The rain on the moon

Last night Fairbanks, Alaska brought us some details on the lunar rain. Our Moon gets water from several sources: hydrogen (ionic) from the Sun, various hydrogen and oxygen compounds from meteors. Rod Boyce claims oxygen comes from the Sun also but, I doubt enough to matter, and the Moon doesn't need it.

Anyway the 3500 km³ of water in the Moon's polar craters might fall from our own Earth. Like Venus, Earth has a tail of gas streaming from the sun's radiation, albeit of course not as strong as Venus'. Also - here is the new research - the Moon interferes with the Earth's magnetotail. Ions which would otherwise keep blasting beyond 1 AU get recombined. This not only creates water, but the water ends up pulled back to Earth. Where the Moon is in the way; far side, at that. Which border circle includes the poles.

I'd constrain this process to our times when the Earth has a magnetosphere, which it didn't always. I take it this must be newer water. Also the Moon was closer in older aeons and the sun dimmer, but these factors might be negligible over this ('zoic) aeon in question.

Solar for firstcomers

Some excellent news for the first Martian visitors: there's a race between small-scale nukes and solar panels, and solar is now winning. At least - for getting an energy-supply OVER there.

This only holds true for the insolation available at the Martian tropics and, I suspect, its moons. But still: gram by gram, solar is better here. This matters for the first visitors. It also relieves Earth of the problem of getting fissile material into orbit where it's not, er, legal.

Later, Martians can probably find some uranium around the planetary surface or dropped in from an asteroid. Large-scale colonies might want these. The polar regions will want these; so will Ceres, I gather.

Goldilocks, or not

This just in, for Earth Weekend: "The Outer Edge of the Venus Zone", by Monica R. Vidaurri, Sandra T. Bastelberger, Eric T. Wolf, Shawn Domagal-Goldman, and Ravi Kumar Kopparapu. Missed the Appreciation Day by a... hair.

Overall, these five argue that runaway Venus can happen further into the habitable-zone than previously thought. Much then depends on the planet. This isn't well-constrained for Venus herself, although we're getting better. Of course for extrasolar planets this isn't constrained at all, although - they note - Webb will help.

I assume as rule-of-thumb that Venus will come for the heavier planets with presumably-thicker atmospheres of carbon, first. Especially if the water isn't there. Also I am unsure that these researchers should even have bothered with the M systems given that their "habitable" zone will be tidally-locked, and often subject to flare. Like Proxima next door.

One strike of bad news falls upon the K systems with their presumed "Goldilocks" planets. K (and M) delivers more radiation into the infrared which is exactly what a greenhouse will trap: K5V (0.70 M_☉) is 0.68 AU. UPDATE 10/8: If the orbit and rotation are in a Mercury resonance then its planet is basically a rotisserie.

COLD WATER 10/12 Ethan Siegel. NO PLANTS 3/5/23 Spectra.

The sidelining of nonSyriac Aramaic

The Near East which adopted Arabic had, beforehand, spoken Aramaics. It's commonly mooted around Christian circles that "Aramaic" was "the language of Jesus". This is true inasmuch as Jesus was a Galilean where (before the Revolt) Hebrew wasn't a spoken language. Leaving aside to what extent Qumran and the Shephelah, and parts of Jerusalem of course, were all keeping Hebrew current, as we'll read in Mishnah.

My issue with the general, not to say vulgate, Christian opinion is that Jesus as a Galilean should have been speaking a precursor of a Palaestinian Aramaic. We actually have quite a bit of Christian Pal[a]estinian Aramaic in writing, albeit biblical and patristic rather than, oh, contemporary literature. Christian Aramaeans by the seventh-century AD corresponded in Edessene Syriac, as when Ishoʿyahb III was writing to Jerusalem.

Anyway they'd all end up in Araby. But how?

The first Arabic Christian bibles cluster in the Jerusalem region and the later/ʿAbbasid eighth century AD. The Jews were probably at least targumising their own scriptures around this time (before Saadya). The Had-Qnoma came to claim that Mar Johanan himself had commissioned an Arabic Bible: which might be a Gospel (harmony?) although Genesis is noted as a point of controversy, so - perhaps a lectionary with bits and pieces.

One factor in the Malkiya was that these Arabophones, not being of the Church of the East, and also being closer to Constantinople (over the ninth century, starting to Make Rome Great Again), had taken notice of the Peshitta / Masoretic commonalities. Some parallels were (and are) innocuous to the Divine Oeconomia. Other parallels work against us - Agapius and Theodore Abu Qurra called out the (shorter) Masoretic chronology, in particular. And as sometimes modern Protestants have adopted LXX here; back then, Elias of Nisibin, an Oriental himself, came to accept this Melkite argument even against his own Bible. Some Muslims like Abu'l-Fida followed, of interest just for their interest in abrogated kutub.

