Wessexian Cornwall

The Matter Of Britain fascinated me as a child. It had some influence on my desire to return there for school. It may have got me into Late Antiquity generally - The Matter Of Arabia, we might call it. So when I heard of this Breton(?) MS about ninth-century Cornish saints I went looking. I didn't find it directly online, but I did find a followup: Charles Insley, Kings and Lords in Tenth Century Cornwall.

"Cornwall" is one of those funny exonyms like Gary Jennings used to mock, there Cuernavaca "Cowhorn" for Quaunahuac. I've seen it etymologised as "Kernow Wales" to distinguish from Cambrian Wales and, in olden times, from Rheged whence came William Wallace. If so I am unsure what to make of that Breton colony over the Channel, "Cornouaille", like so many Vlachs loose in southern Albania where nobody speaks German. For the part of Neustria, I find "Cornugallensis". So an alternate can be Kernow Gallia.

Insley marks Cornwall's entry into English and Norman attention at William of Malmesbury AD 1130s, an historian who was not British and had no love for the Britons. The context might be the rebellion and secession in southern Cambria in the late 1130s, against king Stephen. Malmesbury claimed that he owned some British books, however - perhaps in Latin. In this he reminds of contemporary Geoffrey of Monmouth who did, in fact, own Nennius. Insley warns us that, just as Geoffrey liked to make sh!t up, so might William.

Insley is interested that Cornwall, despite being clearly un-English, with its own (parish) local organisation and its own (Welshlike) language, didn't matter to the Anglosaxons. Contrast how the Danelaw sure mattered and for that matter so did the Cambria. Some dustup or other happened at Exeter. But mostly the peninsula was just where Wessex - the "West Saxons" - tapered off.

In one cultural difference, the Cornish like the Welsh owned slaves, not serfs like good Norman lords such as Malmesbury. The thralldom was rife through the Danelaw and also among the Anglosaxons. But under Henry Beauclerc son of the Conqueror slavery was a relic of barbarism, as American Republicans would call it. That difference wouldn't have existed in the AD 900s though.

Against Wessex I am sure the odd peasant-band rose up across Tamar. And Exeter happened. But there was never a self-styled "King of the Corno-Gauls" to lead them, as Cambria raised up from time to time. As to why Cornwall didn't pose the same headache to Wessex as the Danes or the Welsh did, I must speculate.

The clearest factor for Cornwall is that its people had outlets. The main ratline, as noted, ran across the channel to Britanny. Britons who didn't want to learn English just moved.

Also vaguely clattering around in historians' minds is that "Wessex" is greater Cornwall - more exactly, greater Devon. (The Dumnonia has a presence in Brittany as well.) Its dynasty was founded by Britons like Cedric. The earls changed languages but not, overall, people. So more-conservative Britons under the newly-minted Wessex were protected, if they didn't talk too much. Certainly more than those under the Northumbrian kingdom where, when the Danes had it, all the churls went into the same bucket anyway.

Under the Saxonised Britons, the alternate structure was the Church. Local parishes kept up Cornish culture, such as it was. Overall Wessex wasn't up for fighting a crusade so it just... didn't.

Fellow travelers

Humans walked with companions. Anders Bergström et al., "Origins and genetic legacy of prehistoric dogs"; and Diego Forni, Rachele Cagliani, Mario Clerici, Uberto Pozzoli, Manuela Sironi, "You Will Never Walk Alone: Codispersal of JC Polyomavirus with Human Populations" doi 10.1093/molbev/msz227. h/t Whyvert.

I hadn't even heard of the JC Polyomavirus. I learn today that just about everyone got it. To the degree it affects humans, it's toward our baseline now. For harm I'd start with pregnancies; preemies went down under THE LOCKDOWN which translates to miscarriages in pre-ICU centuries. Maybe it hit Neanders and Dennies worse. Maybe they got a variant of it too and we swamped out that variant like we swamped them out.

I'd suggest the two are related like toxoplasma for cats, except that nobody sees this virus among dogs.

On to dogs, here's Razib Khan. He's always been good for pulling the most interesting facts from a paper and as his style has improved, he's good at laying it out for plebs (like me). He notes that most dogs today descend from a Neolithic mix also found 3000 BC Sweden.

Bergström's paper doesn't see wolf injections in those populations. The dog is considered to descend from a wolf subspecies but that wolf is no longer in the wild. There's a fertile Swiss dog/wolf hybrid - one starred Alpha - but that was bred deliberately and modernly, like the Beefalo^TM. The real trend was a feral dog joining a wolf-pack. The Red Wolf in North America today is part dog, part coyote and part American "Grey" wolf.

Populations kept their own dogs and didn't crossbreed them... much. But sometimes humans crossbred with humans. The Indo-European movement before the Battle Axe Culture is a case in point. So was that Swedish dog from Neolithic Farmers, or from a new protoGermanic aristocracy? I suspect the answer to that is "yes". The IndoEuropeans mixed (forceably) with Farmers along the Elbe, then moved across the Baltic into Sweden and imposed their Celt-like language. The old Scandinavian language survived as substrate, with its plethora of alien Baltic terms, as did many local men (I2); but the local dogs did not survive.

The fifth giant

As the outer planets shuffled around, they constrained the formation of Mars and the asteroids, and locked Earth and Venus into our present resonance. They altered their own orbits as well.

Here is one model - Jupiter:Saturn ratio was 2:1. Corresponding to 24:12 of our present years consider present 29:12 - from Saturn's perspective Jupiter's period has shortened 24/29. By Kepler, Jupiter and Saturn have drifted mutually apart. And 24:12 = 2:1 is not stable; it squeezes the orbits into eccentricities. This 2:1 wasn't preferred in the "Nice Model" on account all these orbits are today evened out.

To solve that multibody problem, the modelers propose beyond Saturn a super duper Chiron. It got ejected. That angular momentum helped fix the survivors' orbits, mainly Saturn's I imagine, which orbits now [relatively] further from Jupiter than it did.

Wonder if that's Planet Nine. Much as we're not inclined to believe it anymore.

Maybe we were the kings

Second best Egyptian dynasty was XXV, the Nubians. 'Tweren't for them, Sennacherib would have ended Judaism and therefore: aborted Christianity. But all agree upon the first best: XVIII, nasty as it was. XVIII came from Ahmose the brother of Kamose the last XVII, in Thebes. That's some ways up river from the Med. There's been talk maybe they were Nubian too.

The DNA is out for King Tut and (therefore) his parents: R1b and K. That profile is... that of my maternal grandfather.

In the comments people are (very) quick to question if the R1b might be Chadic (V88). But the indications are more to M269, present in the Late Bronze Egyptian-occupied Canaan.

This spins a deep story of XVII perhaps being Hyksos who went native on Egypt's fringe. That wouldn't be the last time Egypt saw that happen, as witness those Nubians and, indeed, the Ptolemies.

Bridal investiture as monotheletism

A mother-superior writes to OnePeterFive. She explains why the investiture is a bridal ceremony. Subhâna'llâhi.

From this blog's perspective, celibacy is harmful - but better than some alternatives. It follows that a celibate calling can exist but, where so, should be a term of office. We don't want our priests to end their terms like this guy.

In addition to the convent being a temporary stint, the investiture is not a Sacrament. Jesus had likely heard of the Vestals in Rome and certainly knew of the men-only commune down river at Qumran. The Gospels don't record what he said of them.

Jesus did talk of the marriage commitment, and used that as metaphor for the next world. Sometimes polygamously. Does this Church accept plural-marriage? Of course not. That is why however useful is Scriptural extrapolation as a tool it is a dangerous one. A misreading of one or more gospels becomes a misunderstanding of the Gospel. We don't want our church to end up like this one.

The encratites of old used to teach that the marriage to Christ was the superior marriage, over marriage on Earth. It ended with Earthly marriage being rather neglected. I propose this as a marital Arianism. What I see in bridal investiture is an opposite that turns out the same way. Instead of subordination we have confusion. By my analogy instead of Arianism we have monotheletism. The nature of marriage is confused and, by it, mutually polluted.

As for Catherine of Siena: I'll just point out, as delicately as I can, that the people the Church has canonised as saints weren't always right in life. When this mystic called the Pope back to Rome from Avignon, she called the wrong Pope. That Pope couldn't keep the capitol in Rome and, when he died, as happened soon, it broke the Church. For another three decades two Popes reigned.

Trilemma

Via Vox Populi, Alexander Macris writes on Agrippa's Trilemma. Any sane man hoping to prove any proposition must choose:

• Circularity.
• Progress ad infinitum.
• Assumption.

(This isn't CS Lewis' liar / lunatic / Lord well-poison. Josh MacDowell (la) stole "trilemma" for that. Because the MacDowells are liars like Lewis was.)

To all that Nietszche found a fourth option: to deny cause and effect. The Bagestan has identified this as the null hypothesis toward The Warp. We don't let you off that easy here.

Interrogating the list itself, we all agree to laugh at the Turtles All The Way Down route and to exclude it from logic. We use progress instead forward, with induction and/or the infinitesimal, starting with the Assumption. For probing back in time, we adjust the question, if we can, and if we can't as with Goedel then hey - that can form a new Assumption. We're left with the dylemma.

Macris applies the truncated Trilemma to the Wars Of Religion. Circularity is made truthy by collecting assumptions, examined or otherwise. The circle invites and binds a community: everyone is invested in their fellow man, and the circle of assumptions isn't much questioned. How exactly does the Triune Nature of the Godhead put food on the table?

