The gravity tractor

Project Rho relayed a 2015 article on the Gravity Tractor. This is a means to pull a general Earthbound (or other) asteroid to another trajectory, hopefully one less Earthbound. It's best for those lower-mass pre-bolides maybe a dozen years before it becomes a bolide. So: "Plan A", Plan B being when you start playing Aerosmith records.

To me this method looks like a high-impulse, low-thrust engine. In fact, I do believe that might be the point: use a heavy mass in orbit, as a lever, against that heavier mass. Put the engine on the orbiter.

Seems like the method would be great for scaling up station-keeping on a metastable Libration station. That SVL2 station I've been going on about would, then, appreciate these massive levers which would also, of course, take on an energy transmitter. Once the central core gets big enough.

This, my friends, is an orc

Tree of Woe reviews Daniel Vendramini, calling himself "Danny" I don't know why. Vendramini argues that Neanders either retained early-hominid chimp-like hair, or else regrew it whilst our African forebears steadily lost it in the Afar. The Neanders certainly retained chimp brute strength. And added to both; thus, they became quaggoths.

One salient argument is that the great modern-human bottleneck, heretofore associated with Toba, has since been (far) pushed forward, more to 45 kBC. We can see this in Frost-Age Dacia. Although, that assumes an earlier Neander-age bottleneck; the Ice Age would then be a second strike against us.

As for the Neander language - ehh, they had a symbolic language (they could tell, say, a spearhead from a handaxe) so a mental capacity for abstraxion.

The Crab Nebula as electron-capture

This morning UC Santa Barbara (our lady of the mines) found the star which gave rise to a weird 2018 supernova in galaxy NGC 2146, 21 million light-years away, which wasn't Type I or Type II. The researchers say that the same sort of explosion created the Crab Nebula AD 1054.

This sort was theorised in 1980, as the "electron-capture" supernova. The star would be smaller than the Type II core-collapse monsters at 10 solar masses. As for the Type I: such is just a scaled-up nova so irrelevant; their stars never go above 8 masses anyway.

This electron-capture means I think that protons are taking that electron and becoming neutrons, in the reverse of beta-decay. The classical Type II would implode when the nuclear fusion gets to iron. The EC implodes at oxygen + neon + magnesium. Yep, here we go again with potential condensates: 16, 20, and now 24. But anyway, not every under-10 star qualifies; before totally blowing up, they will be blasting a lot of mass out in a cloud like Betelgeuse just did.

They'll actually be weak as explosions - but the light will shine on the dust-cloud, which may have been what the Asians saw in AD 1054.

I went looking through mine own blog and - the AD 1052 spike. It might be from our own Sun; I have been warning against taking flares as novae. But...

Eggs of helium-4

Carbon-12 seems more interesting than I'd thought: with six protons and six neutrons, this divides out to three sets of p2n2. That is: each nucleus is an egg with three helium-4 nuclei in it. The strong force keeps them bound such that the weak force doesn't act; this isn't ¹⁴C. And the protons, by electromagnetism, present a united face to the chemists. But - the physicists tell us - with sufficient added energy, meaning gamma-rays, these helium nuclei will disassociate into alpha-particles.

The term for nuclei so bound together, before they all fling apart, is Condensed State. The (3α) state in excited carbon-12 is "Hoyle State". Neutron-stars also present a condensed-state to the universe.

This is in our notice because, a fortnight ago, Osaka University found Neon-20 doing the same thing. It theoretically got five helium-nuclei but those nuclei hadn't been liberated in the lab yet. This, the Osakans have now done. It's 5α condensed-state.

I don't believe this is Earthly feasible under other combinations of proton and neutron; I think the egg has to be holding sub-particles at an integer multiple. As to those sub-particles: without such proton/neutron parity, we simply don't get stable isotopes. Beryllium-6, anyone? LOL. So, not for mining Helium-3. And getting deuterium out of a helium nucleus ain't happenin' neever.

This being filed under "alchemy" the energy requirements are prohibitive for, say, turning overly-abundant carbon into valuable helium. So, nobody is suggesting to replace Venus' atmosphere to a helium / oxygen mix.

Although... what about oxygen-16? I'd wonder if the issue here was oxygen's chemistry, making it a pain to work with. Neon is (mostly) inert, and carbon at least can be kept in a diamond lattice. Hot oxygen will corrode your equipment or simply burn it.

How you will be robbed

A few weeks ago Curtis Yarvin posted on his "Gray Mirror" substack an argument that inflation is how rich people steal from the rest of us. Unz.com has Oliver Boyd-Barrett 'splaining the Aithiopia to us.

Unz exists to warn Americans and their mostly-European clients that we're the baddies, or at least our élites are. In that light, Unz's duntzes concentrate on inflationary raids upon "socialist" nations. The Baghistan is wholly uninterested in Red Beanie / Blue Wave bluster about what "socialism" or "capitalism" means or should mean. I get the distinct impression that Unz also doesn't care and allows his poasters to use "socialism" as shorthand for "striving to be economically independent of the West".

When the country's currency collapses, the people spontaneously disassociate from the country - because they have to. Life becomes a mixture of local connexions and of someone else's currency - if they can get it. "Local connexions" becomes local militia sooner than you'd think although civilians remain in denial. And other nations will involve themselves in the militias where they have an interest because, there's no capital-city anymore.

