have is about Egypt in the Bronze Age, why this isn't marked on the map. Weren't their pharaohs I2 (and not J1)? Also not on the map: Ethiopia. The baseline is E, likely from the Oromo / Somalian "Kushites" who were there first. J1 is also strong there.

This is telling me that Semitised J1 North Arabians flooded down to Arabia Felix at the end of Bronze Age, and thence jumped off to Ethiopia.

Population movements in Europe

Sandra Rimmer (h/t hbdchick) offers a series of maps on male settlement through European history.

As you may know I am R-L21. My family was probably in the Severn area since the Bronze Age.

From 7000 AD, Rimmer (finally) points out a difference between R1a and R1b. R1b is more easterly - explaining the Tocharians. Still, if there was any linguistic difference between R1a and R1b; this never made it into the Indo-European protolanguage as of 3000 BC. Also, the I2a clade (to which Hitler belonged, I recall) is solidly a West European huntergatherer clade. I2a2a had a springback when the Germans moved out of their south Scandinavian refugium.

The Anglian bump in eastern England - which was Iceni once - already by 117 AD, they say, was I2a. I2a2 M284 specifically. This bunch also span Hadrian's Wall. But I2a2 was an ancient British lineage before that. Were they always Germannic? Maybe keeping in tune with their Danish and Frisian brethren by ocean? We do know that the Romans settled Belgians up there but their language would have been Latin. Until the local ladies beat it out of them...

R1b-S21 looks like Charlemagne's legacy, transmitted to lowland Britain by Normans and Angevins.

The sigil of Venus' flying city

Venus' floating maybe-flying castles will be in commerce with one another. If they assemble a formation, they interconnect against the wind by a fired harpoon.

Supplies could be fired from vessel to vessel by ballistic - but this has a risk, in the winds. I expect that people, especially, travel from craft to craft by firing that harpoon as ballistic; and then just rappelling over. The travelers attach themself/ves to the wire, and put on their sulfur-resistant wind-gear and breather tanks. Then: jumping into the void! and getting that other craft to drag them in.

For maintenance, and if the ailing craft cannot be left to drift (if flying, on Backup Generation): Four helicopters (drones?) surround the ailing craft. Harpoons are fired. Sick craft douses the turbine (if there is one, and it is still running): it is now dead weight. A wind-shield is draped in front of the sick craft. Mechanics 'poon over to see what is wrong. Last resort: a gentle float down to the chop-shop.

The best copters drag a safety-net underneath.

The harpoon-jumpers will compete against one another, and against tourists, in sport events. All with a net under them of course.

The regular season runs during the tail-end of the synod. The Olympics take place in the flotilla flying above the clouds, during Carnivale.

UPDATE 10/31/2020: Last December I had this idea of longstanding aeroplanes. Although I haven't entirely given up, I've constrained the concept. This post here applies equally well to floaters anyway.

Venus spaceports

The aerodynamic fleet has one main purpose: the loading and offloading dock for Venus-to-station transport. We do this from up here because Venus' surface is hell, and even if we did have a base there the drag on the rocket is ridiculous. I've seen 27 km/s mooted for delta-V.

For incoming space visitors, I think: a net. Four planes in formation, maybe remote electric-powered longterm drones, can drag a decent-sized rope net, to catch what the orbiting stations drop hither - like crewmen. The crewmen drop into the net like in that Red Bull challenge. They attach themselves to the net. Then three of the four planes detach their side of the rope; the plane left over, which bears a clinic for acclimatising humans to 8.666 g, drags the men up. That plane then docks with the floating hospital.

For upwardly mobile visitors, back to Venus orbit and beyond: Again, we'll want a formation of these planes dragging something like the 1969 Saturn V. (Apollo 11 was less than 30 tonnes, mostly chemical propellant and fuel. Tho' some would add the escape tower.) Likely we will be a sight more efficient - our tech is better, and we've only 8.666 g to worry about up here. Let's say, when the fuel, propellant, passengers, and cargo are all loaded: on the order of 3000 tonnes. When not assembled ready to go, these parts float down in the warehouse. These don't need to be perma-planes; they can be Boeing turbofans with jet fuel.

As ever, outgoing passengers board the rocket by harpoon.

Over Venus, most departures are headed to Earth. Therefore the central blastoff time is the end of Carnivale. Although there may be a few before and after, doing stopovers at the two Librations; and the odd Martian.

Every now and again someone is going to fire off a nuclear rocket. (UPDATE 1/29/2020: earlier this month I was thinking the full Orion; nowadays I'm downscaling to a mere Pluto. UPDATE 12/30: How's thrust / ISP on a nuclear-heated sulfur propellant...?) Such rockets are fired off some distance from the flotilla, to minimise risk and even blindness. Usually a bit below the flotilla's altitude. This is so the fallout won't be flying back around to bathe the flotilla, Cherno-style, in four more days. Pluto ramjets will fly in front of the flotilla when Those Engines kick on, so the fliers are just going to have to trust their shields.

There may be a nuclear-powered longstanding 11 AM flotilla but, since it is inefficient, I expect it to be mothballed periodically. As in: when Venus and Earth aren't in good Hohmann position.

When running as a port, the planes involved kick it up to 100 ms^-1, to catch incoming. Even faster, when pulling rockets to leave. These might be boosted to the Mach 4.5 ramjet-house.

SPLIT 12/20. WHICH ROCKET 1/12/2020. AD HOC 1/29.

DESTINATION 12/25/21: To the orbital ring. Lightcraft, before we get that, or to bypass that.

The flying harbour of eternal noon

Consider an equatorial platform over Venus, that floats not in the warm and foggy 55 km altitude but above the clouds.

At 70 km over Venus the air is 60 hPA (Yeon Joo Lee again pdf). That is like Earth at twelve miles up (remember, a kPa is ten hPa).

The platform wouldn't float over - so much as aerodynamically fly over, nose against the 100ms^-1 / 225 mph wind at the frigid cloud-tops. To push against the wind: turbines behind the platform, spun by dynamos.

Such a platform would be free of sulphur corrosion, with little atmosphere, and cold. Materials would be well preserved here. Except where the interiors demand water and oxygen of course.

