Much as I dislike the dumb physics around Λ-CDM and fusion power, I admit some interest in the engineering to (not) get there.
Earlier last week we heard about smaller superconductive magnets. Now I hear about cheaper coolants for those magnets (pdf).
As to my interest - the whole array of magnet-driven theoretic megastructure just got (theoretically) cheaper. The mass-driver. The orbital ring. The directed-neutron fusion drive.
I've been reading Galison's Einstein's Clocks, Poincare's Maps. This reads like book three of a trilogy that starts with Lost Enlightenment. Somewhere in between is missing a volume on Western clockmaking, Galileo's discovery of the four Jovian moons [that matter], and the Longitude.
One chapter is devoted to arguments about the measure of time, which tied into how to measure an angle: degrees, "grads", or some sort of decimal. (The radian was apparently not considered.) Phil Metzger raises another thought: if we should measure temperature in joules. This would render Boltzmann's Constant to 1. We'd then have 4.1 zeptojoules for room-temperature which is, what, 290s K.
Leo Hickman explains the heatwave meme. Rather: Hickman had explained it, last week. This day Ace of Spades decided was a good day to poast the meme.
From my standpoint as one who sees the larger picture of solar warming so doesn't care about atmospheric carbon, the coposter "cob logger" Buck had a real take on atmospheric-sciency shenanigans. Ace should spend more time reading his own co-writers and less time stalking Allahpundit.
In other "news" I caught the movie Vengeance last night. I give it 7/10, from my *ovitz erstwhile-Texan Kinky-voter standpoint; others might mark it down. I did appreciate the MC's anti-yokel rant near the end... although, in the story, MC was ranting against straw. Still. The American Right does have its echo-chamber.
Much as I'm unfamiliar with "Sacred Heart" veneration, I see some Orthodox claiming that it is "Nestorian" so anathema. More specifically it's naturalism, that any focus upon an animal body-part of the man Jesus inflicts a disrespect to Christ's Divinity. Pope Pius XII wrote a whole encyclical defending this veneration, Haurietis aquas: it's symbolic, only.
Pius IX had instituted the Sacred Heart as a feast a century before. I concede: I don't think much of Pius IX. Pius XII's own story is ... chequered.
But should this form of naturalism be dismissed, just because two flawed Popes supported it? I'd think that declaring this symbolic should be the end of the argument. At least as far as the Orthodox should be concerned, praying amongst icons as they do.
As for associating this with Mar Nestorios, well... you've come to the wrong blog for a harrumph against him.
BACKDATE 7/31
To comment upon the actual astronomy at Keck: the higher limit for neutron stars means the stars can, actually, survive as neutron stars - maybe with a few quarks. But they cannot be Quark Soup much less the other exotica.
I don't know if we'll find anything heavier than that, on Hawaii or elsewhere. But, yeah, the heavier the stellar mass gets as a visibly neutronic mass, the fewer quarks are allowed.
I am also unsure what happens if/when some mass limit is breached. Blackhole, sure. But how? does the core collapse into that quark-soup thus raising the eventhorizon? or does the horizon simply appear inside or even outside the radius? If inside, I think we'd be seeing the outer shell of the star simply spin around as relativistic free neutrons, for some centuries as seen from outside. Like a beryllium-11 halo.
Even if interior I suspect that the conversion of a neutron star into a black hole is not as violent as, say, a Type I super-nova nor a Type II gas giant's implosion. Hence why we've not seen any, in the electromagnetic spectrum or in the gravity ripples.
LOW MASS 10/24 This might be a quark star.
Hat-tip to Saraceni: Severan Hispalis.
Something bad happened to Roman Seville in the early 200s. This is now decided to be a storm: a combination of surge and river-flood. Not earthquake.
I am not aware of the Gades / Cadiz corner of Spain, then Baetica and formerly Tarshish, as being hurricane-prone. Back then, the place was like New Orleans with a vast lagoon allowing Roman shipping - so I'll allow that a big wave could do a Katrina. I'd have thought a Lisbon-style earthquake might happen but they say, no.
Other inscriptions of the early 200s have the province as an "Immune" province, that is exempt from Roman taxation. Since Hadrian was long gone, there was supposedly a real reason for not taxing the place. I would think, however, that the crisis should have passed, by the dates corresponding with AD 245 and 253. It may be that the overall Roman crisis commencing AD 238(ish) might have taken the Romans' eye off their western extremities, allowing Baetic Spain to skate.
As Zim noted, the 30-meter telescope is not going to be built. The old Keck 'scope is still doing some science up Mauna Kea, but the TMT is NGH.
TMT is a rabbit in a racecourse. It is dangled in front of dogs, who are American taxpayers. Hawaii will gladly take those taxes. Hawaii might even deserve them. But those moneys are not going to build TMT.
People like Zim who like science but don't get to spend their money on the science they want, could complain about Rent Seeking and about what a shame these Polynesians represent to the spirit of Moana, maybe even about how G-d created Mauna Kea whose heights the Hawaiians never even inhabited; but that is all so much hobbitspeak against the highelves (to channel Yarvin). The Hawaiians have to want the science. Right now they want Zim's tears. Those tears to them are sweeter than a banana daiquiri.
Honestly the Aceribo observatory had similar - but it had one clear advantage: it was expendable. Mauna Kea is a Chile in the northern hemisphere, a mountain surrounded by nothing and over the cloud-layer. This is not easily replaced. What else do we do - erect a 'scope 4.145 km up some Aleutian mountain? I don't know about the cloud-cover. It might have to be raised up a tower.
The only solution is to make Mauna Kea expendable. That is: to build the 'scopes in space.
Meanwhile, don't fund any astronomy in Hawaii. At this point it's nothing but an excuse for nerds to get their unis to pay for their trips to Hawaii - maybe enjoying some, ah, "arr en arr" from the local traffickers. Those nerds can pay their own way.