[UPDATE 12/12: I'd been musing lately, but not poasting, that inflation == debt-relief. Which Michael Hudson would be for. So why doesn't Hudson come out in favour of inflation? Duh, the bankers are connected to an international system and, further, have access to gold. In practice only the midrange creditors will be hurt, that is anybody with cash in the bank. Good thing I happened to pop in on my Juneposts today . . .]

Whatever you think of economic policy; where there is inflation, you know that a policy is in place: extraction. It might be West-driven, or it might be local élites who - of course - have that incentive to blame the West. Doesn't matter for this blogpost's purpose. What does matter is what is going to happen next.

The cosmic static-electricity dumpster

If axions exist, they can violate conservation of charge. Around black holes.

Start with that black holes bear charge - besides mass, that's all they got. (That and spin, but pff.) Most charged matter, like free electrons or hydrogen ions, add their charge to a black hole's. Charge is conserved, in this universe. Apparently axions wouldn't conserve charge. If they're charged (somehow) their charge just gets deleted down there. Unsure why they are calling it an "axion bomb" rather than an axion dump.

I am inclined to call this argument as going against axions existing in the first place, but - maybe we can ascertain where charge-dump events should be happening around all the distant galaxies, and aren't.

Internal combustion

As noted by LiquidPiston, internal-combustion hasn't gotten much better in a century. Any "efficiency" improvements have been around reducing air-resistance and lightening the chassis or, at best, shifting some of the power needs to the battery. I've been looking into the battery improvements especially - and so has Europe, whose masters plan to ban combustion entirely.

With the exception of Porsche. Whose bright idea is to use methanol instead - "eFuel!!". (I'm just glad they didn't call it "smartfuel".) I hasten to tout that this will work ... for rovers on Mars, where there is no petroleum. Down here on Earth, Major Tom, gasoline is cheaper and will always be cheaper.

I do like that LiquidPiston have brought the sheer mass of the engine from 39 lb to 4.5 lb, using a "rotary" model instead of combustion. This presents a challenge for us battery-touters because, current cell alpha is stinky (tho' getting better, and can be incorporated into the rest of the chassis).

Wahibre Haaibre

Pharaoh Apries submitted a (belated) article into the news lately, which they're now trying to translate. Hieroglyphic stela.

I couldn't say I knew much about this guy so I looked it up. Wahibre Haaibre.

The name in Jeremiah 44:30 MT is "Ḥ-P-R-`", usually voiced "Ḥophra". The Greek translation (of the better text) is at 51:30, τόν Ουαφρη βασιλέα Αιγύπτου. Here God is promising to deliver Pharaoh Hophra king of Egypt into the hands of his enemies who want to kill him, just as I gave Zedekiah king of Judah into the hands of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, the enemy who wanted to kill him.

This guy ruled 589-70 BC. His first adventure was to bolster Jerusalem against Nabukadrezar II. It didn't work (to say the least) and, it seems, he faced a mutiny up in Aswan.

The man ruled late enough that, I think, the Greeks and Copts like Herodotus and Ptolemy of Mendes had a decent handle on his name and deeds. Diocletian moved his obelisk over to Rome where it's now at the Santa Maria sopra Minerva church. Now there is a new stela. This has to do with a military campaign to the east.

They don't know which campaign, yet; it might be the Jerusalem misadventure, or the civil war which would unseat the pharaoh, or some other dustup entirely. Unsure how long the translation will take.

Tepe hype again

A former blog back in 2017 linked this, against Martin B. Sweatman. The overall hype up to then was that Göbekli Tepe [UPDATE 5/16/22: among others] was doing zodiacs; which, I'm fine wit'. But the main hype-ers also claimed it witnessed a comet strike, to spark the "Younger Dryas" climate downtown. This was Firestone's theory, back in 2007. IntCal20 sets the YD at 10900 BC.

I'd come around to the comet theory in February 2018 (against, lol, global warming or lmao, Vela). So, last night, with hat-tips from Reynolds and news outlets, Sweatman is defending the impact hypothesis, albeit leaving Göbekli (mostly) aside for now.

Rare minerals - iridium, osmium, and (here) platinum - get barfed up from our own mantle just as easily as rained on here from space. Same with (silica) microspherules, and microdiamonds. There was also the issue that we have no crater and no local abundance. To that the hypothesis sited this impact - literally - across Atlantic ice, here the Laurentide. By contrast to a crater we don't got, we do got a contemporary volcano: the Laacher See.

Anyway today I've found Sweatman's text. This explains his candidate for the YD horizon, the Black Mat.

The paper deals with volcanism #2.1. Although such can toss up rare metals they would come with sulfates (and with "tephra", which Laacher See deposited in Central Europe... only). These aren't in the Black Mat. Additionally, those microspherules are full of iron beyond what any volcano has in its microspherules. And the diamonds are nano-, a thousand times smaller than Earthly microdiamonds.

As for the mat's date, some mooted 10900 BP - if you trust Sweatman's proofreading (see below). "Before Present" means before Los Alamos messed up the carbon. Sweatman's preferred sources pull it to 12840-805 BP so, you know... YD.

Lastly, we might actually have the crater now. In Greenland, one such is under the "Hiawatha" Glacier and it's got a twin to its southeast. Both are Pleistocene. NO THEY'RE NOT 3/11

On the minus side, Sweatman isn't on IntCal20 yet. But IntCal20 only helps him since it pulls Laacher See further back, too early for YD. In any case #2.2 demonstrates Laacher See's residue lies beneath the black mat (tho' not as far beneath as the mat's 10900-BP placement would have it). More annoying is that Sweatman seems sometimes to be thinking "BC" when he prints "BP". As for the facts in evidence, I'd like to know if a volcano can disperse microspherules globally but tephra only locally. How did Tambora do?