The floating / flying structures would resemble the fuselages for our aeroplanes but may be longer, given Venus' lower gravity. UV-shielded glass covered greenhouses would protect human-friendly life in them. The city seal features the harpoon.

Power limitations force a widely-dispersed village, not a city - mostly robots. Work requiring vacuum is more-easily done here... like restoring solar panels. It is a base for telescope-optics, as well; these vessels are designed for nightside drift (obviously).

UPDATE 12/14 MIDNIGHT: If we're dragging anything, Kindltot recommends trailing a weighted kite-tail behind anything we care about keeping stable. MATHS 12/19/2019 - first version posted Saturday morning. Having sat down to run some Physics Equations, per Larson, I've constrained some of my wild ideas - and come up with new ones. 12/20 - split off the port thingy. 1/29/2020 - this is not "eternal noon", sorry! 8/17/2020 - unless we beam the extra power from balloons... 10/31 - scale back its ambitions: "harbour" might have been the title's Problematic.

The flying nuclear submarine?

Continuing to our turbine: I grant that solar isn’t negligible up here. It’s just that our perma-plane, if not a ramjet but we're skipping fuel anyway, really REALLY wants an additional power source. This post investigates nuclear - directly, or by cable.

A Cassini-type MMRTG delivers 110 W for each 5 kg of PuO₂. My 250 m³ cylinder with its GE90 turbine would need 5518 kg of this to make up the difference. So, probably not that…

A better plan is a 2008-era submarine-type nuclear reactor. This adds 1000 tons of reactor and (if water) coolant, among other “machinery”; that is, 900 metric tonnes. This much we might skim down without Unobtainium given it's cooler, although the low ambient pressure might act as a thermos. It will, luckily, fit in the 2000 tonnes our permaplane allows.

I am less sure about volume. Also I'm assuming (for now) it is inefficient. And we have alternatives.

To conclude: we can use nuclear to keep 'planes in the sky, but we won't. I'll entertain nuclear for a floater. Nuclear does give us at least 13000 kW as a baseline.

The sun is not enough

Let’s talk our turbine’s energy needs. Koski & Grcevich (p. 83) mooted solar. For the following, I'm not even looking at alpha: aerofoils force surface-area, so it's surface-area only I'm lookin' at. I'm also assuming magically powerful propellers sans propellant because why not. UPDATE 8/13/2020: perovskite and organic may let us get away with light solar panels, at least.

Venus unclouded in thin-atmo with the sun straight overhead gets 2620 Wm^-2 irradiance - maximum. (We know it's cold up there, so the exosphere is blocking quite a bit of the infrared.) Say I have a 20% efficient solar panel (assuming no windows; although transparent solar panels do exist, currently at 10% efficiency). The rest of the radiation will reflect away or heat the payload. If I coat the top half of my 300 m² wing with that: 2.620 * 0.2 * 0.5 * 300 = 78.6 kW. Since we're right over the clouds we get the full Venus' 3/4 albedo, so we coat the bottom too: add 58.4 kW to that. I assume we fly at 11 AM (forever), relative to the sun, rather than at noon; so we can use the front of the perma-plane so's to free up the back for the turbine. For drag, we were requesting 2025 N: to overcome that in this wind: 200 kW.

So for solar, I’ve got 458 * A of wattage - again, maximum - to counter 675 * A watts of drag.

It may seem counterintuitive but we’re not fixing this with wing surface area, nor with a better turbine. As mentioned lightening the load and/or hoping for that Hadley updraught aren’t relevant either; such just shortens the wingspan we need. If we had 40% efficiency on the solar panel, and/or drag coefficient much less than 0.015, we could do this. But even a robot drone lacking life-support gotta carry a payload beyond just a wing and a turbine, raising the drag. And I class 40% solar efficiency as Unobtainium. Especially once we start sacrificing efficiency for alpha, which we will need to do.

And nah bro, or (here) sisses: we ain't fixin' this by letting these planes run further below. That gives us air density but we're in the acid cloud layer. So we've not only shadowed our cells from the sun's full(ish) 2620 Wm^-2 but we've had to roll up a plastic shield over them, too.

One option is to use a WORSE turbine. I'll deal with that tomorrow - here I'll just note we've already lost Koski's & Grcevich's (tantamount) hope for forever flotilla, let alone raised up an escape-velocity rocket.

Solar power up here is useful, but insufficient to carry an aeroplane in daylight. Additional energy to do runs from vessel-to-vessel, or just to entertain tourists, will require batteries at the very least.

UPDATE 8/12/2020: Solar from L1?

2000 tonnes, airbourne, energy willing

We are above Venus’ clouds, 70 km altitude. Let’s take a ride on an aerofoil. I'm hoping the aerofoil can keep us stationary against the wind. Right now I'm exploring the ideal scenario with arbitrarily-energetic fans.

The acceleration down to Venus’ surface is, here, about 8.666 ms^-2. The wind here is long visible to Earthlings: 100 ms^-1. For air “fluid” density (ρ) at 70 km up, I'm working with Yeon Joo Lee's fig 4.12f, 90 gm^-3.

For reference : NASA. Density of air at Earth sealevel and room temp: 1200 gm^-3 : assuming 1013 millibars or 760 mmHg. Zubrin put 16 gm^-3 on Mars; Yeon Joo Lee puts 65000 gm^-3 on Venus' surface. M. Ballon Solaire is telling me Earth has 1.225 kgm^-3; first with a decimal and next with a comma. I side with NASA. All moot here since we're over Venus.

We're going against steady wind at 100 ms^-1, and tilting our wings up.

FL, Lift, = cL 1/2 ρ v2 A
FD, Drag, = cD 1/2 ρ v2 A

Some of our constants are baked in, which reduces 1/2 ρ v² to a nice 0.5 * 0.09 * (100 * 100) = 450. I don’t pretend to know coefficients; but a drag coëfficient of 0.015 and lift co-efficient at 0.5 seem fair, from what I see elsewhere on the cylinder-bourne-by-wing models.

Here we re-introduce my cylindrical fuselage 20 m long and 2 m radius. For wing area, I was careful with my fuselage: it’s not only 250 m³ volume but 250 m² area. But it’s not aerodynamic so I must add to this area: say, two 12.5 m² triangles, doublesided, 2 m wide at the innerside and 12.5 m long. 300 m² area total.

