Another win for Lambert

End of last winter I was looking into Lambert problems - in orbital dynamics. It seems the old Switzerman isn't done with us yet: apparently he is also known (by astronomers) for asking about albedo. The Bernese in particular are on a roll lately.

Kevin Heng has, I gather, solved a class of phase-curve problems. Where we used to have to plug in some data into a computer and wait it out, now (for these types) we can just solve 'em. Consider Kepler as a solution for a class of Newtonian problems, the Two-Body class - a solution needing a question, which Newton found. Heng has turned that around for Lambert. So I guess he's more like Lagrange here.

So far the method is applied to Kepler-7b and to, er, Sol-5.

Five transiting planets, or stars

Brown dwarfs are defined as the border between yuuge planets like Jupiter and a hydrogen-burning star, the lowest-mass of which are red dwarfs. Traditionally that’s between 13 Jupiters and 80. Why there? Because those bodies actually burn fuel, where something like Jupiter just steadily emits infrared from, basically, rain. And maybe some heavy metal fission.

The brown dwarf’s fuel is deuterium – hey, just like a fusion rocket! Problem: the brown dwarf does not have deuterium to spare, as a main-sequence star like our Sun has hydrogen. So it starts not very hot, and will just get colder. I suppose at the end, it’s just another dead planet.

It turns out that we don’t know a lot about the higher-mass dwarfs, because they are rare. I didn’t actually know they were rare: Luhman 16 is only a light-year past the other side of Alpha Centauri. But, again, these 30-jupiter objects aren’t easy to see on their own – it took until a decade ago just to see the Luhman set. If we don’t see them we can hardly count them.

In particular the University of Geneva wanted some samples of dwarfs at that upper edge, to fine tune that difference between a brown dwarf and a red one. So, never mind Luhman 16. Nolan Grieves has gone through TESS’s “objects of interest” from which his team found five of interest to us.

TESS means Transit. You're imaging the shadow, not the dwarf. On the other hand you do get the radius (as % of star), and maybe even a look in the atmosphere. Grieves warns that TOI-681 and -1213 do not transit very much (check out -1213’s error-bar in Fig. 10!). But all five present a valuable addition to our sample-size.

Catholic University of America: Joe's laundry

Every other week, it seems, our church runs a Second Collection. Next week, we're told: for the Catholic University of America. I had a look at OpenSecrets to see whither the money will be going.

I disclose that I am more pro-Biden than anti-, these days. And I am not about to tell CUA's employees where to spend their money.

By the same token, I won't be listening to our church next week when they presume to tell me where I should spend MY money.

WHERE TO GIVE INSTEAD 10:55 AM MST - Louisiana looks like it will need the help. Keep an eye out for charities on the ground doing rescue, especially. And pray for them.

Avatar's legacy

I'll lay this out front: James Cameron's Avatar was one of the worst films I've ever seen, and the only reason I saw it was (1) my girlfriend at the time dragged me to it and (2) she let me drink alcohol (Alamo Drafthouse, ftw!). I am not Curtis Yarvin and I am nobody's relationship coach, but we'll take that as an example of Compromise. Anyway - on to the movie.

After the (bad) movie raked a LOT of money for a pastiche of the most-obvious tropes of Dances With Wolves and Fern Gully, some fans cropped up to the extent the conlang Na'vi got bespoke for a year or two. Lockheed stole the Venture Star spaceship's name for a X-33 replacement. In 2012 Stephen Baxter put out a science book. He may even have restrained himself from raping anybody in it.

We are now asked to survey its Legacy. There might not have been one. We don't see, say, meme gifs on Twitter much - even ironically. Critical Drinker deems it all a failure.

Cameron announced sequels at the time and every now and then floats the notion to the media, but he isn't a moron (financially) so he has to know that nobody wants more.

As far as this movie's Long Tail, the CGI advances were real, so various Marvel movies have been possible, and even a coming Dune remake that might not embarrass future generations. It may be that the most lasting contribution is the Venture Star spaceship model, which Winchell Chung more-than-less endorsed, although - again - I am unsure how well this holds up since 2012, and we have The Expanse now.

Pamatan

Via hbdchick and SyFy: the AD 1257 climate downturn. This has been pinpointed to the Samalas volcano in the Lombok island of Indonesia. The event is recorded in the Babad Lombok compiled in the 1500s. Also Babad Suwung.

Lombok was, as hinted, literate - in Javanese. Its capital was Pamatan.

Unsure why we are reading about this again eight years later, but I'll not knock it: SyFy is giving us a checkpoint, as we needed for Late-Antique Ilopango. Unlike Ilopango, the date remains secure. And so does the effect - 4.43 cubic kilometers of pumice. VEI 7.

Pamatan remains undiscovered. I should love to see its library: records of thirteenth-century comets? early explorations of Australia? ... ethnography of the last Denisovans?

On the minus side, some of those ancient Javanese records currently thought to refer to the sixth century might be tampered, by copyists active in the thirteenth.

NTR without hydrogen

NΘP works when the N does Θ on the P. The engineers (I am not an engineer) have been talking the P - the propellant. Historically and currently rocketeers like X-Energy have assumed liquid hydrogen. I am unsure that hydrogen (boiling point: 20 K) is a good idea this side of Neptune. I asked some stupid questions last December which I hereby take back. More seriously why canwenot use - say - water (373 K), which stores better. Luckily some (actual) engineers have been coming up with their own ideas. Here is a powerpoint (literally) from one Dennis Nikitaev, via ProjectRho.

Nikitaev is an expert in hydrogen propulsion, offering a paper just last year on diluting it (with argon). Since this is a powerpoint (and since I am no engineer) I find the argument hard to follow, and it assumes the Senate Lard System rather than the SuperHeavy. I'll do my best in what follows.

The PPT does note water has its own problems: in particular it is reactive at steam temperatures (I did not know this). But ammonia isn't! - at least not with our chassis. And its boiling point although chilly (195 K) is at least viable in-system with a modicum of reflective shielding. UPDATE 10/16: Matter Beam @ToughSF doubts they can make ammonia on the Moon or Mars. He agrees that water sucks; he prefers methane. That liquifies at 100 K - not as good as ammonia, but comparable to LOX which isn't too bad. Honestly I doubt his doubt on ammonia.