Different assumptions challenge the circle. Usually those foreign assumptions are just wrong, and break against the walls. Sometimes the new axiom is not so obviously wrong. Even here it might not challenge the circle's assumptions enough to matter, so is simply accepted, or at least permitted. But those other times...

Sometimes Agrippa is devolved into Plato (Assumptions, mathematics) and Aristotle (Circularity, observation of nature). This is simplistic on account Plato was indebted to natural-history in the form of astronomy, and Aristotle to mathematics in doing any sort of logic at all. But up to the Middle Ages philosophers did tend to choose one side or th'other. Since the Middle Ages, the scientific method which works for us is to accept mathematics as the language of possible nature, and to find the simplest and best equations to describe what we observe.

Our modern world, to which even our Pope now subscribes, has chosen false equations and deliberately excluded relevant data. To the extent the term "heresy" is objective, the Pope is damning himself and those he leads.

WITHOUT COMMENT 10/29: DSC goes into postMediaeval scientody, heavily reliant on probability and, I'd add, Bayes. Not really in scope for this post; I am a mathematician and sometime historian, not a scientist. My side took the W when William of Ockham crossed Ludwig's border.

Ediacaran fauna were fauna

The Ediacaran fossils of what we used to call the "Vendian" period - just before Cambrian - were called "fauna" first I heard of them, at seven or eight years of age early in the Reagan era. Those kids' books made sure to distinguish this Classical word from "flora", meaning flourishing flower or just plant. So Rachel Wood's thesis isn't new to me.

What's new-ish is the biochemical evidence for animal life: the cholesterol found as a waste-product. That's the miracle from my perspective; I had no idea this complexity of organic matter could survive 600 million years. Also 'tis nice to define which of these is fauna and which, flora. I'm told there used to be lively debates over these or even if they were like slime molds.

Wood is taking these constraints and suggesting that much Cambrian fauna descends from Ediacaran fauna. Which also strikes me as a starting assumption. There might not have been solid proof for "they evolved somehow and we don't know yet" but that's not where the burden lies. If they were all just zapped on our planet by Lord God YHWH, or dumped by Yakoob in his space ship from Kolob, that is extraordinary so the argument you have to make. Wood still doesn't have "proof", which as we all know doesn't exist outside mathematics; but she marshals some evidence. Thus constraining Yakoob.

Ikaria is her best evidence here as it looks like a segmented worm. That's the ancestor to all the arthopods and protochordates in the Cambrian. I still think Blink Of An Eye is the spark to Cambrian diversity and (probable) mass extinction of the unadapted lifeforms before it. But then, a worm doesn't need eyes to burrow.

Anyway, what Wood has done doesn't change my Reagan-era mind, but it does bolster and constrain it. Which - I am gathering - has been sorely needed, for others, who actually work in this field.

Arrogance

Philippe Lemoine @phl43, 9:30ish AM MST:

It’s amazing that, by randomly picking 15 people on Twitter among those I follow (excluding perhaps those I follow out of anthropological interest), I could put together a team that would be far more effective than basically any Western government and it wouldn’t even be close.

Fine then. Assemble your committee of HBD Chick, Bret Weinstein, Bo Winegard, and whatever other intellectual dorks you netted in your dark web. Make your commands. Who do you call to carry them out. Not just the usual chains-of-command; also the people in that informal network Who Know People.

This is why some of us talk about "midwits". Maybe they have some specialised knowledge. Overall they don't know how to direct authority - they've never been trained for it. Picking 15 of these guys is not all that much different from picking 15 randos from a voter-roll.

Philosopher-kings are good for philosophical debates. They are not (necessarily) good at kinging. In fact, given their starting assumptions that having an IQ and being (more likely) right on the issues justifies their right to a dictatorship, they are going to end up extremely bad at kinging.

Ethicists in space (again)

On topic of space ethics, recently brought to Matt Drudge's attention are some actually-ethical ethicists. Daniel Deudney has a book out, Dark Skies, arguing that space exploration is space militarisation. Fellow author Bleddyn map Owain has written exactly about space war, earlier this year, and with the information fresh in his mind reviews Deudney.

Deudney's thing is systemic political and social change in the way humans govern the world before we get cracking on some of our more ambitious projects. From an academic, usually that means formalising academia into our New World Order. As we've seen the academy prefers population control, mind and body, over population improvement. Because at heart they're not in the population.

None of this is to express entire disagreement with Deudney. I do however want to make clear where Deudney stands: for all his vaunted concern with life on Earth, and for all his noise against Totalitarian Space Empire; he holds a dim view of the actual people on it, and he is a totalitarian. Oh, I am sure his own motives are the purest. But ultimately whoever wants systemic change in a hurry, an orbital weapon station would be a lovely tool to have. So what's even his problem?

Deudney is also wrong in parts - laughably so. Take this, in Bowen's summary: The key negative outcome of the Space Age to date is that space technologies – mainly rockets, missiles and military space infrastructure – make nuclear war more likely. Dude, no; they haven't. We have endured one nuclear war, ever: the Japanese / American war. The Cold War after that ended without a nuclear exchange. So did the "World War IV" against distributed Sunnite terror. I've read For All Time, the alt-earth where nuclear proliferation meant nuclear wars-plural. It's fiction. Didn't happen. Because in real life, Mutual Assurance of Destruction pulled everyone (except maybe ISIS) from even considering The Button.

Deudney argues that life in uninhabitable worlds will follow the Captain Of The Ship model: they will all be despotic. Meh. In the space-stations, sure. Abraham and Franck saw the same on Mars. Abraham and Franck figured the Belters would be more shambolic, as long as life support was working. Honestly I'm not seeing even Mars entering into a single government as Abraham-Franck did. You'll note later events in that very series had Mars' great warrior government crumbling into corruption as life got easier there. As for the system-wide war... mayyybe. But if we survived the Cold War and got the Sunnis sane again, I'd bet for optimism.

Which is not to say the warning is unwelcome. I just think he hasn't thought it all through. If he doesn't want Totalitarian Space Empire (and a good part of him does want it, but Earth-based), the answer is for a balance of power. More space presence, not less.

FINITUDE 11/23: The moon is large, but not infinite, and not all of its surface is useful. Harvard's wargamers are proposing more exploration before landing colonists.

Managing global-warming

Much as I despise the conversative instinct to declare a demonstrably-manageable problem unmanageable ("hurrd moonidy!"), that instinct is understandable. They (we) came off of decades of being hectored by the upper-middle-class midwits, still ongoing, concerning the Global Warming ("science is real!"). A minority report is that Climate Change Is A Hoax and, frankly, in the middle 2000s it was being oversold.

Some self-described alarmists take it all more seriously than others do. James Hansen supports investment in nuclear. And then there's Michael Moore of all people. But overall, as Moore points out, this alarmism has proven an excuse for the likes of the Gore family to wet their beaks.

One of the better conservative summaries (at present) of dissident literature, now stands at The Federalist (h/t the HQ Morning Report). Lomborg and Shellenberger say that, yes, there is a lot more carbon in our atmosphere than normal; and yes, it is a warming agent. The two dispute that a few more Kelvins up in the Northern Hemisphere represent a catastrophe.

Against that, we have more information about the Permian. Anton Eisenhauer at Kiel closes the case for 252 Mya: a massive carbon burp. This follows that study on the Carboniferous legacy, that volcanoes sprouted next to the carbon and un-Inferred it all at once. Hana Jurikova makes it relevant:

Ancient volcanic eruptions of this kind are not directly comparable to anthropogenic carbon emissions, and in fact all modern fossil fuel reserves are far too insufficient to release as much CO2 over hundreds of years, let alone thousands of years as was released 252 million years ago. But it is astonishing that humanity’s CO2 emission rate is currently fourteen times higher than the annual emission rate at the time that marked the greatest biological catastrophe in Earth’s history.

We are not, then, headed for the Permian... much less for Venus, as some alarmists claimed. A lot of that old Permian carbon is now locked up where we humans won't get at it again, in calcium carbonates. At "worst" we're headed for the Palaeocene / Eocene boundary with the Danish Blue Parrot. Not even an early Cretaceous problem - carbon acidification of the oceans ain't releasing more carbon. Obviously mammals and birds survived that. And I think their projections are more clustering at the Eemian, or the Green Sahara era in our Holocene.

In addition, I doubt our ecosystem is nearly as vulnerable to a carbon injection as was the Permian ecosystem. Land plants way back when weren't deciduous. Certainly the C-4 efficiency (millet-type cereals i.e. grass, and bamboos) wasn't there yet.

To sum up, 300000 dead from a virus at its early stages is cause for alarm. Please wear a mask before you're not asked nicely; and give credit to politicians who propose frequent rapid testing. The prospect of some farmers having to change crops and for rich people to ski Banff near year instead of Aspen... is not such cause for alarm.

Qaṭṭāra as Chernobyl

The Qaṭṭāra is a basin like the Dead Sea's on the other, western side of the Nile. It's flatter: the basin floor is about 60 km below sealevel, 150 m at deepest. The sea there dried up, I think, even before the Predynastic era.

If you haven't gathered yet, 'tis a death valley. Nobody lives there because they can't. There have been thoughts to connect it with the Mediterranean. This new inland sea would offer that bit more habitable area to arid north Africa - not just to men but also to ducks and herons. The water evaporate therefrom might, further, add to the moisture available to Egypt's hilly east and especially Sinai. Presently Egypt claims the depression in its Matruh "governorate".