HE HAOLE HUPO KEIA 10/20: Take it from the source - read the comments.
We know Phobos and Deimos are pulling apart; Deimos is going out and Phobos, in. Here's a thesis I saw last year from (ultimately) Barbara Vonarburg February 2021: tides.
Tides complicate the n-body problem, pulling the bodies into different orbits until the rotations run in sync with the orbits. Sometimes as with the Jovian moons the orbits are Laplacian such that they ain't changin' so the moons just have tides, squashing away within themselves. On the way to those orbits is "secular perturbation"; not even chaos, not really. So no Hamilton equations apply. The Swiss did the calculations the hard way, Newton simulations with energy-shifts.
On Earth, tides act like a planet in between Earth-as-lithosphere and our Moon. The World Ocean sloshes forward, dragging the moon faster - so, higher. The ocean then slows Earth. Luna floats outside our GEO sphere and, obviously, our oceans inside. As Earth slows its GEO rises, faster than Luna can escape. Assuming Earth still has oceans and our Sun doesn't redgiant and other planets don't rattle around, Luna/Earth will lock in place - which assumptions most agree comprise too many, but hey.
The moon may preserve some latitudinal wobble on account of inclination so, not planet-stationary precisely. I prefer Greek for -synch and Latin/Italic for -statio: Areo-Synch Orbit. I want true MSO for Deimos but first we must work with the orbits the warplanet has. But hey again. So: on to Phobos and Deimos.
Of course Mars lacks an ocean, nor even a mantle. Vonarburg made clear that the tides are rising on Phobos. Thing is, Phobos can't lose much energy before its spiral enters Mars' Roche and gets shredded. Which some're hoping to do artificially before that but hey hey hey people.
After that event Deimos is stuck where it's at, which - as David Dickinson notes, correctly for once - won't be far above its present altitude. This assumes the Congressional Republic hasn't installed an ocean upon Mars which, as here, will pull Mars' day longer thus lassoing Deimos. (And assumes, again, the other planets don't Velikovsky it all. HEY)
It all makes me wonder. If Theia had been more violent so forming our Moon further out, our (faster) sloshing tides would still act like Phobos pushing our Moon - but this time not slowing Earth enough to raise GEO to join us. Moon ascends the Libration Points, bye bye moon. Maybe to be Dopple-World messing with our tides from L4.
ToughSF directs us to 2011 Plasma Magnetoshell for Aerobraking and Aerocapture (there's a 2013 powerpoint at this pdf).
It's all about propellant, as usual. One well-known opportunity for no-propellant is deceleration in atmosphere, as with parachutes over Earth. But aerobraking heats up the cargo. John Slough, David Kirtley, and Anthony Pancotti disliked that. Tiles are for full-on landing on Earth (or on Venus I guess). If the heating is longterm and in low-atmo, magnets should do the job. ToughSF summarises: a 1m loop of wires can act as a 17m wide parachute
.
This is touted for Magellan, which required a lot of fiddling to get its transfer - to Venus - into something acceptably circular. Decent aerobraking would have helped.
Further digging has turned up cubesats over Earth. Dr Slough had earlier developed it for propulsion, like a solar-sail; I wanted that for a Venus statite. I haven't seen much in the past five years though.
Seems like a job for small packages. Maybe not for, oh, skating a large orbiter across Uranus' atmo.
There's a lot going on here so I'll try my best. They were looking for muh darkmatter but didn't find any (probably because it doesn't exist). Still, unlike all that xenon, this effort was not wasted.
First up: the halo nucleus. Apparently a neutron can exist outside a nucleus in "orbit" around it. (Given quantum blah blah blah.) Chemically the atom acts as usual for as long as it exists, as with other exotica. One such halo-isotope is beryllium-11. The nucleus just cannot tarry for long: in 13.8 seconds one of those neutrons goes beta so boron-11. (Is this halflife or per atom...?)
But which neutron, is the question - in a halo. What if it's the neutron on the outside? Yassid Ayyad and Wolfi Mittig say: this "boron-11" won't even be 13.8s stable; its new outer proton will sproiiing itself out. Thus making beryllium-10. Also unstable, we must point out. But at least on the 1.4 million year scale.
Given how exotic halo-nuclei are - I admit not having heard of them - it doesn't surprise me that something like this might happen to them. Mind you, there wasn't and isn't a lot of baseline research on them.
Some gaps are filled about the Natûnissar Kert.
This is near (but not on
) Lower Zab - then "Kapros" - bordering classical Adiabene. It's all Hidyab to the Church, where our boy Ishoyahb will become metropolitan/arch- bishop. Nowadays that's the Arbela region although back then the kingdom may have included Kirkuk. Probably not Nineveh.
The site is real; the question is whether this is "Natounia" - not the border of Hidyab but its capital.
We learn from Britain: over 100 F (ambient, 100 kPa), a 3.3 xW panel delivers only 2.8 xW. The Telegraph talks giga-. I mean, now that Boris Johnson isn't around, it's safe for that rag to admit his Government's greenening was all cods. At last.
The Moon in daylight gets hotter than this. But that's a ground heat; solar panels will be raised above the regolith in near-vacuum. We have got pretty good at solar-power in LEO, I understand. The British inefficiencies, I suspect, are caused by hotter oxygen [UPDATE 12/25 - see below]. As for Luna, Handmer was hoping to beam energy from Earth instead anyway.
Taking ambient atmospheric temperature/pressure into consideration: for taking solar-energy, Venus might be a very good bet (over the clouds) since (1) very cold and (2) low-atmo.
FIXIT 12/25: EtaVolt in Singapore. Such damage is atmospheric - but a lot is just ambient heat.
ToughSf points us to Eric Berger who is... not exactly pointing to ARCA Space. ARCA Space are considering that we don't need reusability in our roggets if those roggets are trash cylinders. And you don't need the vertiginous height if you rivet more cylinders on the side... a lot of cylinders. The first thirty kilometers are the hardest, right?