Ammonia does share with water a lower I_sp than hydrogen. That cost buys us twice the thrust, though.

I care most about reducing complexity overall. We are not using ANY of this stuff in space right now; best to start as simple as possible. Ammonia might get that simpler engine. That is to say: a lighter engine, so we can bring more payload.

One issue with all the above is that we've already weakened the temperature by insisting on LEU (around here), and now we're set to knock down the I_sp as well. I wonder if we should just give up and head straight to fusion.

PLASMOID 9/4: If the molecules do break up, can we do that VASIMR thing to the plasmoid on its way out? Asking for Ebrahimi.

Prussians in Bohemia

If you'd been following Davidski, you already knew that Yamnaya and Corded-Ware (later Bell Beaker) were not exactly the same. They did have mutual contacts, and maybe border war; but one did not overrun the other. Here is a paper constraining that, h/t hbdchick. These genes come from Bohemia.

Corded Ware arrives at 2900 BC - at that point, a diverse bunch. After a century, three groups coëxisted. Then... oh my:

sharp reductions and complete replacements of Y-chromosomal diversity at ~2600 and ~2400 BCE, respectively, the latter accompanied by increased Neolithic-like ancestry. The Bronze Age saw new social organization emerge amid a ≥40% population turnover.

For "replacements of Y", read "some foreign men did some John Norman Gor shit". By "Neolithic-like ancestry", drilling into the paper, it's from the northeast - from the Baltics. There is R1a but it is forest R1a - some steppe, but not predominant.

Not Aryans - and not Germans, neither. Some may find hard to believe that West Baltic could have been spoken in Bohemia, but then... they do call themselves "Czechs" speaking Slavic today, so If It Happens Now etc etc. This is early in the Bronze Age but not so early that Proto-Celtic and, er, Pre-Prussian were the same; we'll be hearing from Greeks and Mitanni in "only" 1200 years. Between 2400 BC and when the Romans show up, what, 50 BC is plenty of time for a para-Prussian relict population in Bohemia to give up and to switch to Celtic or German. Like the actual Prussians would do.

Hycea

New term, h/t Glenn Reynolds: the Hycean Planet. This is a water-world with a hydrogen-dominant atmosphere. Almost a Neptune: not supercritical.

I take it that when oxygen is given off, oxygen not being very hydrosoluble; it reacts with the atmosphere and just rains back onto the ocean.

Cambridge University is looking between 35-150 light years away because that's where they've found the transits. Closer in, we're not lucky enough to see a Hycean transit. Further out I suppose it's just too far to see much.

As far as life is concerned I am... skeptical, at least of our ability to find it. Just as our planet (until recently) has been busily sequestering its carbon, a water world with an alga / animal cycle would be dumping its carbon onto its own (VERY deep) seabed that much more efficiently. There might be life on that seabed but, er, Not As We Know It. And it's never coming up to the surface. Because there's nothing to eat up there.

And there's no sunlight down on the bottom. Honestly it's all going to look a lot like Europa and we're better off looking there.

AS WE KNOW IT 5:25 PM MST: If the world-ocean is shallow enough, at least in places, we can muse about some carbonbased photosynthetic plants that extend toward the sunlight. Symbiosis will be key. Also where the planet is tidally-locked and the sun doesn't flare too bad, will be a nightside icecap; some lichen might cling to that cap's edge. Yeah, I know; we're reaching.

Toalea

And now, rather 5200 BC, Bessé. She was Toalean, from the southwest peninsula of Sulawesi; 6000 BC - AD 500. They were a forest-and-river people who didn't seashore.

Half her genes are shared with Aborigines. But only half - and that's important, so where Daily Mail says Toalean foragers were the earliest inhabitants of Sahul this is a mistake.

The people on that peninsula now are Polynesians, basically, from Taiwan. They'd arrived 1500 BC so, I gather, elsewhere in Sulawesi, before finally overrunning the southwest two millennia later. Although there's talk of the Toála in AD 1905 from whom the ancients are named.

Of interest: Bessé herself, in that other half, also took on some Asian ancestry, which - again - didn't get further than Sulawesi. I wonder if it is Hòabìnhian.

Constraining cosmic radiation

A major constraint on the payload we can send into space is the radiation shielding, not just from solar protons but from cosmic rays. Cosmic here means they come from the... cosmos, not from our own System. Our Sun actually protects us (and Venus L2) from the weaker nucleons From Beyond Pluto. As for the stronger nuclei... well, I still dunno.

The weaker ones are still plenty annoying and they'll be affecting our Callisto mission should we get there. What might help is knowing where a ray might be coming from, statistically. I mean: why load up on that part of the hull which won't much get hit. To that end, this might help: how the rays cause ripples.

2021 PH27

Scott S. Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution has, with a Chilean telescope, found the shortest-period asteroid: 2021 PH₂₇. Thus beating out 2019 AQ3, at last.

At 113 days, this is near-exactly half Venus' 224.7 days. 2:1 resonances are, I think, unstable; this one gets away with it the way Pluto avoids Neptune: by being inclined 32° from ecliptic. Also like Pluto it's elongated: it crosses Mercury's and Venus' orbits both. Which, as they note, means it suffers relativistic effects at perihelion.

As to Earth-crossers (so off-topic), pace Zimmerman: looking at twilight for near-solar asteroids is not how we find threats to our own little marble. If their orbits are sun-to-planet, chances are very high they are resonant and tilted, so they won't get anywhere near us. Better off looking at night, as the joke goes, for those missiles incoming.

2021 PH₂₇ is a kilometer wide. The astros don't know what it is made of, but they can fairly constrain that it doesn't have any lead or tin - because at peri' it gets to 500 Centigrade. They'll be able to look at it properly early 2022 as it's in solar-opposition against our telescopes currently. Wanted: STL4 and L5 orbiting 'scopes.