The surveyor John Ball in 1927 time hit on a grand idea: use it for hydroelectric power. Water comes in from the north; it spins turbines; the water dries up in the basin; more water comes in. They projected 35 years to fill the basin. Even then I expect the turbines could run forever, given the evaporation, perhaps at lower speed / intensity; but still sufficient to power the industries and homes around the new sea itself. The most (in)famous proposal was Bassler's in the late 1960s, requesting 213 bombs each 50 times Hiroshima's power. Abdel Nasser, despite being expansionist, didn't like that idea much and attacked Israel instead.

I heard about this massive public-works programme maybe ten years ago but didn't post about it. My reason: salt. Bassler did protect the Mediterranean water from further evaporation by running it down a tunnel. But eventually the water must end up in the Qaṭṭāra. The sea ends up one more hypersaline dead sea in the Near East, whose salt deposits must blow over to the lower Nile and kill it. I mean, just look at the toxic salt flats around Urmia in Iran today. If Ball had been allowed to do his work then by 1970, I think, Egyptians would have started cursing their fathers like they were cursing Nasser for losing that war.

Thankfully, thanks to Wiki: here's Maher Kelada's 2010 idea to desalinate part of the new Qaṭṭāra sea. The brine is sequestered in half the lake, and mined for the salts that brine is mined for. Salt doesn't collect to blast the Nile. I wish I'd known about it then or I'd have posted then.

As for why Kelada's project hasn't been acted on: at a guess, the project looks vulnerable to terrorists and to whatever geopolitical enemies lower Egypt may get. Most of all: to crooks, careerists, incompetents, and Soviets... to the degree I'm not confusing the four (like Nasser sure did). If the osmosis project is damaged or poisoned, someone gotta clean it up. Or else the salty sandstorm comes to Egypt.

Lunar water hype

From HBDChick, they found water on the moon. And yes: water on the moon, not in the craters; we already knew about the craters as, to be fair, the article notes.

I call what Layal Liverpool has printed as an "article" rather than a regurgitated press-release like so much out there, on account she asked around if this water was even practical to get at.

Answer: if we're on a worst-case scenario then no. It was hard even to tell these hydrogen / oxygen ions from hydroxyl. Thousands of kilos of regolith have trapped maybe a liter of the wet stuff. It might even be more efficient to melt the rock in a magnetic field (or whatever process) and trap the hydrogen.

On a better-case scenario, the water may be in clumps. Some stretches will be dry; but there will be buried blocks of ice in all that dust. I prefer this scenario. Just in case, to colonists I'd recommend the craters anyway, to keep out the radiation.

About those fission rockets

Here is a uranium fission engine, heir to NERVA. We're promised that this fuel can operate at high temperatures [2430 °C] and take us to Mars in "three months" so 90ish days. "Us" as in: a crew. This is a "high mass" solution, in the tonnes. Also I think we have to be in orbit first; this is not an Orion to blast directly from Florida, or, as the case may be, Baffin Island.

Hohmann to Venus, as I keep saying, takes 146 days and our synodic period suuucks. Given that heat becomes a problem along the way, this fuel looks awesome for cutting that trip down and/or for extraHohmann journeys.

Hat-tips to various press releases. As of [11/10] I cannot find any actual reportage so for my main link, I just relayed USNC.

ULTRASAFE 12/23: Forgot to mention, this is a Low Enrichment powersource. The only kind we're allowed as of today.

DEMO 12/28: Here's our reportage - with a target date for the prototype: 2027. They'd send actual cargo after that maybe 2035. Fusion is conceded as (theoretically) superior: four times the energy, less fuel (since the fused fuel here becomes the propellant), allowing for a higher mass of actual cargo (ten tonnes?). But the Ultra Safe crew point out its production is lagging fission's; fusion has no date for demo, just stages in production; they're in #2 where #4 is demo time. The fusion link I found was spitballing 2047, for Titan. In the meantime the engineering lore learned for fission (like chamber temperature) can be reused for fusion, if/when they ever get there.

NEXT GENERATION 12/30: I had some silly questions.

DETAILS 2/4/21: CNN. I see they're hoping to sell to NASA. SpaceX looks like it's set to be sidelined and looted.

I expect Trump to win

@jasonrantz has a map. It's a decent map. If I wholly agreed with it, I'd not have anything to post about, so - I'll quibble.

Disclosure: I already voted. I voted as you'd expect.

I give MI to Biden, tentatively. I would give PA... except that Biden blurbled out something something oil, which means he's Green New Deal, which means he's hitting coal first. On the other side MN is in play but, sometimes these swing-states tease us. PA certainly teased us 2008 on.

CO is not in play, of course. But then neither is GA or TX or NC or, really, FL.

I am not saying Trump deserves to win. I am not even saying I am particularly looking forward to the 2021-4 term. I am not offering an endorsement (besides saying "I Voted" and hinting how). I am just saying what I expect in nine/ten days.

RETROSPECT 1, 11/8: I was wrong about MN; and [unstated] about AZ, WI. Also GA, NC although they do lean in the Right direction. I did better with PA (divided), MI (lean Biden). I no longer expect Trump to pull this out. He is looking at the Georgia polls for the Senate: whether he can pull more votes for the two candidates from hopefuls should he (feign to) hang in until the runoff; or if he can get martyrdom points if he concedes on Armistice Day.

Jupiter in two years - when you want it

Via Reynolds: Princeton reports on the two-year trip to Titan (Masters thesis pdf). This is done by the "direct" deuterium / helium-3 fusion drive - for part of the mission. Think the hybrid electric / gasoline car. At a two-year run you can see why they can't use tritium; this isn't VISTA.

It's not really news, so much as the annual report and an application thereof. Space.com floated a more meaningful report on Princeton's work last year, telling us the mass this monster could shift. They were talking 10 tonnes. They also explained the milestones, PFRC-4 being where they start prototyping. Princeton are on -2 now.

For now I note what I (still) don't hear: anything about using this to get off the launch pad. We may need a lunar base, or actual Orion, before we can get this stuff off the well. And we may need the lunar base for even sufficient helium-3 to fuel it all. [UPDATE 1/31/21: By manufacturing it, where escape-velocity is low; scraping regolith suuucks.] Indeed, they are projecting that far - the two-year Saturnine window doesn't happen 'til 2046. On that much I am unsure: our synodic period is much less, 378 days. I think they are looking at the thesis which pulls that year out of nothing. No Jovian assist, in there. Venus neither. SHADECAST 12/29: Ah, that's because they're lagging Ultra Safe's fission solution...

In the meantime, I have a better use for this DF Drive. Jupiter / Earth synod exceeds thirteen months. Hohmann then takes over two years. But what if you don't waaaanna wait a year-n-change for the next window? So: rather than send a two-year trip to Titan... I reckon very similar maths can send something up right now to take about that long to Callisto. No need for Hohmann! No need to dork around with Mars or Venus conjunctions, either.

Elsewhere we may compare Orion to Callisto: 910-day round trip to that non-radioactive Jovian. That's, what, 455 days to get there? I'd also be interested to see how this scales up, mass-wise. Orion shifts kilotonnes. I suspect Princeton is constrained by the lack of fuel.

NEUTRONS 2/6/21: Pity about the 5% wasted on neutrons, even from He-3. Can we redirect that?

The Western mind

One seminal title, if not text, of our generation was Charles Freeman's The Closing of the Western Mind. This was its American title, which title the publisher chose to ape Allan Bloom's classic; it bears a different title in the UK, perhaps a better one.

The first chapters retell Gibbon about how THE CHURCH squelched philosophy so as to become parabasilevic: the bishops would let kings rule over the Western body as long as the bishops ruled the Western mind.

I think I had bought this book in the middle 2000s and I know I read a little of it, but I didn't take it with me. By 2007 I was already primed to distinguish between the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages, from Peter Heather's work. I was regularly attending Catholic services over 2008.

By Freeman's American title, his American reviewers judged its content. Publishers Weekly (hardly Inquisition-approved) put out a warning that the argument was basic-bitchery and a slander. Bookstores smelled a market and stocked the book anyway. Besides providing more spank material to the likes of Dawkins, its main legacy was to inspire Robert Reilly's me-too title against Hanbali Muslims.

So here we are in the days of Rodney Stark, Charlemagne bios, Tom Holland, the History for Atheists blog (its prototype reviewed Freeman), and HBDChick. New Atheists who sneer at the Church get flooded with aaaacshually ratio in their Twitter comments. Into this fray comes Joe Henrich with The WEIRDest People Of The World. Freeman has had enough and is two-starring the thing.

Razib Khan is moderating the debate. He agrees on points. He does, however, think Henrich is right on the overall argument. Freeman had argued that the Church was powerful and used the power for evil. Henrich agrees on the Church's power but says this was used for good - banning cousin marriage, especially. Freeman now says there was diversity. So the Church wasn't so powerful after all. GOOOAAALL! - own goal...

When I look at the Late Antique Church, frankly it's about as depressing as the rest of Late Antiquity. Especially if you look at the ostensible leader of it, in Rome. At first it was a Byzantine outpost. Rome took orders from Ravenna; the Exarch there, from the Emperor across the Balkans. Vigilius and Martin resisted the worst of it but, still, couldn't resist that the Spirit came from Father through the Son. In between Gregory I "the Great" finagled some meaningless title from false emperor Phocas. Then in AD 800 came Charlemagne, whom Pope Leo III crowned emperor, instead of deferring to the real empire under Constantine V and successors. Here's the "fun" part - this last change was not for the better. The Papacy crumbled into the Theophylact Pornocracy.