Our first priority is drag, because that determines the turbine we need - which we’ll be carrying too. Our drag force is 450 * 0.015 * 300 = 2025 N.

How much weight can we carry? 450 * c_L * A = 450 * 0.5 * 300. That is 67.5 kN. At 70 km altitude, this wing can bear mass about 7800 kg mass.

D’accord - voici: la turbine “GE90”. This turbine weighs 8300 kg and can do 512 kN thrust.

Note: our drag had inflicted barely two kN. We needn’t need tweak the design much to carry that turbine, the wing, and the fuselage. Heck, a much cheaper turbine alone doing 5 kN would get us there.

Over Venus, the 512 kN turbine can allow to our wing area, up to 75,851 m²; dragging aloft 17066475 N. Over Venus that is almost 2000 metric tonnes. For reference a Boeing 737 maxes out at 80 tonnes. Go ahead and deduct some of those 2000 tonnes for the turbine and the chassis. Deduct a spare turbine too. Sabotage the coefficients (within reason). We’re still looking pretty.

We have learnt elsewhere that carrying hot hydrogen in a hopefully-unreactive fuselage does offer some lift. Maybe 50 kg for 250 m² / m³. But it doesn't offer much, compared to good ol’ aerodynamics. Which gets us 7800 kg for the same. And the latter lets us stay in the sunlight.

Now: GE90 as a turbine is, more exactly, a turbo-fan. The turbo part requires, still, a fuel-tank, whose weight I am not (here) considering. Other essays here handle my power needs, and how I propel the thing. The turbofan is not a permanent flier! It is, however, a very powerful flier; and Venus' atmo has all the elements required to refuel it between jumps.

CONFIRMATION 2/10/2020: I ran the drag coëf by an aeronaut on my 'phone. He was pretty busy, and didn't wholly understand what I was trying to do, but he gave the example of a greasy 737 at "Mach 0.8": 0.019 c_D. Faster than that, the coëf rises - yay nonlinear equations. But ... as you see here: I am looking at Mach 0.3 and as you will see on my other pages, I am prepared to bargain down to Mach 0.15. That is in glider / kite territory, by contrast with a 737. 0.015 is to be considered validated for this project's purpose.

TEST FLIGHT 8/6/2020: the battery Cessna, May 2020. No fueltank!

The Hindenberg comes to Venus

Given last week's Return to Venus talk, here is a digression to discuss how a blimp floats above Venus' clouds (70 km). To spoil the argument - it can, and it will probably not explode; but you don't care.

We're following Zubrin's line of thought, with help from ballonsolaire.

Molecular weight of Venus is 43.45 g/mol; a little less than pure CO₂ (or Zubrin's Mars) but Venus does dilute the mix with some nitrogen. To displace 43.45 kg of Venus would take 2.016 kg of Earth-origin hydrogen gas (Venus hydrogen is heavier, but I hope to drain off some deuterium).

For air “fluid” density (ρ) at 70 km up, we have the Yeon Joo Lee dissertation figure 4.12f, below the Cold Collar. This graph is telling ρ slightly less than 100 gm^-3 but certainly more than Mars' 16. Let's say 90 gm^-3.

It happens that hydrogen AND water (18 g/mol) will cost money over Venus. Carbon monoxide is relatively cheap. That's 28 g/mol. So to displace 43.45 kg of Venus, we need 28 kg of CO. To displace 90 g of Venus, which at 70 km altitude is one cubic meter, takes 58 g of CO. This yields 32 gm^-3 of lift; or 0.32 Newtons / m³. By Newton himself, we plug in Venus' g force: at 70 km up, 8.87 * Math.Pow( 6052 / (6052+70) , 2 ) = about 8.666 ms^-2. Unheated CO may lift a mass of 37 g per m³ of balloon at this altitude over Venus. Hydrogen could lift 100 gm^-3.

But we’re helping hoist some turbines, like the GE90, at 8000 kg each. So damn the expense - full Hindenberg ahead!

Also we will be heating this balloon. With help from GE90, we fly underneath noon (or 11 AM) summer daylight every day. Gold leaf might be as pricey as water here, but (unlike how things work on Zubrin’s Mars) is hardly going to be scraped off in broad daylight soaring 70 km over Xibalba.

For sake of comparison I’ll be lifting a mainly cylindrical fuselage 20 m long and 2 m radius, pointed against the wind. That is 250 m³ volume. So: 25 kg lift if hydrogen. Heated to half-pressure: 50 kg.

Over the equator we get some help from the Hadley effect: hot air rises. This is most helpful where densest, at the lower altitudes. Mind you, there the balloon loses most of the sunlight, which is supposed to keep it hotter (and lighter) than the ambience.

CONCLUSION 7/27: A balloon is of negligible help to keep a craft aloft in sunlight over the equator. Over the poles, that's different.

The Debatable Land

HBDChick has pointed us to the map of where Britons actually live. She's concerned with England, and its Central Province - old Mercia. I'm interested in where the people DON'T live, which includes the Plaid Cymru land... but also the whole of northwest England, and that gap beyond Hadrian's Wall up to the Antonine Wall.

This region, The North if you're a Game of Thrones fan, voted Tory mainly. Tyneside didn't, but Cumbria did - and so did that part of "Scotland" north of that. Scotland's Aberdeen corner also bucked the local trend, which was SNP up there; and went Tory.

Here straddling Hadrian's Wall is the Debatable Land of the book by that title. Here were the Reavers. I have actually been to that line of Hadrian's Wall. Do note, this line is relatively populous! People up in Brampton like their hill-forts and pre-English history. Pity 'bout that weather.

If there be a serious Scots National movement, and it wasn't all just a boot to Corbyn's arse; the English should look seriously into recognising the Debatable Land as something not quite English and not quite Scottish. Call it New Rheged or something. Aberdeen should be recognised similarly as, I dunno, a Norse outpost or Pictish - also not Scots.

Tulsa

The Tulsa riot got back in the news lately with the pilot (and unauthorised) episode of The Watchmen. Fortunately - E;R was there to give a nuanced view, based on the facts as he had them.