And pace Sheppard / Carnegie, I would not bet on a comet here. I think any ol' rock at a Venus-resonant orbit is getting pulled into a trajectory like this one. Keyword missing from the text: "retrograde". That means it's running with the rest of us, not spearing in from Oort or beyond.

Beyond NERVA

Whilst we await the neutron-safe fusion NERVA, we're still tinkering with fissile propulsion. The name of the game is: Low Enrichment. Because no terrestrial entity wants a bomb in low-orbit.

ProjectRho is linking to one such proposal - from 2019 - called the "INsTAR". UltraSafe hyped a LEU last year, U for "uranium". I guess UltraSafe's tack... worked, alongside the coming SuperHeavy; because in their wake the outgoing (sore) loser Trump felt clear basically to ban weapons-grade U from our immediate skies. Sorry, Project-Orion bros...

Here's a site on efforts, historical and recent, to blast our nukey ride to glory: Beyond NERVA. - as Bobby Zubrin would put it. As I look around, X-Energy claims to have a good LEU fuel. Although X-Energy ain't wholly correct that we've squeezed all we can out of chemical.

So, really, what Trump did, was to wink at the LEU (and fusion) guys: that here is where we needs focus, to get started. That's one thing he got right in his last year.

Rotating detonation

As we fine-tune detonations, here's Japan actually putting it into practice. They are using a rotary model. Which sounds a bit like what we want to do to cut engine mass in our own cars.

Engines on rotation would I think go best with short-burst high-energy thrust, like Raptor-Two which Elon hopes won't melt. For higher MJ/kg at even shorter times of BOOM BOOM we might scale up to that sustained-detonation or even Orion. UPDATE 7/6/22 or, in between methane-chemistry and nuclear-pulse: POP FAME or the metastable nucleus.

What Japan is doing sounds great for orbit-adjustment in Earth's own well, like for shuttles and such. Although for longer-distance missions I should still prefer nuclear power. Like to redirect any part of any big nugget of metal.

Pollutants

Carly Cassella comments on a study, over 12000 years, of heavy metal intoxication. The true start is the Chalcolithic 3000ish BC which is when Europeans started to figure out how to melt the lower-point metals.

Meaning: lead. (Mercury would apply too.) Cassella says that lead, like strontium, replaces calcium in bones. For chemical reasons, rather than the isotopal reasons of some strontia; you should prefer to have the calcium.

Lead became a semiprecious metal, they say, about 500 BC with the rise of coinage - by that, they mean debased coinage, as pewter took over from Croesus' pure silver. But also lead was found useful as a sealant for aqueducts. The Romans figured out that Plumbus was Bad For You, and likely pretty soon since it was that obvious; but - what was the alternative?

Not debasing the coin, one might have told 'em... nah, that's crazytalk. Ron Paul talk. Problematic. Ay that's a cheap shot for our time; we're not worried about bad metal in our coins.

Cassella is warning us, for our time, about bad metals in our batteries. We're told (not by our plantlife) it is bad to put carbon in our air. So we're to use the Power Of Chemistry to store the energy. But batteries degrade. Further-unfortunately they degrade chemically, which means the elements don't change, which means the heavy metals are still there.

The smart people won Afghanistan

Obviously the smart people in Afghanistan are the Talibs. It's in their name. If a true IQ meritocracy is what you seek, go thither et circumspice.

We can agree that it's a disgrace to America. We can further agree Milley's sub-Soviet mismanagement of information is a demotion-worthy performance. As to Afghanistan, sure, the Taliban were not elected to their present position. If you are on the Right, you might consider trusting Anatoly Karlin who crunches the numbers.

Where I am going to dissent is whether I should care.

I point out, there are worse things than undemocratic Islam. From a cold Darwin perspective, Islamic law is superior to the Rainbow Flag (seen flying proud this last June, including over Kabul). The Taliban state will tempt your child to the Hagarûthé; the Rainbow Flag wants him gay. The former stands a chance to spawn grandchildren for you... the latter, not so much. This calculus holds true everywhere, to the extent if you have democratically-elected the Rainbow, you no longer deserve a democracy. You have left to others' decision the fate of your neighbours' posterity.

Biden did right to get out. I'll point Right readers to Ann Coulter less because I trust her, more because I can't be bothered to explain the obvious.

A number of disingenuous "ex" neocons, and even isolation-leaning blogs which should know better, are performatively complaining that Afghanistan wasn't gotten out of, "properly". But... suppose America had no choice, between staying there forever and what you're seeing now. Suppose we already had two Administrations both keen to get out, and both hampered by fat generals murmuring "just six more months". The Obama bumperstickers and the Trump bumperstickers (and the Hillary bumperstickers in between) all had our shot. We blew it; blame ourselves, and thank Biden.

So yes: right now in Khurasan, tyranny and repression - as the previous Afghanistan elites deserve, although their subjects don't. The populace may take comfort that in the not-so-longer run this state of affairs will not hold. They're losing the Panjshir already; "Nuristan" (Kafiristan from The Man Who Would Be King) and the Hazara lands to follow.

Cost / Benefit

Dr Ryan Knopp, MD got endorsed by Cernovich, so that's something, from an endorser who keeps palming Berenson's balderdash on us, and occasional stupid gotcha takes. But anyway . . .

The deal is that masks work for large-droplet aerosols. These aerosols disintegrate to smaller droplets as they float in the air. The smaller the aperture, the more effective for the incoming aerosols - but of course eventually you're getting a mask cluttered in dried mucus and saliva going out, so the mask ends up a gag.

So it's not that Masks Don't Work; it's that they're of reduced effectiveness without distancing, and as time goes on they don't work as well. And a lot of those cloth masks start out working not as well. Better than nothing, mayhap.

We also have needed a conversation about masking "children" which includes anyone under 25 (for men) or about 20 (women). Richard Hanania has been banging on about Cost / Benefit Analysis. He's right. Knopp (no disrespect - as a rule after the first honorific, I tend only to keep using it when I'm being sarcastic... as with Doctor Jill Biden, Ed. D. or DOCTOR AMY BISHOP) would also have us look at Cost / Benefit when comparing the Myocarditis, vaccinated versus unvaxxed-CoVID.