What this amounts to, is that for hundreds of years European Christians may or may not have known who the Roman Bishop even was, and they certainly knew enough not to care. For some time the Irish couldn't even synchronise the date of Easter with the Continent; Britain being rather stuck in the middle. In this context when THE CHURCH could barely control itself, we are supposed to believe that THE CHURCH had the most power over the people. Naw, dawg. Pull the other one.

There certainly was a decay in living-standards in the West - and not even only there, it was bad in Byzantium and arguably worst in Iran. I've been arguing that point for fifteen years. There are reasons for this, including "religious" reasons. I don't see those reasons in Christianity. Especially not Catholic Christianity. That's the religion which, when Pope Gregory VII got its act together, brought us back.

Drukhari

Consider Hell - the prison. I model it as the armed camp of janissaries beseiging the White City.

Theistic religion proposes that if you set your sights upon God, you are headed to God's presence. Critics like Nietzsche have noted that this can be corrupted, into temporal nihilism. And factions have exploited this temporally: they expect you to give up your possessions earning your way to Paradise, to die in battle, or (in Alcorn's Protestantism) to enslave yourself to the most charismatic pastor. But that is all they are: exploiters, and victims. The true Church knows what the Epistle of James is for.

Meta-mathematically, our cosmos is in a multiverse. We're protected from the Immaterium. The Warp isn't Hell - it's worse. And we know it's real, unlike Hell (or Heaven). But let's propose a universe like this one, with one difference: porosity.

In the porous universe, we haven't the luxury of hoping for a better one. We have two choices, against the null choice. The null choice is the Sea of Souls. As mentioned, that's gibbering chaos, not a choice. The real choices are: resist, or buy time.

Resistance looks... like what we got now, especially if the resistance be so effective we Earthlings don't see it. At the marches the Empire Of Terra reigns in the form of free-willed angels. If elevated saints accompany them, there's Vox Day's Level Two.

Immediately outside the marches, are those who have made their separate peace. They avoid getting into chaos themselves by being just that bit chaotic enough. This was Earth as the Aztecs envisioned it. Blood for the Sunbane, hearts for the Sun God.

There, I think, is classical Hell. A land where instead of getting ahead by doing and being good (naïvely), you get by - for one more precious moment - by doing evil. You tell the difference between Hell and Imperium - quite easily, most visibly by which way the swords are facing.

This is, incidentally, why Warhammer's Imperium has an Inquisition and why we in the real world cannot tolerate the Gamma Male.

Where's the alt-right gone?

Maybe the decline in the alt-right is due to deplatforming. Maybe. One could make that argument for the "alt lite" and so much more so for the Post. But.

We can still read Dalton if we want; Richard Spencer is still merrily Tweeting away. In fiiiine company.

Consider instead Vox Day's "16 Points of The Inevitable", once the "16 Points of the Alt Right". I took that original post (and translation-series) as an anti-Spencer Putsch, to wrest the "Alt Right" label from him - like Nick Land and others tried to wrest "Neo Reaction" from that MoreRight blogger. Against MoreRight Nick Land succeeded, because Neo Reaction is still something worth keeping. For the "Alt Right"'s part, Vox Day has let Spencer and those neopagans with him have the label. Because the "Alt Right" now pretends to supercede Throne-And-Altar and that, dear ones, is no Right at all.

And if you don't care about that, care that Nietzsche was a nutter.

As to why Twitter is letting Spencer rant like this, I don't think @jack is doing the poor man any favours. Don't deplatform him; pray for him.

If you read Nietzsche unironically

... you are an idiot, at best. More likely a lunatic.

Seriously, you don't deserve respect if you believe any of this nonsense: The universe is "enteral" in the sense that it is outside the delineation of time. "Time" is in your head, not in the world. Once more, my dear readers: time is that dimension of any universe whose direction assures sanity, and our universe is Einsteinian. "Muh quantum physics" is midwit posturing; paradox doesn't happen. The moment anyone breaks that covenant, he opens his mind to The Warp.

Nietzsche gets attention for two reasons. When someone into philosophy reads difficult or, yes, dishonest texts; Nietzsche consoles him that logic doesn't matter all that much in the first place. That, and Nietzsche has been historically important so is a recognisable name and shorthand. I'm not selfish, brutal, and ignorant - I am a Nietzschean!

The Babylonian train-schedule

On topic of cosmology, let's discuss how the Babylonians dealt with the Vault Of Heaven. In short - they failed to.

Babylonia was already an old civilisation when the Greeks found it. Akkadian readers could look back one or two thousand years to Sargon; Sumerian readers could look further still. They had more than enough time to notice certain repeating patterns, mainly the recurrence of planetary conjunctions. The main conjunctions are of course the Moon and Sun in their eclipses, most dramatically the solar occultation.

Enter Francesca Rochberg, “Periodicities and Period Relations in Babylonian Celestial Sciences” ed. Kozuh ch. 16.

Here's the fun part: the Babylonians didn't ask why. They just figured the heavens for an impersonal orrery. They wanted to know how these natural patterns in heaven might affect life down here on Earth. They basically don't but there was a whole industry of quacks to claim that they did. Given that, they didn't care what was making the planets and Moon go 'round about as they do. They just took notes on where they appeared and when. The Babylonian approach wasn't the geometrical diagram sketched on papyrus; it was the timetable chipped out on stone and clay.

It was Greeks like Euclid and finally the great Ptolemy who plotted out the trajectories. And then Kepler, picking it up again, with an algebra. Then Newton and, at the last, Riemann and Einstein.

For a timetable approach, the 360 degree allocation worked well-enough. Perhaps with a five or six day pause between "years". Mesoamerica did similarly. Except that Babylonians tended to a base-60 arithmetic - two months at a time - where the Mesoamerica went with base-20.

Rochberg further offers the Babylonian view of the circle. For them, it was the "shape within a circumference". If they put this in a square, they could get diameter from that or, you know, 7/22. Area was calculated from diameter. The centre of the circle did not matter; accordingly, the radius did not matter. By extension no-one was asking about the distance between the Earth and the Moon nor, for that matter, the Earth's surface to its own core. Well, no-one but them Greek homos.

What I suspect a truly mathematical civilisation could have used, in the Bronze Age, was a log table, like Napier's. Ah well. Even the Choresmians didn't swing that.

How the sailors discovered Purgatory

Bruce Lincoln wrote “Myth, History, Cosmology and Hydrology in Achaemenian Iran” ed. Michael Kozuh, Extraction & Control STUDIES IN ANCIENT ORIENTAL CIVILIZATION v. 68 (Oriental Institute of University of Chicago - pdf), ch. 14. This starts with a cosmology from Late Sasanian Iran to whit, the Bundahishn. This cosmology - credited to the now-lost Damdad Nask - was Euclidean. Lincoln argues that the Damdad Nask's hydrology was known to the Achaemenids a millennium before Khusro I. I deem this argument reasonable. As to whether I deem the Damdad Nask reasonable . . .

The key constraint of the pre-Classical cosmos is that Purgatory cannot exist. We live upon that middle-earth which divides heaven from hell. Uranus and Hades have no connexion beside Gaea.

Where you see myths of the dying-and-resurrected god, the drama plays out right here. The so-called "mythicists" would claim that the drama doesn't have to. In the preChristian world, it did have to; there existed no other stage possible. If Christ died, I don't know, at Tehuantepec or on Gor's STL3 libration-orbit then there should exist some mythology which tells us as much. Maybe post-Valentinian Coptic speculations. Which should count as much as The Book of Mormon.

Neolithic thinkers ate mushrooms or peyote and stylised this triverse as cruciform. Heaven is infinitely up; hell infinitely down, so middle-earth should be infinitely sideways. The middle earth would be flat. Because ancient astrologers were quacks who didn't give a fig, flat-earth worked right up to the moment seamen ventured out of sight of land. (I fully accept that the Polynesians were wiser than Persians and their Iraq.)

Coastal Greek philosophers soon allowed that an infinitely wide Earth wasn't needed, nor even wanted, because gods were greater. Since the curve of the earth does not (visibly) differ north-south and east west the Greeks concluded: sphere. That is: it is finite. The epicycles of the heavens are finite too; that famous minority-opinion of heliocentric cycles altered nothing here. The Greeks went so far as to measure Earth's [north-south] circumference. I don't know if they measured Saturn's orbit, which we now know is semimajor 9-10 AU or 8-11 if geocentric. If the ancients couldn't measure 10 AU they could muse that some number could be had, eventually.

A finite Earth (more exactly: a Saturn-bounded system) cannot interpose between heaven and hell. Then came a lively debate about whether our universe is, still, finite; not fully resolved among the public until Fred Hoyle got patted on the head and bidden a pleasant retirement.

Intuitively thermodynamics apply: creations wind down. If we inhabit a 20 AU diameter sphere of crystal and clockwork today, then something had to have wound it all up... at some point. Philosophers up to Hoyle never explained what, in an infinite universe, is still creating suns; nobody could catch the demiurges at the job. Theists had it easier: some gods said "fiat lux", one time, some finite number of years ago, and this is what we got.

Christianity inherited a Bible stating as much. A universe bounded in time, and spherical, cannot be a middle-earth. Heaven and Sheol could meet somewhere else.

Purgatory is made thereby possible. So also made irrelevant, to the cosmos, is the dying-and-resurrected myth. For those still interested, Easter could have taken place on some other plane.