I'd pondered if anyone here had bothered with the local Palaestinian Aramaic tradition but, it seems not. There exist Arabic / Greek multilinguals touching upon Aramaic, foremost Russian State Library 432. This Aramaic was Syriac.

I conclude that the Melkites of Jerusalem read Syriac and Greek, and ʿAbbasi-era Arabic. The Melkites under Islam ignored Palaestinian Aramaic, shunting this aside. And nobody in the Had-Qnoma ever touched the stuff; Mar John in particular being a Syriac man.

As for modern claims that the Syrian villages which have preserved Aramaic might speak descendents of ancient non-Syriac dialects; I don't know. If so these villages did not contribute to any independent Christian literacy. Where they own Bibles they are Syriac Bibles or VERY recent translations.

Mar Mattai and Tikrit

Having blown the greater part of last winter on the Oriental churches, I've this morning stumbled upon Marianna Mazzola in Le Museon 2019.

Ishoyahb as bishop in Nineveh, on its way to becoming "Mosul", dealt with two centres of "Heresy". One was Tikrit; the other, Mount Alfaf. Alfaf (we find elsewhere) is host to the monastery of saint Matthew, Mar Mattai in east-Syriac.

Mazzola calls this "Mor Matay" in a nod to the Western pronunciations - for my part, I grant to the Had-Qnoma more agency in the East (cf "Cave Of Treasures"). In fact Mazzola argues similarly: Athanasius blessed the new bishoprics in the East on condition he not subject these to the West. It seems Athanasius' sincere belief that an orthodox metropole look to its own hierarchy without a universal pope. The Nestorians, by then, looked up to a "Catholicos", at least ideally.

Mazzola would divide the post-Athanasian Orient further: that Alfaf was a metropole looking over the Jazira, whilst Takrit took on only the six episcopacies across the south. There might be a metropolitan in Tikrit with sufficient personality and wisdom that his opinions be respected in the north - Marutha assuredly fit this bill - but, sometimes, a "Matthean" bishop would assert himself as archbishop, to the irritation of the Takritis.

I will keep Mazzola in mind, when looking at Church politics from the seventh century onward. Although honestly as I read Ishoyahb, Tikrit does seem like the metropole. Alfaf acts as maverick: Ishoyahb can sometimes work with its leaders, but sometimes thinks he can appeal over/around them - at Tikrit. This may reflect the political realities of the Arabs who had sultan "KBB" (Khabib?) at Tikrit, with no direct presence at Alfaf.

Elite

I found out about Elite in late 1987 when I went to England and saw people playing that on Acorn machines. First reaction: "this looks like Starflight except you can't land". Starflight came to the Isle a couple years later... mostly pirated.

Elite was already an Old World classic by 1987. If you were an American, as I was (effectively), you found out about Elite about when I did. The sequels (Frontier) and... whatever Dangerous is, were more international in reach. But of course they are not the same.

Unlike for Starflight there exist Elite remakes. The first was Christian Pinder's 1999 "The New Kind"; an illegal reverse-engineer of the code to C. The original developers disagreed on whether to permit this piracy: David Braben disapproved, Ian Bell approved. Braben won and got TNK yanked off the Internet. Then came "Oolite", for the Mac at first, but done in object-oriented language (which C is not) as would compile for PC also. Somehow Braben was convinced not to block this version. "The New Kind" meanwhile has resurfaced, freeware as of the "30 year anniversary".

This blog cannot advise which to pick up; I never played any of these. I lean to "Oolite" on account, if you really want the TNK experience, there's probably a mod for it. Called "ODX" in their jargon.

BACKDATE 4/23

Un-boondoggling the ice-planet mission

I had to LOL over Zimmerman's summary of the National Academies' decadal priorities which, being National, they'd like NASA to do. Insert he's right you know Morgan Freeman meme. UPDATE 4/24: not the same document as NASA's actual budget (pdf) but . . .

Zimmerman's post does note the Cassini-Uranus proposal, which this blog has been mooting. It doesn't note Voyager III-Neptune because - Z assumes - NGMI. UPDATE 7/7: and China might be doing an orbital on a nonreusable Long-March. With Uranium Nitride. GLWT.

