Dienswasser

China went looking for water-ice in the Martian tropics and didn't find none. Zimmerman has been suggesting that we look to the glaciers instead.

Yesterday we got major news from the south pole. Not just water ice; actual fluid.

At some point I need to run some sums on an Ice Gun in the Martian antarctic, aiming just as high as Phobos, or a reasonable Zylon dangle therefrom.

DIG MOAR 10/28: big ice blocks from 20 meters under Amazonis. That's 25° north. In fairness to the Chinese a meteor had to find it for us.

The Otomí pyramids

Today we hear of a 950 year old mummy... buried ~AD 540 (longcount 9.5.5.x.x). Yes, THAT era. The mum (literal XX!) was buried in a pyramid. So she was actually born 400 BC so, like, 6.18.0.0.0.

The locals are your standard altiplano Otomí / Nahua mix today so, the archaeologists (mostly local Mexican citizens) suspect the leaders were Otomí then - Nahua being, you know, northern. But the local genetics of the pyramid don't help - they were a mix. Mostly northwestern (Nahuas, Purépecha, Tarahumara) but there's Maya there too. Also to be kept in mind is that first the Triple Alliance and then the Spanish Conquest since brought Otomí and Nahua both into vast lands as were neither Otomí nor Nahua before AD 1441 = 11.11.0.0.0. And I remain skeptical as to when the Otomí arrived before that.

AD 540 was, as David Keys could tell you, significant, including in Mesoamerica. It wasn't long after this that a revolution overturned what the Maya called the Place Of Reeds. The Place Of Reeds was a polyglot concern. But this pyramid doesn't look Teo\huacano.

'Tain't Maya neither. No written records - at least, nothing chiseled. Wonder how long that will last? The Maya could write; and some of them did graffiti at the Place Of Reeds.

Burisma blowed up the pipeline

On the one hand, we have Biden promising to blow up the pipeline, and some Polish politicians thanking Biden for blowing up the pipeline.

And then there's Brennan out blaming the Russians.

However Biden seems sincere that he didn't expect this to happen. I don't think this is just a Biden problem; Biden's inner circle overall looks like it wasn't on a Need To Know Basis.

Brennan knows, I am certain. What Brennan says goes the opposite.

THE ACE VIEW 9/30: Post-Soviet engineering. To whit: the craftsmanship might have been shoddy to the point where somebody had to do regular maintenance on the thing. When the Russians were told to leave, they... left.

Plausible. This may be our way to save face, here in the West. I say run with it. I don't believe it but - I'll not argue the point.

ACE WAS WRONG 2/8/23: And I call on him to admit it. The lie was arguably noble but, as with Ozymandias in The Watchmen, it was still a lie, and lies get uncovered eventually.

For my part I'd underestimated Biden's complicity (although not Burisma's). Keeping in mind that Seymour Hersh might be holding back.

Zenobia 2015

I didn't go to Nederland Inferior in 2015; I went to IQSA in Atlanta instead (at risk of life and vehicle). Apparently the proceedings got published three years later - which nobody read, because it was in Dutch. Most of that, recently, is now translated to our language.

Seven years on we can ponder if this is all so dated. The reviewer David Woods disapproves the (English) title: most these essays are not, and never were, about Late Antique responses to the Arab conquests. In fairness back in 2018 they weren't about Mohammed en de Late Oudheid either.

Well, okay. I do see some Sura 30 in here. I've agreed to let the scholars just have this one, because I always suspected this one was early. Maybe even authentic to "Mohammed" . . . but, by that token, too difficult to interrogate for historicity.

I see some Motzki in here (zt''l); also van Bladel and al-Jallad. Although I suspect their essays have been floated in academia.edu since '15 or - worse - superceded by later work.

Of most interest to me is sura 16. Johan Weststeijn has thoughts about v. 67 in a Late Oudheid context. I admit - back in 2015 I don't know if I'd even dared sura 16 yet. I'm glad to have this article however belatedly.

Gnosticism against homosexuality

Dr Will Roscoe wrote this about the Gospel of Judas.

This blog you're reading now hasn't engaged the Judas Gospel - directly. (We do appreciate the Tchacos Codex here and we're glad we now own it.) We generally have associated the Judas Gospel with its namesake from Not The Nine O' Clock News (specifically the Beeb's Not 1982 calendar spinoff). Also the first Judas translations were ... unfit for purpose. (Since 2007 we might be better off.)

