ToughSF hearts<3 science.
I mean, excepting that the new Matrix (which is rubbish) had an awesome "trans" journey (you cannot change your chromosomes). Excepting that, although battery power requires metals, we shouldn't mine the metals from the seafloor. Excepting that we cannot have 100 m/s δV because the radioactive power is "insane". Or use a chemical rocket because it's toxic.
So he refuses us any engineering. But he'll science the sh!t out of it!
I was thumbing through Future Spacecraft Propulsion Systems and Integration (2018). It is the smart-person version of Nyrath's Atomic Rockets. As long as Chung is babbling on Twitter and not doing featured-updates, that's what I'm reduced to.
One thing popped out that I hadn't heard of - the Metastable Nucleus. It seems that some heavier-than-steel elements, like Tantalum and Hafnium, have isotopes which can exist in an unbalanced state. They are written Hf-178m or Ta-180m. They are not radioactive; they are just unbalanced. When the nucleus balances itself, it releases the potential energy.
Like, a lot of energy. Not enough to induce any fission to surrounding elements; no neutrons or heliums are ejected in this process, in fact the opposite. But a thousand times more energy than the usual chemical reaction. By the way, this means the shielding only needs deal with the X-rays.
Obviously we don't see much of this in the wild. They're rare-earths to begin with and, well, any such created in the usual process would have gone boom by now. But the authors observed that someone might make some.
Sadly this means, at present, skyscraper-leveling bomb you can carry in a laptop case. Nobody wants this monster on controlling the reaction for anything good, like a Starship with twice the cargo-space and nitrogen or CO2 for propellant.
Thera! Always nice to have some Thera information. Here it is a story of a boy and his dog. Looks like a tragedy.
These two were not found in that island lately consecrated to Saint Irene. They were found in coastal Anatolia. And I do mean, in. The problem with making sense of tsunami leavings is that they churn up the soil. It also is evident here that the soil was laid down in waves (as it were). Several tsunamis (or whatever that plural is) hit this place, and then the survivors came back to dig up the remains. Many manmade pits are here with, one must assume, dog assistance. But then one more, later, tsunami struck. This, I suspect, did for the boy and his dog, looking for their relatives.
You can read it all on PNAS for free, ahead of time, because it's dated 4 January. So, foreposted; I'm backposting this one.
After that last kick in the pants the site was not repopulated for another hundred years. I cannot say I blame them.
As for dating Thera... well, the context isn't exactly good for that, for obvious reasons. They can report that 1612 BC is a hard date for a minimum. Baillie's retraction holds strong.
BACKPOST 12/30. Bit on the nose. Pray for us.
Having called myself out, let's talk progress. Assume I'm doing it wrong; I had an ustādh[-a] for Arabic, which I don't have for Aramaic.
I acquired Larry Mitchel's Zondervan Student's Vocabulary at a used store awhile ago. It is mostly for Hebrew. However. The "Late Biblical" Hebrew, and several of the later prophets, had come fresh off the Babylonian exile. Some of these guys (2 Isaiah often cited) may well have spoken Imperial Aramaic as a first-language. Accordingly Mitchel devoted a section for the kind of Aramaic you'll be seeing in Ezra and in canon-Daniel.
It gets better: Mitchel organises the words by frequency. This means, if you memorise the more-common words, you can get started on translating a lot of this up-front, leaving the "hapax" stuff for the dictionary.
One clear problem with this approach: I am not learning Syriac. Syriac came off Edessa in the Assyrian Emperor's milieu of the northern Mesopotamía. This would be "EA" for David Taylor. Mitchel is relaying words from the Biblical dialect - "BA". This looks to be a Babylonian-Canaanite hybrid, unbespoke in Edessa and, very-likely, by anybody anywhere else (although some might say the same for M.S. Arabic). I certainly see some Babylonianisms in here like "gabbar" for a tyrant which cannot be anything but a calque of Sumeria's LU.GAL.
What I think I will get, is a basis on the boring stuff, most of the vocabulary I'll expect when I do learn Syriac in earnest. And to speed-read at least one Aramaic script, the same one the Jews use. Although I get the feeling the Syriac scripts came from the Assyrian Empire's.
I've been putting off since maybe I was a teenager a serious attempt to read some kind of Aramaic. I've stymied myself several ways: didn't learn any Semitics in high school, went down a blind alley in Hebrew in my early college years (plus - needed Latin, elsewhere). Although I did pick up some Modern Standard Arabic alongside Qâric and Classical; plus, lately, Safaitic.
My problem was that I didn't have a focus. I don't care enough about the Book of Daniel, which (like Jeremiah) is better in Greek anyway. Ditto Aramaic Levi or the rest of Qumran (like Tobit). Um. Ezra-Nehemiah/2 Esdras? Looking abroad Aramaic is not a classical tongue (yet).
Another issue here is that whenever something gets published in Aramaic it tends to get published, concurrently, in Latin or French or English - or, failing all that, in early mediaeval Arabic translation. All these can be cross-translated in Google so, if it gets into one such language, it gets into all the others. Why learn what everyone else has learnt. I felt more immediate need to get Arabic over to the Western languages.
One exception has been nagging at me, over the past year. John bar Penkaye's Main Points - which some of us oldsters remember as "The Foreword" (LOL): resh mille. As of 2010 Steven Ring listed the MSS. From AD 1875, a Syriac Nestorian resurgence resulted in several mediaeval MSS getting recopied. Of their Bar Penkaye work, Alphonse Mingana's famous 1928 Sources Syriaques amounts to one (partial) example. In a now-disfavoured font. Hey, at least that got to a printing-press and (at last) onto the Internet.
Since 2010 Mingana's French version of chapter 15 can be read in English; but, if you desire a better text, Sebastian Brock beat us to it doi 10.1163/9789004307742_028 - not that this really matters, since this translation from French certainly used Brock. Brock also got us the end of chapter 14. Since then a few other chapters have been relayed to us, especially if Mingana did not publish these, just because there's been more interest in reception-history of earlier Syriac lore.
It turns out rather a lot of Syriac has not been published or - if "published", as in Mingana's case - the publications were done in bad scripts from not-enough MSS all without a proper apparatus. Last year I got wind of a whole library of Syriana encapsulated in the Siʿrt Chronicle.
I also am a Catholic now. I hold that we in the West need a spokesman for the Nestorians.
Looking to Bar Penkaye in particular, I find that his generation had Stuff To Say about Ephesus and Chalcedon. That's the dark-age, not just because Siʿrt skipped it; more because there wasn't much even preserved. Except Bar Sahdé, the Martyride. Maybe.
The only person whom syri.ac has listed for the Resh Melle is Yulia Furman, who has been doing other work since after Memras #1 and #9. She may have lost interest. Mar-Emmanuel promised, but so far has dangled excerpts only (pdf). Until some-one else translate those pages we want, I'll have to do it. UPDATE 2/1/2022: Memra XIV.
I didn't catch the earliest moves, but JWST is now making its own (solar) power and is passing the MCC 1a checkpoint - for one more sizeable burn. All by itself.
You can track its journey at NASA; along with the deetz. Arin Waichulis has spreadsheetz.
Assuming MCC 1a worked tomorrow it gyres and gimbals its antenna assembly; and I still mean "it". Fortunately that's the last of the mission-crit automation. Everything after this can be done manually. Beware the bandersnatch, my beamish boys.
Neil "Vridar" Godfrey is translating (via Google) some German dood. Which is fine. Great, even. Although I am biased myself having (basically) scanlated Nöldeke and Kamen, some years back. We all can only hope that the translations are good enough.
Vridar has some questions about the initial call for disciples. First (okay, technically second): why is it that John head of the Baptist movement is proclaiming the arrival of one greater than he. Next (last of three): since when does sensei ask for followers. Imam Malik didn't want Shafi'i to hang around his majlis. "Club Mayhem" in Fight Club isn't fiction, here.
Tell you when the guru does call for help - it is when he is calling for volunteers. The Prophet Muhammad blurted out that the deen would be better off without so-and-so. Some Muslims duly ridded the deen of said turbulence.
"Well that just shows how Jesus is different" - nah. Not good enough, mate.
I will pipe in that sometimes the prophet does predict a later and greater man. The former prophet might think he's not fit to rule, himself; often prophets and seers were blind, in antiquity. I do not think that (say) Samuel calling out for a David is a mere trope. More: in the post-Jewish tradition, Moses himself (famously) did not enter the promised land. What's John even doing in the Jordan if not aping Moses. In our times Joseph Smith hoped for One Mighty And Strong. So that's an L for Bauer, and I'll say: a double L for Vridar, for Just Raising Questions that he should know to answer - in the negative.
On to the Gospels, I've said before they're not good as primary sources - but. I do take seriously cases for the sources of Mark and "John". Mark may be the direct hearer of an aged Simon Peter; at any rate, his gospel is the Petrine community's official rebuttal against what's now "John". That community, and perhaps Peter himself, had no motive to propose Peter as hanging around the Rabbi Jesus for enlightenment and healing, as so many other proto-Christians did. If Jesus took the initiative to select Peter, that supported the Petrine claim to Heaven's Key. Which is (through Peter's bishops) the Church of Rome, Antioch, and Alexandria.