I say that both planets are similar so both missions will be using similar instruments, so NASA may as well start making those instruments now. Thus: a quick scan of the ice giant on flyby. Radar for the moons. Sensors for how the moon looks in daylight (going up toward the subsystem). All testable at Venus and/or Jupiter en route (Venus is a gas dwarf for this purpose). Aim for as much science to be done in the shortest timespan of intercept, in case it's blasting past (i.e., Neptune).

Personally I think the most value can be had from a Uranus longterm mission, even if we lose the Falcon Heavy [UPDATE 7/11 - note that SuperHeavy doesn't have to be lost]. Voyager III (or whatever the Chinese are doing) can await the results from Uranus; we might get other launch-windows later (maybe from a Deimos colony...?).

The polar-cap robot

The zimmer man has been flooding the zone, or at least the near-Earth environment, with content over the past two or three days. Tonight I'd look at ESA's robot. Which they can control from orbit.

As the 'man points out, this particular robot doesn't work for a "planetary" environment, which means an near-airless irradiated low-G environment; not yet, anyway. And for any 'bot of this genre, Venus is wholly unfit. I should add that Mercury's delta-V pushes back such exploration compared with Mars, our own Moon, even Ceres and Callisto. So: add "cold" to the list of expected conditions.

I think one good next-step might be controlling a robot on Antarctica. This shares many features with the cold worlds, particularly the icy worlds. The orbit to control this 'bot is annoying but then, we are used to comm-delays when contacting Perseverance from all the way over at Earth. Also if the future 'bot is roaming the Martian poles, some lessons learned at Antarctica can be reused there.

Nova news

Over the last week we had a lot of news about nova - here, smallscale. Normal nova makes cosmic rays although, not such as irradiated holes into the Mir station over here. This was RS Ophiuchi; CK Vulpeculae being a kilonova, of two big neutronstars.

On the small side of the nova, meet the micronova. Apparently some dwarfs have magnetic fields. As they steal mass from their companions their magnets funnel the mass up to their poles. These go boom with a million times less mass than the usual, hence "micro". I expect they go boom more frequently also, and they'll probably never do the full nova as long as the magnets are up. As for cosmic rays we might not even see these.

I am somewhat surprised we don't see more, but they are harder to spot from over here.

Our next Cassini

As we're looking toward future NASA missions to 30 AU here is a 20 AU proposal. That's right: to probe George III's Planet, whose Greek name I shannot utter here.

The G3P mission having fewer AUs to travel can get there slower, and hit the brakes. Cargo: 5 tonnes (metric). NASA are looking at a "fully expendable" Falcon Heavy so, I guess, they're prepared to take Musk's bill for throwing aside his rocket. UPDATE 7/11 - If only they'd allow the Super-Heavy . . .

The launch would be AD 2031 arriving Planet VII around our winter 2044/5, AG 2356 if you're Syrian. By then Musk should have Starship running, as the comments point out; I wonder if even Rocket Lab's Neutron might be running. Either way nobody thinks SLS is a starter.

MOAR HYPE 2/16/23: Kathleen Mandt.

Catch me if you can

Last night Rocket Lab laid out details of its booster-retrieval plan. That's the one where they don't redirect the stage back to the pad; that rocket ejects ALL the fuel, throws up a 'chute, and some helicopter picks it up again.

You'd think Starship stands to make it moot; although, I had some notions on holding the 'Lab on standby in case a Falcon misfires.

Absent from the latest article: the word "Neutron". This one is the Electron. The names must have something to do with size. The Neutron was also supposed to be first-stage reusable, with this stage landing close to where it fired off from; the "static tests" start this year, meaning such tests as don't get up off the ground. Anyway that's flying 2024.

Now they tell us

Masks should have been taken off mass-transit ten months ago, when everyone who wanted vaxx (like me) got vaxx. (And yes I myself was a total maskbro . . . before I got the Trumpvax.)

I am not a "BIPOC" so on my United flight last Saturday I wore my mask. BIPOCs didn't bother, at least not at the lounge at the DCA aeroport which dare not speak its name ("Reagan"). BIPOC masks there were nowhere to be seen. Here in Denver our [few] BIPOCs didn't care much either. Muzzles are for whites.

It is sometimes hard to tell if my fellow Semite the Crusader is being sarcastic. I think he might be also a fellow GenX so may actually ... mean it, this time.

Meanwhile there's Sam Stein and Mark Stern. When the judge rules D he's good, when she rules R she's bad. Mike Cernovich has been on this case.