Overall I deem Sweatman has a strong argument. At least it should inspire the Laacher proponents to refine their arguments.

Sylvester's children

Felis silvestris is the feline species in which El Gato is a subspecies. But not all these cats are house cats. Now, the Chinese have sequenced some genomes.

El Gato came out of F.s. lybica, they find; these tend spotty, like leopards. Over in what used to be Tibet - Sichuan / Szechuan, Qinghai - is a striped wildcat which, now, they realise is a homegrown F.s. bieti. Also out here is spotted F.s. ornata from the desert northwest, which used to the Uyghurstan. F.s. lybica and these Asians diverged 1.87 Mya. Later bieti and ornata diverged 1.27 Mya, although since then an adventurous ornata - rather, ornatus - delivered some DNA to bieti.

(Yes, I spelt "lybica" right; I've checked, over and over again. Blame the old taxonomists.)

So the domestic cat is an import. Since then, well... life has found a way. They found a catus Y signature in an ornat...us and three bieti Ys in local housecats. In fact those housecats are all 10% bieti now.

Absence of mind

A few years ago I got into a flamewar over at Ace's place, which I'd started by praising the British influence (overall) in India. In those days I did not know about the British part in the famines, especially the one in Bengal 1943. During that altercation my counterparty put me some knowledge, as Paul Anka would say, about the Maratha.

I'd read my Flashman and thought I was pretty good at India over the AD 1800s; back when I had Indian-origin colleagues, in the 1990s, they agreed I was pretty darn good at nineteenth-century trivia. It turns out the Maratha were a century prior, so I had not heard of them. Why should I have heard of them? Europe is my subcontinent; India is not. But by that token - I should have shut up about matters concerning which I had no 'ilm. I took the L, as we say now, and moved on.

So, here is Razib Khan, who does know the Marathas, given that he is of the (Chittagong / Rohingya) Bengalis. Khan is here to put ALL of us ALL the knowledge.

Khan reviews Peace, Poverty and Betrayal: A New History of British India by one Roderick Matthews. Matthews - endorsed by Khan - has a revisionism perhaps less violent than McMeekin's. He figures that the Brits in India should not be associated with the Brits back home; because the Brits in India were stationary-bandits who kept disobeying Westminster. But although they were pretty-much just pirates, in the fine old Francis Drake and Henry Morgan tradition, the East India Company did at least try to work within the system.

At first in the 1680s The System meant - Aurangzeb. Say what you will about 'Zeb, he weren't no pussy. The Brits bent the knee to him - full prostration, in fact. Owww. But later, Delhi raised up sultans who weren't nearly as strong as ol 'Zeb. And the Brits got sick of the kowtow.

The Marathas, a mostly-Hindu coalition, are today the toast of Bollywood. These guys fended off the Brits too, as they took over a swathe of Mughal territory. But they were also piratical when they wanted to be, for instance in the AD 1750s launching a murderous crusade against Bengal; which adventure Razib Khan, Bengali as he is, will not spot them. Around that time Robert Clive also invaded Bengal but in this case, made an effort to rule it, not (just) to loot it. Which meant Clive was protecting it. Credit to Clive.

Credit to Razib, and to Matthews, for informing us of all this. Mind you, Clive was doing a Cortes; not exactly having permission to carve out this little empire.

Clive's approach would be vindicated during the sepoy mutiny to which Bengal - like the Sikhs - did not participate.

Overall it looks like the British approach was to uplift whom they could, creating an educated class in hopes that class might educate the next generation. The British didn't ever want to annex India which would have brought its various constituencies into the London Parliament. This was about the best approach the British could have mounted.

There were failures along the way, but (1943 aside) many of those failures were due to the Brits not wanting to uplift the local forms of land-ownership and cultivation. Again: India is not our subcontinent. They got different crops and different seasons over there. Chesterton left the fence up. Unfortunately that meant India didn't get the technologic advances that England got, or that Canada got for that matter. Mind you... that's why it was so important to teach the locals how to science.

Old South Arabia

Back when the Happy Arabia still had Jews, and not yet Muslims, some Greek author wrote the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea. George Hatke has a chapter about how well this text did at aligning its report on the Red Sea and Yemen, with the epigraphic data from the local southrons. And with the elder Pliny.

This paper focuses before Pliny's time. And I'm sorry to report that, here, it relies on secondary akhbar such as Eratosthenes as provided by Strabo, and on our boy Bar-Agatharch. Luckily: I am a Late Antiquity student. So I don't care. I'm looking here at the later data and, here, Hatke is legit.

So, the Periplus is authentic, as far as it goes. Maybe not entirely accurate beyond what its author experienced directly. And of course it would go out of date, for instance when Parthia lost control of its Indian protectorates at the end of the first century AD. I think this is about when the Indian-Ocean silk route diverted to Singapore. Luckily for us, the Periplus stayed "in print" like Agatharchides lingered on, and even more luckily a MS survived to our day: Codex Palatinus Graecus 398.

The Romans, too, had protectorates, and these lasted until the Five Good Emperors. Drumanagh might be an example in the Dublin area. (UPDATE 9/29: Post-plague.) We learn that their outpost down south was Ḥimyar. Ḥimyar's régime called itself "owner of Raydan [palace]" and claimed overlordship over Saba but, by then, the Julio-Claudians and Flavians had a garrison, so this kingship was rather hollow. The Romans were also friendly to Ḥaḍramawt, further east - but didn't hold troops out there. Dhu-Raydan-and-Saba paid for the Romans' services with "gifts" meaning, tribute. It was that or get overrun by Qatabān, says Hatke; erstwhile lords over Ḥimyar before 110 BC.