As I'm reading "John" 1:35f, in fact that's how it works. Andrew bar Yuhanan a Baptist, alongside a fellow Baptist, traipse after Jesus. This, Jesus then permits. Same for Andrew's brother Simon, whom Jesus will rename Cephas (=Peter). The first man Jesus picks out of the crowd is one Philip. This may or may not be Andrew's original companion. "John", I suspect, doesn't want us to think so; "John" may want us to see Philip as someone else, and Andrew's companion to be The Beloved Disciple.
It all seems on-brand for both texts. "John" starts closer to events, downplays Peter, and is (I must allow) more believable; but "John" has been ideologically corrupted on its way to our New Testament, for a start to insinuate The Beloved Disciple. Meanwhile here comes Mark to recast those events as to serve Peter. In, certainly, the wrong sequence. Papias wins again.
Air-conditioning units and refrigerators haven't changed since I first remember seeing some in the 1970s. They are big and noisy, such that - if you find yourself in a bedsit apartment or a hotel-room - you just have to learn to live with intermittent engine noise. Oh yeah and such use liquid coolants, often toxic and/or horrendous for our atmosphere (remember CFCs?). At least they're a consistent price; you know what to budget for.
There's also Einstein's fridge. I guess. It didn't take off.
It turns out that a third design exists: the Peltier. They're smaller and quieter. Peltier, unfortunately, relies on a slate of seperate joined parts, complicating the design and running up the price. (Our Peltiers are less "efficient" as well but the real waste in AC and refrigeration isn't the unit, it's the moron opening the door all the time.) Looking around, I find Peltiers used for small-scale projects like keeping beer cold in camping-trips. Mostly the process is for laboratories where they need to cool small samples and don't care about the cost as much. It's been mooted for cars... which means it is not currently used for cars outside chillin' yer tush.
Here is a paper that they've got a simpler, cheaper, and more efficient Peltier. That'll scale Peltiers up to the car level, I think.
This seems as good a moment as any, as we await both the birth of our Lord and the launch of James Webb, to take stock on astrophysics. From last December to this one. Actually from March to now, when I'd "sage'd this post" indexing my work.
First up, which happened (too) late here, we solved the Venus problem - that is, the means to shift freight from Venus' floating cities to the LVO. That shall be done by Paul Birch's orbiting magnetic ring. This incidentally also stands to cool the place. Post, un-sage'd!
Before we get that ring (with elevator) built up, consider more cloud-to-LVO rocketry. This also took awhile to find but: Lightcraft, especially if it ends with a tether.
Last winter we found free-return Venus/Earth cyclers which weren't Hohmann. One was the 2L4 - which gets only as far as STL1; the other (superior) was 3-0-2-9 or, if you like, 1.5L1.
These require high-thrust manoeuvres to get in and out. To that end I sussed out the difference between NERVA and Boom Boom.
Back when I'd given up on Venus proper I did more work on SVL2 which I thought would be the only human presence in Venus' vicinity. I got very excited about Ebrahimi-Alfvén, for stationkeeping. I floated some cockamamie ideas on how to supply SVL2 with water which I'll spare you today.
Elsewhere several advances have been made in getting cargo up off our own planet into LEO, in both theory and practice. Most of those were for smallsats (Rocket Lab) or for nonfragile commodities (SpinLaunch). For a canned monkey SpaceX shows the most promise, if we let them.
The books of Reigns include a story wherein a Prophet miraculously restores to a woodcutter his lost axe, metonymed "the iron". In these books the Prophet is Elisha. The Gospels may refer to this miracle when they have Jesus walking on water and fishing Simon Peter out of that water.
The original story parallels an Aesopian fable. Here, after the woodcutter loses his iron axe, the Satan shows up. (In Greek this Divine Diabolos is Hermes.) First the Devil raises a gold axe; the woodcutter says, that ain't it. Then a silver one. Still no. Finally he raises up the iron. THERE you go! So the Devil, impressed with the woodcutter's honesty, lets him keep that. (Also blah blah the gold and silver, etc etc contrast with a less-honest woodsman yawn. This poast doesn't care about the sequel.)
William Hansen's 2002 Ariadne's Thread, a book I used to own but abandoned (stupidly), discusses the Aesopian version. It's in the first-century Collectio Augustana. The Greeks chose Hermes - this book says - because Hermes is the god of lucky finds and also a woodland deity. Hansen dismisses the importance of the river; he thinks the story is originally Greek. Vridar of course pounces on it all as a potential Biblical plagiary against classical Greece, because he wants a Hellenistic-era Bible.
Pace Hansen, I'd give more credence to Recension II (AD 300-499?) which explicitly associates this story's Hermes with that river. As he notes, a proverb came about that a river does not always bring axes
. I suggest the story was of an Iron Age river spirit, first. We up in Colorado can report that rivers do sometimes bring gold, and can tell you through silver or iron oxides what other ores might sit upstream. Pace Vridar that would make this story... an old one. Iron fit for woodwork is available to the average Yosef, but still not exactly cheap. 800ish BC if truly Greek... maybe older if Lydian (note, Aesop himself will be - classically - considered more Lydian than Greek, and the lands of Midas and Croesus owned ores a-plenty back then).
The folktale was subsequently reässigned to a trickster-spirit: Pan or Hermes in Greek (and Phrygian?), the Satan in Canaan. As southern Canaan grew less henotheist, Israel re-re-assigned this tale to some prophet probably, still, more concerned with the woodcutter's honesty. Our edition of Reigns locked this to Elisha, thus erasing the moral of it. If the "Deuteronomist's History" thesis holds then this violence was done in King Josiah's court.
Which makes me wonder if the original prophet of Israel, who attracted the first cycle of edifying stories, say under Omri and Ahab: was no less than Balaam of the famous talking "donkie".
...by stalling approval for the launch.
I disagree with Zim that we focus on these "bureaucrats" as "unelected". First, they are implementing the desires of the slovenly, envious, and maleducated electorate who got them into their bureaux. That is a more northeastern electorate, we shall allow - and it might be changing. But. What if we did let The Local Community vote on it? How's it going in Camden?
Also Elon Musk, G-d bless and keep him, has the autist's eye for individual targets not quite seeing that those targets all attend the same yoga club. When anyone goes on Babylon Bee, mocks Bezos, identifies CNN as a paedo den, and slams Elizabeth Warren; these people are allies to one another and to the Administrative State.
I will agree with Zim that a civilisation cannot be run like this and remain a civilisation for long.
As for what to do: more space-scientists need to make their voices heard. Say someone like, oh, Triton Station made half as much noise about Starship development now as he did about "black lives" last year. We might actually have our Triton Station, and supplies to man it. Okay okay, that'd be a Lunar station, to start with, but...
And the government of Texas should get involved. NOAA is acting like a court. In that capacity it is denying Elon Musk his Sixth Amendment right to a swift legal process. We see what happens when rocket engineering has no deadlines; this isn't a joke.
UPDATE 3:40 PM MST: Oh look, Putin has a space programme too. You want Elon to head up the Energia Β Projekt? Because that's what NOAA is going to get.
When last we were looking at high-impulse engines (sacrificing thrust), we were looking at the Ebrahimi Alfvén plasma torch. This came out of Princeton's fusion works. Princeton also owns a lab for actual thrusters; last night they announced progress on the Hall design.
DEFINITION 4/18/22: Lou Grims.
As intimated last weekend, it's all well and good to have a high energy process, but if your chassis melts or even reacts with the plasma, you don't have an engine; you might even have a bomb. Best is not to have a chassis at all, as such. These are possible because, hey, ions can be channelled with magnets; in practice, the plume widens at exit. I hadn't known we cared after the plume was out of the tube but, apparently, we care.
Princeton propose a segmented
(concentrically joined
) electrode. The propellant they've chosen is xenon. For that, the application will be the smaller satellites, "cube sats".
I am curious: does it scale to Ebrahimi's design; can it focus ionised helium from a fusion drive? 'Tis possible both designs already blast the plasma so fast outward there's not much value in focusing the plume further. And with the latter, they'd like to deal with the neutrons before getting into ions.
Welp, we got let out early. So on topic of the Kentish Invasion, Razib Khan points to this lactase-persistence chart. He recommends it for textbooks on "selective sweeps".
Milk doing a "Briton" good actually started in the Middle Bronze Age, diverging from Central Europe about 2000 BC. 1400 BC represents an inflexion as the numbers pivot upward. Inevitably it tapers, toward today's 0.8 (80%), over the first century or two BC. (That's about when Central Europe starts its own rise.) Seems like Kent's killer app.
Animal husbandry made sense on an island never quite as fertile as France, nor as wooded as Germany. Continental livestock was, I guess, the pig, which nobody milks. Cows too; but if they had more land so more cattle, they could spare cattle like pigs, for hides and meat. Sure, cheeses, butters, and yoghourts too; but these keep and ship better (Louis Pasteur as yet unborn), so go for export. Across the Channel, nobody was that big a landowner. Each farm needed to make the most of Bessie - right there, right now. That milk got drunk at home.