He is risen

Happy belated Pesach and happy Pascha to ... whoever is still paying attention here. I was VERY busy at work, unmotivated to blog, and last week I didn't even have a laptop fit for purpose.

I don't know to what extent filling the past weeks is even practical. I'll fill in comments upon stuff I read in the past few weeks on the (approximate) day I read it. Expect gaps.

Trident aka Voyager 3

Perhaps in light of recent measurements ToughSF directs his readers to NASA's Trident mission. October 2025 or October 2026, there's a planetary alignment to shave delta-V from the initial thrust; Venus and Earth (if 2025, passing 2027, 2028, 2031) and then Jupiter (2032) providing the rest. Arrival 2038, or 2039.

The flybys present opportunity to test the instruments. Like at Io.

Problem: I don't think this mission actually stops at Neptune orbit. 2032 to 2038 for a 25+ AU curved geodesic is FAST. It's billed as a thirteen-day flyby. So we're not getting a new Cassini; it's a new Voyager. Trident would however get to map more of Triton than Voyager did in 1989.

NASA tossed this one in the bin last June but maybe some other agency might hurry up with a similar slate of sensors, and pack it all onto a Starship.

I'd not mind to throw in some NTP, to slow this thing down after getting thrown from Jupiter. It would get to Neptune maybe 2040 but then it would get to stay there.

BACKDATE EASTER TUESDAY

The cereal origin of state numeracy

On this week of unleavened bread we got various pressers on cereal agriculture. It bounced around all week, and I've slated rather a lot of stuff for this week already - so the 15th should do for it.

The prior theory has been that stone-age agriculture allowed for surplus which could feed an idle class, which class then took command. The "controversy" is that, just because you got a village growing potatoes or yams, doesn't mean they'll ever enter the Neolithic. Look at New Guinea as of its discovery by Europeans. There will always be people who want to rule but their authority will be limited as long as the farmers can simply hide their crop of onions and radish under the ground. These root crops are also difficult to tally and to store.

Cereal crops, by contrast, are eminently storable (if you have cats), shippable, and countable. These can support the class of accountants. Meanwhile the farmers starved but, it seems, at least metallurgy came to restore some of their stature.

I honestly don't think this is controversial as such. It is just common-sense. It does however rely upon some gaps in the record, because the written record starts exactly here, and the record only puts numbers-to-pictographs as in (I think) Susa III. We do not know the names of the kings, nor of whatever eclipses or cosmic-ray bursts struck around that time. Something like that might be more useful to palaeoanthropolists.

UPDATE 4/20: Steve Sailer reviewing Oded Galor. Sailer observes the Andes as a potato culture so, shouldn't be imperial by this thesis, but Huari was. But I think the Huari had some grain-crop, which passed to the Inca.

BACKDATE EASTER

The Jews who didn't leave

This Passover weekend, Tablet published Alana Neuhaus as I suspect is her ancestral name. (I am a litwak myself.) Newhouse brings to our attention the rabbi Rashi, that chamushim means "fifth" rather than "armed". The "armed" interpretation might involve military structure at some later date, like the Roman legionary "century". Shemot Rabbah agreed.

For my part I've seen the Egyptian bondage as, in the main, a bondage by Egypt over Canaanites, which might include those in Canaan itself during the Pharaonic dynasties XVIII-XIX. Other amateurs - like Dr Freud, at his best - argued that the Exodus only involved the Levites who had Egyptian names so were dissident priests, meaning we don't even need involve Semites. Our written accounts are very much later so difficult to tease out, here.

I am inclined to accept Rashi inasmuch as sometimes a five is just a number. The Jews writing Torah - i.e. not Moses - lived at a time when much of Israel were living as guests not only in Babylonia but also in, er, Egypt. We have much record of them from Elephantine, sadly of a quotidian nature not much dealing with their own historical memory. But it's good enough to tell us that they were there.

Anyway although I'd not put much credit into the Exodus account as it exists in canon, Newhouse's article isn't about that. It muses upon a Judaism as collaborates with Pharaoh in our own day - and in the days of the Persians.

BACKDATE EASTER

Spacewar!

Rep. John Garamendi cosigned Dana Goward yesterday on the war in space. I recall other articles bumping around, but that's the most-interesting link, because we in the West seem to be screwed.

China has a landline Internet and GPS. The US does not, to that extent. Apparently the Trump Administration was supposed to get this done but it didn't. The Biden Administration hasn't got it done either. So some bad actor could fire missiles at our sats and we'd be hosed.