Soyuz and Ariane have sort-of taken this Soviet line in their own rockets although, they go more vertical. Pity about SpaceX's Falcon 9 cutting them under.
ToughSf (and several Berger commenters) are recalling OTRAG. I didn't know what this was so I looked it up. Apparently it was some Germans who wanted a commercial spaceflight option. They couldn't fire their roggets in Germany (for several reasons) so went to Mobutu's Zaire. Then they went to Libya and, well, lost their roggets to the Libyans. That wacky Qaddafy!
Kerbal jokes aside, xkcd handles the engineering of a, er, 540 stage rocket. Still. OTRAG failed mainly due to the Cold War / Third World politics of the 1970s and 1980s. And if you don't want to build the insane vertical stacking-cranes we see in Boca then, horizontal seems the only choice.
The Kzinti Lesson is lost upon Livia Ionescu of the, er, Glaswegian Ionesci.
I actually like the idea of making mass-shifting cheaper than it is. It doesn't have to be muh astroyds. I believe the same process could, say, shift a Hohmann cargo into a cycler.
I must further point out Evan Gough's command be quiet, space elevator people
is exactly the wrong thing to say if we're putting a new Deimos into high Earth orbit for a momentum-bank. The rope doesn't have to be a full elevator; its anchor doesn't have to ride the GEO. A long strong tether will do us just fine.
It's just... do we trust this? For an Eros mass toward Earth...?
Nickster suggests Mars as the spot to tear off volatiles from a rich asteroid. The Martians would do the rest of the smelting; then blast it up to Deimos for solar-system export.
The latest on Teslarati concerns NASA's upcoming Roman telescope. Therein is a recent (non)history of the Falcon Heavy.
I learn here that whilst we've all been cheering the Falcon 9 and rooting for muh starship - which is SuperHeavy - in between them, the Falcon Heavy hasn't been flying... at all. It's been three years since the last flight. Various proposals have come up about pushing big cargo to (say) Uranus but the proposals haven't left the boardroom, or the cargo is delayed. Nothing has been loaded upon this actual rocket.
It looks like an old story at NASA: it costs so much to launch, that the mission doesn't have failure as a mode. This by contrast with SpaceX, who are happy to fail if an engineering or process lesson can be taken from the failure. Falcon Heavy, I suspect, doesn't reuse all its boosters, sticking NASA with the bill for the junk.
The Roman looks good for Falcon Heavy on account it's almost a freebee - for NASA, anyway. Some glowing spooks at the National Reconnaissance Office had built the thing as an Earth-facing Hubble. This means we already paid for it. NRO have been using Rocket Lab lately, but this cargo is too big for them. Apparently the 3LAs don't want this monster anymore so it's off to our favourite 4LA for a little tweaking and then launch on a man's rocket.
Or maybe a lot of tweaking. Zim scoffs at the whole project, deeming it a "job program". Some red flags I detect are the linkage with the Webb telescope and the exorbitant tag on the launch.
Launch date is set for October 2026. By then though... could NASA bargain for a lower price, by abandoning the Falcon Heavy and loading it on the SuperHeavy?
The NYT has a piece about some Space-Exes racing their former employer to Mars. The piece seems skeptical and Zim is more so.
Impulse Space was founded by Thomas Mueller. He's best known as the chief developer of the Merlin engines. He left the Raptor in incapable hands although this may or may not be improving. Where the Raptor is designed for thrust - getting the SuperHeavy into orbit - Mueller aims more on the specific-impulse side, a long slow burn from Earth to Deimos.
That means launch-windows. NYT says: two and a half years from now
. Here's Hop's ancient Hohmann spreadsheet; this one's more current. Yeah they're not making August. Next window should be October 2024. Not really 2.5 years - unless they know they need the extra propulsion to catch up.
The media skepticism revolves first around the choice of booster, which is Relativity's. Relativity haven't launched anything yet. I get not using a foreign company. I get not using SpaceX (I think). Also, ULA and Blue Origin keep having problems. But . . . RocketLab exist. Why not them? Too busy?
Assuming orbit (which Zim doesn't) I assume Mueller's engine can push a cargo between 1 and 1.5 AU. I am less sold on his lander, once at Mars. It's Insight but lighter. Also: no solar-panels.
Capitalism In Space, is Zim's categoire de blog. Seems more like Marketing.
Via Razib, Harvard has a summary of the Reich lab. Dancing around the Aryan Problem, which became (for Gimbutas) the Kurgan Problem.
These are theories of the IndoEuropean invasions of Europe and India (and Tocharia, for those who've heard of it). You-Know-Who and his forebears lumped them all in as "Aryans", based on ancient Indian and Iranian (and maybe Baltic) memories of Aryan invaders. It's turned out that this doesn't apply so well to, say, Iberia and Italy. Gimbutas revived this as, more neutrally, the "Kurgan" hypothesis - adding a lot of 1960s/70s feminism and Gender Studies, so as to make the Kurgans into the BAD guys.
This may account for why Harvard cites David Anthony as the Kurgan expert and completely ignores Gimbutas. Although Schiklgruber (yDNA E)'s notions are mentioned (at the end). I think Mallory deserved better however.
Anyway I got to wondering if the old myth of the Gemini, whom Greek dimly recalled as Castor and Pollux, may reflect the division between R1a and R1b. Their successors are both associated with Indo-European. R1a is strongest for the Aryan branch in Iran. Although some R1a came along west and some R1b east (especially Central Asia).
We heard sura 15 at our Mass this weekend.
Okay okay; we heard the pre-Jubilees version, from Genesis. Abraham and Sarah (and Ishmael fitzAbraham I guess), are in their tents not long after Abraham's circumcision. Three men show up on their way to King Bera's city. Abraham recognises them as honoured guests, and addresses them in the singular.