At this time Ḥaḍramawt sometimes hit the Raydan régime too. From up northwest the Hijazis did some recreational pillaging of their own, against Qatabān as well as Ḥimyar. The South Arabians like the Greeks deemed these raiders all "Arabs" and annoying. I've already related this to how the Assyrians had summarised "the Medes". As for which "Arabs": some Arabians called themselves "Amîr" speaking a Semitic language... but no language anybody can place yet, for instance using hn for "that". Hatke has to point out however that the Amîrs didn't identify themselves as Arabs. Other Arabians out there were Tayy who used the am- definite-article, although - at first - they didn't attempt the level of notice as did the Amîrs. Neither of these tongues are Safaitic; neither of these peoples are "Arabic" as Allâh knows them. Although I do wonder about those Tayy whom the Syriac peoples will (famously) name Tayayé.

Over Late Roman Antiquity that am- article would trickle into Ḥimyar such that Ḥamdani and then Rabin later called it out as typical of the first/seventh century dialect. In Late Antiquity, perhaps due to Ghassân, al- would replace that one in the Hijaz. That tongue was Arabic.

Posting the L

I was, of course, sick after all when I'd poasted this stupidity. I realised that much by the following morning. I was in semiconscious denial.

I still don't see it as Pooh(?) Flu - I didn't get the Delta headache or the fever, much less the loss of taste or smell, allowing for congestion. Might have been an inflamed colon over this week but that was probably just an overly spicy curry. Overall just a rhino', methinks.

What I did about it was: went to the mountains Saturday morning, where I went masked and asked to be seated outside. I skipped the weekend Mass, skipped the gym. I went back to the gym Monday where I went, again, masked. I went to the Thursday morning Mass - once more, masked. By Saturday I figured I was no longer transmissible. I reckon I'd got back to normal maybe this Tuesday evening.

I soaked up the extra time (when not at work) reading forward in Stalin's War and Brave New World Revisited. I felt like this crud was Zhukov's Moscow campaign, stalling me from my objective.

Luckily I'd held the line so today I posted some gainz. I might be almost where I was February 2020. I'm already at 100 lb pull, 90 pex and now I'm close to 80 push and 50 vertical push (seems I can do one or the other). And I'm definitely 145 on the pulldown.

And I'm now inoculated against one more nasty.

Jargon for solar-flares

I am making sense of BT Tsurutani et al. "A brief review of ‘‘solar flare effects’’ on the ionosphere" (2009). That's DOI 10.1029/2008RS004029.

This is in the genre of Jargon Update. Another example of the form would be McConaghy / Russell / Longuski, "Toward a Standard Nomenclature for Earth–Mars Cycler Trajectories" (2005). Which topic I'd burned out on - I mean, for an amateur like myself, or like Charles Murray for that matter, learning how to Kepler be quite enough fun for a month. But for solar-mass-eruptions I have been trying to be a professional. Or at least to fool the professionals sufficiently, as Turing's Monster could in theory fool Alan Turing.

As best I can interpret Tsurutani-plus, we all should be smarter about how we describe SFEs. That "E" part is for "effect" but, really, for "Earth". Solar flares do pound out some impressive radiation directly, but - per Tsurutani - that's not all they emit. These flareups also hit stray protons and other ions in the stellar corona, like that which your humble blogger witnessed up in Wyoming four summers back. This knock-on effect delivers mass with its energy: the ions get boosted to 10-10000 keV. Such behaves differently over here than the direct radiation spike behaves; more like cosmic rays.

So: the Interplanetary Coronal Mass Ejection. "Interplanetary" because such particles get kicked out from 3-10 stellar-radii (R☉) away from the star. For reference in our system Venus is 154.55, then Earth 218.57 R☉. "Interplanetary" seems overblown for something that's pretty-much still in the Solar exosphere, but hey: we give "astronaut" badges to LEO technicians. So why not.

Anyway, for my purpose, which is stray references to aurora AD 774 (and 660 BC), I am unsure that the base (ancient) documentation offers sufficient detail to decide if an aurora comes from the initial solar flux or from the heavy "interplanetary" particles afterward pushed this way secondarily.

Brave New World, re-Revisited

During my off-week, in between Barbarossa, I found Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Revisited. For free! So, that has entered the Lockdown List.

What we have in BNW-R is what Paul Casanova would call an Avertissement. That is: it's an argument explaining to the new generation why their school superintendents should keep buying BNW. Hence, I think, why Huxley.net are giving it away.

Huxley was winding down over the late 1950s and, in the meantime, one Eric Blair had written an interesting set of rival novels to Huxley's dystopia. I've heard Blair was even Huxley's student although, Blair was in such poor health, physical and mental, that Hux ended up outliving him.

The Great Dictators were dying off over the 1950s with the VERY notable exception of Mao; and the fascist fanclub, like Nasser and Nehru (and Khrushchev), weren't ruling in nearly the same way as their mentors had. Instead they were dialing back the stick and rationing the carrots. And yes there were carrots - if you were useful. Chernobyl does pretty well at illustrating the decent life you could have Back In The U S S R if you were Alpha and a team player. If you were a prole, well - you got lies with your prolefeed.