It wouldn't even have to be one of our satellites, either. LEO has a lot of junk flying around at bullet speeds. Suppose some Russian satellite OOPSIE crashes into some junk, together with an orbit crossing an important sat of ours. It's "an accident" so not a casus belli. But we're just as boned.

To get unscrewed/-hosed/-boned, we need a much heavier space-presence. Junk-salvage tugs, which don't need be manned. China is working on a Starship of its own, to cheapen their cargo-to-orbit pipeline. I'll bet some of their interest is in cleaning up space junk... for Chinese sats. We're on our own. So let's do what Apple is doing with microchips and look to our orbits.

BACKDATE EASTER

Bohemund by Duggan

In exile from a Book Thread, here's Count Bohemund. Me mum had this from Alfred Duggan, whose publishers emitted it 1964.

Duggan had died by 1964. This is a posthumous production, like Arabs and Others and Before Orthodoxy. If I'd been his editor I'd have offered a number of suggestions, but dead men don't get editors they get proofreaders.

My copy came with a foreword by coreligionist Evelyn "Brideshead" Waugh. I am unsure to what degree Waugh was interested in women; Duggan married, happily by all accounts; but his subject Mark "Bohemund son of Duke Robert the Norman" didn't get around to that, at least not over the course of this novel. Waugh, amusingly, didn't like this manuscript so his foreword directs the reader to other work. Not a good sign!

It's difficult to classify this particular work as a novel, in the way of, oh, a Gary Jennings production. It is a step-by-step narrative of Mark's career up to the conquest of Antioch, followed by an epilogue in Jerusalem. The outline is finished but the prose is not. This is particularly notable in the dialogue which is naught but expo.

Much of now-Bohemund's thought is in conversations with nephew Tancred who just sort of shows up in the novel a third of the way through. Tancred is spawned from one of Bohemund's half-siblings. Tancred is a youth, perhaps daring perhaps headstrong. How did such an important character end up the way he did? Did Bohemund see any of his upbringing? Was Sigilgaita involved?

Sure, Duggan's story isn't "Tancred". Its focus is on its stated protagonist: Mark Bohemund. The narrative reads like Thucydides when he discusses his own (failed) activities in the Archidamian War. Everything Bohemund does is right: either because he wins (which he usually did) or because someone else did him wrong. One could just as easily write such a novel about Godfrey or Adhemar. Success has many fathers, as they say. That said, the chapter which centers some other protagonist does not fit this narrative (this could perhaps be saved as Donaldson saved third-party accounts in The Power That Preserves).

As history goes, it's pre-Runciman normie tier for Catholics. We can definitely see a difference with Runciman on which side are the Good Guys; Runciman, Anglican, preferred the Greeks. Duggan blames the Greeks' problems on Manzikert. And sure - as a massive check against Greek ambitions - Manzikert matters, but I think modern consensus calls that Manzikert simply laid bare the rot in Byzantine society at the time. The manpower shortage under Alexius Comnenus came not from Turkish arrows but from the civil strife and general demoralisation. The Comnenus dynasty fixed most of the problems except for its new problem, with the Crusade it had summoned. Here I might concede to Duggan the mulligan on account his book expounds Bohemund's perspective on Manzikert.

On a high note, I like that the book informs us of certain quirks of society at the time. For feudal Europe, the dux outranked the comes. For Diocletianic Greece, that rank went the other direction. Oh and especially in the East, the dukes and counts of the Crusade had whatever resources they had at the time, which didn't always correspond with their rank back home. So it was always negotiable which dukes and which counts had pride of place; enabling a near-dispossessed knight like Bohemund to improve his station. A purer meritocracy would be hard to find in history.

Also of interest is that these Normans had come through Italy to the Magna Graeca with the Carolingian bipartite manor. The northwesterners ruled their new dominions with much less caprice and with more regard for their smallfolk than had the Greeks, and the Arabs for that matter. So Greek peasants rather preferred Norman rule. Hence why Bohemund's line in Antioch would actually outlive the Norman empire across the English Channel. Here's something to present to Michael Hudson, against his brief for the Macedonian system. Also: I don't know if the Comneni ever considered the reforms what King David did in lowland Scotland.

If you wish to use this book as a guided tour into the First Crusade, be my guest. As a novel, I side with Waugh.

BACKDATE EASTER

Jews under Islam

About a year-and-half back I reviewed Mark Cohen on Jews under Islam. Cohen was writing in 1994 but, to my 2020 eyes, his book held up (still holds up). Laskier and Lev summarised the field 2010ish. Didn't mention Cohen.