Sura 15 is clear that they're Celestial angels. Genesis leads away from that: they "stand" (don't hover) and they eat food.
The "Non Apologist" does not accept Rublev's famous icon. But if the three are human and are not the Trinity (Jesus eats food, remember), we cannot say What are they - so, who are they?
Their mission to Bera's city would hint against their being present citizens of that city. But. When they arrive in that city, we do not hear that Bera is still king there.
There seems quite a bit of intertextual strain around Abraham's section of Genesis. Non-Apologist thinks chapter 18 (wherein Sarah is la femme qui rit) is an "insertion". He also wonders if Bera is the leader of the three guests(!).
Had Bera been deposed? Was Abraham's faction of Hebrews a haven for dissidents? This would not be unknown in Hebrew history, even Biblical history, as witness the various Kenites giving succor to the Hebrews. As Kenites might aid the righteous Hebrews later, earlier the Hebrews might have aided righteous gentiles.
Jeff Greason complains about a Mars colony that it won't be self-sufficient. A commenter @Deadly_Laser adds that Mars' 3.7 gravity although not Earth's is still annoying. Consensus seems that the asteroid belt would host better colony-prospects. Metzger (whom we've blogged) promises an essay countering this.
Before we read that essay Mars has one resource asteroids don't: exile.
More precisely Babylon Five raised the issue of some prospector going to a space-station and, for whatever reason, failing. They didn't do anything wrong, or at least not wrong enough that they need to be booted out the airlock; they can't afford the passage elsewhere; nobody wants them onboard. Larger stations, therefore, are getting a skid-row each.
Maybe not Deimos however. There's a whole planet right below that high moon. It is not a very nice planet but it does have room to build, if not to breathe exactly.
I'll also point out that with Deimo'Station still being up there, ideally trailing a tether, the exit-cost from Mars-to-elsewhere isn't as bad as you'd think. Especially if Phobos gets tethers too.
Environment, social, governance - where the fascist replaces the worker with the "stakeholder". You know your company is this form of fascist when your manager's emails tout "Earth Day" and Martin Luther King, and lecture you against Hate.
I am old enough to remember the "standard reading assignments" in Massachusetts. These were bite-sized cards with some shpiel about what the authors wanted you to read. One was the royal coronation in Bhutan. The coffeehouse set were big on Bhutan in the 1990s. National Review I think it was who pointed out that Bhutan was an impoverished mediaeval despotism.
On the other side of the subcontinent, Sri Lanka in 2018 made a number of top-ten ESG lists. They told the world economic forum how they were going to eliminate poverty by 2025. I don't believe Sri Lanka are on track for this.
A common complaint against the Mars-colonisation boosters - some might say, gurus - is that there exist plenty of spots right here on Earth as could be terraformed and are not. Gobi often crops up; ditto Antarctica. Some of us retort that Antarctica could be terraformed but that politics get in the way.
So: Neom. Muhammad bin Salman Ibn Saud would terraform northwest Arabia. This is about where Hismaic was historically graffiti'd, I think. Obviously politics are hardly a problem in an uninhabited desert basically owned by the Saudi family.
I've seen plenty of Arabian boondoggles mooted over the decades, like the ice-tow scheme. The Egyptians had the Qaṭṭāra. I've even mooted a Gaza canal, myself. What can I say: I am a Semite too. Water-management is in my blood. As it were.
A problem with vanity projects - Elon, take note - is that the project-leader is one man and he tends to be vain. Nobody tells him no, so he waxes whimsic.
GM is the gravitational parameter μ. It varies from system to system; per system, we need it whenever calculating a Keplerian orbit. M is the mass of these orbits' barycentre. G is Newton's "constant".
It turns out that G is poorly constrained. A lot of the error-bars I see around orbital dynamics in extrasolar systems come from our inability to figure G, thus the mass of the suns in question.
ETH Zurich have recently constrained it... 2.2% higher than the consensus up to today. Or, at least - they promise they will constrain it. Some of these papers aren't in publication yet. And we're still screwed on "dark-matter" elsewhere.
Without agreement on basic cosmologic parameters (admittedly better outside gravity), the space is opened up for Big-Bang skeptics. And for the temptation for censorship of same which - I hope, obviously - does not help anybody.
Our standard-model is getting challenged elsewhere, if I'm understanding the Turtle on the muon.
ht ToughSf - from October 2020 we got a review of Atmosphere-Breathing Electric Propulsion. Best I gather, these are satellites which get their energy from the Sun and batteries, which they expend upon ramjet-like scooping of the exosphere. What might be drag for a higher satellite, is simply a propellant-source for this satellite.
Other LEO satellites need to carry their own propellant for course-corrections and, at end-of-life, deorbit. For the ABEP if something goes wrong, it... burns up. It doesn't become space junk.
BACKDATE 7/18 obviously. Had a gap to fill.
Today we got some dynamic simulation of what happens if Neptune's orbit is nudged by 1/1000. 0.0000515 M☉ at 30.07 AU semimajor, 29.81 AU peri'. So H. Rein and Garrett Brown MNRAS 515 are looking to nudge its peri' 0.03 AU, I guess.
The main candidate is Gliese (GJ) 710. This is a 0.6 M☉ mass coming within 14000 AU some say 10k. We'd have to look first at what Neptune's orbit might evolve into after 1.29 million Earth years which is 7827 2/3 Neptune's. Keeping also in mind that we don't know if Planet Nine exists.
UPDATE 6/21/2025: provided the sourceref, which Yahoo Entertainment(?!) didn't.
Casey Handmer noted last Sunday that we can power the Lunar base... from Earth.
It's wasteful, of course. But electricity (currently) is cheap down here, by contrast with up there. Even with the waste it's more scalable than erecting generators around the Lunar surface and then threading cable across the regolith.