I should disclose that I respect revisionists, as a rule. E;R, in his trolly way, has enlisted himself in our ranks. So let us discuss the conventional wisdom such as claims It was the worst spasm of racial violence in the history of the United States. And it has been largely ignored in history. Such are the words of Rick Moran. That means Moran is a revisionist too. He's just told us.

On hearing out Rick Moran, I have rated him dishonest. Oh, Moran is not "lying" - not exactly. But Moran is exaggerating for effect, at the very least.

First of all, if the Tulsa riot has been ignored, Moran has mooted no names of such historians in our age as are deliberately ignoring it. I can read Loewen just like Moran can. I've been hearing about Tulsa and about Colfax and about Rosewood all through the 1990s and beyond. The Left and the Black Israelists have an interest to keep these old sores open and bleeding. Moran is not the brave revisionist he claims to be.

Much has been made of Tulsa's white population having access to Air Support. I suppose the other side considers that unsporting; riots should be conducted on the ground. Even besides that this opinion is ludicrous; as E;R has pointed out, the Tulsa Air Force made little effect on the festivities. It's not as if 1920s-era crop dusters had smart-bombs; if they were bombing rioters it's even money they killed men on their own side, and buildings belonging to neutrals. I consider the best analogy to be whatever effect the Iraqi air-force had on ISIS. (Not taking sides on whether in 2011 Iraq's Shi'ite bigots were any better or worse than ISIS's Sunni bigots.)

If we are talking "worst", that is not a measurable claim. For body-count the riot in Wilmington, North Carolina 1898 deserves some space; as does Colfax. Certainly as far as long-term effect, these meant much more at their times than Tulsa meant in the 1920s.

And you'll note I've just discussed the "white" side so far. With Tulsa, Moran's sources have come from the black oral history. So it's fair that we hear out the white oral history.

flatland_onlooker

When we came to Oklahoma in 1971 there were still people alive who could tell their stories. I heard some of the tales [mainly that the black neighborhood was surrounded by armed whites, the neighborhood set on fire, and anyone who tried to escape was shot], but not from Tulsans. Investigations were initiated in 1996 under Governor Frank Keating, a Republican; Democrats held the state houses for 100 years, and the governorship for most of that.

If there were orders to deputies/patrolmen to open fire, then the government has liability - but good luck finding any historical record, signed orders, or witnesses.

Tex Taylor

I've lived in this town since 1966, one of the best kept secrets of good living in the U.S., and I've heard these stories for years, including my now deceased grandfather-in-law who actually witnessed the events while he was 24 years old. He worked in downtown Tulsa and was told to go home and get his gun.

Have you noticed each passing year, the story gets more and more egregious? It's only the last five years I've heard of these "rumors" of planes strafing the neighborhoods and the like. Now somebody wants to tell me that kind of information was just buried for 60 or 70 years?

I knew my GiL well, one of the most likable and honest good men I ever met. I find it hard to believe that planes strafing neighborhoods wouldn't have been remembered by Poppa - and he didn't pull any punches about what went down.

I think this was a race riot with both sides culpable, and then one side got their asses handed to them which quickly got out of control when people started dying on both sides. Each year, the tales grow a little more unbelievable, the demands a whole lot more expensive.

Now it's grown into little more than a shakedown of an entire city from a time in America that no longer exists. What it is beginning to do, predictably, is arouse suspicion and hatred on both sides once again.

It's led by a City Council with a grudge, a dying far left newspaper trying to stay relevant, and a pathetic, lily white city mayor who happens to be Republican with an incredibly lefty minded bent.

jsarver

i have also lived in Tulsa since 1966. There are all sorts of wild tales that have gone around for years, none of which have any evidence supporting them. There were multiple witnesses saying that a plane was somehow involved but their stories do not agree. I'm not sure how that morphed into strafing of fleeing women and children.

There was a race riot that required the National Guard to suppress. That is bad enough. Now it has been declared a "race massacre". There is no new evidence. Next thing you know it will be a genocide and the U.N. will get involved.

Tulsa had the lopsided bodycount it had because... one side won, and the other didn't. That isn't "massacre". That is defeat. Even if 200 men rioted and were killed in the process of this crime, then that's 200 men we're few of us going to miss - white or black or chartreuse. And if there are MASS GRAVES - again, we're talking about criminals. (The article is claiming 25' x 30' and maybe twenty men in this MASS GRAVE, by the way. And also: men. Not the women and children expected from an Ethnic Cleansing.)

This story is of interest to historians, yes. But it offers nothing of interest to modern politics or the Reparations Debate. Unless you're a self-aggrandising sneak with no loyalty to your own purported side - and (more unforgivably) with no interest in history. Unless you're Rick Moran. Unless you're Stephen Green.

Unless you're PJMedia. Good luck with getting any honest readers to spring past that paywall. But hey. Maybe Pierre Omidyar has some cash lying around.

RESTORED 12/18 6:30 PM MST - first version was rambly, and ranty, and not up to the Bagastan standard. Also I found some ahâdith I could use. But I was too tired at that point, so I stored it away. This version is, I think, better arranged and sourced.

Around Ontario Ice

From Saraceni last week: 10500 BC site found at Avon in Connecticut.

This is during Younger Dryas, 10800-9700 BC. That was a sharp return to the Ice Age. So from an Atlantic shore perspective: Avon is about as far north as humans could live in those times and with their technology.

We are divulged some facts about Avon’s level of technology. The tools are stone of course. The spearheads are consistent with atlatl-driven spears. That implies that this tech is post-Clovis – the American Solutrean revolution. Back west, in the Great Plains, among the “ANC-A” gene group, Clovis was fully underway by 10900 BC. Thus is constrained a latest date for when Clovis tech got to the American Atlantic past the Hudson.

It doesn’t tell us anything relevant to the Solutrean Hypothesis. Also we don’t have the DNA.

For those (like me) who don’t accept this hypothesis: ANC-B DNA is projected to have split off by 12600 BC; which ANC-B becomes predominant in Ontario 2800 BC on, up to the 1500s AD. During Younger-Dryas, ice and harsh tundra (featuring that eponymous Dryas octopetala) coated Ontario proper; and I do believe the megafauna had been hunted out by then. There would be little cross-continental contact between Avon and Clovis as of 10500 BC.