Cohen had structured his book as a parallel-life between, well, Crescent and Cross. The project is valuable; I wholly agree (as with CoVID) that you don't compare Crescent or Cross with the Messianic Kingdom, you compare Crescent/Cross with the available alternative. Failing a long trip across Turk territory to China, the Jew must pick one C or the other C. Historically that has been Crescent although, not always.

Did Laskier and Lev think Cohen was doing a Fuller? I'd call that unfair to Cohen. But maybe Cohen's project spooked the scholars. That's a pity if so.

BACKDATE EASTER THURSDAY.

The Arabic Targum

In Judaism, the Torah is central and best transmitted through the Hebrew of the Masoretes. Over Late-Antiquity, Jews tended to live among people who did not speak much Hebrew . . . which came to include many Jews themselves. As a result their services made use of freeform translations, the Targumim when in Aramaic. Which wasn't Syriac but, then, not all Christians were speaking the language of Edessa Callirhoë amongst one another either.

Under Islam, many cities which had been speaking Aramaic shifted to Arabic. Saadya Gaon duly translated the Torah and much other Tanakh into Arabic. Question: did Arabic-speaking Jews exist before Gaon? Answer: duh, of course they did. Next question: what did they use in services?

Meanwhile among the Muslims came al-Jahiz, against the Christians. Muslims had their own interaction with the Judaeo-Christian Scriptures-plural. Most Muslims went with an oral-tradition riffing on a text they didn't much respect for its own sake. At worst it's the Israiliyyat, such as Ibn Ishaq provided - not always approved by the ahl al-sunna, although some like Ibn Jarir al-Tabari thought better of the genre. And then there's al-Biqai. Nathan Gibson sees al-Jahiz as a parallel of Martin Luther or Saint Jerome, approving a Hebrew text of [second] Isaiah. Better than Greek, surely. Although Peshitta was fairly faithful to the MT as I recall. UPDATE 4/13/23 Or the Syriac.

Gibson knows al-Jahiz was a sharp fellow but doubts he could read much Hebrew direct. More likely is that a Jew had translated excerpts from Isaiah, perhaps just the poetic bits. Like we Catholics do for Easter lectionary.

BACKDATE EASTER WEDNESDAY

The LEO archipelago

A few months ago I ran across Andrew Meulenberg (and Karthik Balaji) on the LEO Archipelago. This has footnotes "accessed" August 2010 which I take as the final edit; Meulenberg followed up in 2011 with the Sling-on-a-Ring.

Meulenberg takes Paul Birch with a few moderate tweaks. If the tether doesn't have to enter the stratosphere, then the tether can be spun. This means the orbital ring doesn't sweat the mass of the tether itself, as Birch had to; sometimes the rope weighs down but sometimes it weighs up. We still must worry about the weight of the cargo but we'd be worrying anyway. That cargo, by the way, is no longer going up only to the ring but is being slung into a higher orbit in the Van Allen belts.

We are then concerned with getting the cargo into such an over-the-atmosphere position. I cannot see balloons up there. Hypersonic aircraft are mooted.

Or maybe shooting it up there with the SpinLaunch^TM, or with Jules Verne's cannon? Another issue is, once it's in the sling, that's "10-G" that is (still rounding) 100 m/s². Meulenberg and his cowriters think we can buffer semifragile cargo in a water bath, whose destination then gets the water too. (Event Horizon wins again.)

Then there's the tensile strength / toughness of the tether, now pulling mass at ten times the G. Last I looked, I was assuming Zylon for the cable, on account muh karbun nannotoobs are science fiction. Meulenberg and Balaji agree; instead, predicting something called a "carbon colossal tube".

Given the unobtania Meulenberg thought we could get part way there, with an equator-orbiting fibre-optic. It would be narrow enough not to annoy stargazers more than all those satellites do already. This would deliver a short(er) return on investment, such that nongovernments might actually want it. With ring experience we could get on with building the sling(s).

Meulenberg and Balaji desired, finally, to shade the Earth and solve global warming thereby. I wasn't sold on this much; especially when those two babbled about propagandising this to the public meaning, to soyboys. But one prospective service they suggest is to shade specific points of the Earth. There exist Siesta Cultures along the greater Sahara (Spain, Arabia, northwest India) where, in the summers, nobody does squat because it's too hot in the afternoon. Ramadan especially is hell when it bumps into summers. So a ring might be slightly angled to cover the edge of the Islamic Belt when our Earth herself angles said belt into the Sun. Also they thought building the ring ever outward might push back Van Allen thus opening now-irradiated "MEO" to habitably LEO.