Various reply-guys are 'splaining to Handmer about (small!) nuclear-reactors (pdf) and stuff like that. Handmer keeps 'splaining back that first we have to get to that point. Yeah SpaceX's SuperHeavy could shave some cost-per-cargo but, we'll want that for the actual mission(s).
If power can be beamed from Earth, that's one problem solved, at least for a small base for a short term. Better that Lunar colonists make their own solar-panels and their own (thorium?) reactors, and maybe a voltage-capture system. All sorts of options.
But first we have to get there.
UPDATE 7/11 - One more use for the energy is spinning a habitat. I expect this is for VIPs. The average workman will be sucking it up in 1/6 gravity hopefully being permitted to jump back to Gateway and Earth before nightfall.
Alice Evans has hollowed out a subniche on Twitter in the larger feminist-interrogates-the-patriarchy niche. Evans is notable in that Razib Khan retweets her stuff. Turtle Island this week now raises up Evans' findings (from last week). Evans floats kind words for the Latin Catholic Church!
Evans had done some major work in Zambia, even learning the local language; this explains Razib's interest. That she's going against inbreeding and giving credit to the Latins, will likely pique HBDChick (in all definitions of "pique"; Evans really should have credited her, lest Evans go full Slate Star Codex).
I must confess that I had avoided Evans' posts on Twitter on account "patriarchy" as a term rather turns me off, as a male, since male-power (if it existed) would benefit me personally; by the same token I don't trust women who talk "patriarchy" on account male-power would (by definition) reduce womens' agency, personally. Evans somehow, I don't know how, has blasted past her biases such that she can, with sobriety, explain how not all patriarchies are, er, equal. She also knows such practices as should be anathema to all mankind, like inbreeding; and practices as might harm the immediate economy but offer long-term social trade-offs. Who, whom - again.
As to these trades, Evans throws unpulled punches against the religion of the Arabs. I use that term with due care: it is Umayyad praxis of "Islam" which comes to play here, followed by the post-Umayyad Arab-speaking tribes. I noted some time ago, when writing Throne of Glass, that the Umayyads weren't completely patriachal... yet. This was, I thought, exactly because the first Umayyads who cared about Islam, the Marwânids, were cousin-bumpers. Later when and where the 'Abbâsids took over (that is: not Spain, not really western Maghreb either) the royals left their cousins alone but at the cost of going EXTREMELY patriarchal. The next rungs down in the 'Abbâsid 'Irâq assuredly kept up the praxis, which is notable to this day. And it wasn't just the Arab-speaking Muslims. Pope Timothy tried to ban cousin marriage among the Christians (for which even Leo III - I think - needed Carolingian prompting) but failed at it. Basically if Islam is to work within civilised society it cannot be the Islam as historically practiced in the Near East and along North Africa.
Keeping aside from the Battle Of The Sexes, what patriarchy offers to men, is a reason for those men to support not only their own children - any baby daddy with proof of paternity and a 90+ IQ will do that - but to support baby mamma. Otherwise we are just wolves.
Last month we had a yuuuge report on newly-discovered dwarf-companions, some of interest (to me anyway) as tight-orbit brown dwarfs so constraints upon Earthlike systems. Yesterday, we got thirty-four more! Pity the press-release was so bad . . .
Today I figured I'd, like, read the arXiv.
Time was, I'd have appreciated Table 1 giving us parsecs and not just parallax. Nowadays I can skip it. Anyway #26 "NSC J123900.73-005433.72 AB" aka "NSC J1239-0054" has the most parallax so is closest at, er, 42-3 pc. So they're like the Bonavita dwarfs in distance... pretty distant, indeed.
One numeric I hadn't seen before was Binding Energy, in 1041 erg; #33 here had the highest. Although I expect the Bonavita dwarfs all, er, dwarf that.
Table 5 delivers the goods: masses and separations. The main stars are all pretty small (Ks at best) and the dwarfs all orbit waaay out. The second-to-last one, #33 "NSC J2333-6347", has the least separation at 322 AU - which is getting into Planet Nine territory. Unless these orbits are obscenely eccentric, like almost literally phallic in width and length, I don't see them affecting inner planets at the least, especially since these systems are all K and M.
There remains a question, albeit entertained these days mostly among Patriot Front edgelords, to what degree NSDAP elites intended a Shoah.
We are reminded recently, to whatever degree we need be reminded, that in the 1930s Deutschland young edgelords joined the NSDAP. That the edgelords hoped to rise to the National-Socialist elite. And that these edgelords hated the Jews - and not just "Jewry" or "the Jewish press" or what have you.
I don't know if Jared Michael Boyce wants to be a génocidaire, as Eichmann desired. But Boyce joined a crew who are on that path. (I'd welcome him if he wants off that path.)
China believed in 2020 it could insert a probe into Neptune's orbit:
the escape velocity of Neptune is 23.53 km/s, which is about twice the Earth’s 11.18 km/s. Unlike the exploration missions of low-mass celestial bodies such as Mars and the moon, the propellant consumed in order to realize the gravitational capture of Neptune is greatly reduced.
No, I do not claim to know any hànyǔ (nor 韩语 for that matter). I'm trusting Google.
The main constraint was how to power the thing, since solar's out (faaaar out, 30 AU). Also they need to keep some comms on whilst it's going out there, and to beam signals HARD back to Earth. They figured: 10 kWe. Per ToughSF: Heat pipe fast reactor
, Uranium Nitride.
The Long-March rocket might actually be able to do this, if they don't mind spending the cash. I'd prefer Uranus as closer UPDATE 7/11 especially if they forget about throwing away a Falcon Heavy and use the SuperHeavy.
ALSO UPDATE 7/11 China is still working on it.
The Philistines were recalled as hosting some giants, especially at Gath. The Mycenaeans, also, were recalled as having hired [one-eyed] giants to build their cities. Gath is being excavated. Its walls were found (in 2019) pretty big... in the 11th century BC. [h.t Cerno.]