Last winter this blog flooded the zone on Sean Anthony. David Powers is on that case. He is... less forgiving, than I was.
Powers, like me, came to Anthony's book with published material as overlaps Anthony's dataset. I admit to some annoyance that Anthony had not referred to my work when he did his work. I don't overlap Powers, much, for my part; Powers is on the sura 4 / sura 33 beat. It turns out that Anthony didn't refer to any of Powers' work, on that score, either. Anthony claimed the Qurân bears no biographical material on the Prophet. Uh. Dude. Sura 33?
If you assert that the Qurân is unfit for the sîra, you need an argument as to why sura 33 doesn't count. I can dismiss sura 33, because my two projects didn't touch that particular sura - here's the thing, tho': both those projects say as much. Can Anthony dismiss sura 33? I'd argue that he can. But - says Powers - Anthony has to argue that point. Anthony has to say as much.
Reich's lab has gotten around to publishing That Talk from last month. Which, as noted, constrains the theories on the Coming Of The Welsh - so far.
We start with that county on the opposite side of the island from the Welsh. "Kent" is a Celtic term. The BBC tell us Kent was founded by Celts 1400 BC, as Sims-Williams conjectured last year. 1000 BC is when the Kentish genes swamp what's now England and Wales. Sparing Pictland and Ireland.
Some moron on Twitter was sneering at the "irony" that the Scots and Irish aren't real Celts but, bah to that. Everyone knows Q-Celtic ain't P-Celtic. Even the English know that. I'd give a fairer hearing to theories that Q-Celtic and P-Celtic are like Baltic: perhaps less interrelated of themselves, as being two branches of a three branched tree, Italic being the third branch of Celtic, like Slavic be the third branch of Baltic. But I shall leave that to actual linguists.
Barry Cunliffe is saying that the Q-Celtic languages should have arrived earlier, but I don't buy this (yet). Q-Celtic (albeit more conservative, closer to Old Latin) could have been brought - and preserved - by a sea-route from the Spanish and Breton coasts. Sims-Williams by "Celtic" may mean specifically P-Celtics like Welsh and (northern) Gaulish. Lara Cassidy is with me on this one, that Ireland's DNA needs to be next up for study.
As to the success of Irish: Tocharian should have taught us that more-conservative languages are not necessarily spoken by the more-decadent people. Toch-A (for Agnean) was the innovative branch. Its manuscripts are swamped by Toch-B (for, er, Kuchean). Latin is more conservative than Greek. Arabic is arguably more conservative than any of the other West Semitics. And so on.
What the researchers conjecture about lactase-persistence in the British Isles, being a result of crisis, is near-proven for the spread of Old Irish in Ireland, that it followed a turn-of-millennium crisis.
EUROGENES 12/23: Smoke if you got 'em.
There are two well-tested ways forward in a multiethnic society. One is segregation. Unless you are Swiss this gets enforced in Lenin's direction: who/whom. Another is integration. This gets enforced by neutral parties. By definition, such parties won't be living with the consequences. You can see why people keep thinking (or hoping) for alternatives.
Chloe Valdary last week picked up Derrick Bell's Silent Covenants and found something striking: in Bell's application of "critical-theory" to race, Bell wanted school choice without forced busing. Without irony if you liked your school you could keep your school.
Bell sounded a lot like... Thomas Sowell. Sowell may or may not have been aware of this. Most on the Right are unaware. The Left of course doesn't care because their sole motivation is to bash the fash, fash being Lenin's whom.
On "Kendi" Rogers' so-called equity, Valdary agrees with Richard Hanania. Namely, it's mainstream of Civil Rights.
WEB DuBois, after 1934 when the New Deal disillusioned him, went more to Bell's side. Note, 1929-35 is when DuBois was compiling Black Reconstruction. Leave aside what we say about DuBois' opponents today. Did DuBois ever have regrets?
Before paper was cheap, and before plastics became a thing, "post-it notes" took the form of broken pottery sherds / shards. Ostraca for past peoples were the most valuable form of lower-middle-class accountancy and, for us, of social studies into the past.
I don't know why the Mycenaeans (for one) didn't think to use ostraca for their accounts; maybe because where we've excavated, the accounts were all run at the palace without thought to the local markets.
Anyway, via Saraceni: Atribis @Sohag. This is a bit upstream of the White Monastery and Akhmim / Panopolis but not as far as Nag Hammadi; I cannot make more sense of the Wiki. Lower Egypt got papyrus by the skiffload but Upper Egypt, it seems, went the ostraca route. Thirteen thousand ostraca are here. In demotic, hieratic, Coptic, Greek and Arabic
. They say "also", which I take means a second deposit, more ostraca specifically Roman-to-East-Roman. These will cluster Coptic and Greek.
By Coptic up here... they don't tell us. We can start with "not Bohairic". I expect something like Akhmimic at first, just because that's the conservative dialect (pdf). Moving on to Sahidic as that subAkhmimic "Lycopolitan" variant gained prestige as The Christian Language, and pushed south. You can see that process already up in Nag Hammadi: some texts are pure Lycopolitan, others are Sahidic.
The excavators think there was a school here, and one ostracon reproduced here does look like an exercise in practicing the letter "C", more likely the Coptic / Byzantine "S" tho'. I wonder if we'll be seeing quotes from common prayers.
Although I do wonder if the school ever bothered teaching Latin. (Probably not.) But how about Nubian? ...Meroitic?
That phosphine hype last year was just that: hype. Instead, MIT (and Cardiff and Cambridge UK) are now looking at ammonia - again.
We'd like to know whether life even can survive in Venus' clouds, maybe 35°C at 1.3 bar pressure of Carbon Dioxide. MIT think it can: ammonia dissolved in sulfuric acid makes the acid less like a leaky battery and more like a lemon juice.
The life would produce ammonia - to survive - and give off oxygen as waste. The paper says it gets the ammonia from the ambient nitrogen, of which Venus has twice as much as we have (buried in the CO2).
Seems like something the floating zeppelins would dearly love to have in the outer layers of their habitat. Oxygen and weak acid seems a sight better than unbreathable air and strong acid.
Cerno made some comments this weekend concerning the "Pachamama". He basically came out as a Gnostic, citing the Apocryphon of John.
By CS Lewis' criteria, we have to take seriously that Cerno has been visited by a Divine spirit. Either he's a liar, a lunatic, or a prophet. Cerno doesn't strike me as either of the first two.
The Catholic Church is also aware of Pachamama. An idol of hers ended up in the Vatican late in 2019 - just before we were all visited by plague, especially the older and more religious of us.
What to make of all this, then. The Maya in Mel Gibson's Apocalypto ask for a goddess' intercession. It strikes many Catholics as voodoo to have indigenous goddesses treated as Catholic saints. Although... the Irish did this as well, with their goddess Brigit.
If we allow Brigit, it is hard to deny Pachamama and that Maya goddess. And if we allow them, it's also hard to deny Allah.
On our way to the torchship, among our engineering constraints is temperature. As we energise the exhaust to high speed - increasing our Isp - something has to heat it. The hottest stuff gets ejected but some errant fallout will go sideways. Absent various unobtania like magnetic shielding (against ions) and the perfect mirror (against radiation), that's a solid chamber wall. Which will get hot.
Tom Mueller notes rhenium radiation cooled combustion chambers. Looking around, I find "Design, analysis, and fabrication of oxide-coated iridium/rhenium combustion chambers"... from 1993. The numbers check out: Mueller says hours at over 2500K
, the abstract says 15 hours at 2200°C and - yes - radiation-cooled
. The private companies offering these chambers say the same: 2200°C.
Rhenium melts before tungsten would, and (say the commenters) it's ten times as expensive; but it seems easier to work with chemically. Those old lightbulbs burned in vacuum. For a rocket what's the point of a chassis that doesn't melt if it reacts with the plasma long before it even starts glowing.
Similar constraints will apply to NERVA engines like Ultra Safe's. Maybe they use ceramics. Anyway, one more reason for them to stick with HALEU.
Then the question moves to, can we construct such chambers on the cheap. We might want several of these on the same rocket... like the Raptors. NASA were working on that in 2016.
If we had abundant rhenium down here (or in an orbiting factory for that matter) that would help too. It's the usual story: once in space, everything is cheaper, but we're not in space, so to get into space is expensive.
ToughSF-twitter points us to "Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gasses, Chemistry, and Imaging Plus". We're in acronym hell, here...
The tech report URL hints that the powerpoint presentation is from May 2020, so - I missed it. They were looking at flyby November 2026 and September 2027, so to insert April 2028. Like Magellan. The actual work would be done that November, over Alpha Regio.
The people posing for the photo at the end are wearing woke hijab. Maybe as a (probable) late-spring 2020 fling. Although I fear they'd be wearing the same if they did it today.
Also they have Earth at the inner edge of the Solar habitable-zone. My readers may or may not buy that; it is Conveniently Truthy for the warming-alarmists. Personally I do buy that, as a member of the Paul Birch Society. Venus, of course, is no longer in habitable scope.