So for Younger-Dryas Avon I expect ANC-B, or some now-dead para-B population, in any human remains.

Luke > Matthew

From GNXP, here is Anglican Curmudgeon on the Virgin Birth. Specifically: Luke's, and Justin's; against Matthew's.

The Curmudgeon brings the Shroud of Turin and the Sudarium. (Also brought up: Veronica's napkin. I also wonder about that Mandylion of Edessa.) The stains on both are blood, from a human. That blood was AB type and didn't have male DNA markers. The conclusion is that Jesus had no Y chromosome. He was an XX male. (That at least would bolster the feminised Jesus portraits rife throughout popular Catholicism, for instance pictured here.)

If these two are from the same ... person, then that person was genetically not Joseph's child. Luke was right to trace the Davidic succession through Mary; Matthew, who did it through Joseph, was wrong.

These samples further knock out the Bar Pantera hypothesis.

If, that is, all the Tradition and the blood-sampling may be independently verified.

Summary of Venus clouds

Over Venus the clouds are densest at 48.5 km up and extend up to 70 km. Between the 50° latitudes, and I’m pretty sure in the 50s° bands themselves, our cities float in the middle layer, from 50-56 km. It is Figure 1.3, here (Yeon Joo Lee's thesis pdf).

If I am reading this right, the middle layer is best rated as “foggy” (and shady). Thicker clouds float below and above, but nobody at 55 km is going to see them. Wind speed: 55 ms^-1, so 125 mph. Mostly zonal although slight (< 10 m/s) cloudtop meridional direction poleward.

This layer gets cooler north / south of the 50° N / S latitudes. 60° is where the circumference is cosine-60° half that of the equator, so here a 125 mph wind should return to its start in 345000 seconds. 96 hours; four Earth days. Just like what Is Known about the cloudtops at the equator.

60-70s° are the polar collars, famously colder at high altitude but, I think, cloudier. Winds are more erratic, especially north/south. Within the 70s° polar circle, is the respective polar vortex. Its eye is not at the pole itself, but offset –and shifting.

From the viewpoint of continent Ishtar it is difficult to recommend a floating midlayer city north of 60°. Fortunately the southernmost part of Ishtar extends south of that; so at the tradeoff of a bit more heat and pressure, the farms can get some starter surface camps.

The easiest mining camp this side of Proxima

A couple days ago, Sue Smrekar spoke about Venus. She didn't like the idea of landing on the surface - landing pretty much anything. As she noted, our first priority in getting humans here is to get electronics here. Tin melts at 505° K, and lead (the usual Venerean benchmark) at 600°. Zinc at 693°.

So let's look for how we can work around this.

My first notion is that miners will stick to the highlands anyway, where it is likely to be cooler. Solid or liquid, many metals would be experienced as compounds here – but often as sulfur compounds, many of which full-on vapourise in the lowlands (did we mention that CO2 is a solvent here?). Those pyrites recondense up in the highlands, as frosts.

There is a highland-of-highlands on Ishtar Terra: the Maxwell Montes. This range sits at 65° latitude, ecliptic north – underneath the polar collar. We'd call it "Arctic" if Venus had Earth's axial tilt and/or white bears. The Montes’ summits making up its ecliptic east range 10-11 km up.

The conditions on Maxwell are not measured directly. A Seiff et al., “Measurements of thermal structure”, JGR 85 (1980 - pdf) discussed the four Pioneer probes; their temperature-sensors conked out over 12.5 km, at 630 K: p. 7905. Seiff’s crew for 10-11 km had to estimate: 650 K at p. 7914. Given that the lowest Venerean “atmosphere” up to 3 km is a supercritical fluid, it efficiently conducts heat. So the temperature at 3 km is pretty much the same all over this world, whatever is happening up in the clouds. Seiff’s estimates between 3 km and 12.5 km seem reasonable.

Zinc is solid at Maxwell elevation. So, the Maxwell range has that going for it. Which is nice.

Given Venus' g-force and density, both less than Earth's; and if Venus weren't so hot and bothered: 5 km below Ishtar's surface would be feasible. But, you know... Venus.

Now, I have no way of knowing if Maxwell itself has ores worth the mining. [UPDATE 9/25: I'd look for something like Zimbabwe's Dyke.] Farms will want phosphates and those are more likely around volcanoes - like Colette and Sacajawea, some distance west of Maxwell on the Lakshmi plateau. The orbitals might prefer hard metals and those will be found in (probable) crater Cleopatra (to the east) and certainly in Vlata in the Sacajawea region. It may be that prospectors will prefer the Lakshmi volcanoes. Maxwell is simply closest to the sky. And it might be catching phosphate frosts from across the western plain.

Once the minerals are found and shipped up, more investors will fund an expansion of this operation.

Kaminalhuyu

It was inevitable that the Maya would want a stake over Venus; on Earth they all already venerate this planet. As Mesoamericans, the Maya haven't named this one so much as dignified it, with descriptive labels. The K’iche associate the planet with the male quetzal Ama Q’uq’, but this may reflect the Central Mexican quetzalcoatl. Per Thompson 1960 (pdf: yeah I know) most Maya have called it Big Star.

Their bubble will aim for a 260 day season. As highlanders they descend from a common Mam / K’iche population from 100 BC. Of the highland body of tradition, the K’iche “Popol Vuh” has the most prestige. They will translate this book to their common tongue (somewhat anachronistically if, as I suspect, this book itself was a reaction to the Cholti).

This will cut the clans… at cost of making a superclan. Some of the local colour might be retained in the ball courts.

The K’iche refer to this planet's surface as “Xibalba” of course.

The farming bubbles over Venus

We've done with the train-scheduling (and what fun!). So let us look at what's feeding everyone here. That's right: we're finally discussing those floating habitats, mooted by Chernenko among many, many others.

The colony baseline is upper troposphere. Toward 50km runs slightly over Earth sealevel pressure (Lima: 760mmHg) but at a too-hot 75 C. At 55km, pressure is at 53% but 27 C. Somewhere between, we have 60% (that is Lhasa at 3.65 km up, and 460 mmHg; above Cuzco is 3.4 km at 480).