Gath got more Iron-Age so more in tune with the Canaanite and Israelite model, as of when Hazael found it (and trashed it) during Biblical times.
This is telling me that the story in 1 Samuel of David (or Elhanan) facing down the giant of Gath, is a late story. I mean, besides that the giantslayer became David; and besides that there survive two versions of this story even as a David story between LXX and (merged-into) MT.
The purest Goliath story, which is preLXX almost certainly starring Elhanan, might date to about the same time as the Elisha stories date. Anyway the Goliath story was written down (finally) after the fall of Gath, when survived no literate Gathi citizens.
NEPHILIM 2/3/26: Daily Mail and PJMedia note Papyrus Anastasi I, on the Shosu. Human Events strikes a more cautious note.
I never did take the geosync rope seriously. Hence Paul Birch and his orbital ring, with Kevlar (or Zylon). Tonight I've been alerted to the selenosync rope. Unlike the cables to the Galapagos or Nairobi lifts, Elon promises to talk with us about Sinus Medii's cable.
Luna doesn't exactly have a "LEO" like our GEO but she does share with us a (t)LL1. (And L2, darkside.) Also see Jeremy Hsu from 2019.
First problem: 'tis halo. One could stationkeep it with aluminum/oxygen thrusters, but that seems likely to dust up the region. "Gamma Factor" notes a better idea: that this Luna-focused rope will need a counterweight, as we're pulling toward the Moon whenever we use it. That's another rope dangling toward Earth - the Spaceline.
GEO is uninhabited by space-stations today. Only unmanned sats float there. So shall GEO ever be.
The spaceline does not dip into our GEO unless GEO hosts an orbital ring, which it probably won't ever. The idea is that the Earthside point of the counterbalancing tether get its own little station, mostly just a hook for the (long) pull up to L1. From GEO to this hook requires a little boost through vacuum. Which shouldn't be that bad compared to getting from Earth to GEO in the first place. In fact small cargo might be possible by railgun or spinlaunch rather than rocket.
As to the cable, the Shenzhen trio Wang Weiweia, Wu Zhiganga, and Liu Jiafu have a paper "Conceptual Design and Mechanical Analysis of a Lunar Anchored Cislunar Tether". This assumes an internal tension of about two kilonewtons along the L1 plateau: Kevlar or some other 2.5+% elastic. Kevlar counterweight dangles as far as 110 Mm over the Earth so 114.8 Mm semimajor. Under-elastic T1100G could, I think, bring us down to the 80s Mm (extended to its maximum 2.2%); but there's still tension for the Lunar side of L1 pivot. So here we might have to swap it out for, I dunno, Dyneema somewhere on the Lunaside where the tension be less. Of course then someone has to pay for all that cable.
UPDATE 6/17/26 David Jensen keeps citing a mammoth powerpoint from Bell and Hines (2012 ppt) that anhydrous glass can reach 13.8 GPa - that's a giga. I couldn't find this number in the document which anyway is a... powerpoint, not a study. However I do find studies from 1993 which point to 13+ GPa at 34.5μm width (pdf). Jensen honestly should point to those. Anyway a fiberglass that is four times as strong will yield 5700 N breaking pull for 1 g/m3, although anhydrous might be denser. But we are assuredly going down to the 60s Mm even 50s Mm.
REWRITE 7/20/23 - ugh this poast "GEO space-stations won't happen" was baaad. I've redone it. AND AGAIN 6/17/26 because there's more, tucked into the appendix.
ABOUT L2 5/18/24 - This poast left alone what to do with the far side of the Moon and, three years later, I'm still stumped. Its tangential delta-V against the ecliptic is too powerful for anything out to Vesta. It can lob parts of a longterm-transport at (say) Ceres, to be assembled en-route. So... maybe that?
Late in the Carter Administration, some liberal-fascists thought to merge the Ten Commandments with the Neolithic monument at Salisbury and put this up as a monument in that President's home state. Among its prescriptions was the reduction of a then-four-plus-billion population to a half-billion population. Once more the morgoth can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own
. Today I learn this is no longer with us, at least a good part of it.
An iconoclast is suspected.
I do not support the Taliban nor paraTalib vandalism... but. As Ace points out our post-bell-beaker monuments have been coming down all over the planet. In the 1960s many statues to Cromwell were erected; those who disliked Cromwell wrote whole books upon them and upon how they should be unerected, among which monuments this particular one curiously went unnoted. Here is another monument to Cromwell, indeed truer to Cromwell's party (and to Carter's). Loewen did not mourn those other "lies". Must I mourn this druj?
I can mourn the waste of a perfectly good explosive. We need it for roggets. Even the Talibs might agree nowadays ( . . . ).
Anyway buh bye I guess.
SAFETY FIRST 7:35 PM MST: Demolished entirely.
The bacterial-grown fuel has been knocking around for about a week, which week I had better things to write about; I may as well get to it.
The backstory is that kerosene ain't the best fuel, being sooty. Also the best kerosene for rockets gives up 35 megajoules per liter (46.3 MJ/kg), which is nice, but not as nice as methane's 55 MJ/kg or maybe 55.5. (I don't care to look up the difference between CH4 and LNG. But: 120% as good, by mass.)
In an analog to the metastable nucleus, metastable carbon compounds exist. These are "polycylcopropanated fatty acid methyl esters" which name Pablo Cruz-Morales and his crew have arranged to spell out POP FAME. That's 50 MJ/L. I don't see how they converted that to MJ/kg and, again, can't much be bothered but it looks like 1/70% = 143% as good as kero', by volume.
The same problem applies as applies to all metastable compounds - how do you even make it before it goes boom. Fatty acids imply that some organic life form might secrete it slowly and carefully... of which they're looking to Streptomyces. If they can ramp it up to industrial levels, a mature process for methane but not yet for a petri-dish.