If she ever was. Part of the mission was to ask if this planet ever had oceans. They point out that the James Webb has a bias to Venus-zone planets so, learning more about Venus right here will help figure out the new exoplanets coming online.
I like that it's not just krypton and other inertia, but also phosphorus chemistry. Wonder if that's piggybacking off the phosphine hype we'd had. Either way, if we're going to have floaty farms over that planet, they'll need their own phosphorus.
UC Davis reports on Kr-78 (radioactive, but a slow burn) and -80 in our "deep mantle". Kr-86 too where they could get it. Kr-84 is most common here at 57%.
Deep mantle is Earth before 44254460 Mya. It sends its hot rocks to research-accessible depths at Iceland, cross-checked with Galapagos. This magma looks like carbonaceous(?) chondrites: although, less Kr-86 than the 17.28% we find up there. Our mantle in turn differs from this its crust. Tho' carbon tends to signify outer belt...
UPDATE 12/23: ... ah. They're non-carbonaceous. Like chondrites that would have formed in the inner system, but no longer exist free of inner planets.
So they think that the Kr-86 in our crust and air would have been delivered by, exactly, meteorites; after the Big Splat.
Porky the Telescope is coming.
The article considers in part how to raise, not just mass, but diameter beyond Earth-Luna escape, here STL2. Although I blogged that already. I am, further, tonight, holding off on the "Latinx" posturing of this half-brasileirão and highly privileged family; that is why we have Ace. So anyway -
Maybe Webb is launching Christmas Eve. More likely Holy Family Day - "Boxing Day", if you like. Launch windows to STL2 are allowed until 6 January; then the Moon gets in the way for another week. A large problem here, in terms of cost-overrun, was Inventory, a class of "waste" for the Agile method. We actually must keep this thing in liquid nitrogen like a superconductor - constantly. There's a (literally) cool $10M for every month it's not in space.
One hero(ine) here - if you are a hard Democrat voter like Peter Woit - was Senatrix Barbara Mikulski of Maryland. Some of us non-Acela types consider the Webb project as a excessive expenditure on par with... an aircraft-carrier.
Would we have been better off awaiting a Lunar colony and assembling it all in a lava-tube... maaaaybe. Would we have been better off awaiting the Starship to cut launch cost. I am unsure. I am more sure those would have been better priorities than this nice-to-have telescope.
But that's just it, isn't it? Once the costs are sunk, we have to keep spending to ensure it is not all wasted, like that Superconducting Supercollider in Waco was abandoned thus wasted. Money must be allocated for maintenance and for additional safety protocol. Elon can fail, up to a point, if his costs are in the mid-millions. Once in the hundred-millions, a project cannot fail and balloons to the billions. And then the porkers in the Senate come out and say, "if you can spend $x billion on this, why not a piddling $y million on MY district".
A couple days back, spacers got promised a new sleeping bag. This resolves a problem for airbreathers in microgravity for extended periods: fluid builds up in the skull to such an extent that it deforms the eyeball. Yeowch!
I wonder if this contributes to the brain damage as well, although - it seems - the eyes go first. UPDATE 5/17/22: Besides Russian-approved exercise... and their space-pants.
As a rule I don't want people in microgravity for extended periods. If we're going anywhere past the Moon, or even if we're hanging out in TLL1 or Gateway or wherever before even landing on the moon, we should be Spinning The Drum. But.
Say we have a shuttle that goes a little astray and runs out of sufficient propellant to return. Or, say we have an asteroid mining ship that needs to chase after a phat nugget of platinum. Might be a week to catch up to that, on a shoestring vessel without spin. And we'll be hibernating. Here, I can see this bag of use.
The Lightcraft is for any (light!) freight over an atmosphere-bearing planet in the 8-10 m/s2 range. It shortchanges Tsiolkovsky but doesn't totally cheat him: it still needs propellant to push that last push from Mach Ludicrous Speed to actual orbit.
Consider a barge in a very eccentric orbit around the planet, such that it skates the upper stratosphere. When done and back out of atmo, tethers redirect the payload back to a high-apo[Greek word for Keplerian focus] trajectory, which barge then falls back to the atmo for another load.
So: no more propellant. On Earth, if 5550 kg: we now allow 800 kg payload. I assume more if Venus and Titan especially since the upper atmosphere extends higher.
Same model can be used for a scoop to get volatiles like nitrogen and oxygen into low-orbit, if we don't yet have the full ring. I don't expect this for Earth but it might work for, again, Venus and Titan. Maybe Mars (pdf), as repurposed for feeding Phobos.
As with the orbital-ring, ProjectRho does have a placeholder for the Lightcraft... but that's about all it offers, sketches. As we await new content over there, and for that matter at the ToughSF / Matter Beam blog, ToughSF happens to run a Twitter account... hence how I found out about this.
The Lightcraft is a revolutionary design from 1987-8 in the wake of the Challenger disaster. Dissidents in NASA proposed to replace the Shuttle with something cheaper. As in... a LOT cheaper. It also borrowed design from the Apollo project, back when NASA were getting stuff to work right.
You can read the 166 page spec at archive.org. Assuming Earth: The gross liftoff mass is 5550 kg, of which 500 kg is the payload and 300 kg is the LH2 propellant.
The first stage is retrievable (after burning through its fuel). So they were promising payload delivery cost of $3.11/lb meaning $6.86/kg in Reaganbux. (Their metric was the 100kg "person", kek.)
That propellant wasn't even to go to its maximum aero (Mach 25!). The liquid molecular hydrogen was to boost from aero to orbit. Honestly I would not be married to that propellant. Launch could be cheaper overall with the newer propellants or just Elon's methalox. UPDATE 12/15: If we have an eccentric-orbit tether we might not need even that. UPDATE 1/18/21: The Ionic Ramscoop? ...anyone?
As to why nobody picked up on the Lightcraft plan, well... it needs external platforms to fire lasers at the stratosphere, to get this thing to that Mach 25 (where I guess the ramscoop might take over). Quite a few moving-parts, here. Jordin Kare in 1991 followed up with a laser thermal rocket a.k.a. the heat exchanger (HX) thruster ... but it hasn't been much looked-at, since.
The researchers were hoping to get those lasers into space - eventually. I imagine the Soviet Union although moribund would have objected to space lasers penetrating near to spyplane- and scramjet-altitude. I know that horrible movie Real Genius so objected.
Mainly I suspect that "in the wake of the Challenger" also meant (ironically perhaps) more conservatism at NASA and less general interest in alternatives to NASA. So all we got was a safer Shuttle. Until, you know, that second disaster, two decades later.
Times have changed and the present concern is, how to compete with the Starship. For that, the Lightcraft may find its niche. We might not need ground or space platforms if we can float the laser(s) on balloons right up close. Or fly them on Aether. Nuclear ramjets, if over Venus.
Today is the feast of Lucia in Syracuse; a Greek city ruled from, I think, Milan at the time (d. AD 304). I find the evidence for her sanctity insufficient, and move this feast be abolished in favour of a saint better-attested.
Lucia Lightbringer is matron of the eye. Personally, I am happy to have a saint for that. Except that Lucia's life, to the extent it had meaning, is irrelevant to vision.
Over her short adult life Lucia decided she didn't want to marry. On AD 304, one of her gamma-tier suitors ratted her out. Diocletian was still Emperor, with Maximian as Augustus; those terrible twos would not resign until the next year.
I agree, the manboy who had Lucia killed must answer for his sin. I also agree that Lucia deserved better. However. Lucia also had motive. Which motive, matters.
The motive which the Catholics ascribe is that she had consecrated her virginity, in which case it wouldn't matter to whom she was betrothed. Alternatively - we are always warned for vulgar-Christianity that the source material isn't great - Lucia simply did not want to marry a pagan, especially not this pagan (and hoo boy did he ever prove her right). Her "consecration" was then a desire to hold out for a nice Catholic boy.
Is there enough evidence to say, which? I'd grant to Lucia the benefit-of-doubt; she was, after all, still young, and events would support her immediate decision. Unfortunately the Catholic sources make her out badly. They venerate Lucia for being a "virgin" as such. I am sorry but this reason is not pro-life.
Because we do not know, until we do know, we should not accept Lucia (admittedly misused in life) into the canon.
INSTEAD 6:40 PM MST: Robert of Lincoln, of the large testes. (My Latin might need work.)
Among Casey Handmer's 17 November Starship recommendations was for warming Mars. He'd have Elon run a honkin' mirror or several at SML2. Maybe L1 too. Consider this a sequel to "Librations".
Everything here applies equally to redirecting extra solar energy (which I will call "exergy") to Venus' floating cities and low-orbit satellites, including its orbital ring. Or for that matter toward Mars' satellites especially Deimos.
My first animadversion to that is that L1 and L2 are metastable. Any satellite at either point needs stationkeeping. Luckily, the Sun provides propellant in the form of solar-wind, so a sail might do it for low mass. Unluckily the planet sits in the way of the L2 focus, shadowing it. At L1, we have another problem: the point blocks the sun from the planet. So each orbit stands to be a wide one: Lagrange, not Lissajous. Besides that, we have that L2 is further from the planet so gets less Solar irradiance. So L1 is the priority for a heat-up-now solution; if on a wide-enough halo it might even coëexist with Lissajous ad hoc flare-protection.