But, as the anti-Thomas people like to point out that fake gospel's anti-feminism; here Roscoe would point us to Judas' anti-homosexuality.

Roscoe believes that behind the polemic of Judas is an illumination of Judas' opponents - who are, as they must be, the other eleven disciples. If Judas condemns homosexuality and Judaism, this points to a pro-Jewish and pro-"Queer" (Roscoe's words) earliest, or at least earlier, Christianity. Judas meanwhile uses Pauline language as Paul did - as insults: arsenokoitēs.

Roscoe concludes, implies anyway, that James and Peter and The Twelve had set up a boys'-own society. The Carpocratians held best to the Apostles' vision - by way of Saint Mark, as Morton Smith has transmitted him. Paul resisted this and his "Homophobia" (Roscoe's word, again) has carried the day. But before Paul became orthodox, heterodox cults also adopted Paul - like the Valentinians. Judas represents a Sethian cult, also adopting Paul.

Of interest is that The Expanse proposes a future Christianity (based on Augustine) whose marriages shall be between a woman and a... woman. It's progressive Christianity today but four centuries from now, it may just be Christianity.

Eusebius of Emesa

I hear that Ishoʿdad cited one Eusebius of Emesa, Arabically Ḥimṣ. I think this town was Arabic-speaking already by Eusebius' AD fourth-century / AG seventh-century. Although: what dialect?

Eusebius himself spurned Arabic. Eusebius didn't approve Greek, either; he was a man Jerome would have approved, a Hebrew enjoyer. To that end Eusebius made a strong play for Biblical "Syriac", as he called it (ho Suros). "Syria" in his days expanded into Emesa on past Damascus. To narrow this down: from the quotations he makes therefrom (against the Greek), our scholars tend to see ho Suros as an ancestor to Peshitta. That's the Edessene language, not the Palaestinian language.

To narrow this in time: the Peshitta like the Vulgate is famously post-Masoretic. I conclude that Syriac had already displaced more-Palaestinian Aramaics at Ḥimṣ, among Christians, by the 300s / 600s.

Ishoʿdad of Merv

h/t Davila, whilst I recover from the massive hike I just did: Schmidt's translation of Ishoʿdad Marwazi on Daniel.

Ishoʿdad has, best I can tell, an Iranian name (and the man is traditionally thought to have come from the Margiana) but he settled as bishop of al-Ḥadītha over the first half of the ninth century AD so the middle 1100s AG. As an East-Syrian who didn't limit himself to East-Syrian exegesis, and as a fairly intelligent specimen of the breed, West-Syrians paid him the tribute of citing his work in turn.

Ishoʿdad's old-testament has been published before but, I guess, Schmidt felt he could do better with the Daniel part. And C. Van den Eynde's translation was in French.

Daniel is important for students of apocalyptic and, the ʿAbbasī era certainly raised up a lot of that. Ishoʿdad piques interest inasmuch as he rejects apocalyptic. He couches his study of Daniel such that Daniel's "prophecies" although true prophecies were all fulfilled in the Maccabean era. Which is the churchman's politically-correct dodge around Daniel's clear status as a Maccabean forgery.

Ishoʿdad is also, thereby, able to tell his fellow Christians to quit citing Daniel against the ʿAbbasid sultans. Which makes his commentary, perhaps, not terribly useful for Islam As Others Saw It... directly. Although one wonders if one might spot Daniel-based anti-Islam apocalypse in this book's shadow.

The CO2... shortage

For all that we're hearing about decarbonising our energy-supply (which this blog supports) I wasn't quite prepared to see that we are now enduring a... carbon dioxide shortage.

Honestly I don't care about lacking that carbonate fizz in my soda; I don't even drink pop. Or "coke". Whatever. What surprises me is that carbon needs be introduced into... beer. I had thought that beer carbonated itself through the fermentation process, mediated through yeast and not through chloroplasts. No: the Coors brewery having ejected CO₂ into our air then buys it back.

Maybe they could buy the CO₂ from the ejecta from natural-gas / petroleum plants. A sulfur shortage has been ongoing, as well.