Huxley's book is, then, mainly a victory-lap around "Orwell". A well-deserved lap, I posit we should allow. Huxley also predicted that Communism would probably win in the next twenty years, which would come to 1977-8, when indeed it was marching across the globe.

One thing Huxley didn't predict is Brezhnev's deterioration, physical and moral, over that future decade. The Soviet form of Marxism (recently found was another FAIL with Kapital, its wrongheadedness on enclosures) ended up a Spartanism, very top-heavy. In the 1970s, the top was Brezhnev. This fossil (like US Grant) was unable to keep his Politburo from cutting corners and skimming off the top. This march-o'-progress hit its first speedbump in Iran where the local leftists couldn't stop Khomeini's ultra-reaction. As they say, weather-forecasters cannot predict a fortnight ahead; Huxley did pretty well for a score of years.

Another prediction is that populists could win against technocrats if they just entertained (most) voters. Here: Trump, Duterte, and Bolsonaro. A further one: corporations melding together, subverting democracy, and taking over the public square as oligarchy.

The one serious incoherence in this book I find was its comment on overpopulation. This middle-upper-class moral-panic was all the rage 1950s-70s. Huxley's solution amounted to "ban the Catholic Church", and "take over education". In that case Huxley is advocating for the brave new world and not against it.

BACKDATE 6/25, to when I'd finished reading this one.

No more hydrazine

NASA have apparently seen Europa Report so are taking alternatives to hydrazine seriously.

I admit, I am one of those Deplorable people whose nose wrinkles when he hears the word "green" bandied about. Usually it refers to carbon-dioxide. Which molecule helps keep plants green in the first place. So I wish they'd not use the word. Still: this is a health issue especially if a module fails to break atmo and ends up back down here. Or for lightweight payloads whose first-stages aren't Elon's - like China's whole fleet.

One avenue of approach is to send up a lot of water, or get it from Ceres I guess, and then use solar-panels to break up the water into the hydrogen and oxygen you can use to give thrust for your journey.

Then there's ASCENT. It's better than N₂H₄! ... because it burns hotter. There's your Tsiolkovsky: faster exhaust, more I_sp, as they hint when they talk about how awesome it is for small spacecraft. A bit hard on the ol' engine tho'. On the other hand... we're going to be graduating to NERVA eventually, nu? So we need that engine tech anyway.

Push and shove

Schwabe's eleven-year solar cycle is explained: it's the alignment of Earth / Venus / Jupiter, which recurs in 4043 Earth days, or 11.07 years. That means Sidereal, so sorta-Julian if we're marking time on our calendars. Although as Dr Frank Stefani's and his team's paper notes, Newtonian mechanics get chaotic over long spans, so the great calendar debate might not matter much.

I did like Stefani's title. Bond... Gerard Bond! In that spirit, I've run a title to fit Stefani's own name . . .

I perked up at the word "alignment" and wondered it I might fit 4043 days into an even number of Earth / Venus synods. No such luck. Nicola Scafetta had posted an article 2011-12, doi 10.1016/j.jastp.2012.04.002, which defined that trio's "alignment". The alignments, Scafetta warned, are not perfect. IRG Wilson explained this a bit more the following year (warning, Stefani's link is bad, use mine). Even an imperfect Jovian alignment with a Venus/Earth synod might add torque to such tides as our inner planets raise upon the Sun.

This further implies that not all eleven[-plus]-year sunspot cycles be equal.

The Latin Leo/'Umar

Per Arthur Jeffery's introduction to the famous Leo III / 'Umar II Armenian text, In [JP] Migne's Patrologia Graeca, CVII, cols. 315-324, we find the Latin version of an Epistola Leonis Imperatoris Augusti cognomento Philosophi ad Omarum Saracenorum regem de fidei christianae veritate et mysteriis et de variis Saracenorum haeresibus et blasphemiis, printed among the works of Leo VI (886-912) the Philosopher. Jeffery notes also that the Latin tracks close to the Armenian. The Latin is shorter although - pace Hoyland - still in the form of a rebuttal to argument previously written "to me": scripsisti mihi, dictum est mihi.

Jeffery deemed our Latin text a misfile from Leo III, presumably misfiled well into the tenth century AD by men ignorant of the Byzantine kings. Hoyland, 498-9, follows Jeffery and also 'Âdel Théodore Khoury, Les théologiens Byzantins et l'Islam (Paris: 1969), 201-2. Although, as a misfile, some features of the Latin look more anachronous than the Armenian.

Jeffery's footnotes follow a nineteenth-century discussion about this work. Jeffery notes that the Latin is a pro-Toledan text which filioque formula Leo VI, good Byzantine as he was, refused. The whole filioque controversy had grown out of the Monotheletic drama; that debate calmed down with the Romans' rehabilitation of Maximus Confessor, then re-arose under Constantine V once that strong emperor wrested peace from the 'Abbasids and started looking west again.

Charlemagne and the Aquileians seem to have been the most gung-ho on filioque. Rome herself refused a side until AD 1014 which, notoriously, set Rome on that track to break from Constantinople.

Another contemporary controversy was that over icons. The Armenian version mentions - on the Arabs' side - some words apropos of the Cross and images, Jeffery 321-2. The Armenian text accordingly starts by defending the Cross, moving on to the images. As I read what Jeffery brings as parallel, in the Latin, here also is a defence of the Cross. But for images I do not find in the Latin even a mention.