50 / 1,000,000 for kids who get the "Clot Shot". If they are left to let 'er rip, that's... er, 500-3E+3 / 1E+6. Hey y'all, I never promised there should be no math on this blog.

That's one in a thousand myocard victims, aka the long-haul. You might like your odds especially if you're not one of the fat kids. But you might like 1/20,000 odds a lot better. If you'd even been paying attention in maths class. (The best odds in DenningerWorld are: don't get vaxxed, and don't get the bug, because the bug doesn't exist; in practice, the bug exists, so those are the two choices you got.)

The Cost / Benefit in 2020, therefore, was clear: sequester the kids, who'll probably be okay, so they don't infect their "Dad Bod" / "Mommy Pooch" parents, who might not be okay.

The Cost / Benefit in 2021 is clearer. Don't wear those stupid masks. Get vaccinated instead. Yes, that includes teenagers. That especially includes nurses - walk off the job, go do your nursing in Kandahar, they're more your speed.

And you may or may not want that booster later (for me, I calculate early next January). I'd say, you probably do. I'm not an obtuse idiot, and I remember hints about boosters in March. Pfizer were working on them in January, fools.

Witches

Over at Unz and his baseboy collective, I've run into Edward Dutton. Not to be confused with Dalton the moderate Hitler fanboy.

Dutton writes books. Not to be confused with Darwin, who also wrote a lot of books. Lately Washington Summit is floating Witches, Feminism, and the Fall of the West... at Amazon. We will see how long that lasts; Jared Taylor got deplatformed and I wonder how long Vox Day's work has got, over there.

As far as The Supernatural goes, I expect I am in Mike Cernovich's court. I know I am in the court of HP Lovecraft. We humans may or may not be open to forces from beyond our cosmos. We humans may or may not believe we are. But the witches believe they are - and they're not on humans' side. They serve the demons.

ADDENDUM 8/21: By the law of fanaticism, this means that if demons don't exist, the witches will serve them all that harder.

Guangxi before the Han

Interesting genetics from south China / north Vietnam, 8000 BC.

There were three races here, in three places: Fujian, Guangxi, Viet. (The latter are termed "Hòabìnhian hunter gatherers".) None of these races survive in any of these locales today except as traces. The article claims that Guangxi was first to go. They were swamped by Fujian, with some introgression from Vietnam as well. This happened 7000-4000 BC.

So, I take it, Fujian adopted some Chalcolithic / Ceramic farming practice and expanded their population.

It's all moot since the Tang régime, or so I gather from "≤ 1500 BP". The Han swamped the lot. Even the Viets got heftily HANNED. In the north, anyway; although, that lot did keep its language.

Old Fujian language could be Austronesian, but my money is on Kra-Dai now clustered in that Thai-Lao basin. Old Hòabìnhian may well be Austroasiatic aka Mon-Khmer. As for Guangxi's ancestral tongue I dunno. Hmong? Seems like the thing to do if your homeland's been took, just run for the hills.

Ogallala

I figured I'd look at the Ogallala Aquifer (not "aquifier"). I live more in an affecting area, than affected; our water flows northeast, to the Platte.

The Ogallala used to be a beach. Seriously: the "old Rocky Mountains" disintegrated, and its sand flowed into the inland American Sea, to such an extent that the Gulf of Mexico is about all that is left of it. So there's a lot of sandstone up in Lyons here. This sandstone and not-so-stone is porous enough that a lot of water got buried between South Dakota and northwest Texas.

As I read up on this, that water is still there... in the Platte watershed, through Nebraska. As we go south, we get more arid. The Ogallala frackers and farmers got to pulling the water up out of there, after the Dust Bowl 1930s. On the farming side it's called "center-pivot irrigation". Might explain those circular-pattern farms we see flying over eastern Colorado into Denver.

There was a move to improve center-pivot efficiency. It worked! Unfortunately it worked so well that those farmers figured they could grow thirstier crops now. "Jevons' Paradox", Wiki tells me.

The frackers are I think pumping that water even further down there, to get the natural gas out. Seems like this is expanding the aquifer more than decreasing it. Mind, then we don't have the water up here anymore. And this water isn't clean.

As for other environmental issues, the Keystone XL pipeline was proposed to cross it. Although as I read the map, its path would cross only the northeastern Nebraskan part of it, which (1) isn't our problem down south and west and (2) those Nebraskans don't even need, themselves. If you oppose the pipeline, you should consider better arguments.

The real pollution risk seems to be the nitrates and phospates, which introduce all manner of microbial life, and their toxic leavings, into the water-table. Salt, too, I imagine.

What we might consider is an underground aqueduct. From the upper-Platte side of the aquifer, over to the Front Range headwaters.

Chicxulub's outer origin

10-15 years ago I recall breathless comments about an asteroid breakup 160 million years before that, that its fragments did the Chicxulub in between. Those comments dropped by the wayside, maybe because that asteroid-cluster got ruled out. Here we go again: Simone Marchi, William Bottke, David Nesvorný... some others, as 'splained to us by one Ailsa Harvey. This argument looks more plausible, though.

What we know about the impactor itself is that it had iridium... but not as much iridium as (say) a Psyche 16, nor a Vesta. The impactor was assumed of a near Earth origin because, well, it did hit Earth, after all. Marchi's simulations involve "thermal forces"- so I gather from the Harvey summary. Whatever that means, it allows outer (semimajor axis 3.4 AU) asteroids to cross into inner orbits, like Earth's 1 AU. The further out (originally), the less metallic. REALLY further out you get those iceball comets but I'm pretty sure comets have been ruled out for this one.

I must question that Harvey knows what she's talking about, herself. Asteroids don't get pulled from orbit. To me that means something like Oumuamua (or Voyager), heading into interstellar space. Asteroids might however get their orbit altered - usually keeping about the same semimajor, but getting a different eccentricity. Such orbits may, if eccentric enough, intersect with some other body's orbit.