Also if methane-driven engine melt is a consideration for the Raptor 2 then POP FAME's energy is that much % more a consideration. I suggest this for the supersonic sustained denotation also rotational, assuming that at least the energy isn't blasting through for as long. Manufacture should be easiest in microgravity itself.
At the end, nonreusable rockets should get a nicer massratio: lookin' to Uranus here on Falcon Heavy or maybe SLS. I dunno about SuperHeavy or Starship, both designed to come back down to Earth like the Falcon 9. Controlling that burn is going to be ... difficult. And won't the pickup barge or those tongs melt into pieces?
Astrum raises the probability of electrocution at the Lunar poles' craters. I hadn't thought of this...
... but I should have, because the issue was raised twelve years ago. There is a solar wind, which is 29 days a month at the poles, of ionised particles which will be ionising for the regolith dust at the craters' rims. As with katabasis at our own polar Antarctica, and I strongly suspect at Maxwell: this wind blows downward.
This makes me wonder if a Lunar colony might use this to power a dynamo even without direct solar-collection (which at the poles should also be month-'round potent). I mean, obviously the air pressure isn't much, but the electric charge might make up for a lot of that.
Pierre Larcher is a philologist in early Arabic. He collected one series of such essays, written over 1983-1997, in Linguistique arabe et pragmatique. For this, book-reviews exist in English - of which I am presently aware of Ovidiu Pietrăreanu's (and I am grateful this is not in Romanian). Lately Dr. Larcher has published a second collection, for this millennium. I do not find English-language reviews of this one; but... Paul Neuenkirchen has reviewed this in French in an open journal. I have taken upon myself to translate this review into English.
Larcher's work can be had in his own Academia site. Most of it is in French, but Prometheus Books has translated and published some of it into English. I am aware of three English renditions of his work: one in Inara's Hidden Origins and two in Ibn Warraq's Which Koran?.
As to what I think of Larcher's work... well, Neuenkirchen is at his most critical when looking at Larcher's take on salam / islâm (and aslama, silm &c.). I must admit, myself, not quite following Larcher(?)'s arguments in the other two English articles - and I reviewed Hidden Origins ambiguously and Which Koran? poorly.
These might not be Larcher at his best, however. This is why we need Neuenkirchen's summaries, to direct us to a wider range.
Protestants, like my grandfather, protested the Church in part for her "Mariolatry". This is excessive veneration of the Bearer of Christ - for my grandfather, I admit, this extended to any veneration. I detect within the Church herself some parallel uneasiness.
We'll leave aside, here, the Monarchian tendency of Cyril of Alexandria and of his acolytes in the had qnoma. The Latin Church still has yet to address this - she venerates the Mother Of God, and even allows Cyril as a Saint! We'll also leave aside why the Church prays to begs the intercession of Mary as "Our Lady" with or without "Theotokos". More important to the Latin Church has been to clamp down on enthusiasms as have attempted to ride Mary's stature to support their own causes, usually political.
The internal Latin counters, which I see thus far, involve venerating Mary in public whilst constraining what she is. For instance: take Jerome's doctrine of Mary as "ever-virgin". This ensures that nobody can claim female descent, like the Taiping rebels in the nineteenth century, or - for Late Antiquity - like the Ebionites of Saint James (and one wonders about the Fatimiya in "Islam" . . .). For another instance: the Assumption. This means Mary cannot deliver apocalypsis from Hell. (Like that other Fatima: again, no occasion of sainthood for me.)
I pick these dogmata because they (1) are ex cathedra and (2) go beyond the (canon) Gospels or even contradict them. But, to secure our faith, against Montanisms here, the Gospels have to be weighed in this balance.
Let's go through the Azevedo and Pelluso bibliography. I mean, besides Hoenselaers.
First and I suspect foremost: Carl Mungan 2005. This took the original Bouguer (Cartesian straight-line) problem and recast its Mercator maths for physicists. So: time derivatives and vector components
. Chashchina and Silagadze 2009 represents, with full credit granted, the followup to Mungan. A-&-P had noted, exactly, that t became a nonparameter in Bouguer's chart hence their efforts to put it right back in there.
Next up is Arthur Bernhart. It turns out that his two articles in the A-&-P biblio aren't fit for a merchant (or a rabbit or a duck) on a variable-speed track, even a Keplerian orbit. Luckily for us, those articles launch a trilogy: here's the third (pdf).
Also not A-&-P, Morley has actually handled the case of a circular orbit where the pursuer starts from the centre. But can the pursuer neglect the Sun's gravity at the start?
Curved-track merchant routes are, it seems, also 1732, here from Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis. Bernhart's third article delivers this to us in our language.
Overall I get the impression from A-&-P that they didn't want to chase that, er, rabbit; they concentrated on Planet Cartesia in the Euclid System.
Yesterday we considered the Cartesian expression of the pursuit problem with relativistic time-delay. For an eight light-minute comms delay this looked best-modeled at the edge of the solar-system. Now, let's consider a light-minute example closer to home: intercepts to Venus/Earth transfer-orbits. Or Earth/Mars. Say we're denied clearance for Zubrin's torch.
Most supply-runs will be Hohmann, usually one-way trips. Earth/Mars, rather famously, affords also (theoretic) Cycler Orbits, the best of which may be semipermanently colonised with a "castle" each. Between Venus and Earth(ish) Hohmann is almost a cycler itself. I have identified two more: one between Venus and STL1 repeating two synods with four revolutions so "2L4"; another repeating three synods passing both planets - Earth once Venus twice - "3-0-2-9". [LAPLACE 12/6/23: And now, the circular Hohmann.] But here we'll start with Earth/Mars (or HEO/Deimos, whatevs). If only because it's that bit further from the Solar well.
Stuff happens in space and, when it happens, the ailing transport-vessels will be calling the Lewis and Clark. The merchant is in a free Marsbound Hohmann without propellant. The pursuer starts from a castle at some arbitrary point between Earth and Mars. Again, we assume that the pursuer can get initial-velocity from a coilgun, Laurence Fishburne not minding the G-force because he's awesome. Pursuer keeps the same speed, as it locks onto where it sees the merchant... with time retardation. Formulate the equations of motion.