Leo III was no iconodoule himself, for instance dismantling the Pantokrator (seen in Justinian II's coin) off the City gates. But he also wasn't an iconoclast like Constantine V. It seems in character - as Hoyland implies - that Leo preserves a vestige of an earlier version. Come the Latin version, icons no longer pose a controversy between Christian and Muslim. The abbreviation - I think - gave this author his opening to skip all that talk entirely. Much as the Romans didn't want to talk filioque.

I would, then, propose a western author, aligned with the Latins although assuredly a Greek speaker, running a parallel Latin defence of the faith. He was doctrinally Toledan so probably not writing in Rome. This westerner wasn't much for icons so agreed with the Byzantines on that much. To this day, we Catholics prefer stained-glass and statuary; they can be lavishly done, as we may observe in the Sistine Chapel, but they are an afterthought in our venerations.

I'd put our man in northwestern Italy rather than the Adriatic. The Catalan / Marseilles littoral looks promising.

Disortion

Some segments of the mainline conservative press are filing in behind the alt-right to support Sean McMeekin: Powerline, National Review. These are, perhaps, emboldened by the Guardian. For fear of dis-serving my readership, of which faithful souls Google will acknowledge one person in Portugal and maybe some Algerians; I give you a contrary opinion.

I only have the one, tonight: Geoffrey Roberts at The Irish Times. I'd give you David Aaronovich at the Times of London too but they're paywalled (although I can probably beg a reader to send that over). Anyway those fine Gaels accuse their fellow Celt McMeekin of disorting (sic) the history.

Do forgive my descent into gotcha-poasting. Roberts had attempted his own, by quoting further from a Stalin quote which McMeekin quoted in part. The Irish Times is, I'd argue, insulting its own readership: by assuming that said readership trusts the word of the Vozhd.

Roberts thinks that relentless anti-communism has led McMeekin into his flaws. I tend here, perhaps ironically, with Vox Day that, yes, "communism" is a bugaboo to the Right as is "capitalism" to the Left - or "fascism", or "racism", or "whiteness" - an idle bandying about of names, designed to cast out one's opponents to the outer darkness.

To that end I am unsure, despite that "SEE? SEE!?!" comment about the Stalin quote, that Roberts has even identified flaws, beyond aligning against Koba The Dread more than Roberts should like. Take this paragraph:

According to McMeekin, it was Stalin who goaded the Japanese to invade Manchuria in 1931 and China in 1937. He says the Soviet campaign for collective security against fascist aggression was a sham, as was Moscow’s support for Republican Spain during its civil war. Then, in 1939, Stalin engineered an Anglo-French-German war over Poland. Allied to Hitler, Stalin overplayed his hand by refusing to deepen his pact with the Nazi dictator. That disastrous miscalculation almost led to the Soviet Union’s defeat in 1941, says McMeekin, but Stalin’s bacon was saved by western military aid, the crucial source of all subsequent Soviet victories over Hitler’s armies.

Where is Roberts' rebuttal? For that matter, where is Roberts even quoting McMeekin? Roberts in his paraphrases is even less fair to McMeekin than McMeekin was to Stalin - this man is in John of Damascus territory. That is not a compliment. (There's content about 1943 in Roberts' review as well although I'll admit, I haven't got this far into McMeekin's book, so I must reserve judgement on that. 1943 wouldn't matter to my main concern anyway, which is the Icebreaker hypothesis, all about the lead-in to 1941.)

Even Roberts has to agree that ol' Dzhugashvili murdered Poles and deported suspicious elements as in, all the Crimean Tatars and Ukrainian Germans. But... eggs, omelettes; Uncle Joe saved us from Hitler. Mind you, Hitler thought he was saving us from Uncle Joe. GROG TRIBE ROOL, GRUG TRIBE DRULE

At least Roberts does not libel this professor at Bard College of being a "pseudo-historian" as Max Parry has done. Although that might just be because McMeekin was holding back. And/or because Roberts' publisher doesn't want to get sued.

I see in Roberts' review an implicit threat. Nice career you have there, Sean.

Health report

The usual suspects are still slamming "DAH VAXX!" so, here we go again.

On Wednesday, I wondered if I was getting an ear infection. Yesterday the crud settled into an upper throat / sinus thing, so - at least it wasn't strep. Today there's been some nasal congestion.

Throat lozenges did the trick yesterday. Didn't even need zinc, which is good because I ran out of cold-eeze last year. And there aren't any anomalies with taste or smell. So yeah: allergies. Air quality in this valley has been terrible this week (it's been running into the 90°s F) and, oh yeah, the flowers are in bloom. I did my work up in the Estes region, thankfully without disruption.

As for the rest, here is the nugget of truth in the piles of AC/VD ordure (VD is to AC what Driscoll is to Treacher): the immune system is greedy. If your body thinks it's got an infection to handle, it is going to prioritise that over the rest of your body's needs. I can fully accept that the immune system considers muscle-maintenance as "Priority 2". That is why allergies, multiple-sclerosis, and other autoimmune nasties make us weak.

I am still going to the gym, but. Obviously given the heat (and work) I have to get on that early in the morning. And I'm holding steady at the weights I'd been doing Monday / Tuesday. I don't expect to be upgrading my system for another couple days.

As for DAH VAXX - whatever.

Upload #200: laying the table

It's been over a year; and we're at the bicentennial mark. But I haven't forgotten this project!

The first issue here is that Google forced its websites to follow a different format. I'll get around to finetuning all that as the weeks go by and I figure out, say, how to get HTML working again.