For Venus in particular, I want L2-Lissajous for a permanent installation, being shady and easiest-access to the rest of the System. SVL2 is, thus, a net consumer of energy, not an exergetic mirror. I have pondered L2-Lagrange to aid this station but such must be stationkept as well, and jostle with visitors.
We cannot get around that L2-Lissajous on this scale cannot sail so needs propellant. The Ebrahimi Alfvén engine is the highest-efficiency propellant-accelerator thus far mooted, short of thermonuclear fusion.
L2-Lissajous aside, at Venus' orbit is easily solar energy to spare, even after stationkeeping, to beam useful power to the inner satellites and L2. For planets further out L1, L3/4/5, and finally L2 present a progressively tougher call: larger mirror means more propellant and more endo-ergy. For Mars "we'll make it up in volume" comes to mind . . .
For the longer term, a planet might swing mirrors at L4 and L5 where they don't need stationkeeping and they're closer the Sun than L2. Should some go astray, we don't care too much and a high-orbit rescue can retrieve them with reasonable delta-V. These are wider halo orbits so will be using some of that solar radiation to turn the mirror. To even out exergy, where the planet's orbit is elliptic (read: Mars) best to orbit so their periods match the planetary highs and lows.
My problem with all these distant points is attenuation. Assuming tightbeams, the Inverse Square Law is the floor, which can assume vacuum. But. L4 and L5 are always 60° from the orbiter, fore and aft respectively. That means each forms an equilateral triangle; so the light-distance between that Point and the orbiter is always the orbiter's astronomical-unit. Space is almost a vacuum here in the solar-bubble, but still an imperfect vacuum. Best-case, Mars gets an extra sun or two, each shining at maybe a tenth irradiance over the whole globe, whose "noon" revolves around 1/6 of a day before and/or after true noon. Venus (and Earth absent orbital-ring), by contrast, won't want the extra warming; our L4/L5 tightbeams will be limited to radio. By the way, radio aside: I class a Flaz Gaz Heat Ray at Martian distance as severe unobtanium.
A high polar orbit is less silly. Again, here each satellite shall be uneven in what gets directed where. This is mitigated (in lieu of stationkeeping) by having two (or more) polar mirrors, so that at the time of year the Sun is shining edge-on to one, the other one is Sun-facing.
I missed this talk 19 November: "Large-Scale Migration into Britain During the Middle to Late Bronze Age". David Reich. Maybe also N. Patterson.
The main Indo-European signifier in Western Europe is R1b. Wales, Ireland, and most of what's now southern England was R1b-L21 by 2000 BC. Wales / England remains heavily the L21 subset, as we go west (I am L21, my ancestry is Severn). So I was unaware of any genetic break from the Early Bronze Age to the Roman era.
This means IndoEuropean Britain was an Early Bronze Age phenomenon, I think drawn thither exactly by the best copper alloy-material available, namely Cornish tin. Back home in Europe protoCelts perhaps calling themselves Volcae had extruded into Bavaria by 1200 BC. Italic and (probably) Lusitanian, paraCeltic both, I think had got into central Italy and western Iberia some centuries earlier. Implying that the first British Indo-Europeans were also paraCeltic... at first.
The extent to which south Britain's IndoEuropean chieftains and druids kept in pace with the Continental Celts would depend on regular contact between south Britain and the northwest Continent (UPDATE 1/27 which we'll see in MBA-LBA plagues). To be kept in mind, historically France had the population advantage over Britain absent imports. England got as far as it did from AD 1100 through events like the Norman kings forcing imports from France, then the British Navy scouting the Caribs and Cape Cod, and finally the agricultural tech of the Industrial Revolution. "Paleolithic HVAC Technician" / @AccurateCaption wonders how lopsided the balance, when the "Vampire Of The Continent" couldn't batten upon her host.
So far I have been aware of a sharp break in southeast British material culture 900 BC. The value of bronze collapsed and its jewelry thrown away. For the British, I think, "LBA" ends here, not in 1200 BC as in the eastern Med.
Reich and Patterson are telling us that this economic break represented the tail-end of a racial break. Over 1000-875 "BCE" (sic), a signature bearing more Farmer ancestry than the old British genome rose to a full half of the south British population. These must have been migrants
. They believe that this formed the vector
for Brythonic Celtic. This means: before 1000 BC, Britain was an island.
After 875 BC, the insular / continental gene-flow stopped. Britain became an island again. Until the Caesar-era Belgae I suppose, but they're hard to distinguish from the Roman invasions close on their heels.
EPILOGOI -
I am unsure what the research says about Old Irish, a famously conservative Q-Celtic tongue, as of 900 BC; they will hit their worst bottleneck at the millennium's turn, perhaps mediated by Continental meddling and diseases. Which will culminate in that Roman embassy although I'd not set Drumanagh itself before the Flavians.
I am wondering now about Macsen, Spanish-born hero of Cambria; was his rebellion driven by Welsh physical hunger?
The I2a2-line as we know it, now German, started to return(?) into East Anglia later. Certainly after the Iceni were gone; into the Roman era "Boudicca" is a Celtic name, for what that's worth, but at least shows Old Brythonic as still a prestige-language in the insular southeast. We'll see that I2a2 M284 bump AD 117.
The "lab leak hypothesis" (why not give it its abbrev: "LLH") broke out of Q-e-stan, for me anyway, when Razib Khan approved Alina Chan's findings on his blog. Chan then co-wrote a book, Viral. Stephen Glass' former digs at The New Republic trashed that book.
Kelsey Piper finds something interesting: there are no scientists, immunologists, epi people, public health people, people who've worked on the Covid origins questions, no one, quoted in the whole piece
. The whole piece
would refer to piece that's reviewing [the] book
. 'Tmay be of interest how TNR is getting funded these days.
Whilst we're here, soi-disant Lion Of The Blogosphere / HalfSigma is onto Xi's nu "Omicron" variant. Ν-Ξ-Ο diverged from the others' base mid-2020 and is only rising up recently. In my esteem generally "Lion" ranks alongside RawMuslGlutes, on account of both clowns Asking Questions about Sarah Palin's pregnancy back in 2008. Although, that was a long time ago; Lion did better at predicting just how bad the virus would get. So, you might not want Lion as your gynaecologist, but he's doing fine as epidemiologist.
The present leonine take is that Omicron only seems mild because CoVID always starts mild whilst it's ruining your lungs - Gradually Then All At Once, as they say. But also if you took the jab (or already had the bug) it's mild. Milder, if you're not a fat old slob. From my perspective the only reason "to boost" for this is to avoid Teh Crud like I'd caught last June.
Which reason is, I concede, a good reason. When we get that Ν-Ξ-Ο booster.
UPPER 12/15: This variant has min/maxed to spread through the bronchials. Not the lung. So, indeed, pace "Lion": less dangerous. Pretty much an airbourne vaccine, itself . . .
KENNEDY 12/15: The Associated Press on the grassy knoll. Except: this shot is a miss. The piece is so unbalanced, including so many slanders and guilt-by-association ("adjacency", in Newspeak), that it nears unreadability. It just adds more fuel for those who claim that Big Journalism cares more for divisa et impera than for the facts. h/t Drudge but it's not that site's fault, not really.
There's a whitepaper out, on putting powerful rocket-propelled missiles on the Moon. This for defence against meteors; although I should bring in the STL1 magnet against Carrington, which would require a rocket component, as long as it needs station-keeping.
The various solar-system moons all have less gravity than our Earth, so can support larger rockets than our planet can. With the notable exception of Titan they also don't have atmospheric interference. As long as Earth is inhabited, we on Earth should like defence against space rocks, either mindlessly intersecting us or, perhaps, flung this way by future hostiles - The Expanse has cited the Belt, here. And nobody is terraforming any of the airless satellites; thus, most of their surfaces will always be wasteland, allowing for even stronger (read: atomic) rockets - starting with Old Boom Boom himself.
Fair enough: I am sold. Problem: any rocket that is tank enough to pound a 100 km asteroid (or to balance, what, 500 kilotonnes of Rebco plus heat-mitigants at L1) is tank enough to plow Washington DC a new bayou. If that sounds fun to you, then consider triggering the Yellowstone Caldera or the Campi Flegrei near Naples. I know some of us talk carbon alternatives or even direct mitigation, but for the latter I should like more from the process.
So I wonder. Railguns in specific parts of the Moon that can't hit the Earth and can't be redirected to hit the Earth? The best place for that is the direct opposite side, pointing up. That gun will be strafing TLL2, admittedly. But that's a metastable site anyway and if we're worried about Apophis, we just tell the station-keepers to nap this one out for a few weeks. Of more concern is that the rock won't be in the exact sights of the railgun like, ever. That'll be true of every railgun that isn't given the flexibility to point, load, and calculate energy-requirements.
My answer is a rocket launched from the Orion site - TLL2 remains a fine place for the post-Orion rocket to hang out, so that site can be the farside as mooted earlier. Railguns can feed to it more propellant and more mass generally once it gets to L2. Then run it to Apophis. We are absolutely maximising mass and velocity for this; I foresee a high-Isp solution, saving on propellant, because what's thrust at L2.