The proto orthodox Church took in all these musings and came up with the compromise: Easter did happen and took place here, by God's mercy. Purgatory was accepted as real - but it is not a respite a mortal can count on. In fact the difference between "purgatory" and "Lovecraftian chaos" might not be constrainable.

The Muhammadan biography, reformed

On 17 October, Craig Considine at Rice posted concerning Qutham al-Qurâshî: How did he respond? By remaining calm, ignoring the insults, & focusing on his mission. To that Robert Spencer has objected [UPDATE 3/4/24: original is churchmilitant.com/news/article/catholic-don-spins-jihadi-beheading], based in part on the Ka'b al-Ashraf meme.

There are quite a few scholars out there who would prefer a different Islam than the Islam we have. Fred Donner, famously, has proposed a different early Islam, a Community of Believers. Juan Cole has written similarly, tho' not nearly as well. Considine had earlier jumped on Kendi's "antiracist" bandwagon claiming Muhammad for it. That's supposed to be a good thing and... well [UPDATE 3/4/24 from churchmilitant.com/news/article/catholic-sociologist-calls-muhammad-first-anti-racist; also see Jonathan Brown, Blackness in Islam now].

I do not know if Considine is aware of Roohi's revision of the Muhammadan maghâzî. I do know that Spencer is unaware but, I've tried to make him aware. Spencer (like Donner) is also quite aware of the ZimrielProject and House of War, not that Spencer has spared much attention to this work. So we shall see how that goes.

I will say that Roohi's revisions lead, potentially, to the Madina narrative's overthrow as maghâzî (or Sîra) and its reformation as biography or even gospel. The maghâzî does have Ibn Ishâq and (now) Ma'mar supporting it, that Hijazi / Basran consensus to which the Umayyads and then early 'Abbâsids caught up. But the true story might differ. The true Qurân certainly differs. I was skeptical about this modern scholars' project in 2014; I then followed the counterjihad consensus that academia was tendentious, some mix of wishful-thinking and propaganda, thus unscholarly. I am less certain now.

What is left for the Believers won't be "Islam" anymore, but it may end up better than Francis' Catholicism.

CONSIDINE EXPOSED 12/1-3: Stephen Kirby demonstrates Considine's bad faith 1, 2, 3. We all make our choices in life. You can abandon the sira, but then Muslims won't accept you and you'll - at best - be preaching a paraIslam forever tagged Speculative. Or you can accept the sira, which is a road to Qaeda or worse. Or you can just lie, and be safe in academia. Considine chose the last path. It's a living, as they say.

Dairy and millet in India

Lipids are found in the Indus Civilisation. Lipids are insoluble fats from milk; they stick to pottery.

The site is Kotada Bhadli, 2300-1950 BCE. This spans the notorious 2100 BC climate upheaval. It's a pastoral site rather than pure agriculture. I guess that's why they figured its pottery a good place to look.

This milk, further, came from a carbon-4 cereal. For India, they think "millets". Apparently there are variant types of this; Kiel University has studied central Asia at 2700 BC. Hardly anybody feeds even a millet to goats; not if cows or buffalo are present. South of the Hindu Kush the cattle would be indicus. They'd been domestic since the 5000s BC but maybe just for the yoke and the slaughter.

I don't think anyone in India could process lactose directly. Straight milk-chugging was rare even at the Tollense 1200 BC. But a new mother could use it... on her child, for early weaning. For adults, there are the cheeses and the butters and the yoghurts.

To me this implies that Indus traded indicus breeding-pairs for millet seedcorn, deep in the Bronze Age like the middle third millennium BC. This may well be mediated by IndoAryans who had, formerly, been eating the millet. Was Kotada Bhadli an IndoAryan village?

DAIRY 12/10: Rakhigarhi and others, from Akshyeta Suryanarayan et al.. Mature Harappan, 2500-1900 BC, followed by what they're delicately calling the "post urban" Late Harappan.

The STEAM shakedown

Some "STEAM Degree" types dumped one out: Ethical Exploration and the Role of Planetary Protection in Disrupting Colonial Practices.

The Turtle sums it Delphically: I predict that planners of new missions of the Moon and Mars will completely ignore the anti-colonial ethical analysis of this paper. I'm not a planner, so in that capacity I'm here to NOT ignore this analysis.

On to the buzzword-laden eight-page white-paper, it's as white as I'd expect. A lot of this "violent colonialism" wouldn't even apply to a planet where there are no natives, like our Moon and almost certainly Mars. I'm a Venus guy - a lover, not a fighter - on which planet nothing can live. So where is this colonial "violence" relevant?

The authors do mention eugenics. Because to keep a population alive in a place like Mars (or in my SV Hilda orbit, for rescue-ops; or on Venus' floaty farms...) would require some sort of genetic selection, as Tibetans do better in Tibet than do Chinese. The authors base their critique against that on... white supremacy. That would be news to this blog, which has proposed floating Zapotecs and New Guineans in Venus' farms, as best suited to low-atmo and high-temperature environments. Mine is a colonialism of indigenes. Mine is a colonialism to Empower The Global South at least some of it.

Since the article itself believes we haven't the tech to plant a colony onto Mars in the first place, one does wonder what they're even talking about. Asteroid mining? Where, again, there isn't life and where the "colony" would just be a mining camp that redeploys after a few months of ore-digging.

More likely is that this tiresome wordsalad is a communal ritual by professional academics with no actual skills in getting the job done. They show here that they are Not To Be Trifled With. They're shaking down the science departments - and the Dean, and whoever's allocating budgets.

Maybe the Chinese or the Russians or even the Indians will get out there first. Then these scholars can explain to Xi how they'd better let them share in the wealth or else they'll call him a racist. Nah, whom'm I kidding. Xi's likely funded the whole "ethical" enterprise already.

IN THE NEWS 10/24: Elysium. REBUTTAL 11/16: Zubrin. Where were you last month?

Two cows

We had the Bronze Age horse, which I found uninteresting but posted anyway; last year we had the cow. Two cows. Intrinsically more interesting. Razib Khan has a full (belated) post to which the Turtle has a followup.

Razib for his part was preparing the way for his Semitica post. As for the Turtle... keep in mind he isn't good at the pre-Thera Bronze Age. Reserve judgement accordingly.

Pointed out at the Turtle is the horrible climate 2200-2000 BC. This is true. Also mooted is that it may have spurred the Aryan movements: bringing Mitanni to the Hurri lands, Sanskrit to the Indus and Iranians everywhere in between. Although certainly the Near East and I think also the Indus held on for a few centuries more. But, first the Aryans had to get there...

The original paper, and Razib's summary, serve to constrain the possibilities. And what they find is: the cow, up to the Neolithic, was two species. They had split well before the Eemian, 300 kBC. As Razib points out, they are cows: that would be 1.5 My in human years; and 300 kBC may be an underestimate. Taurus is the Near Eastern cow, or bull if you're a Latin or Greek, familiar to West Europeans and Semites. The Indicus cow is different, though crossbreedable. Like the bison.

Indicus came to the Near East 2000-1500 BC, based on genetics. Razib at Brown Pundits figured that the Mitanni had planted their Aryan aristocracy upon their Hurri 1600 BC; he draws back to 1750 today. Missing in both Razib and the Turtle is that the Semitic Near East came back strong circa 1800 BC, with Zimri-Lim and Hammurabi, and the Assyrian merchants. Razib bases Mitanni 1600 BC on when the Hittites and Hurri allies sacked Babylon. Wikipedia thinks the Mitanni were already "king of Hurri"; Razib (here) deems Mitanni proper to have arisen in the vacuum. (Thera wasn't a factor but here's where I perform my obligation and say that went up around the same time.)

I am inclined, then, to agree that the Mitanni brought their species of cow along with them. 1600 BC is indeed the upheaval time in the upper Mesopotamia / Naharayn Hani GAL-bat (i.e. rabbat, Great Hani). Before that I am not seeing Nuzi, Mari, Asshur, nor Hammurabi's Babylonia much needing to bring in different cows. Pace Wiki I don't see the evidence for Aryans over the seventeenth-century Hurri; I am aware of no Aryan words in the pre-sacking tablets. In Assyria's northern colonies, we do meet Knesian "Hittites"... but, were they milking Indicae yet? Doubt it...

Razib considers a common protoIndic culture between east and west, before the Mitanni and Sanskrits made their move. He analogises to the Saxons, a German people who could notify raiders in the Mediterranean that the pickin's were gettin' rich in Britain. The protoIndic people had the Indica cow which they could assuredly herd on horseback. Iranians I suppose were north of there milking the Bactrian camel, I'm unsure if these were pack beasts yet.

Euro-sinia

AD 1348 - 1665, Plague transmission rates increased 4x. So David Earn (McMaster U, Canada) and others.

Yersinia is a bacillus. Bacilli mutate, but not as fast as viruses. Yersinia itself mutated: it's been recorded in Central Asian skeletons from Andronovo / Sintasha (Aryan) and Afanasyevo (Tocharian? paraTocharian?). Septicaemic by then. I had the idea it weakened the Balkan Cucuteni culture, as well. Probably not Indus; they seem to have taken sanitation seriously.

These researchers don't think Yersinia was primarily airbourne in AD 1348, when it transmitted quite a bit. Person-to-person is mainly pneumonic. It should have knocked out 15% given its virulence; but it knocked out 30%. So Dr Earn told UPI. I'm unsure about the maths here and not really up for tracing it all down, so do read the preprint.