I'd point out that when a further asteroid gets too close to Jupiter (5.2 AU), Jupiter elongates that orbit. A more-elliptic trajectory, you should know from Kepler, has a lower perihelion. When that perihelion dips below 1 AU... well, that's an Earth-crossing orbit, ain't it.

Pity I have to wait until November to read the actual article.

Mitigating slosh

We have three median states of matter, between the Einstein-Bose Condensate (too cold) and the plasma (too hot): solid, liquid, gas. We're here to discuss that state sloshing in the middle.

Liquids by nature slosh. We know where the solids are. We know where the gas is - distributed evenly-enough around the container's interior, with some allowance for when they go plasmic. Over a planet, liquids ruin our ramjet. In space, they go lava-lamp on us so we cannot measure them.

Awhile ago, we got an article on gauging propellant in microgravity. Once gauged, we could use origami, to squeeze the container.

If we must use liquid, proposed was a Liquid Annular Reactor System. LARS would be rotated. Doesn't work in a gravity-well, but might be viable for deep space.

The Germans' filioque

I have read SteVen Runciman so I am here for the re-read. I'm getting a handle on how filioque entered Rome. Despite Chalcedon's dyotheletism, in its Greek creed, using a Greek term for "proceeds"; it never thought to clarify the mechanic with the addition of a new word. It seems that foreigners forced it upon us in the West.

Stephen II and Leo III were the Roman Bishops during a fateful time in European and Byzantine history/es. Carolus Magnus was uniting the West; Constantine V was consolidating the East. Over Church affairs both the adventurer and the emperor were meddlers, and both were iconoclasts. So the Papacy of this time didn't have great choices. Constantine wasn't helping the West, so - by default - Leo III ended up crowning Charles as "Holy Roman Emperor". This was annoying to the Greeks but, well; there wasn't much those Greeks could do about it.

I find interesting that it was German saeculars like Charles who insisted on the old Toledan filioque to be inserted: first in the "Athanasian" Creed, then into the "Nicene" (really Chalcedonian) Creed. Contemporary Greek saeculars like Heraclius were more like Theodosius II or Constantius, big on unitarianism, one way or another.

At the Vatican, Leo III himself didn't want filioque and received complaints, from Jerusalem no less. Later John VIII would accept that this was provocative to Greeks, with whom he wanted better relations. The Theophylacts, for what they were worth, which was little, followed John here; Runciman sees them as a second Byzantine Papacy in practice.

So, why did the Franks, other Germans, and various pro-German Popes insist on filioque, and impose it upon our (version of) the Church?

I think it might be that although the German kings were meddlers, they were preëmptive meddlers. The Germans didn't think they were as powerful as Heraclius, able to take the rôle of Father over the Church as Son. (They'd be proven right as the hillfort came back into fashion.) They noticed that it was the Bishop of Rome taking that title Papa. The Germans would not be chained to a new Empire at the Vatican. Especially not if the Vatican was itself answering to near-alien Constantinople.

It was vital to Carolingian Civilisation that the Spirit not flow from the Father alone. And no, the per filium proposal was no compromise.

Bear tribes stay with human tribes

Rachel Fritts reports that, in the American Northwest, bear tribes and human tribes coexist. As in: where the locals spoke language A, those were the bears they lived with. Those humans didn't move much into the lands with language B; neither did "their" bears.

To me it all seems so Ainu. I am unaware of bear-cub adoption among the Na-Dene...

... but who needs that, when bears and humans adopt one another. The Wuikinuxv and its bears have lived amongst each other for thousands of years, and they don't mess with one another. If a Wuikinuxv brave (more likely: outcast) wanders outside his territory, he might be attacked by some other tribe - or that tribe's bears might get him first.

I wonder if this same dynamic had applied, earlier, to humans and wolf-packs. The (human) Tribe Of The Red Pelted Wolf stuck with the Red Pelt Pack (who couldn't even see red, but could maybe smell it). Wolves are smaller than bears.

The most Denisovan people

... are not the Solomon Islanders. Some fine-tuning has been done and they're marked as 4%. The Ayta Magbukon "negritos" in the Philippines are 5%ers. h/t Turtle Island; Saraceni got wind of this later.

Science News prefers two or more Stone Age Denisovan populations independently reached various Southeast Asian islands, including the Philippines and [Sahul].

My thought is that these populations mixed in the Sundaland, first. Maybe the first New Guineans / Australians were 20% Denisovan/Neander, 80% sapiens, when they first took to the low seas. Still a high proportion! But I'm not seeing the pure Dennies (or Dennie-Neander mixes) being crafty enough to get past the Sunda Strait unaided.

SULAWESI 8/26: Per Toalea in the southeast, they'd mixed on the hither side.

Spin polarisation

Gerrit Bruhaug and Ayden Kish may have solved our fusion-rocket problem: The Benefits of Spin Polarization for Fusion Propulsion. h/t Winchell Chung.

The issue we've had around here is the neutron problem. If you want to ignite the fuel (and if you want a cheap fuel), you want Deuterium-Tritium. That sprays neutrons all over the place. There's also "aneutronic" Helium-3 but it is expensive, and doesn't ignite so well. And in practice that process sprays some neutrons too. (BTW, ignore the LOLworthy bit about neutrons being "ionizing". Although, once they've made an isotope unstable... that can be ionising.)

On February I got wind of directing the neutrons. There's a term for that: spin-polarisation. Bruhaug and Kish have crunched some numbers. It cuts down on the anti-neutron shield - and that's not all! The exhaust velocity is higher, so there's your I_SP - awesome for getting out to the Jupiter-and-beyond range.

Spin-polarisation even lowers ignition requirements. The authors point out this brings Helium-3 back into play. Better, I think, it may allow to ignite the fuel from an orbiting solar-energy concentrator, rather than using some chemical or nuclear detonator which we then have to keep from detonating (or getting robbed). Best done at the Venus orbit I think.