Once past the overstuffed first chapter and the two otiose chapters following, Mark Durie gets to the three chapters which count. These sketch out the Qaric theology and rasulology, and then the Platonic forms underlying the religious vocabulary. The Quran is, indeed, a feat of linguistic voodoo. Allâh is not God any more than either is Bondyé (the "good god") in Haiti. Gerald Hawting was wrong.
This isn't Durie's first rodeo, but Amazon has stuck Durie in the "Christian" millet; thence he's been unable to reach the Quran-Studies mainstream. Durie's sensei Andrew Bannister has, perhaps, done better. After decades of Reynolds, Akyol, and so many others arguing for a "Biblical subtext" (xxxiii-v); Durie sees most of the Biblical themes they'd chosen as supertext. Now, Durie might be able to prove his point. Pity Amazon still hasn't presented his text properly.
As of AD 600-45, many Biblical beliefs ended up in the wider milieu of what Donner has called the "Believer" movement. An Arab in Syria could maintain (say) the return of Jesus the Christ to rule in glory. Such a post-Christian Arab would even know what "Masih" meant. But the qurra never allowed such to compose a sura. The first sura to cite "Isa al-Masih" did not know what that meant (and its Jesus isn't Davidide). Instead, the qurra in their own world tried time and again to pound the Devil, Adam, Moses, Mary, Jesus and others into their worldview. It may be that a few post-Christians (or post-Jews) got some of their compositions past the Qaric net but, if they did, they too had to affect the ignorance - sincere or feigned - of the first qurra. To play their game, gotta use their rules.
The first rule of Quran is: Allâh is above. He does not manifest Himself on Earth - ever. He does not exist in, say, a burning bush. Where the Quran mentions "Sakinah", that is like "Al-Masih": it doesn't mean anything.
Allâh communicates to jinns and men through scripts relayed through rsl and nzl roots; His medium down here is the rasûl. Where another office appears, like the nabi or the caliph ("Messiah" as noted being forgotten), the Quran tries to hammer him (or her!) into the rasûl category. The rasûl is in competition with the sahir and sometimes the kahin.
Allâh is unbound by His Biblical promises. 'ahd and mithaq may look like Biblic "covenantal" phrases, but this God doesn't feel 'em. I'd add that Allâh does offer (other) promises to His Believers; but here, Allâh mainly does so by declaring various elements in heaven and/or earth as collateral. The Quran owns no theory of Covenant.
Likewise ruh and rih may look like - they ARE - the same Semitic terms for wind and breath as are in Hebrew, but unlike Septuagint / Luke pneuma these terms don't carry their Biblical weight to the Quran. In short where God breathes, Allâh commands blown. The God whom Daniel 6:26 called hayé qayamé gives life through his own breath. Allâh by contrast sends (rsl, nzl again) the wind. This too is sometimes through his jinn and angels, among which the Qurân will recruit Gabrîl (this dialect doesn't hamza).
As I look over this, Allâh looks like an Arabian wind god. (So hey - the "Moon God" meme remains a meme!) Some Arabians elevated this god over the other gods first by hailing him as "Allâh". Then the Nabati Arabs of Raqēmō-Petra, through the qurra, did their best to claim identity of this god with the God of transJordanian Jews and exiled Christians. But this lord of the air is not God. He never can be.
In 2002 Maureen McHugh gave a brief, in science-fiction form, against the Fountain Of Youth. McHugh was talking about economics and young male involuntary-celibacy.
Edward Dutton will add to that, the Mouse Utopia. This showed that Malthus was wrong, if applied to rodents (who are, I think, more closely related to primates than either are to, say, deer). When mice are freed from all care and want, they do not simply starve. Instead, they get androgynous: females get more aggressive and males get effeminate. If there's no upside to breeding, why bother.
Elon Musk offers a new argument: history of philosophy. Musk holds that death allows for old ideas either to die with the old people, or else to try their luck with the next generation.
I keep running into the question: what would Muhammad have had the Muslims do elsewise? Why can't a Muslim community live their Deen more healthily? Edward Dutton does get around to this, focusing on the House Of Wisdom so-called, under the Mutazilite 'Abbasids.
The later-/post-'Abbasid history raises up dozens if not hundreds of expert mathematicians (especially), which is exactly the g-loaded science which Dutton should elevate above all others. Although Dutton cites The Big Bang Theory which wonders if mathematicians exist on TOO high a level (PS: LOL).
Tannous would say, East-Syrian Christians helped out; and the Jews would likely add the Bavli community. We haven't even got into "Persianate" India. But it wasn't only "dhimmis" with the Muslims subsequently "stealing" their work. Dutton knows this. Instead, he suggests that the vast reaches of Islamic Empire widened the Islamic gene-pool. I would add, the 'Abbasid openness to interracial marriage under Islam. If the Arabs wanted to keep marrying their cousins, that was the Arabs' problem. The 'Abbasid caliphs, increasingly mixed-race as time went on, could leave 'em to rot. Ditto the Aryan Muslims over all those endogamous jati tribes across the Indus. Edward Dutton, in an inter-ethnic marriage himself, is no Madison Grant.
Thus: the "Lost Enlightenment", continuing what other literature calls the "Iranian Intermezzo". [MARKER 7/21/22: I have, on this day, almost a decade later than I should have done, read Lost Enlightenment - beyond just the reviews thereof. I am not changing the text of this poast. POASTCHANGE 4/7/23: Okay, this one paragraph...]
Could the Persian(ate) Muslims have kept this run, running? Well... history as such cannot tell us "what-if", only "what"; and in this case the answer was, "they didn't". But then, Orthodox Christianity also "didn't". The West by contrast "did".
But for how long? To paraphrase that possibly-apocryphal Chinese comment, is it too soon to tell?
Edward Dutton is not good explaining Islam and its sects. These (dozens of) pages are riddled with howlers and are very sloppy. I find more enlightening, as it were, Dutton's discussion of Islam's "pillars".
These are practices which define Islam past some Sufian "iman" into a "deen". Such practices, it turns out, are shared with Latin Catholicism and, we can assume more-so, with the various "Orthodoxies". [Disclosure: I do not scare-quote all the Orthodoxies; this blog is highly partial to the Church of the East, secondarily to much of the Greek tradition although maybe not to this jerk.]
Dutton notes a Scandal Of The Mind, applicable to Christendom as well as to Islam. Dutton asserts that prayer makes you stupid. So, to him, does fasting. These ruin sleep-cycles; the latter also deprives the brain of nutrients. Their deleterious results have knock-on effects. In adulthood, if your brain isn't prepared to engage with IQ-115s, it is going to engage with IQ-85s. We're social animals; human engagement is necessary.
I dispute that regular prayer makes you stupid. Here is a study on what late-evening meditation does for your sleep-cycle. Yes, that is different from being kept up late and awakened early by some old goat bleating through a loudspeaker. But the Muslim who is far from the minaret should do better.
Fasting is likewise questionable. Many Muslims take it too far (biologically). So do many Catholics. The Church line (today) is that Lent is for fasting and almsgiving; sometimes the Shepherd by Hermas is cited (if not it should be). Many Christians believe that when you are fasting and not at the same time helping others, your sacrifice is vanity or even hypocrisy. Such Christians don't even need Hermas for that; they can cite Mark and Luke. Also there's the notion that "fasting" should entail giving up only those consumables which are bad for you. That's mainly alcohol. Lent is also a fine time to trim carbohydrates and to correct the winter weight gain. None of these course-corrections seems (to me) to be detrimental to IQ.
All this may be "Cope", from a committed Catholic. I expect these mitigating factors are what smart people do (or at least smart-aspirant), to stay in the community without compromising the brain; a less intelligent Catholic will mess this up.
Late-Antique Catholicism, which means Dark Age Catholicism, had some other foibles, in particular cousin-marriage. The Papacy and Charles the Great between them did fix much of this mess. I do wonder if we can meaningfully talk about a brain drain over the 300s-600s AD, before Islam as we know it. To this day the Hajnal Line is a thing.
Last weekend I received Edward Dutton's Islam: An Evolutionary Perspective - as turnaround from such Islamic literature as this one. Wikipedia HATES him!!
I can see why. In its first fifty pages, Dutton wastes no time in setting his text to the Right of Steven Pinker and even Gregory Cochran. It cites Richard Lynn and Philippe Rushton. Wew.
The book starts well in explaining the basics of psychometry. It assumes its readers all know the term "bell curve". Probably a safe assumption, for Dutton readers (who are Unz readers); but the term is loaded, so it turns off the rest of us. I should have dumbed the text even further down by illustrating the Exp(-x^2) curve, explaining this "Gaussian distribution" as fundamental to statistics as a mathematic. (Perhaps with smaller words.) Also, where the text cites Lynn and Rushton, maybe it were better to cite their sources, since more-primary is always better. We are on the Hadith Principle, and all.
Also of interest: the Dark Triad. Dutton posited that low-IQ implies low-empathy. So now we see that psychopathy is for morons. (Narcissism and Machiavellianism aren't. Explaining, perhaps, Ibn Khaldûn.) Maybe this nuance will enter into a future edition.