As to why this bug became more transmissible as the population decreased and cities were (supposedly) improving: at a guess, after the initial shock, cities started crowding in again. Cholera wasn't licked until AD 1854. And then there those Confederate idiots who tried spreading yellow fever among the Union with... blankets. So I fully believe that sanitation was slapdash and ineffective over the three centuries in question. No real need to suggest an improvement in the Yersinia genome.

What language did the Germans speak?

The classical world classified space more than peoples. If you lived north of the Pontic Sea, you were a “Scythian”. If you lived beyond the Sind, along the Sindhi river: “Indian”. “Ethiopians” lived south of Egypt. Nobody knew a Slav from an Ossete, a Hindi from a Burushaski, a Nubian from a Somali. Nobody much cared. So when Julius Caesar or Tacitus is talking about “Germans”, they just mean someone on the wrong side of Gaul.

The third part of Gaul – the Belgium – Gaius Julius Caesar noted as part Gallic, part Germanic. Which I fully believe; I’ve long suspected even the Yorkshire was Frisian throughout the Roman age. Julius hired some transRhenian German mercs in his struggles against the Gauls proper. Germans, whatever that meant, were considered friendly enough that his adopted son and heir Augustus sent over three more legions. Er. Anyway Julius didn’t bother fine-tuning the names much.

I’m considering all this when I see the trailer for “Barbarians”, about the Varusschlacht. So, at any rate, modern Deutsches term it. I was discussing all this with my German-speaking mother and she wondered how come the Germans put That Statue in the wrong place. That got me thinking about Wiker and Hahn (although I’m too Catholic to have mentioned it), and the late-mediaeval rediscovery of Tacitus especially across the Alps and Rhine.

Modern “Germans” do own a folk memory… of Late Antiquity. They remember Etzel, widely accepted these days as Attila. They remember the Fimbulwinter a century after him. But they don’t remember Arminius. Tacitus had to teach them. In Latin.

The “Germannic” languages denote the languages recorded there in Late Antiquity. Franks and Goths spoke related languages. So, it seems, did the Sueves by then. Before all that there was (Runic) literacy in old Norse around the Dane Mark. Arminius wasn’t in any of those tribes; he was in the Cherusci, far up the Weser, east of the Rhine. What did they speak?

Words like “Teuton” don’t help; Teutatis was a god of the Gauls too, you’ll remember from Asterix. The Volcae were probably Celts, certainly foreign to our [neo]Germans.

Wikipedia has a map of “the Germanic tribes”. The map is from Penguin Atlas of World History… 1988. I take it the Penguin was looking at Jastorf. Jastorf got to the green bits, including Germania Superior province, by Year One AD. But … 1988.

I think the background to the revolt was, exactly, the tug-of-war across the Weser. The Rhine was becoming Romance. The Elbe still oriented north, to what we'd recognise as German. Whatever was in between had to decide between them.

Count me as a skeptic that in AD 1988 the archaeologists could declare Jastorf in the upper Rhine as of AD 9. For all we know the Cherusci spoke Gaulish. I much doubt that Netflix Germany knows any better. The Swiss certainly spoke Gaulish and, in fact, their metal bands are now reconstructing that as a common language.

Endotherm

Warm-blooded mammals and birds are constrained: the Triassic.

During the Permian, every land animal was a reptile. They wandered the land sprawled out like a lizard. If they lived near water they could do as crocodiles do today. Over the Triassic, the synapsids evolved means to put more of their - our - weight directly on thighbones. Same with the first dinosaurs who later would spawn the birds. This helped the animals run; warmth evolved in our bodies to improve the metabolism of a running animal.

That Carnian extinction 233 Mya, for reference, will have done for Probainognathus and Chiniquodon. It spared, alone, the Prozostrodonts. True mammalia branched off them soon after that. Apparently paramammals like Tritylodon lasted into the Jurassic, I guess to end up in an allosaur's belly. So we don't see them anymore like we see, say, the platypus. [INDIA-MALAGASY 12/20: Unless...] Note that the platypus is still a swamp thing.

The new study adds that the dinos had feathers and the mammals, whiskers early on in the Triassic. Given the dino oxygen-efficient bone and feather structure, which Out of Thin Air taught us and which keeps getting into the press, I'd rather thought we'd inferred that already, for them. The Jurassic "Brontosauri" would have lost the feathers secondarily on their return to the marshes.

Pacing the Flash

The philosopher Zeno mathematically proved, by paradox, the quantum nature of spacetime. If Achilles races a tortoise but the tortoise gets a head start, on the assumption of a continuous spacetime, Achilles will never catch the tortoise. If there exists a minimum quantum of spacetime, they must meet someday. Obviously Achilles can outrace a f@ing turtle, thus proving - in nature - quanta and disproving the infinitesimal. Even the Human Flash must boast that he works on the level less than a f@king attosecond; he doesn't say zepto- or yocto-.

That there can be no "infinitesimal" in nature ended up retarding the seventeenth-century calculus and flummoxing nineteenth-century study of light. These fields moved forward when scientists told Zeno, Hobbes, and the Jesuits to shut up for a moment, became on the wider scale of things - like planetary orbits - we don't need a f@king attosecond. Zeno was allowed back in when Einstein figured out the photoelectric effect and got us the quantum physics.

What hasn't been done, yet, is to use that quantum of spacetime directly. This is changing. Ineffable Island has two papers up from last weekend: picosecond 3D imaging (CalTech), and holy-shakes inferring a photon crossing a hydrogen molecule: 247-zeptoseconds doi 10.1126/science.abb9318. That's 247/1000 of an atto-. The memesters tell us that 12 attoseconds is the shortest we can measure directly.

247 zeptoseconds is probably about as blinkity as the Flash goes, since as noted if he'd undercut the zepto- he'd tell us. Achilles isn't contrained yet though.

This is more than enough for a femtochemistry. I have no idea if this timespan can be shortened further.

The mathematical civilisation

Richard Spencer's Twitter reminds us of the Bryan Caplan / Scott Alexander title-fight. You might want to download the latter one; Alexander has taken down his content before.

Caplan argued for the Western civilisation and for its superiority. Alexander argued that the "Western civilisation" consisted of Latin manuscripts, maypoles, and Thor - all romantic silliness and dead now. What we live in, isn't "Western"; it's just Science. It's all so much neoliberal Epicurean cortex-hacking. It'll work just as well on Congolese as on Bostonians. Better, perhaps.

I'm not getting into all that. I'm not even getting into, "how come this happened in the West", first; as Alexander points out, it happened in Macao before it happened in Connacht. I'm interested in the intermediaries. I'm interested in Late Antiquity. I'm interested in Islam.

I suggest here that Islam reacted against the Late Antique natural-history. Up to about AD 600, there wasn't a scientody in the West as such. The study of the observable world was natural history, a process of classification and common-sense. Much was fit into models: the four humours for medicine, epicycles for planetology. This worked okay if you just needed to set bones, drain internal haemorrhages, or to set a short-term calendar. It was stagnant beyond that, and failed utterly at explaining how it all got here - it could not compete against the first chapters of Genesis. Everybody knew the haruspices and astrologers were quacks, but nobody could do better.

The Qurân proposed a model whereby the stuff the Syrians couldn't explain, like birdflight, happened by Allâh's Will. When the qurrâ took over the Islamic culture, which was a long process complete by the 'Abbâsî régime, natural history became something that good Muslims simply didn't do anymore. You'll notice that the main [al]chemical discovery at the time was the Greek Fire discovered and transplanted by Christians. You'll note that the best doctors were Jews.

But Islam persisted. And it attracted converts. Upwardly mobile converts - the smart set of people. What were they doing if they weren't fighting jihad or playing politics? Well: many of them got into the Hadith science and the law. That wasn't a total waste of their time - this (with Syrian Christian help) got us our modern tools of text-criticism, which in turn furnished much help to the infidels' medical texts. We also got the political-science of Averroes and more so Ibn Khaldun.

I'll further suggest that Islamic scientists, barred from alchemy and astrology, concentrated on astronomy and mathematics. There was cartographical use in measuring the positions of planets against the vault of stars. Not least - this corrected the qibla, the direction of prayer toward Mecca. And mathematics hold true whatever language one uses to invoke Allâh, and whatever "incoherences" a Ghazâlî might publish UPDATE 3/30/23 but not Ghazali himself! He's on my side, on this one.

Perhaps the world civilisation needed a break from classical philosophy. Perhaps we needed some space in our times and space, free from the quacks, for Choresmian mathematicians to improve our Language Of Sanity. Islam seems to have focused its dhimmis on rationalism, as well.

But in the end, the Muslims needed to allow the Natural History back. With some exceptions like al-Jahiz they didn't. If an individual bright spark like Ibn al-Shatir proposed, say, heliocentrism the Muslims wouldn't do anything with it. The Muslims couldn't. Only dyotheletes bound only to mathematics (again, whoever did the sums) and unbound from an immutable human capital-S "Scripture" could do that. Only Italians, Frenchmen, Portuguese, and Spaniards could do that. Caplan, like Napier and Newton and Einstein, is on their fringe; but Caplan knows what Alexander doesn't know, that it takes the Western balance to apply mathematics to natural-history, which Islam could never allow.

Richard Simon

Next up: Padre Richard Simon. He was a French priest, despite that his works were more popular among the English and Germans. So: "Simón", forthwith.