I spent much of last year, off and on, figuring out sura 45: only 37 verses, or maybe 38 or 39. Either way you slice it, or add a verse to it if you're Ibn Mas'ud, it's not much to go on, for linking with other suwar. Some while ago I figured out that it used sura 25 and was parallel to sura 27. (And to 85.) So what I've done, at last, is to strip out MUCH unnecessary content and to figure out where it sits with respect to 27 and 85. I now think it precedes both. That's an edit to "Days of Allah" and to "Hell's Ditch", also "What Waits Behind These Roads" for sura 34.

I've been tweaking "The Rebel’s Wind" whilst we're at it. And "God’s Path Leads through the Caliph". Just because those were more recent and needed the love.

And because centennial, I felt I needed a new project. You've seen I've been interested in John of Damascus' hits against the Quran. Honestly, I wasn't trying to misdirect you. But I couldn't prove to myself, let alone to you, that John was using any version of sura 4 other than the version of the mufassirûn. John's take(s) on the fifth sura - I think - showed more promise. So: "Jesus’ Arraignment". Not part of the Table sura, at least not at first.

Madrassa.

The axion laundry

Late last night, maybe even midnight (I'd hit the hay right after finishing Wilczek's book about nine PM), the Kavli IPMU put out a press release through its Japanese domain. They are on the hunt for "axions". I might as well transmit Wilczek's take on these.

Wilczek has gone long on axions, mediating his "axial field". In fact, he gave to these elusive particles their name - inspired by a detergent, no less. This is the "Higgs boson" of dark matter, if you like; a wonder-particle explaining a lot of stuff at once.

Also like Higgs, axial researchers constrain the axion's mass ever-higher until, as with Higgs in 2012, they (hope to) find it so proving the field. Unlike Higgs, the axion cannot be detected in any mortals' lab. But the primordial axial-field fallout can be mapped: beyond that Cosmic Microwave Background which, against Big Bang research prior to 400000 years, presents the foreground. Kavli IPMU figure that experiments looking for dark matter can be reconfigured to map the axial background. If that earlier field exists/-ed.

As noted here, axial research got Betelgeuse wrong and couldn't find any axions thence; and I haven't heard any followup from those seven quasi-magnetars. I've been an axion skeptic for about half a year now. And Wilczek is a climatebro so a thorough heart<3soience normie. I distrust normies.

But as the IPMU point out, even if there is no field and its axions don't exist, any map of whatever is behind the CMB is still of value.

Time-reversal asymmetry

Wilczek again - at his best. I'm up to time-reversal symmetry ("T"), which works for Newton but not for the second law of thermodynamics. Wilczek is looking at K mesons.

A meson is an even number of quarks together; as opposed to the classic triple-threat of a nucleon. The mesons are rare in nature, and nowhere on Earth naturally. The K meson has a strange quark and is the lightest such hadron possible. It's unstable of course; it decays.

Anyway in 1964 James Cronin and, er, cronies found that the K meson decay follows an Arrow Of Time, as Discover put it as decade later. Apparently (I have no real clue how) the Standard Model will allow for this if there be quarks beyond strange (and charm). But, no more than that. Thus the bottom and top quarks were "born", posited anyway; which then got found during the 1990s.

Wilczek cites Helen Quinn that T-asymmetry depends on a quantum field which tends to zero over time. Lower field, T becomes more symmetric. Or so I read him.

Filtering out those perchlorates

We looked into getting oxygen (and hydrogen) from Martian perchlorates. How about skipping that and just getting the water?

Apparently perchlorates do have uses, like in rocket-fuel (nothing to sneeze at in a low-g planet), but you still don't want to drink them.

Besides electrolysis and straight boiling, both of which need energy which Mars is short on, UC Riverside went looking for a catalyst to turn the perchlorates into less-harmful chlorides.

What they've done is mixing a common fertilizer called sodium molybdate, a common organic ligand called bipyridine to bind the molybdenum, and a common hydrogen-activating catalyst called palladium on carbon. The oxygen in those perchlorates has to go somewhere else, probably into all those chemicals, but that's a job for the chemists; point is, you've now got water, albeit a little briny, but at least not toxic.

Do Shas voters even like girls?

This Shas advert is making the rounds in antiIsrael twitter. Apparently if you don't vote Shas you're at serious risk of accidentally wedding a beautiful tall blonde who slips into Russian when she gets hot.

I mean, credit to Shas, they're proving the Mizrahis are as good at cracking jokes as us 'zim. But. Err. How to put this politely. What's the audience?

Is this some appeal to nebbishes who fear getting hoodwinked by die ewige Shiksa? (Was David Cole helping out on this one?) Or maybe it's to their mamas. Except that mama enthusiastically approves this union once the bride's got her, um, fax.

It's amazing Shas get any votes at all. They need to head back to the drawing-board and rethink their priorities.

The limited hangout

Sean McMeekin is making waves, with his Stalin's War. Various reviewers are mooting what it's missing.

I'm interested in this because I first heard about the "Stalin's War" thesis when it was called the Suvorov Thesis... and only being touted by the Institute of Historical Review. "Suvorov" - Rezun, a Right-wing defector from the Soviets, in the Solzhenitsyn tradition - was writing in 1990 when the Soviets, nominally, were still in charge and few Westerners could verify sources. And Rezun made the autist's mistake of taking his findings to their logical conclusion, or at least to a reasonable one, here that Hitler had inflicted damage to the Red Army sufficient that the Iron Curtain ended up along the Hajnal Line and not at the Channel. So "Suvorov" got panned as a crank at best and as a Hitler apologist at... well, at middle.