It gets positively high-Sumatra in in the more-temperate 50s° latitudes. This if north, also, skirts the southern edge of mineral-rich Ishtar. It does come at the cost of distance from the orbital plane: affecting access both to the spaceport and direct sunlight. For outside contact they can hit the polar ring.

For im/emigration they'll rely on the flying equatorial spaceport. I should note that if we have an orbital ring here, the equator can't farm.

One issue up there is that the cloudtop meridional wind pushes poleward - northward, over Ishtar. Less than 10 m/s though, and it does get weaker the further north. To the extent that's even a worry, just throw up a sail.

The basic shape of a farming-bubble is the torus. I think the first such will be inhabited directly.

Imports: Water, salt, phosphorous, calcium, metals. Exports: Earther lodging, wood, food, coffee, honey, oxygen, sulphur, halogens, 15%-heavy water. (And coca.)

SPLIT 1/19/2020 industrial farms from this basis.

The southeast spread of Iberian?

There's a recent article about deep structure in Iranian-speaking populations, far deeper than the age of the Iranian protolanguage itself. Even of Indo-Iranian.

I was most interested in the Daylam and Tabari regions, up along the Caspian shore toward historical Atropatene / Adarbadagan. To that, here's Nasidze's 2006 article on their languages and peoples. The claim: genetically the men were "South Caucasian"; the women, Pahlavis. The women won this one, and now the people speak Gilak. (Well, okay; they now speak Farsi with a Gilak accent - but Gilak used to be a language, in living memory.)

Still: Old Gilak retains some "South Caucasian" structure. So does Old Tabari.

One point I'll point out: this doesn't always happen. Sometimes the men win. That happens when the male language has extreme relative prestige, like the Bell Beaker (ItaloCelt) language or like Islamic-era Arabic or like Spanish in Puerto Rico. And sometimes the men and the women end up splitting the difference: there's a male language and a female language. This - I am told - happened in Greek-occupied Milawanda. Or there is a male register and a female register like in Sumerian. Maybe even the male and female genders in Semitic started out this way, I don't know.

But it does often happen that a force of male invaders give up and take the language of their conquered peoples. The Huns spoke German and the Avars spoke Slavic. R1b males in Basque Country speak Euskara. The "Urnfield" crew were certainly Gauls up north; but once in Etruria, they spoke like Etruscans spoke. And let's not even get started on China.

I am interested in knowing WHICH "South Caucasian" language the Gilak men first spoke. The claim is that they are speaking Kartveli. Not Hurri, which I would have expected this far south.

The last breakdown of this Caucasian language family I can find (right now) is that of Georgi Klimov 1998 - and I'm getting this from Wiki, at that. Klimov has Svan, on the Caucasian fringe, breaking off deep in the early Bronze Age. Then in the Iron Age, around when the Urartu state was running, there's the next split: between Iberian (now, "Georgian") and the coastal Lazican languages. Did Urartu conquer the Black Sea coast and leave alone the Kura watershed? How far down river did the Iberians dare?

South of the Kura when we next see the Araxes plain, in Late Antiquity, it's full of Armenians getting thoroughly Parthicised. "South Caucasian" isn't heard anywhere there.

Maybe the Gilaks and Tabaris stem from Iberian exiles and/or adventurers who took ship and settled the Tabaristan, beyond easy reach of the Parthian Empire.

UPDATE 10 PM MST - This Nasidze et al. 2006 article depends on Donald Stilo's work on contemporary north Iranian dialects. In 2005, that is "Iranian as buffer zone between the universal typologies of Turkic and Semitic", which I've read on Google Books. Google let me read the whole chapter, so, I am grateful for that. And I can report : this article alone cannot bear the weight which Nasidze's crew place on it. The earlier one is "The Tati language group in the sociolinguistic context of Northwestern Iran and Transcaucasia" (1981). Thirty eight years ago.

Yeah, I'm going to stick that ? mark on the end of this post's title.

Upload #183: dust-off

I was introduced to the Mashhad Codex at IQSA (so the trip was not a total waste of my time). It taught more to me about the Masudite codices, so I added that to "Central Suras"; also, I heard about other names for sura 66, so "The Prophet's Excuse" has that much.

Also: I took some time on sura 77. I think this short piece uses three-and-a-bit other suwar. So: new project! to justify this otherwise-minor set of change - "May the Rocks Become Dust". I think these could be Muhammadan. That era, anyway; they precede sura 69.

All this entailed fixes to "Defending the Days of Allâh", "Blasting the Sultan", and "Fire from the Mountain".

Madrassa.

The Right Stuff

Some of these Moon Denialists might be simple self-promoters and trolls. But as I read the articles posted on Vox Populi and on Unz; it might just be that the Moon Landings are an embarrassment.

The Landings embarrass a central thesis. Their thesis is that the European and American governmental (multipartisan) and cultural consensus over the 1960s, arguably from the 1940s and perhaps even from the 1860s has turned The West, sour.

And for some who/whoms, this Neo Liberal Consensus has done just that. But, also, it landed men on the Moon.

History is the story of man, and men are messy. It can happen that men do evil: we sin, and we make mistakes, and - most inexcusably - we lie. We do these bad things quite often. But sometimes we do great things. Sometimes, in the same week: we do some bad stuff at home, and The Right Stuff in the heavens.

Let us not lie. Let us not be Moon Denialists.

Venerean summary

Over the last five weeks I have posted enough content on this topic, that I should pause and index it all.

I didn't include where I did a mad-lib, or got to calculations which I had to abandon. I'm also sparing you some maths. Well, okay... I saved such posts for this para.

For those here December 2019 (especially), I have errata.