Simón is that figure we'd been wanting since the whole scriptura cult began: a Catholic who could argue for the Church's rôle in maintaining the Faith, from the standpoint of the Scripture being perhaps imperfect. The irony - as Wiker and Hahn point out - is that the same Church Tradition was thereby indicted as having delivered a poor edition of the text.

Simón performed brilliantly at explaining how the Greek, the Latin, and the Hebrew are all at variance, and at showing how translations have failed. What he forgot, apparently, was to throw any new support to the thus-weakened Tradition. As a result, Simón's legacy ended up with the ultra-Protestants, the laïcists: those who weren't going to support either the Pope nor the Lutherans.

Since then of course many Catholics have stepped up to trace lines of doctrine from the New Testament (Nestle-Aland edition) to the Apostolic Fathers to Justin to Clement Alexandrine to Jerome and finally to our Church. But not Simón. And not, for some time, Simón's Catholic peers. The Jesuits disputed him - having their own agenda. The French king just burned his books (or tried to). By the time Catholic scholars had reapplied Tradition, the damage was done.

This may be moot these days. Since Pius IX, the Tradition has rather gone out of fashion in Catholic literature. Timothy Flanders, who found his way from Protestantism to Orthodoxy to Catholicism exactly along the Tradition's path, has noted that we're being fed Encyclicals these days. Pope Benedict XVI - a theologian - at least tempered this with theological treatises, not to be taken as Papal.

Flanders doesn't like it. He'd rather the Pope was more orthodox (you can take that as you may), supporting the Tradition more than making new pronouncements. I agree. The progress of Western ethics, and the improvement in Western lives owes everything to the Church. The Tradition is where the Church documented it all.

Pharaoh's slaves

I mused on the invention of slavery last year. h/t Instapundit now we have Hymowitz, summarising the slavery of the ancient world. Hymowitz isn't comprehensive, leaving out - for instance - the Portuguese and Sephardic domination of the Atlantic trade AD 1500ish on. But I'll leave that line of talk to the Nation of Islam. I'm more interested in when slavery started, as opposed to bonded servitude. We're here being told 1580 ... BC.

Hymowitz here cites Orlando Patterson. According to him, slavers were hitting the East African "Punt" for human livestock. By that he means Dynasty XVIII, the Pharaonic age. Tuthmosis III wrote this for his 33rd annal at Karnak #486: Marvels brought to his majesty in/from the land of Punt in this year: dried myrrh, 1685 heket; gold, 155 deben, 2 kidet; 134 slaves, male and female; 114 oxen, and calves; 305 bulls; total, 419 cattle; beside vessels laden with ivory, ebony, skins of the panther; every good thing of this country. The translation is James Henry Breasted, 1962 and not, I think, subsequently revised except maybe the year.

Why did Tuthmosis the Nastiest Pharaoh of the Nasty Dynasty (per Larry Gonick) do this? It helped that he simply could. He had the wealth; he had the navy, and he had the land. I don't think the Minoans or Canaanites were up to a proper slave-trade. The Greeks and Anatolians were then bumpkin villagers, just about able to sack a city like Babylon, unable to chain up masses of prisoners nor to have anything to do with them back home. Babylonia, as mentioned, had recently been sacked. Anyway before the sacking she had a nice little feudal system going on that didn't need foreign slaves - do read Michael Hudson here.

As to what these 134 poor Punters did in Egypt, here I will posit that Hymowitz and Patterson are getting it wrong. The imports do meet my definition of "slave" as against "bondsman" in that they are foreign. But: these slaves feature in a royal text. That means they were royal slaves. They weren't conquered in a border-skirmish, Punt being too far for that. These were exotics. Kings did sell war-captives via intermediaries, especially if they preside over a secular aristocracy, as did Roman emperors. But this doesn't seem like a Pharaonic act.

These 134 slaves, as royal property, thereby stood on a social plane of direct Pharaonic protection perhaps not available even to the fellahin farming along the Nile. Construction in Upper Egypt, sunnier and hotter, is one thought. Maybe they could form the core of a non-Nubian black colony - to shore up the Nile against the Nubian kingdom, or the coast against Libya. This by parallel with Justinian II's raid on the Slavs, for enlistment against the Arabs.

It is of interest that here in Pharaonic Egypt are our first true slaves. I am still not seeing the commodification we see among the Greek and Roman - and Sasanian - worlds.

Spinoza's tiered society

Absent the dyothelete society, the Leviathan tends to a vertical dyotheletism. The Holy Spirit descends from the Father through the Son. The Scripture is politicised. That, argues (at great length) Wiker and Hahn, is the story of Bento Despinoza.

To such lengths, I didn't even spot the politics in the first half of their chapter. Ah me of little faith.

Spinoza is like Locke as a mufassir on Hobbes. He doesn't like that the sovereign be absolute. Wiker and Hahn notant bene that all these philosophers reacted to dangers of their time. As Hobbes demanded security from chaos, Spinoza wanted some means of keeping out the ignorant (goyische) mob. Both agreed that there must be a sovereign, and that the sovereign must use the ambient Scripture to mollify the plebs. Spinoza, as a Jew closer to Torah, proposed how to do this.

Making the Bible an historical document, was how Spinoza did it. Machiavelli had already proposed this before all the Protestants.

And, really, to evangelise the Bible outside Judaeo-Christian circles, anyone has to address unbelievers who will start out assuming it's just someone else's literature. If Machiavelli, Hobbes, and now Spinoza were more motivated to treat this text as outsiders, I don't know that this discredits their project. In fact Catholics should be more motivated than these secular authoritarians; once Luther started out-scriptura'ing the Pope, a pivot against scriptura on Tradition's behalf seems exactly the winning move.

Also like Machiavelli, as noted, Spinoza didn't intend that his advice to princes get out among the rest of us. For Spinoza, the princes were the Protestant elite in Holland and maybe republicans in Italy. Rather than King Henry VIII telling his subjects what Scripture meant, the burghers of Amsterdam and of New Amsterdam would figure out what Scripture intrinsically meant, and - in their wisdom - decide what lessons their pastors (and rabbis!) may preach. Those lessons would be entirely moral, alongside respect for wise authority. In the meantime the universities can get cracking on the exegesis of Scripture because, as Spinoza became aware, the Scripture was riddled with holes and its seventeenth-century interpretation inadequate.

Spinozan liberalism is fragile, assuming the Nederlander bourgeoisie don't suddenly decide to spout self-detrimental slogans like "Spaniard Lives Matter". I wonder if, for Spinoza, Hobbes lay out there as a bogeyman: accept this two-tiered system, and propagandise accordingly; or else you'll default to Leviathan, because the third alternative is anarchy and death.

Maybe Ibn al-Ashraf wasn't murdered

It sometimes happens that extremists agree. Noted earlier was the case of mediocre philosophette Hypatia, killed by Christians during a riot. Modern atheists blame Ephesian Christians; Ephesians in antiquity proudly claimed it, themselves. Impartial historians these days suspect the Christian establishment didn't approve an execution. So: on to the Jews of Yathrib, and why there aren't any there today - the so-called "Khaybar" (oasis) expulsion. Or at least the murder of Ka'b bin al-Ashraf.

If you ask a Palestinian, he'll chant about the Yahud of Khaybar and about Ibn al-Ashraf in threats against Israel. If you ask Robert Spencer... well, The Truth about Muhammad should still be available for purchase. Ehsan Roohi offers a contrary opinion.

There exist skeptics of the Muhammadan sîra. Spencer took the skeptic tack in another book, Did Muhammad Exist?. Roohi splits this baby: he bypasses the Meccan mab'ath, to accept the Madinan maghâzî.

The man who has taken on much of the credit, or blame, for Ka'b's execution is one Ibn Maslama. This man turns out, at the time, to be a Jew himself. Plenty of Arabians converted to Judaism in sixth-century Late Antiquity; the king of Yemen was one. Ibn Maslama is credited/blamed for further murders of erstwhile-fellow Jews. It would be possible that we have a Torquemada here - but the accounts all follow the same pattern. This induces Roohi to consider Ibn Maslama's spree a topos, a "meme" in our parlance.

As alternative, Ibn Maslama and Ka'b were both Jewish-with-emphasis-on-ish warriors aligned with Muhammad. Ka'b may have died in battle but, perhaps, not with particular distinction or even on the "wrong" side. Ibn Maslama, who survived, ended up in high positions in 'Umar's circle and then with 'Uthman al-Umawi. Ibn Maslama faced accusations that he favoured the Jews among the Believers. It was remembered that Ibn Maslama made a personal petition with Ka'b. Ibn Maslama saved his reputation among the Muslims against the Jews by inventing or at least permitting a story that he had murdered some prominent Jews in his life.

Roohi does however accept that the Muslims expelled the Jews from Khaybar. Although even that might not be the Prophet's fault.

Moral Collapse theory

Alongside Michael Hudson's neoMarxist analysis (I mean that as compliment), I recommend Richard E. Blanton, Gary M. Feinman, Stephen A. Kowalewski, and Lane F. Fargher: "Moral Collapse and State Failure". Daily Mail got a summary.

The paper starts with a theory of the Good Government: the system which enables a productive working class. I'd call out the Mail's use of "middle class". As President Obama proved, that is a shield for what the "Lion of the Blogosphere" in his halfsigma heyday called value-transference. The middle-classer might earn the same salary as a worker, but his job is a Bullshit Job and he lives as a parasite, inhibiting production.