Here is how one might set up the Cartesian Bouguer problem, at relativistic distances and nonrelativistic times-of-flight. The "pirate" pursuer expects to detect the merchant's infrared at maybe 1 AU distance - here the retardation due to C is eight minutes.
The big dumb freesailing merchant can be a colony-ship off to Alpha Centauri, with hibernation. Starshot at 0.2C is 60000 km/s for a 20 year trip to that system; I allow the merchant 120 years at a negligibly-relativistic 10000 km/s. Assume the merchant reaches that velocity in the Kuiper Belt around 60 AU from Sol (and Earth): where the pilot and crew cut the engine (saving propellant for the decel), and all take naps.
The pursuers, meanwhile, start by assuming G-force, so are using robots. These are humans not leaving our system; they know that they cannot issue on-the-spot commands from light-hours away (eight of these, if from our inner planets). They have programmed their robot fleet to intercept the merchant's general course. They had to do this far in advance, before the merchant even left; further, they knew their robots' trajectory would burn some propellant. So, they found a KBO which would approach that path approximately. The KBO being icy would supply the additional propellant, to intercept the merchant.
Also, the initial speed is... high. So the initial acceleration is high; maybe a coilgun. 1000 m/s2? For 10000 seconds...? KBOs move negligibly compared to a colony ship (Kepler, yo!) - Eris at 68 AU goes only 3.434 km/s. And (mostly) at right-angles to the merchant - although at 0.4 ellipsis, in the middle of its orbit there's some angle. That's the sort of KBO at the epoch of time the pursuer will want.
All this done, the pursuers now have their robots ready to catch the merchant when it arrives in the not-so-near vicinity. The robots' AI is rudimentary: the orders are "fill the tanks; wait; pursue". The pursuers aren't being clever about anticipating the merchants' flight because, what if the merchants change their trajectory (not easy at 10000 km/s admittedly). And one excellent reason for a constant speed (which is >10000 km/s) out here is that it is a maximum speed, to protect as far as possible from ambient Kuiper snow-specks.
As for the pursuit's overall motive: yeah, it's difficult to justify a robbery this far from a decent fence. A pure saboteur can work; lots of crabs in a bucket dislike when a crab gets 67 AU from the bucket. Better: they're not even pirates, but are - exactly - the propellant-supply mission, to feed more ice to the colony-ship for that eventual final decel.
With that unfortunate name of "Retarded Time", Thales Azevedo and Anderson Pelluso revisit Pierre Bouguer's Pirate Problem from AD 1732. This, we're told, founded pursuit-analysis as a branch of mathematics - I suppose Lambert's Problem is a Keplerian subset.
There's a pursuer P, anthropomorphed as a pirate (or privateer); and a target, the merchant. The merchant travels in a straight line. Assume P receives information on the merchant's position accurately and immediately. For Cartesian purposes this is best modeled in deep space where the merchant is beelining between star-systems without propellant (we'll get back to this). By whatever means, the pirate vessel immediately accelerates at the merchant to hit its chosen speed - faster than the merchant's. For whatever reason, the pirate holds that speed constant - but its velocity-vector always points to the merchant. In our coöordinates, the pirate starts (0,0) and sets off once the merchant hits the X-axis. Mathematically the merchant starts (m0,0) going (δxm, δym). Draw the graph of the pirate's trajectory y = f(x).
Unlike Lambert, Bouguer's problem was soluble nonalgorithmically which solution Bouguer derived himself. It is always soluble, in fact, if only the pirate is faster than the merchant (although he'll want to get there sooner than later).
Bouguer was talking the high Caribbean seas 'pon de flat eart', so wunna can correct the merchant's path for a geodesic 'pon de globe if wunna have to. In our normal space, the merchant's geodesic should be taken as between planets, probably Hohmann but maybe cycler. And of course any pirate who knew an unsuspecting merchant's destination would consider kicking off his own geodesic, to intercept without trimming sails / blowing propellant (hence Lambert). Bouguer didn't overthink this, but if you're interested Paul Nahin comes recommended.
In space Azevedo and Pelluso note the obvious problem, even interplanetary: communication is not instantaneous. (In the oceans one might consider a U-boat hunting the merchant via sonar.) Here the pirate does not point to where the merchant is at time t, but where the merchant was at earlier time tr - hence, that time is retarded. Jokes about the mental state of pirates who can't relativity, aside (maybe they lack a bead on the parallax).
A-&-P point out that the retarded-time concept is already used - in electrodynamics. But electrodynamics be overly hard. A-&-P considered other relativistic solutions already published especially C. Hoenselaers' "Chasing relativistic rabbits" doi 10.1007/BF02107933. A-&-P deemed this inordinately hard as well, since although the light is going at 300000 km/s, the ships don't have to be. We can handle the setting and the motive, next post. A-&-P suggest this pirate-problem as an entertaining and gentle introduction to retarded-time, for the university freshmen, before they go on to using this in the higher courses.
As apparently my custom, I didn't post anything on the last day of the month... which, for June, was Tunguska-Day. Welcome to July; so under the rockets' red glare let's talk Von Braun's Dream (pdf) of assembling interplanetary craft in orbit. NETS 2021; @AerojetRdyne (pdf).
ToughSF don' like it: This Mars ship is assembled by 11 launches. 9 are performed by privately flown launchers, but 2 are sized specifically so they won't fit on Starship so SLS has something to do.
Although: this blog has long argued for one-way high-load cargo. We simply need to include the empty propellant-chassis as cargo (living space, yo!). I concede that Starship is king for cheap delivery of midsized cargo.
The commenters are asking how come no aerocapture. Maybe if Mars had the aero to do the capture . . .