I confess: when I read the IHR summary of Icebreaker, I thought this was neo-NSDAP crankery. Times change and it's looking like Suvorov is being rehabilitated.

Vox Day is wondering about the people involved in Roosevelt's circle; he's (rhetorically) cagey, in character. Guyénot at Unz re-raises Suvorov's politically-incorrect conclusion. (Vox Day retains an open mind whether Stalin was all that bad for the historical central-European nations. I do hope he is excepting the East German experience . . .)

If you get into Google for "Suvorov" and "Stalin's War", you'll see the "extremists" linked, in preference; the Vox Day sorts will wonder if Google is deliberately raising the cranks to the forefront, to bury McMeekin's allegations. So they link Counter Currents, Paul Craig Roberts, Guyénot - although, to their credit, they also had the Grauniad's review, which was not a takedown. DuckDuckGo got other minor blogs, because DDG tends less heavy-handed on curation than Google, better or worse.

Anyway I do agree McMeekin has such Opinions as he has not let into his book.

Suvorov appears in the index and he is mentioned in the text... once. It absolutely looks like McMeekin knows that his thesis is Suvorov's and that he's got to mention Suvorov somewhere. But he's done the utter minimum, in the main text (I suspect there's more in the endnotes). Left to his own devices, McMeekin is happy to credit Suvorov's work.

This is telling me that Western historians, who are nowhere near as brave as the midwits imagine they are, see that the truth is coming out, truth such as cannot be suppressed nor (as Suvorov) left to the fringes. I see this book as a Limited Hangout in the Nixon tradition; it's as much truth as McMeekin's publishers will allow for us right now. I don't even blame McMeekin.

Keys to Reality

My dad got me Frank Wilczek's Ten Keys to Reality. Wilczek is most-famed for time-crystals. Here he's sort of speaking for Carl Sagan if Sagan's later, more Christian-tolerant self was writing his earlier pro-science work. Wilczek is wholly superior to Neil Tyson the Gaseous in any of that one's output in the past and, I expect, in his future.

A lot of Wilczek's stuff, I already knew; but I did perk up at a few points. Like: I appreciated the explanation of diffraction, how it got us maps of molecular structure, beyond the classical lenses. Also it was interesting that Newton didn't like his own theory of gravity on account it magically happened across vast distances without any medium of interaction of which Newton was aware. (I'd have added that the Three Body Problem stymied the great man too, such that it inspired Lagrange and, ultimately, the Chaos Theory.)

We also learn of quasi-particles, the holes in a crystal lattice which - as far as the chemist is concerned - act like real particles [UPDATE 10/28/23: excitons, I think]. So... like the missing electron in an ion, allowing its proton's positive charge through? This seems to be Wilczek's main deal. I mean, why not; the Standard Model had pretty-much solved mainline particle physics by the 1970s. The gaps where a particle should exist aren't as famed outside Wilczek's lab, but they have real uses, in semiconductors especially. So I'm glad someone's on it.

Where the book is covering stuff I don't know, I am - obviously - still not an expert, so don't take this poast's word for any of its content. Overall I'm enjoying the book (my dad enjoyed it) and I'm noting markers for followup reading.

Why don't Egyptians do astrology?

I noted here where Egyptians of Late Antiquity, nearly alone, have a dream vision where contemporaries had astrology. I called this "characteristic" given that Joseph ben Jacob, famously, had interpreted 'Azîz's dreams back in the prePharaonic era.

So: why didn't Egyptians do astrology? They had the same zodiac. Their calendar was solar. Light-pollution couldn't have been that bad. So let's float possibilities.

One is that the various beasties which mark the various hunting- and gathering- seasons upnorf in Anatolia are less seasonal in that southern "up", namely the Nile. The Nile floods or it doesn't, and for Egyptians pre-Nasser that was enough. No real need to track lions or gazelles. And every season is croc season.

It might be difficult for southern Egyptian and Nubian astrologers even to communicate with Babylonians, given that they're far enough south they see a whole band of sky the northerners don't.

And suppose you did want to do some astrology off the lighted river. Guess what: you're deep in the desert! Water costs money out there. And why do you even care? Sure, with an accurate clock and a sextant your astronomy can help guide caravans to the Garamantes or to Lake Chad or out to the Red Sea. But on the off chance someone wanted that, they hired a tracker who knew the landmarks.

Egypt's need for the heavens went so far as marking the seasons, and (later) the latitudes. They could do both with sundials, as Eratosthenes famously did. No need for nighttime "astro".

BACKDATE 6/8

Boris Johnson is a bigamist

... and the Roman Catholic Church is complicit.

In our Chalcedonian tradition, confiteor unum baptisma in remissionem peccatorum. If you are married in a schismatic tradition, you are still married in the Christian tradition. Unless you are a Monophysite or Vox Day or, I dunno, a Jew.

Yes I know; muh 'nnulment process, yadda yadda. Annulment's unideal but traditionally the Church may grant it if there came no viable children from the union. Bigamous Boris, of course, has spawned several.

Honestly even if you're Jewish you shouldn't be divorcing and marrying again under another roof. It's not even the Creeds at issue here but Jesus' exegesis of the Torah - which was shared by the Essenes, and by the Prophets. G-d has joined man and woman, not man and woman and woman. To the extent Lilith be a thing (she shouldn't be a thing) we are really getting into apocryphal weeds if we posit children from that union.