• Case for Venus [orbit]
• Life in space
• On building the stations
• The main embassy
• Life on the edge
• An idea on catching cargo
• Cyclers generally
• Plants at night
• Librations
• Libration-Halo generally
• Pre-Rama
• Rama
• Rama regs
• Between Earth and Venus
• Venus' Year
• En passant
• How to Hohmann
• Where to Hohmann
• On the way to St. (L-5)Ives
• 2L4: from Venus to STL1
• 3-0-2-9: from Venus to Earth!
• Emergency!
• Earth tourists
• School
• Twins
• You have to go back
• How Venus handles Earthers
• The orbit
• Bottlenecks
• The orbiting bandit
• Kepler... and Donald J Trump
• Venus' stations
• Self-sufficiency
• Canali
• Perched in shadow or flame
• Umbral ice depot
• SVL2: The icebox
• L1 + sunfacing polar orbit: relays and power stations
• Conical L2
• Building L2
• Around L2
• Spinning cable
• The stable librations
• L5
• L4
• On building L4
• Hilda
• Hilda
• That Cycler from Mercury halfway to L4
• The rescue station
• Over Venus
• Polar station
• How to leave
• Ramjet house
• Orbital ring
• The Venerean
• The harpoon
• The pilots
• Staying sane
• Water
• Deuterium
• Down in it
• The port
• The flying harbour
• Venus spaceports
• Powering them up
• The backup generator
• The telescopes
• The warehouse
• The 50s
• Farming
• The shape of a Neolithic farm
• The new Maya
• A fish-bearing reservoir
• Industrial farms
• Spa
• Uranium City
• The planet
• Ishtar's mines
• Port Maxwell
• Fountains
• Building the Maxwell mine
• Chill out
• The gem of great price
• The underdark
• Ishtar united

I'll add to this list as I keep trainspotting.

"Just askin' questions"

It is rare they are Just Sayin'. Theodore Beale: can only come as a surprise to those who still believe that ... NASA landed men on the barren Moon.

But but but I thought Vox Day was Just Askin' Questions. I thought he just had some slight cavils about the 1969 landing in particular. Why, even one year ago Beale professed mere uneasiness at "unshakeable faith": Now, I have not said that the Moon landings were a hoax.

Even now, Beale - in a manner befitting a Clinton - won't argue the Landing itself. Even now he simply promotes that people who reject the "Capricorn One" hypothesis are "Moonies" and cultists. But few were fooled, any more than they were fooled by Clinton. We all knew where Beale was headed. We all knew that Beale wants to say the Moon Landings were hoaxes.

It amazes me that I have to point this out; as pro-revisionist myself, in my case concerning "the Holocaust" and against interest. It is certainly often that a bigger picture is missing. The reason I cannot go as far as Beale goes in the case of the Moon Landings is the bare fact Beale is wrong here.

And I am certain at this point that Beale knows that he is in the wrong. Which is why he won't argue the point. He'd rather tear down the people who make that point. That way, as any rhetorician knows, and Beale is a master of Aristotelian rhetoric, is the easy way. This latest post doesn't even do that much work; it just launches a side-swipe, in a post about something (ostensibly) different.

There are many demons out to harm the Right and the Good. Of these demons, it is their greatest joy to cloak themselves in the garb of the Right and the Good. Some are David French types: ideological Leftists, haters of the American posterity. But others - well. We'll get to that.

FAKE AND GAY 3/10/22 Vox Day.

From Mercury's orbit to Venus'

Last night I mused on the 3:2 Venus-Hilda Cycler's orbit, how to protect its natural stability from a Mercury crash. And, if you read that post, and did any math on it ... you'd have found out that I was wrong. (I've fixed that post since.)

But also at that time I wondered: what if we used this cycler for shuttle from Mercury's orbit, via its own orbit, finally nearer to Venus' orbit. That much, I can salvage. Even if the cycler only runs to 0.578 AU.

Forewarning: Hilda doesn't go to Venus itself. She just goes to points with ballistic access to Venus. From perihelion, her aphelion disembarks toward L4 - the shipyard. "Toward" because this variant only gets within 0.115 AU of L4 proper.

For our purposes we define "Mercury" as its L1 / L2 gravity-well, which Hop David's xls defined as a sun-biased 220000 km radius ellipsoid. At 1.1° upward of Venus, 2.5° apart, a Hilda cycler and Mercury can at closest meet 0.02 AU apart. That’s thrice Venus’ own L1 gravity-well. Or: since an AU is 149,600,000 km, 0.02 AU is 7.8 times the 384,400km Earth-moon distance; for that, Apollo 11 took three days, 16-19 June, into Lunar orbit.

What Mercury’s emigrants want is to match Hilda’s speed and angle at its perihelion. I should point out that Mercurians rarely meet Hilda’s perihelion when Hilda is closest to Mercury. Some Hilda cycles will take more of Mercurians’ time. I imagine anytime from one to ten weeks. The good-ish news is that Mercury mostly exports heavy metals, which should shield any outgoing humans.

From perihelion (here, on the Venus upside of Mercury’s well) to aphelion (L4), Hilda will coast for 1/3 a Venus year, a cool (well, warm) additional 75 days.

For shuttles on that cycler that is a straight run from 0.578 AU over. That is 0.115 AU against Solar gravity; and an additional push up-ways for that 1.1° angle.

0.12 AU mightn't seem like That Much here on Earth but, we're almost twice as far from the Sun. Also 0.578 AU will have inverse-square less direct Solar radiation than what Mercury usually gets at 0.387. On the other hand, Hilda did get us to 0.578 AU. Maybe the L5 college students will figure this one out. WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE 1/2020: A pre-Rama seems like the ticket.

Assuming they do : this further implies that the first Mercury-Hilda cycler's run will swing by Venus when that planet is (also) perihelical. One such perihelion occurred 26 December, 2018.9863104. So after October 2224 Carnivale: 0.0776404 year into 2225, 28 January. It gets to L4, 13 April.

The Venerean Hilda-cycler

From Space Stackexchange today (UPDATE 11/23/21 because I hadn't read Hop), I've learnt about Hilda orbits. These are at a 3:2 resonance internal to the main orbiting body, Jupiter in the eponymous asteroid's case. Think of Hildae as looking-glass Plutini, there 2:3 mostly external to Neptune. And unlike Kirkwood resonances either 3:2 is stable!

Asteroid 153 Hilda runs three orbits every two Jovian years. Hilda's ellipse is entirely internal to Jupiter's orbit: her semimajor axis is 4 AU to Jovian 5.2 AU. But she's eccentric; she gets closer to other points, of interest to Jovian-area explorers. Specifically, the Librations, L3-5; in sequence, L5-3. When closest to Jupiter itself, 153 Hilda is at perihelion - so sunside of L1, 3.4 AU. When skirting th'other Librations: 4.5 AU. The Hildaeans as a group trend 3.7-4.2 AU for semimajors.