The dust rocket: Martian edition

Our moon has aluminium oxides and is energy-rich for half the month. It also doesn't have a lot of gravity. Therefore an outbound craft, rather than burn expensive hydrogen, might have a crew spend time separating aluminium from oxygen, then burn that dust. So: a similar suggestion for Mars.

Mars can get oxygen too... but what it can get for cheaper, is carbon dioxide. Now: CO₂ is pretty inert, as gas goes. Goroshin, Lee, and Higgins back in 1999 suggested that CO₂ if liquid could burn magnesium.

Back in 1999 these three weren't confident in finding water on Mars - meaning, equatorial latitudes, best for getting back to Earth (which, further, could refuel and tether at Phobos / Deimos). We might be better-off now. Honestly I remember some confidence of finding Martian-tropic ice even in 1999.

I'll bring in that whatever you can react with carbon-dioxide, you can react so much better with carbon-monoxide. Mars' economy, if we trust Robert Zubrin, will use much CO. Instead of Mg + CO₂ why not Mg + CO for more exhaust-velocity? I can think of soot as a clog-opportunity, but if so then the authors should have noted that - I think.

The Volkswanderung into Britannia-Inferior

HBDChick points to Gretzinger et al. including Stephan Schiffels. Summaries at Science and at Schiffels' own Twitter.

Here the Venerable Bede is affirmed as flagging post-Roman pre-Viking Britain as taking on a lot of migrants. These migrants would include female migrants. So far, no argument from me. Until we get further west, out to "Wessex" and to the Welsh Marches and to literal Cumbria; there I might take a stand, as perhaps my ancestors did.

We're not quite there yet as defining what a "Jute" was. Bede and the Anglosaxon Chronicle(s) said they're the tribes who settled Kent. But... the Chronicles depended upon Bede, or at least upon the sources he had, which also trended eighth-century. The genes in the southeast point more to Franks and, indeed, there's a Merovingian influence in Norfolk-Suffolk late-sixth-century aristocracy. Raedwald was of the Angles. Kent and the East-Saxons slipped back into paganism in his time, thus seceding from the Franks.

In that respect I'd not yet call out Frankish genes as being "Norman". Especially when you consider (A) Normans were actually Viking-descended and (B) Bill the Bastard had called in many many Bretons, who - by their name - could boast Devonese and Cornish ancestry, by conquest claiming their homecoming. The "Franks" in Dark Age southeast Britain, if by that we mean Gaulish and/or inland-Germanic, look to be centuries earlier than 1066. Or a century later: Angevin/Plantagenet-era, when the kings and nobles became more French, in culture and in marriage.

Hatepe

In light of this nonsense, why not.

Over the past couple decades I've understood the latter Lake Taupō eruption called "Hatepe" to be AD 180. (Like Iceland, this isn't a one-and-done.) I just looked back in on Hatepe today and now they're like, no; AD 230ish. And its date now sports an error-bar.

For New Zealand this isn't just prehistoric, it's prehuman. Only moa saw this thing (briefly). The nearest human society was Polynesian yes, but way north in Tonga whose inhabitants were not yet Maori. Also this precedes the eastbound migrations lately fictionalised in Moana. Prevailing winds would keep the Australians from knowing anything about this (as a landbound quake - no tsunami).

The AD 180 date - I find - wasn't dendrochronologic. That date (perhaps always suspiciously round) came from Herodian and Fan Ye; neither of them Tongan, nor anywhere subequatorial. So maybe some other event caused the climate they noted. Rather: claimed.

The late 220s-230s would overlap Severus Alexander, I think. Could we assume some other climate disruptions then?

Enrichment

A couple weeks ago World Nuclear News relayed press-information from Silex down-under.

I bring this up because recently we've learnt how long Australia is on Net Zero. Solar will be part of it (especially if beamed from orbit); but meanwhile, why not nuclear too.

"Enrichment" has a long history in isotope-processing; at first, with a uranium centrifuge. It's not literally enriching the isotopes they got. It's about separation of isotopes, so they can skim valuable U-235 from the U-238 baseline.

Note: the same process should be good for, say, Boron, to get the lower-neutron isotopes of that. You want this to soak up stray neutrons from your reaction.

Haldeman as seer

On this fine Sunday in time for the Texans / Broncos game, I drove up to Breck and here finished Joe Haldeman's The Forever War. I wish I'd read it in 1998.