Dutton asks the right questions about religion - as a whole. Is any given religion good for IQ? What is "religion" in context of a community - what are "best practices"? What does Islamic orthopraxy do for IQ and for the Umma? If Islam is good for the Umma, what IQ would best suit Islam?
The star-through-planet Libration Points L1, L2, and L3 are all metastable such that I have little time for any terraforming-proposal which requires indefinite-period magnet-and-shield (Lissajous-1) or mirrors (Lagrange-2). Winchell Chung needs to sic his Rocket-Cat upon every blogger who floats such. I might however entertain a temporary installation, so far looking to the Martian mirror.
Today we are warned of hyperflares and Coronal Mass Ejections. Not just Carrington, not even the AD 775 carbon spike. EK Draconis is the real deal. For our Sun when it was younger, it was the real deal; although I doubt something like that might happen here, we must anticipate another AD 775 to happen here.
If such can be predicted, then might be worth the planet's while to get a big shield into S*L1. We'll want the tightest halo-orbit possible, so this "L" is for "Lissajous". It's temporary; but that's a feature, since normally we don't want to darken our planets. Before shipping out, the material would be best parked in a high orbit or maybe L4 or L5.
The question then moves to: first, how bad can we expect of the CME, and how much warning are we likely to get? We may be able to predict in terms of yellow/ orange/ red someday; maybe float it out to S*L1 every eleven years.
The flare will be less harsh at Mars and will take longer to get there. On the other hand, Mars' stable Lagrangians are that much further from L1. Probably best to store the materiel up on Deimos, and assemble the magnet on its way Sun-ward. I don't know about punching it with a torchship on account that will irradiate Mars from its own exhaust.
Earth and maybe Venus have less time to get the shield up on account they are closer the Sun. On the other hand: circular(ish) orbits each whose circumference is less. Might keep the magnet at L4 and/or L5 and go ahead with that torchship, toward L1.
MATERIEL 6/18/22: Bubbles.
Pardon my title; I do that sometimes. Pray for me. On this Day Of Obligation, Academia has sent to me "The Islamic Mary".
I'll raise here that I have no stake in this debate myself, as one who prays mercy for Nestorius every week I remember to. I don't consider Mary theotokos so I don't require her to be prokathartheisa. I believe it is Nishant Xavier who should come home
. Still: Xavier raises an excellent point about my fellow Dyothelete, Saint Sophronius. Sophronius had no problem venerating Mary as full of grace "among" women - meaning, beyond. As Younus Mirza points out, many Muslims have agreed.
Ibn Hazm is no orthodox Muslim's first choice as an authority. Nonetheless the Muslims always respected him as an 'alim; enough that his books got copied. Among Ibn Hazm's observations was that Mary[am] had received similar Divine attention as had Joseph; he concluded that Mary deserves to be considered a nabi (although not rasul). Says Mirza, the local Sunnis (Malikite by then) quickly accepted Ibn Hazm's theory even as they expelled the man. One such Maliki was Qurtubi. Qurtubi's tafsir acquired wide respect far beyond his Western base, as Ibn Khaldun noted.
I do not find anything inherent in Maliki fiqh as would demand this. Malikism had sprouted from al-Madina and spread to Egypt, neither province particularly tolerant nor feminist. What Ibn Hazm offered to the Malikis instead, was a promotion of Mary over Fatima. Fatima was no competition for a woman elevated to Joseph's stature in the veriest Book Of Allah.
Even before enforcement of Malikism, by the AD 850s the Andalusis had bound Mary to Muhammad in marriage in Paradise. An insult to Catholics, still numerous in the Maghreb; but an honour for Mary.
Ibn Hazm was in the context, in North Africa, of the Shi'a - especially, from the fourth century [tenth AD], the Fatimids. Such proposed Umm Husayn Fatima as the most righteous of Islamic women. The problem with that is that many Maghrebis remembered the Umayyads fondly. This was certainly true in Spain which had adopted an Umayyad amir against the 'Abbasids. In that century they'd even promote 'Abd al-Rahman III (back) to Caliph.
What I don't see in the West was much debate over either to accept some woman as worthy of sainthood. Here I will debate Mirza. I think the West was primed for it.
Over in the Maghreb, many Muslims were Imazighen whose women were of some stature. Not for them the circumcisions of Egypt or the mutilations of the Somalia. Also over in the Maghreb was a longstanding tradition of saint-veneration and, more directly, Latin Christianity. That form of Christianity was visited by no less than Sophronius' protégé Maximus the (somewhat) Dyothelete, immediately before the Muslims invaded and Maximus became a Confessor. So here was veneration of Mary mother of Christ but not theotokos (yet). Already.
All these themes came together in northwest Africa and southern Spain, the "Andalucía" also called "the Maghreb". There was always going to be a feminism here, even if expressed Islamically. The veneration of Mary as Christotokos was natural to them.
For some years now, and maybe even in Chalcolithic times, it's been known that copper alloys are great for killing germs. But then came the Iron Age and surgical tools were made of iron, or stainless steel. And hospital fixtures are plastics now. The result: MRSA.
"Hey, replace everything with BRONZE!!", I sometimes thought but - yeah, not exactly practical. Copper has never been cheap compared with iron. Well into the "Iron Age", I understand that prestige cutlery and weapons stayed bronze just because it worked better. Iron was for poors.
So now: the iron / copper bronze. Billed as a stainless steel, they got just enough copper that the price is right. And they sussed out how to mass-produce it.
I'd be looking seriously into this if I were designing deep-space fixtures, as well. Elon likes stainless steel. Although this alloy will be an inside material.
We've been saddled with Nöldeke's and Schwally's (buncombe) chronology of the Qurân for something like a sesquicentennium by now.
So far this blog has dealt with Aziz al-Azmeh and Sean Anthony; now I must add Mark Durie to the roll of shame (although writing before Anthony). Anthony somewhat had an excuse: he was writing about the post-Muhammadan tradition, so perhaps was simply pinching some incense to the regnant idol. Mark Durie can claim no such excuse; he sets his work (in the Introduction and first chapter) as a corrective to Gabriel Said Reynolds. Durie imagines he is based.
I was worried for Durie over that first chapter. I had hoped that Durie would move on, like Anthony had moved on. No such luck.
Durie's second chapter concerns the Eschatological Crisis, which happens to all apocalyptic religions when the end of the world does not arrive. Stephen Shoemaker and David Cook (for two) have written several (excellent) books between them on Late Antique apocalyptic and on early Islam's (and not-so-early) place within it. Durie, on the assumption that the Qaric community was unitary, assigns each sura to Before and After sides of the (one) Crisis. "Before" means the sura still anticipates the Hour; "After" means the sura concerns itself with laws and rules for the community on assumption the Hour is far off, or maybe fulfilled in the founding of an Islamic state. UPDATE 12/9: The third chapter brings "lexical distance" (LD) and "formulaic distance" (FD) as a statistical tool to the job. MORE: On the assumption of Andrew Bannister that Neuwirth, Sinai, and Witztum, in arguing for the Quran's literary intertext, are all wasting their/our time.
Warmed-over Mecca / Madina, in short.
But... if we are no longer assuming Muhammad as the one author (or revelator) of all the canon suwar... why are we still doing this? If the suwar have several authors, and if we're not assuming Muhammad anymore then why should the authors all agree with each other? Maybe there's a caliphate already. In which case we should not only allow, but expect, that qurra on the outs with the "fake" caliphate will compose their own suwar. Such will not accept the caliphate as fulfilling God's Promise; a qari may, in fact, see the caliphate as dajjal in which case the Hour is even more imminent.
Which is what I find, with "Madina" and "Mecca" intermingling amongst each other right up to (I think) the second Hijri century.
To read the chapter requires, therefore, to interpret Before and After as states of mind. Frankly "Mecca" and "Madina" are better frames to view this phenomenon; they are spatial terms, not temporal. [UPDATE: Same goes for LD/FD.] Durie's temporal frame renders these chapters barely-readable.
At what point should we quit indulging scholars who rely upon Nöldeke-Schwally? I reached that point by New Year's Eve 2003. Every year I grow less patient with scholars who won't break out into their own.
Science Twitter has been touting Dr David Sinclair's Lifespan for a few weeks now. Here's today's take.
As with everything, What's The Worst That Could Happen. Some wags said, "you die horribly - if you DON'T do anti-aging". Well, that depends on what we mean. It also doesn't consider the wider society.
SF authors on occasion consider uploading consciousness to some database, to be transferred to some clone or other. Altered Carbon's first season is big on this (it was good!). Mike Cernovich last week pointed out that this means that eternal hell is possible, managed by a sadistic mortal. He might have been influenced by I Have No Mouth or maybe that Deep Space Nine episode. Altered Carbon posits that the Catholics (rather: "neo-Catholics", suggesting an interruption in the Curia, which wouldn't surprise me) would ban consciousness-upload.