We can picture a Hilda's first orbit, rolling past trailing-point L5. She then blasts past her planet; some distance internal to that orbit, at her fastest. That pulls her to leading-point L4 for the next orbit. Her third orbit takes in anticthonian L3, over at anti-Jove. Then repeat. At each three of these Librations, she meets the plateau Sun-ward of it, and coming in quick. But as she skirts the plateau, she does so relatively more slowly.

The Hilda trajectory, then, is a fine way for L5 to shuttle widgets to L4, in 2/3 a planetary year, without a stop at the planet itself. L4 can supply L5 in 4/3 such a year. If L3 hosts an anticthon, L4 can use Hilda to supply this one too en route. The initial boost is comparable to a ballistic / parabolic push; to catch up to this trajectory, and to get off of it. That's not so great in itself; but for the Jovian Librations, we can finagle a permanent Cycler. Heck, some miner could just hollow out 153 Hilda herself. Tho' if she were greedy for more materiel, she'd want to kick her base more eccentric, closer to the Trojans and the Greeks.

Mind, we were talking about Jupiter. Not all the planets are this amenable.

If Earth had a perfect Hilda: at a period of 2/3, by Kepler P²=4/9, so cuberooting that: semimajor 0.763 AU. Let's propose a longer-period Hilda-like, just by getting ugly and dividing 153 Hilda's vital statistics by 5.2: perihelion 0.65, aphelion 0.865. Even this will overlap Venus' semimajor 0.723 AU. Plus, its 3:2 is irresonant with the Venus:Earth cycle 13:8. Ships shuttling around Earth's Librations can still, Venus synodals permitting, use a Hilda trajectory; but they can forget about any regular and useful Hilda Cycler. But keep hold of those numbers! They are useful for the maths we're about to do.

If Venus had a Hilda, its 0.41 period (150 days) implies semimajor 0.552 AU. By contrast the Vulcan-est asteroid known as of this year is 2019 AQ3 at 165 days, at 0.5888 AU. [2021 PH₂₇: Here's another but it is a resonant, and tilts too high at aphelion.] I don't actually dare alter a Hilda semimajor, this close to the Sun. But I would dare increase its eccentricity, to get as close to the Librations as I can.

INTERJECTION 9/6/20 now 1/20/21: Some Venus' Hilda ideas.

If Hilda aphelion is closest to Venus' perihelion at 0.718 AU; Hilda perihelion will be 0.385 AU. For this one's meddling inner planets, we worry about Mercury. The aphelion of that one's eccentric orbit is 0.466 AU. Not only that but Mercury is badly irresonant with Venus; in fact, Einstein had a few comments about Mercury's regularity besides that. If I make Mercury's aphelion and Hilda's perihelion coincide, with a 0.522 semimajor, Hilda will come out the other end at 0.578 AU. Not, I think, close enough to the Librations to make do.

The Hilda for Venus, I rate as infeasible as a Venerean Cycler. If we want to avoid Mercury. If we can't push Mercury out to be Venus' main Hilda...

If we're fine with approaching Mercury - that is a problem for tomorrow.

SCREW IT? 12/10/19 - Revised some maths and, turns out, we're not getting this cycler... as such.

A late-antique fleabite, at most

Last week Lee Mordechai and others published “The Justinianic Plague: An inconsequential pandemic?” [h/t Saraceni]. Here they question Procopius and other Byzantine-era historians who claimed that Lady Yersinia killed six trillion Mediterraneans.

(Goak Here. But only by a factor of six…)

Since solar flares, droughts, and earthquakes hit the archaeological record; and since eclipses are predictable – when some liar misdates one of these, we can catch him in the act. Certainly the climate crisis of AD 536, which David Keys related to the later plague, is (well) documented. The failure of rubbish pickup in Elusa likely reflects that, and maybe Saracen attacks. Just not “disease”, at least not any one specific disease.

With plague, we can tell when a raconteur is honest: habeamus corpora, if you will. I understand we habemus many stiffs from the last days of Neolithic Cucuteni Culture, for instance. In an absence of corpses, we cannot test the raconteur so easily.

But we can bring in other proxies. One nice one, which Decker's The Byzantine Dark Age used, is the ratio of farm pollen against invasive weeds – mostly pine. Against Justinian’s Flea, Mordechai et al. argue that we’re not seeing the mass depopulations in the countryside which various studies have claimed of Justinian's reign, lately Kyle Harper’s Fate of Rome. The absence is so glaring as to restore the burden of proof back upon Procopius.

Chroniclers, where ideological, and post-Eusebius many chroniclers were, were ever-tempted to arrange (at least) events to critique some contemporary regime. Andrew Palmer a generation ago noticed this from the Maronite Chronicler concerning the Damascene earthquake of AD 659, which that chronicler misdated. More recently we may read vridar on Thucydides’ account of the 430ish BC plague in Athens, way back in 2014 noting Procopius as similarly compromised. (vridar on topic bolsters Mordechai’s case even where some historian does describe the symptoms, which most don’t.) Whenever you read a Greek - or a Hellenised Syrian - discussing a disaster, you must watch for Sophocles’ ghost standing behind him.

This goes to other comments that Kyle Harper overblew his case.

One complaint I got against Mordechai's crew: The fourteenth century mortalities would cause such a labour shortage, that these disasters even improved the fortunes of the survivors in the lower classes, raising them to the middle. If similar sudden mass mortality truly happened also in the sixth century, then we’d expect similar. Mordechai’s point that the Med economy was not adversely affected is, thereby, otiose. We should agree to exclude artisanal economic production, one direction or another; from evidence for the plague’s effect, one way or another. Land use being the great exception.

Where Mordechai's crew dismiss the drop in Med inscriptions AD 550s as random, perhaps they reflect Berber attacks on an inadequately defended Byzantine Africa; and taxation levied upon postRoman loyalists. Although I agree with Mordechai that this drop is not demonstrably relevant to plague.

As for the onset of the Dark Age: third look at Pirenne?