BACKDATE EASTER

The worst quake

A few days ago we heard from the 3800 BP Chilean quake. 19 April this is going to be rated the worst ever.

Diego Salazar et al., by using the "BP" notation, track this to the 1800s BC; BP counts (down) from AD 1950. Why? Because after 1950 our crust got layered with nuclear-tests making carbon dates worthless. Brave New World.

New Zealand got a taste of the tidal-waves, although there weren't any people there at the time. One does wonder about the Solomon Islands tho'.

BACKDATE EASTER THURSDAY and this is a wrap, I think.

Text-mining the sunna

As I'm going down my Academia.edu mentions I find Christian Lange. He's doing a computational analysis of the Sunna across the five best-documented schools: Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi'i, Hanbali and (for the Shi'a) Ja'fari. Not Zaydi or Ibadi; but their texts might not be digitised so well as the other five, those five having governments behind them. Oman, I think, would be advised to step it up.

Over the last two decades I've grown skeptical at "computer analysis" although, for translations at least, artificial-intelligence is improving. (Especially for Romance, I can attest. I remain unsold on Latin itself.) Computers are a wondrous timesaver for a human when s/he goes through a text for (say) parallels. But computers don't do a human's job.

Lange finds the Malikis to be the least Quranist of the schools. I take Lange's word for the Malikis. Imam Malik himself always struck me as the Shi'ite for the family of 'Umar; Malik also (lest we forget) transmitted much sunna from the early 'Alids. It was well into the 'Abbasi era, really the post-'Abbasi era, when both the ahl al-hadith (Shafi'i, Ibn Hanbal) and the Shi'at 'Ali (Ja'far) came to pound the Quran for their jurisprudence. The Hanafis - well, they were Iraqis, caught between these schools, where Malikis in Greater North Africa (+Sicily+Spain) weren't. So the Hanafis gamely followed.

BACKDATE EASTER MONDAY

Vulgar Latin

A capsule-history of study of "Vulgar Latin" can, now, be had from Versteegh.

Being a somewhat ultramontane Catholic myself I tend toward Dante Alighieri generally; although I must warn that our man held some biases. Dante believed that his Florentine dialect deserved the same status as Latin, this Italian being the Latin which Christian Florentines spoke during the last years of the Principate.

On topic Martin Haspelmath and Bernd Kortmann deserve also to be noted in the biblio, I think; Wiki is directing me also to van der Auwera (pdf).

BACKDATE EASTER MONDAY

The Syro-Roman lawbook

This blog has mentioned inheritance-law in the Arab-dominated Iraq. Here's The [Bavli] Talmud on inheritance-law: the Jews did not allow daughters to inherit if a son was available, the "Christians" did. This being not specifically the Gospel but "the Torah of the Gospel". That's the Syro-Roman Lawbook.

Keep in mind that Talmud may have taken on post-Islamic accretions. At the same time the "Islam", in the Iraq, in its first century - the Jews may have experienced as Christian in legal content.

BACKDATE EASTER MONDAY

Not-Altaic

The "Altaic" hypothesis has been a pain in everyone's rear since it was first floated. In 2014 a linguistic subhypothesis proposed a mechanism for Japanese, Korean, and Manchu. This work has recently been bolstered by genetics. Turtle Island has the synthesis.

The Liao watershed is the Urheimat.

Suggestive here is that the Japonic family may have survived in the south Korean highlands well into the Tang period, on account of Chinese colonies keeping Baekje and Silla from swamping the highlanders. I'd suggest a better factor from the Later Han era to the Tang era be protoJapanese islanders maintaining their own interests (and perhaps estates) back home, that is home in what's now south Korea.

All tantalisingly close to written history in Japan and Korea both. It's a bit tricky because literacy in both regions, in those days, was in contemporary Classical Chinese. The parties involved might care about the great acts of kings but not so much about the yokels. Compare the last years of Elamite under the Iranian empires of late antiquity. Or the Caucasian Albanians under their Armenian-speaking overlords.

BACKDATE 4/5 BUT MAYBE I SHOULDN'T HAVE BOTHERED 6/14. In fairness the Turtle isn't talking Robbeets.

More on the Tarim

Razib Khan posted on First April... some silly, but then this report which might not be a joke. He complained about the article's overcomplexity so he has done some good translating it into the sort of English a, er, Bengali would understand.

Last we looked at the Афанасьева matrix, it was Yamnaya or para-Yamnaya. Junggar was marked as solidly Yamnaya 3000-2800 BC and presumed Tocharian. Razib is saying, again, 3000-2500 BC is when Yamnaya mixed with the locals and created the Tocharians. Before 3000 BC said locals were Ancient-North-Eurasian Mal'ta Boys.