Ethically, I assume that no true Church will allow consciousness to be transferred. Far too many ethical problems. Longevity-treatment, on the other hand, seems a no-brainer. If a Christian can avoid death without harming others, the Christian should avoid death. Eventually the Reaper does arrive, even if after 150 years, no matter what we do; but by then, although we should not "embrace" Charon, at least we can give the ferryman a proper accounting for our lives on this side of his river.
So: this longevity concerns our physical frame only. For that, first: the good news.
As we talk longterm space travel, I notice that once you get to the Belt, transport takes awhile. Ceres to the Jovian system is a four year trip by Hohmann. And we've all seen or read 2001 - which tech is delayed, but maybe not by all that much. If we are stuck with the bear model for hibernation: how about an induced dreamless coma with occasional awakenings, all with the aging-process cut out. The traveler ages "normally" but doesn't feel it, and is physicially unaffected over the time taken. Now those Ganymede-bound transports, full of precious metals, can house human mechanics and antipiracy measures.
I assume, of course, that we still keep the gravity on. And I'd test all this on guinea-pigs first. As for interstellar travel - well, let's see how it works in the 5.2 AU range.
Now the bad news.
Maureen McHugh wrote "Interview: On Any Given Day": about "boomers" still surviving on the fringes of this "democratised" anti-aging process. If you are aimless at 40 you are likely to be aimless at 90, even if you look the same, give-or-take longer ears and nose(s). Who cares, right?
The next generation cares, is who. Look at the boomersite PJMedia today. Less concerned right now with Matt Walsh, I barely know who he even is. More concerned with Glenn Reynolds, who as a university professor in law has much in common with the lawyers mostly making up our lawmaking Constitutional Branch. Prof. R. is fine with putting the next generation in hock for such Poor Life Choices as getting a law degree as he'd done. Spring 2005, I recall the Instapundit singing a different tune about the credit-card bill which George Bush will sign 20 April (to no mention on 20 April Instapundit). Tho' muted, we still see some pro-debtor instas in 2010.
McHugh imagined what (very) young people, especially heterosexual and male, would think about the "boomers". And those males weren't even in debt (yet). Gardner Dozois picked McHugh's story as one of the Year's Best for 2002; it anyway was among the best in that book. I suspect Vox Day read this story like I did, hence his constant fluffing of pillows.
Ah, Michael Hudson! we should have listen'd. 'Tis all moot; we'll be erasing debt via hyperinflation instead. It's quieter. Muffled, Vox might say.
Yesterday evening I mooted, impressionistically, a question. I didn't answer it, and didn't quite pose it well (I've rewritten it this morning) but I might be stumbling upon a larger question, which I can illustrate here.
As of maybe a quarter-century ago, we owned enough Dead Sea Scrolls and enough knowledge about them that Gabriele Boccaccini felt safe to sketch out a mental corpus: "Enochian Judaism". Genesis has a genealogic bent and among the heroes in its line of pre-Abrahamic "patriarchs" was one Enoch. וַיִּתְהַלֵּ֨ךְ חֲנ֜וֹךְ אֶת־הָֽאֱלֹהִ֗ים; he walked with the elohim. Then (no ha-!) some elohim took him.
Around that, accumulated the "Enochian" literature. The earliest known exemplars of Enochism are the Book of Watchers and the Astronomical Visions, followed by the Dream Visions which are clearly from the Maccabean civil strife. Almost none of this is Biblical save the language and the proper-names. Indeed, the Dream Visions goes so far that Boccaccini argued it outright rejected Torah. I don't know exactly where this debate stands today; I suspect he's been accused of Speculation and/or Overstating The Case, but I don't think the case has been refuted, nor even decisively rebutted. Michael Wise's The First Messiah didn't cite voodoo but it did cite the Cargo Cult, which Mark Durie cites now. DUGAN 4/9/23: Dream Visions 90 and Jubilees 4 are not in Qumran and may have approached Barnabas, and us, differently from how they reached the Maccabeans - if at all.
If Boccaccini was right, on the Watchers anyway: "Enochian Judaism" was no Judaism. It was a voodoo. Its antecedents should be sought among Babylonian astrologers and Persian apocalypticists, and all their demonologists. 1 Enoch happened to be written in Hebrew, but anybody can write in Hebrew. (Okay okay - I can't, but I'm not as smart as Saint Jerome was.)
As to what happened next: the Enochians decided, for whatever reason, they would appeal to Judaism. The Dream Visions are all about recent Jewish events. Next on deck was Jubilees alias the Lesser Genesis although, this isn't nearly as easy to date as is the DV [UPDATE 4/9/23: Sigh]. This flat rewrites Genesis and early Exodus to fit the Enoch / DV worldview.
More recently, another literature around Isaac/Levi has been identified, including a testament? of Qahat/Amram and our own dear Tobit. Boccaccini writing in the later 1990s didn't have the benefit of the last few decades, but could tell that Aramaic Levi used the Enochian calendar and, in turn, was cited by Jubilees. At the same time, Boccaccini did not so suggest DV-contemporary Daniel. Daniel borrowed Enochian tropes whilst firmly endorsing the Torah and several Psalms and Prophets, I think including Ezekiel. Why not Aramaic Levi as well? ANSWER 12/9: Because Aramaic Levi had a different theory of sacrifice.
To sum up, the Watchers and the Astronomy were still in the voodoo stage [UPDATE 2021 and PseudoLevi too]. This voodoo became popular enough with the Jews - many fresh home from Babylon, or still living there - that Jews of the Torah needed to react to it. In fact, this may have been an impetus to edit the Torah as we have it; for an orthodox prequel to the "Deuteronomic History" which probably already existed, alongside orthodox Prophets like Hosea, Isaiah 1-39, and "Greek Jeremiah". The hardline of Judaism rejected Enochism entire. Some literate Jews made peace with parts of the lore, looking here at Daniel mainly, but I think also Aramaic Levi; anyway, none of these secondary texts made it to full canon, although Daniel was a candidate for awhile, as reflected in Christianity.
Christianity, then, is no voodoo itself; but it does accept more of that Enochian hoodoo that some Jew do too well. One more likely reason why Christianity kept getting nagged from the fringes about not being Jewish enough.
As we come to sura 7 in Islam, this smells like Arab Jubilees.
Is Christianity a voodoo? a pagan religion with a few terms swapped out?
What looks like polytheism in Trinitarian Christianity wasn't always so "heretical" to the common Judaean before the second-century rabbis laid down their law.
The New Testament consciously sets itself upon the Hebrew Bible in its Greek form - mostly. (I think Paul himself was more Masoretic.) Accordingly we see some citations of Biblical texts as aren't Biblical anymore, like Jude citing the Watchers and Hebrews citing 1 Maccabees. And don't let's get started on the Revelation.
Also we must reread Gabriele Boccaccini on the divisions within Judaism herself some generations before Christ. The Jews had Enoch and Metatron standing in for ascendant Christ; as for Mary, they had the Holy Wisdom.
Christianity has always been consistent that Genesis 1-2 was the true foundation of the Cosmos. I don't see (say) the Greeks' mythos about Cronos and Zeus "reflexed" into (say) Justin Martyr's summary. I do sometimes see takes of the odd god or hero cast into this or that tale of the saints. But Christians as a whole can take 'em or leave 'em; we don't have to accept Saint George And The Dragon. More worrisome is the Gospel demonology, I concede.
UPDATE 12/5: A voodoo in Judaism might look like the earlier Books Of Enoch: Babylonian angelology and cosmology recast in Hebrew with reference to Genesis and certain Psalms, downplaying Torah. Mind you (1) the Enochians preceded Jesus' ministry by many centuries and (2) Jesus himself was a Danielist, never citing Enoch as far as the NT will tell us.
Durie's first chapter, I must say, is not as focused as was the introduction.
This chapter ostensibly on "theology" digresses into the state(s) of the Arabic language(s) as of AD 600, as understood as of AD 2015 (via al-Jallad). Which - don't get me wrong - I find fascinating, and vital. But Safaitic and Hismaic graffiti don't show Biblical Reflex, the topic at hand. Any background discussion of the Late Antique milieu could go to an appendix. Maybe even a footnote. Or a separate chapter on How We Got Here.
I'd say the same for Durie's treatment of the earliest codices and their carbon-dating. Here, unlike with al-Jallad, I doubt the premise. I'd not even mention this, myself.
As to the core of this chapter, it's impressionistic - as are most treatments of the Qaric canon which aren't mine. (Sorry.) Durie doesn't give us a methodical listing of which sura preceded what sura. Durie defaults to the neo-Nöldeke timeline currently being bourne by Nicolai Sinai (who has a blurb on the back cover) and Angelika Neuwirth. I'd not talk about a Quranic (or my preferred "Qaric") Theology so much as a sura 40 theology per sura 40, or a sura 75 theology per sura 75. UPDATE 12/6: it doesn't get better.
I do agree, though, that when any one sura cites its predecessant suwar, it does appeal to a wider audience - of believers in those suwar. The average qari found much easier to cite Quran than to quote Bible (although the latter does happen). There arises a Qaric Genius, if you will.
Which goes to the voodoo-matrix. We're not dealing with the community of the Christian Saints, nor even with the Gaonim. The qurra were outsiders.