I've flagged that tritium has a half-life so is storable only over a timescale of months (although, if your storage facility is good enough - possible if you're not in actual transit - you do get to save the He-3). Chung flags that nucleons depolarise, also. Especially if there's a magnetic field from outside. That's going to be an issue in Near-Earth Orbit, and near Jupiter - so, the space station to launch these ships will need to be in some Libration halo, Mars, Callisto, SVL2 maybe.

A KICK OUT THE DOOR 9/4: Neutrons excepted, the results of fusion should be a plasma - rapidly moving. Is it worth our while for VASIMR to run out the ions that bit faster? Asking for Ebrahimi.

Donald Kagan pays his fare

Yale delivers Donald Kagan's eulogy. For historians, Kagan is best known for his work on the Pelopponesian War. The one book of his I read (the first few chapters of) was about Thucydides as revisionist-historian [UPDATE 2/2/22: now finished].

His son Robert is a "neocon" who opposed Trump; a McCain-Romney man. This apple did not roll from the tree: Donald, also, supported the Iraq intervention. In fact his support was touted by the neocon blogs over 2002 - influencing people like me, to my regret.

I cannot recall how Kagan applied the Pelopponesian War to American adventurism abroad. I recall that he did do so. Since his conclusion was wrong, I assume his argumentation was flawed.

All I can say here is, Donald Kagan goes to judgement.

Kuiper

Yeah, I suppose I'm making up for last night's debacle in poasting, that I'd got took by a Matt Drudge trollpoast. Not that I believed any of it ever, but it's embarrassing enough that I'd thought it was worth taking seriously. So, now: Kuiper Belt Objects.

We've been to one - sent a probe thither, anyway. Ultima Thule, as we called it at the time; Arrakoth, now. We seem to be on a hunt to find more closer to home. These n-body systems move about chaotically, and sometimes Kuiper comes closer to us. Triton, dramatically, came to Neptune.

Just in the last week we read that a couple asteroids look Arrakothey. And now, Hokkaido University is looking into a rock that came down to Tagish Lake.

Tagish Lake is metamorphic, as these things go; it got hit (out) by something. Also there was "radiogenic heating" around that time of impact. That means homemade radiation. According to the abstract, the internal radiation happened during the parent asteroid's formation. It had got to 160 km diameter or more, in Kuiper; before the impact, which - they say - probably happened in our Asteroid Belt at, what, 4 AU. I assume Jupiter was mostly formed by then.

They say the impactor was only 10 km across. Doesn't seem enough to vapourise the parent.

Is, then, that parent ex-Kuiper still among us?

The Mayas' other ancestry

LindyScience (clumsily) translates some Italian, asking a question about the real translation she has in her head. The real translation is, Native American populations genomes do not show any contribution from non-American populations, with one exception: the Maya, to whose (al cui) genetic makeup 'Tuscan' and Bantu ancestors have significantly contributed. She asks how come the conquistadors only raped the Maya and not the other indigenes.

My answer is that the conquistadors didn't rape the Maya. Since we're on topic, they somewhat-famously failed even to conquer them, much...

The Spaniards in Maya lands lived among them as Maya. Vaguely recall a nineteenth century book about the Maya which noted some Spaniard villages in their lands who spoke only Maya and not Castilian (anymore). UPDATE 8/17: Daniel Brinton an Carl Hermann Berendt. Perhaps from the unedited Nombres Geograficos en Lengua Maya.

Spaniards elsewhere when they went mestizo got their kids to speak Spanish, not their mothers' languages. Where there was a pure "Indian" town, it has stayed "Indian".

The dinosaur peoples

... or the "bird peoples", if we want to be more polite. Here's a thread summarising David Epstein, The Sports Gene.

Claim here is that when West Africans (especially) got selected for the sickle-cell, to protect against malaria; other genes followed suit, to build a body that could live on less oxygen. You know - like birds.

East Africans as we all know are the world's kings of aerobic exercise. But West Africans trend for sprints instead. Because East Africa, at least the parts in question, is desert or high-plateau, where mosquitos don't thrive.

Although: high-plateau seems like a great place for people to hang out if they don't need the oxygen.

I wonder now about the Denisovan relationship with malaria. As African-born themselves, I'd thought that they wouldn't need the genes which got them to Tibet; that they'd acquired those genes in Tibet. Maybe, though... their ancestors needed those genes for other reasons, those reasons being malaria.

Might also explain why Neanders (Dennies stem from the first Neanders) took that ambush-predator niche. With all its knock-on effects.

Horse leavings at Troy

From Drudge Report 'an Jerusalem Post 'an Greek Reporter: "Boston University professors" Christine Morris and Chris Wilson are claiming they have found The Horse. That link has a date: 6 November 2014; found it on DuckDuckGo.

Part of their evidence is an inscription For their return home, the Greeks dedicate this offering to Athena. The article doesn't say what script it was in, but - they say - the offering was legible to Quintus Smyrnaeus. Which is telling me: it's Greek. Attic Greek - who else is dedicating stuff to Athene. If it were a Bronze Age inscription, this should be in Linear B - which no Greek could read anymore. Or maybe in Luwian hieroglyphic although I much doubt that a Smyrnaean of the classical era could still read that. Old Cypriote?

I believe a horse has left SOMETHING here, all right. I cannot find Morris nor Wilson in the BU Faculty page. Iiiinteresting; maybe they used to be there in 2014? I found a Dr Christine Morris in Trinity Ireland who does archaeology but, something tells me, she's uninvolved in all this.

Call it here and call it now: it's a froggery. It might not be a modern froggery, but ... a game of Frogger has been played, by somebody, and we're the marks.

I have no clue about Greek Reporter but I'll assume it's a rag. Shame on JPost which should know better, for not looking deeper.

READ THE COMMENTS 9:05 PM MST: hoo boy, they're a doozy. Apparently the whole thing was satire. A. HaLevi uncovered this nine hours ago. 28 September 2014 on the satirical tabloid site "The World News Daily Report", he says.

Anyway, I'd not be too surprised if some Athenaian businessman had set up a fake horse there in Antiquity. An earlier version of this blogpost mused about Morton Smith's interpolations into Mark's Gospel. They might not be Smith's; they might have been the Carpocratians'. But if there ever was a fake horse there, now we know the JPost isn't the venue to tell us. Now we know the JPost isn't a venue to tell us anything.