Blanton et al. don't look at democracies. Their paper looks at three empires for which we have good record: Flavian / Antonine Roma, Ming (not Tang!) China, the Mughals. Also one republic: Venice. Neoreactionaries will accept that this is because democracy doesn't work. Small-d democrats might excuse this in that those systems can serve as example and shame for democracies.

Michael Hudson isn't cited. I moot he should be. Hudson is ultra reactionary here, taking cue from Babylonia and from the crypto-monothelete Macedonian Constantinople. The Emperor Protects, and Forgives Us Our Debts. The Macedonian Dynasty is at least as well-documented as is second-century Rome. It is just not well studied, outside the Orthodox world.

The paper goes further than Hudson, to explain how the Good Empire fails. Empress Zoe presided over the Macedonians' failure. Installing a good system is necessary, but it also needs a plan to keep it aloft. Most of all - should the system falter - the Imperial Court needs a "plan b" of restoration. Antonine apologists often neglect the Flavian decades starting AD 70ish. Roma survived the later years of Domitian, the Nerva-Trajan coup, and Trajan's overextension into Iraq. The new dynasty wasn't genetically Flavian (a lot of it was Spanish!) but, I'll propose, the Flavians laid down the foundation for a post-Flavian Romania.

Also good news is the exercise of scientody in political science. Bruce Gilley at Portland State seems authoritarian enough; I suggest he take this tack of doing scholarship, instead of chasing notoriety and a conservative fanclub like the late Mike Adams did.

The Xinca never had a chance

Hearing about Ilopango, and considering its [lack of] effect abroad; I really should look closer to home, also supposedly literate. That's central El Salvador during the Classic Maya heyday.

Ilopango and the "Our Saviour" volcano both erupted during this time. We've now dated the former to about AD 431: longcount 8.19.15.*.*. The latter went up AD 600ish, 9.8.0-3.*.*; that one doesn't seem as well constrained.

Where Ilopango was an epic blast, affecting the whole Southern Hemisphere (tho' not so much the North); the latter Loma Caldera was more a Vesuvius. As a Vesuvius it did blanket the local villages and, here, the archaeologists have been hard at work at the "Jewel of Cerén".

These cultures are considered Maya; I don't know about their languages. Due north is Copán; west, Tazumal alias Chalchuapa. After all this San Andrés picked up, as a trade entrepôt.

What I don't hear about, here, is literacy. Nearby Copán etched out a LOT of monuments. I haven't heard about monuments in San Andrés nor even Tazumal. Copán for its part faced north, somewhat famously controlling Quiriguá downstream until 18 Rabbit got killed AD 738; Copán didn't care about the Pacific.

Quiriguá might not have been Maya at first, although its élite spoke the Chorti - Copán for its part still does. I cannot help but feel that El Salvador spoke different Maya, in the Quiché and Mam branch. Nahua came later; Lenca and Cacaopera cluster east of here, as in Honduras. And even Maya did not extend to the San Salvador volcanoes, now Nahua and Spanish. I am told that the local toponyms are Xinca. Xinca culture was inferior to Maya; the Xinca language, where it held on (west of here), borrowed Maya technical vocabulary.

At a guess, the eruptions AD 431 and 600ish cleared out the whole area, and made difficult for to resettle. When the Nahua-speaking Pipil came, when was decidedly Postclassic, they found few-to-none locals to oppose them.

I'd also not hold out hope that we'll find dramatic pyramids or monuments as we find in Copán or will probably find in Tazumal. Toponyms are all we'll get from the eastern Xinca culture.

De Peyrère's intuition

Following René Descartes, now Wiker and Hahn are on to Bento d'Espinoza. In between they discuss a few others.

I don't know that Spinoza has a place in a book titled Politicizing the Bible. Spinoza didn't do politics. Spinoza's antecedents were Hobbes arguing for a theory of absolute kingship and Machiavelli advising on the king's conduct. About all He has in common with the former that his books got banned and, with the latter, that he left several of his manuscripts to be published posthumously. In Spinoza's times the Bible was already subject for secular study. I am worrying if Hahn's and Wiker's own book has carried on too long by now.

What this chapter does net us are those intermediaries between Descartes and Spinoza. Da Costa seems very tragic - less a philosopher than a depressive. De Prado held to a universe boundless in time so was, er, wrong. Wiker and Hahn find more interesting Isaac de la Peyrère.

Like Descartes, la Peyrère was optimistic about how much knowledge seventeenth-century Europe had acquired. In 1655 he published the Prae Adamitae which entered the English tongue the following year as Men Before Adam. Samuel Fisher built from la Peyrère in turn. Menassah ben Israel rebutted him.

La Peyrère believed that Egyptian and Babylonian astronomy preceded 4000 BC. He also could not see where to fit the Native Americans and Inuits - "Eskimos" then called. He noted that not all the races owned a Flood myth as had the Greeks and the Jews. But the man was unwilling to abandon the Bible entirely. He concluded that vast swathes of humanity had branched away before Adam's Fall. Adam is, then, the father ultimately only of Noah so of Ham, Shem, and Japheth; Asians, Americans, and Africans are para-Adamites. And the Flood never reached them, or at least reached only part of them.

His main source was Claude Saumaise' De annis climactericis, a comprehensive refutation of astrology published 1648 which, I think, had pretty much written off the whole science.

We now know through several scientodic lines that la Peyrère was right: the Bible is for Semites and doesn't know much beyond its Levantine and Iraqi world. The world's Flood myths as we know them postdate, by far, the migrations and separations of the world's human races and have little in common besides the molecule of water. In addition not all human races even have a Flood myth. Egyptian and Babylonian history are deeper than the Biblical narrative. The Mesoamericans (and Chinese) kept their own records, Mesoamerica fixing its year-zero at 3114 BC.

What I don't know is how Saumaise or la Peyrère could have known all this and, I have to conclude, that they didn't. Egyptian, Sumerian, and Mayan in script were none of them legible to the seventeenth century reader; Sumerian not even comprehensible. European sources for these cultures were really, really second-hand at best. These two skeptics left themselves wide open to a critique like Menasseh's.

UPDATE 10/16: The authors get into Spinoza's politics later in that chapter.

Syngas is awesome

The best thing you can do with your plastic waste is reuse it - especially if plastic is expensive. Venus, short on hydrogen, will find plastic expensive. But sometimes it is not feasible to reuse the plastic. A plastic item might tear or, if in oxygen and sunlight for too long, degrade.

Via hbdchick comes a means to accelerate the degradation: microwave. We're all here to retrieve the hydrogen. But looking into all this, I'm not minding the Old And Busted way.

The usual process does this at 1025 K but that is too hot even for Venus' surface; it also gets syngas back, which mixes the hydrogen with carbon-monoxide. Luckily hot syngas at least will not explode outside a zinc-oxide catalyst and 30 MPa which is, what, five times the surface pressure. (Unless you add oxygen, which in free gaseous form isn't natural to Venus.) Unluckily it takes a second step to separate the gases.

... if we cared to do that.

The CO, as Robert Zubrin teaches us, grants a wide array of useful chemistry (or is that "chemody"?). Mixed with hydrogen it should reduce our rusty metals better - and syngas is so used in sponge iron production. Syngas also makes alcohols starting with methanol at 575 K with those catalysts. It's good for all sorts of stuff. Waste products are carbon dioxide, which we vent out; and water, which we also love. Might be a bit fizzy.

Further: CO's molecular mass is 28 like nitrogen gas. Given that Venus' atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide, our poison waste is a lifting gas even better than the breathable-air mix which will be 20% oxygen gas (at 32). Especially if it is mixed with hydrogen instead.

How do we get 1025 K over Venus' surface? Float a BIG transparent balloon with your plastic trash and a few focusing mirrors in it. Let it break the clouds, above. As mentioned this process will only lighten the load.

AMMONIA 12/15: We can also talk fertiliser from urea.

National holiday for some nation

I dealt with Chris' deeds last year. [MISSED THIS 10/14/21: Fynn-Paul "The myth of the ‘stolen country’".] This year, let's look at his family. Some claim him for the Tribe.

Since 2002, at least, researchers have been looking at the man's family DNA. Periodically the case rises up in media. It never goes anywhere. My only conclusion is that the DNA doesn't help any hobby-horse. The Sephardim aren't like us Ashkenazim whose DNA can be spotted a mile off; they're more Moroccan-tinged Spaniards like the, er, Galicians. But in Iberia, if someone's DNA is Aragonese: you do know he is not Jewish.

We are left with some loose ends - Chris' Spanish was accented, with Judaisms in certain Ladino turns of phrase; he didn't care to share genealogy. When Chris found himself in a Genovese prison he (finally) bandied about that he was a fellow Ligurian. But nobody there knew who he was, and nobody had raised the issue beforehand - not Chris, not Genovese diplomats.

But the accent is Aragonese, even Catalan; the opposite of the more Moorish tongues along the Atlantic and Granada (then still Muslim, if tributary). And as Jared Taylor helpfully reminds us the religion is Catholic to a fault. As for the Ladino, consider how Yiddischkeit has entered common New York speech or even the speech of my generation brought up on MAD magazine and Mel Brooks.

If Chris was, in fact, Catalan: to European bigots that might well be enough. Spaniards were aware of the Catalan language as an outlier in Iberian Romance, further off than Portuguese. Castilians deemed the region as a debateable land with southern France - the peninsula was fresh off a war over the succession. As for Italy, the 1490s AD was the de Borgia age. Many Italians had learnt to distrust the Catalans.

Let's go with that this guy was Northwest Mediterranean Mystery Meat. Father Catalan; mother perhaps Piedmont.