Where Афанасьева proper is postYamnaya or paraYamnaya, paraTocharian or preTocharian, doesn't seem to be answered here. Razib leans postYamnaya, preTocharian.

BACKDATE 4/5

Mercury's dynamo

Fairbanks in Alaska is telling us that Mercury has magnetic "storms". Given that this dwarf-planet has no atmosphere, I take it these are sparks coming off the surface.

Mercury has that mix of low gravity and proximity to the sun which makes delta-V a pain to approach this planet. On the plus (heh) side the Sun also provides a lot of energy.

I wonder about levitating material off the Mars-tier surface with magnets; not even superconductors but plain magnets.

Mercury looks a candidate for running an orbital ring around it, which would at least offer a wider net to catch incoming cargo (mostly food and water). Also there could be SML2 but shielding this might be a pain compared to SVL2. Newton famously doesn't work as well for Mercury.

BACKDATE 4/5

Kevin Jardine's starmap

I like 2-D representations of our 3-D immediate space; Kevin Jardine posts (png), I admire. This one's got TRADE ROUTES! How Starflight 2...

Anyway I'm keen on how it works for viewing the night sky, which is also two-dimensional to our eyes, on the Projection model. Also considering the 1994 Guide to the Galaxy which I wish I still owned.

First up is something called "Coma" very close to (0,0) which is us. (We're somewhat-famously almost dab in the Local Bubble's middle.) I hadn't heard of it (somehow); unless this be the Local Fluff of 1994. Looking around, I read that the Greeks first assigned the stars here to Leo's tail and, later, some Ptolemy in Alexandria renamed it after Berenice's hair. This Ptolemy proved cartographically correct since the Coma is closer to us than are the bulk of the Leo stars. At least they hadn't passed it to Taurus - Taurus is its own cluster (Hyades) except for Aldebaran which is just in the way, and for T Tauri of course.

The familiar-to-northerner stars cluster to the top of the map, I see. Alpha Tucanae (named after a toucan) is lower; same with the Eridani. So I guess up is north. The zodiac, which is the plane of earth's orbit, does have some lower-left presence, though.

I had no idea, none, about Alessi 13. Apparently this is a star cluster. It is also called χ¹ Fornacis... and it's 108 parsecs away. Which means it doesn't belong on Jardine's map. D'OH! In fairness Jardine's websites have that distinct 1997 scent of Tripod to them.

Azathoth is a liar

Earlier this week Cernovich linked NGC_2264's post on the DMT Nexus. It's a psychedelic forum, mostly (but not totally) involved with what Cerno calls Plant-Medicine; so don't go there if you are underage. One part of this particular post mentioned music as involved in the trip, more so than the drugs; this now seems to be a thing.

This blog exists in such a tradition as must accept the supernatural. "Luckily" this is a basic tenet of mathematics. The question NGC_2264 raises isn't whether Azathoth exists. It's whether a "psychonaut" can access It, when he hears the pipes at the gate. Or, if he hears the pipes, if its music is all just an avatar of the chaos in the human soul.

To disclose, I haven't accessed Azathoth. I would not attempt this. It doesn't matter to me if Azathoth speaks to us or does not.

NGC_2264 seems about right that whatever is out there, not involved with the real and tangible world, is not a friend.

Muonic helium

Happy April. I didn't and, really, don't have anything recent. ToughSf twitter did point us to a new exotic nucleus - more precisely, ion. Here a helium atom with a mu-lepton taking the place of the usual electro-lepton (or unusual antiproton).

The muon (like the antiproton) being so much more massive than the electron, it sinks to a lower quantum "orbit". For as long as the muon lasts (I'll get to this), the helium atom is now - chemically - an extremely heavy hydrogen atom. In the meantime researchers use this atom's odd setup to constrain the charge-radius of the helium nucleus. Which has its own interest since the helium nucleus is (1) the second-most common molecule in the universe, I think and (2) emitted as Alpha Radiation.

Now, er. The muon's lifespan. I'd wondered if some actual chemists might get some play out of this monster pseudohydrogen (E.G. 3/12/22 rockets). When I looked up the lifespan of a free muon: it looked assez, très, troup short-lived. Microseconds, I think. Even milli- wouldn't be good for most reactions. I suppose it might (seem to) last longer if pushed to relativistic speed or gravity, but if you can do that why are you even looking at chemistry?