I feel really, really bad for Dr Morris right now.

Keeping the ramjet in one piece

Concerning supersonic generally, Sabine Hossenfelder explained what this means - assuming chemical fuel.

Sabine like United Airlines cares about Sustainability - which she'll tell you. Sabine is furthermore the sort of Twitterite who posts pronouns on her profile. She/Her has taken the corporate ticket, in short. But here she/her is talking serious physics.

I am not a serious physicist. I am a very silly physicist. To that end I want a persistently-flying Mach 8 Pluto ramjet using vaporised Curium-247 for energy. (I tried melting the fuel. It didn't work.) Notion here was and is that if my ramjet is hot enough I can boost it above the SLAM altitudes. Ultimately this isn't for Earth but for Venus.

Hossenfelder deals with the chassis of the rest of the craft. I hadn't looked at this. There's a thing called Stagnation Temperature which is the temperature of the bow-shock in front of the craft. 3000 K at Mach 8. Owch!

She does point out that where the atmosphere gets more rarified, it doesn't heat up the outside as much, even if (on paper) the temperature is high. So I'm thinking that a scramjet with superPluto energies, flying higher, might not burn out the outside.

Supersonic is coming (not near you)

I was in transit Saturday afternoon - on United airlines, from DC(ish) to Denver. United's inflight rag regaled me with several boasts about their Sustainable supersonic option. They'd bought several such craft promising Mach 1.7. h/t Sabine Hossenfelder, NASA are looking into getting that sonic-boom quieter, around 2024. The X59.

"Sustainability" aside, the damn'd noise pollution is of concern where people are living, lookin' especially at densely-populated regions where the rich people take off and land... like Washington DC and New York City. That's what limited the Concorde.

So until that little problem is solved, expect United to be flying their supersonics to distant suburbs, or to parts of the world where the people are such people as Hossenfelder and the United C-suite doesn't like such as Trump voters who fly "Economy". Actually Denver's aeroport isn't a bad idea for the former. United won't be flying to DC/NYC until they get X59.

Then there's that Branson / Rolls-Royce thingy at Mach 3. That'll probably always be exurban.

Ashtinameh again

I'd been studiously avoiding the Ashtinameh and other early pacts floated by Near Eastern Christians over the Middle Ages. In 2017 Michael Rozik wrote a Masters thesis, musing on What If we took those pacts at their word.

Craig Considine, doing a strong-form of Fred Donner, is mooted; but I recommend to avoid his output, studiously or not. Ditto Andrew Morrow. More serious a challenge are Ahmed al-Wakil and Amidu Sanni - because they've done some textual criticism. They argue that these pacts descend from a "master copy", subsequently altered to fit ... whatever. Some might be forgeries locally, but - because also plagiaries - reliant on a real ancient ideal.

Rozik argues, plausibly, that these pacts are in the tradition of better-attested sulh texts like those drawn up between the Umayyads and the famous Christian towns of north Syria, like Edessa. They also align with the "Hanafi" doctrine (really Shaybani's) which underpinned the 'Abbasid treaties between Islam and the Rhomanía. We might also bring in Cyprus.

MUSE 10/16: I suspect ur-Ashtinameh as a counter to Ibn Jurayj kitâbî law and to the Pact of 'Umar.

Why Sunday?

Basil Lourié directs us to a Late Antique controversy over what's the most important day of the week.

First is "The Epistle on Sunday", delivered from Christ Himself to the author. This seems to be about the most-canonical Scripture that Christians these days don't read anymore, extant in hundreds of MSS. Some say it dates to AD 540ish in Jerusalem, although Lourié would nuance that. A rival tradition argues, from a Hebraic tradition, that the week should start on Wednesday because by Genesis One no sun existed to mark time before that; a "day" before that Wednesday has no calendric meaning.

The debate hit Christendom during the AD 450s in the wake of Chalcedon, as did many controversies. Theodosius of Jerusalem refused this Council.

If Wednesday was just as good as Sunday, other days would get their place in weekly devotions - which, for Christians, meant Friday. Friday became very important for Near Eastern Christendom, not just for Lent. Lourié thinks that's whence the Arabs got the idea. And then the Muslims.

Orthodox jihad

I was earlier this week reading Steven-with-V Runciman's old book on the Eastern Schism between the Latins and the Greeks, which book I generally appreciated. One off-note I noticed was the claim that Orthodoxy didn't have a doctrine of sanctified warfare.

Christendom doesn't naturally have warfare as holy in of itself. It does however own an apocalyptic tradition, which in the Orient trended to the Last Emperor motif. As with ISIS, that meant warfare. Stephen Shoemaker wrote a whole book on that.

Anyway I found Yuri Stoyanov, buried in a collection of Armenian apocalyptic scholarship. As Heraclius went, John Tzimiskes followed: he cut a swathe deep into southern Syria, even taking Damascus. More than a century before the Crusade, sure but... not much more.

One difference between East and West was that the West had warrior clerics; but, when you consider the hooliganism that monks got into during "the last pagan generation", I'm really not seeing a distinction in how the violence is organised. The Fourth Lateran is coming AD 1215 but of course that's a few Crusades too late.

Runciman notes quite a few instances where East and West castigated each other for sins common to both cardinal regions, such as the use of castration. I'm chalking crusading as another instance.

Hydrogen from water and silicates

In chemistry news, from last July anyway, "green hydrogen". That's hydrogen made from water directly, and efficiently (low-energy).

Currently most of our hydrogen is made from methane, which isn't "green" because methane has carbon in it. Again, I don't care; but Our Betters make a show of caring, so the midwits care. Where I start to care is where I look at other planets which might not have the carbon but have the water ice. I'm thinking of Saturn's moons, here; and Callisto. Maybe some of those outer asteroids like Ceres. Although plenty of these have methane too.

When Egypt seceded from Islam

Call last night's a throwaway essay, but I do want to look at Pseudo-Athanasius in Arabic. I want to start with some understanding of the installation of Arabic in Egypt.

The Egyptian Muslim historian al-Kindi, because he was of Kinda or at least a mawla thereof, accordingly wrote in classical Arabic. He told about the earliest occupation: that the "Bashmur" rebelled several times. This was the marshy, reedy part of the Delta - think, the Nilotic Zanj. Arabs didn't live here.

Athanasius of Qus tells of a Delta Coptic dialect, that it was dead by his (14th) century. By this he distinguished it from Bohairic, which he would have known well; Sahidic was more an upstream thing. Although, from what I've seen of all recorded Coptics, they were mutually intelligible as written, like an educated modern Portuguese should be able to read Alfonso's Castilian. I'm calling that 13th-C Bashmur "Coptic" was a creole and irrelevant to our eight/ninth-century purpose.

The most successful uprising seems to be the Miaphysite move against Marwan II in AD 749, which detached the Delta from his Harranian régime. The 'Abbâsid historians, who got to write the histories when they took Syria, say the new caliph al-Saffah reached a deal with the rebels: tax-amnesty for two years if you allow Arab garrisons to stay, meaning Fustat "old Cairo".

This smells about right to me. In context many Arabs in Egypt were Umayyad loyalists. Either way, they still wanted their pay. If they weren't being paid locally they had to beg their stipends from al-Saffah. Change allegiance or be hanged as a bandit. Easy choice!

As for the rebels, the choice was similar for them. I mean, they could (in theory) have called in the Greeks, Constantine V being fairly good at his job as the emperors went. But, even besides that he was a dyothelete, he was also an iconoclast.

The Bashmur rose again AD 767 and, this time, had Arab settler support. I don't find where Fustat quite put this one down. In fact Alexandria herself exited the caliphate, I'd say during the fitna between those brothers al-Amin and al-Ma'mun. Around AD 830, Ma'mun sent his general al-Afshîn at least to get Alexandria back, but the Bashmur could not be so taken... until it was. That marked the end of Christendom in Egypt.

Add to this that our copyist Thomas, writing during the Plague, was a Mahalli - a Delta man. I think the Arabic translations of Pseudo-Athanasius will date around to AD 830 when Alexandria was multiethnic, Christian, and anti-'Abbasid. But still not prepared to be speaking Greek again.

"MS" is not short for "autograph"

JP Monferrer-Sala in 2011 published a study of Pseudo-Athanasius as he read it in Arabic. The Vatican kept it as the 99v-111v part of Arabic #158. I have to say, this article is rough. The essay starts by dating the "MS" to AH 96 / AD 715 with a link to Hoyland Seeing Islam, 285.

It happens that I have read Seeing Islam several times. I've consistently rated it as my favourite book... ever. I didn't remember Hoyland dating this Arabic MS so early. As I look it up, I can confirm. Hoyland was cagey enough on speculating as to Pseudo-Athanasius' autograph. Looking around for Vat. ar. 158, the date I find (admittedly for other folios herein) is AD 1356/7 by Thomas Mahalli. Interesting year, I must say.

I think Monferrer-Sala meant to say "the autograph" or maybe "the base MS". I suggest that authors only use "MS" where we own the actual strip of paper. Any preserved MS is rarely the autograph; Zuqnin is famous (or should be) for being an autograph.

I am letting Monferrer-Sala off the hook on this one, since I much doubt he intended what got published; he seemed in 2011 not to own English as his first language. As I keep saying, this is why we have editors and I'm more inclined to pin this slip on them.

As to why MS-v.-autograph matters - I'm interested in when this Coptic original (Monferrer-Sala is well aware it was Coptic, using a Sahidic Bible) got translated into Arabic. I am trying to get my head around its translator's familiarity with Qurânic tropes. AH 96 / AD 715 is super-early in Islamic development. It's rather early for Copts using Arabic for their own use, as with Pseudo-Athanasius.

Before Joseph

Another academic presser from Japan: Stable Climate Led to Origin of Agriculture. They're studying settlement patterns 16-8 kBC. And yes they use "BC" - the Based Count.

A common theory is that unstable climate leads to longterm planning, as we Based Counters (and Jews) read at the end of Genesis. But no, say the Japanese: when your village isn't even at the ceramic stage yet and you can't tame a cat to guard the granary, the correct strategy for a drought is "move".

And that's what the early Japanese, technically more likely Ainu, did during the Ice Age. The weather got warm (in Japan) 13 kBC; but nobody grew the plants on purpose until the weather was predictable, a millennium later. Also the 10900 - 9700 BC event, called the Younger Dryas where the dryas tundra grew, occasioned a step away from agriculture.

I gather that the Japanese would respectfully have us occidental tartars know that the Joseph episode is the end of Genesis, the Middle Bronze Age; by which time the race in question - the Egyptians - had been civilised and indeed literate for over a thousand years already. (As for the character of Joseph, feh.)

Fixing the chemical rocket

The Japanese may have figured out, in theory, what Elon is trying to fix by practice and redundancy: why rockets break down. Apparently the news got out last June but it's only now we got the press release.

Hiroshi Gotoda says the problem is resonance: heat release fluctuations and pressure fluctuations synchronize to each other. You expect to detonate your chemicals - hydrogen (called "the fuel" here) and oxygen - in one place; the resonance forces a second detonation zone in another place, which place of course wasn't designed for that. Soon you've got the fuel detonating in every place and Elon's lost a Raptor.

I am unsure how this affects longer-lasting detonations but I suggest this as a future avenue of research. Controlling this resonance could turn a curse into a blessing.

Twitter's speedbump

Twitter got stupid and is putting up a "signin" nag when I go to one of the four-ish accounts I follow. If I click on a thread, same nag; but now the browser (Brave) boots me back to my starting point. So I cannot follow threads anymore.

I wasn't about to be signing up with Twitter anyhow but it's looking like I might not even be visiting the place anymore.

FIXED IT 8/3 AM: Right, I am allowed to copy the URL and to repaste it into another tab. Where there is no "before", there is no option to backpedal, so I can read the thread in peace. Screw you @jack.