I mean of course I should have read it long before that, but 1998 was when I read Starship Troopers. There's no excuse for reading one and not the other. Both authors Served; both books know the score. Although I'll rate Haldeman's score higher as dealing with the civilian side, where Heinlein flat doesn't hold civilians as worthy of an opinion.

I get the impression from Haldeman that he doesn't respect civilians either, given how he depicts civilian society. We're criminals and/or decadents. Haldeman's edge is that he argues the point where Heinlein just says "whatever; just pay your taxes, pleb".

As for the Future as seen from the middle 1970s:

Haldeman called it that we'd be finding dwarf-planets pretty soon. He also called it that the next one would be named "Charon". And that an interstellar military would prefer a further Kuiper body than Pluto, which journey cannot use Neptune for grav-assist - a nonPlutino can.

Unfortunately JH didn't call that Pluto would get that dwarf-planet, as in fact a near-twinned moon. So his "Charon" is out at, what, 80 AU and has a Mercury-like size and gravity. Honestly I think that even in the 1970s Haldeman should have guessed that ice-rich dwarf planets should be Tritonlikes with low density. But, back then, everyone was still banging on about Pluto's effects upon Neptune. Some thought Pluto was an aberration (we see echoes in Mass Effect's mass-driver); Haldeman represents the side which assumed that Pluto would be followed up by bigger Plutones out in the Kuiper. This can be fixed by positing a Marslike even further than 80 AU, or else setting the whole scene on Eris allowing for low-grav.

Haldeman also called that the world's dominant governments would be subsidising homosexuality as population-control, and that we'd be Malthusian - by 2025ish. Here he was optimistic; we've been there for some time now. Haldeman doesn't express an opinion that we should be Malthusian given our energy capabilities - overtly. Haldeman's book implies that much of this is a racket, excused by the Forever War (a theme he borrows from "Orwell" Blair). We don't have Taurians for our excuse but we do have other bogeymen.

A good day

I want to check in on some personal comments. Some positivity, perhaps. Because in the southwest-Louisville / Superior region, we needed some of that this year.

I was readying for a day-out in Superior (and Broomfield) when, around 8:20 AM, I looked in the mirror and saw Jack Torrance staring back from it. So: haircut time. Superior actually had a salon open, so I started out early. This done I got a nice breakfast next door, and then headed out to the bookstore. I got Joe Haldeman's The Forever War (and Daryaee's Sasania), so walked (back) to the park.

I was early by three hours for the chili fest, but they let me read this book in the nearby soccer field. So I did that. Then I queued up to pay my $40 for four hours of beer and chili (and to pay another $5 for a shirt).

I can't exactly say I had too much beer - anyway I wasn't driving - but I definitely had more chili than I needed. Nice conversations. No rain! (Until I was walking home, but - well - it was hot, so I didn't mind it.)

The second monkey

JGS has adopted a spider-monkey, chuen to the Quiche. The Internet warns that these are Not Pets but maybe that's just for urbanites and Martha's Vineyard residents. They were tolerated among all the Maya, and indeed kept as pets as in Apocalypto. Much like macaques along North Africa, except more so. There exist other monkeys in the region however (and not just us bumbling tourists).

In Chiapas lives also the howler-monkey, no domesticate for anybody. This is called batz among the Quiche / K'iche' today (I assume mantled palliata; black pigra is more peninsular). In their bible the Popol Vuh, Hun Chuen and Hun Batz were the older brothers of the Hero-Twins; those twins finally usurped their brothers' tyranny and drove them into the treetops. The Quiche have reasoned that chuen laughs; batz grieves. But one must always keep in mind that the Popol Vuh is a postapocalyptic foreign text which, like our Bible (and Apocalypto) often reacts against the Choltal culture which, as we all know, ended up in failure.

As for the Choltal, some modern research points more to the capuchin as the brother to chuen. The capuchin was either indigenous to the region at the time or else imported from further south. With the collapse of the Maya oeconomy the capuchin became more scarce this far north and was no longer remembered among the Quiche.

Checking in on the White Dog

h/t Saraceni and the NYT, here is a nonpaywalled Indian-Express reprint of White Dog City, Sak Tz’i’ in Choltal. This has been mentioned a few times over the past two years or more; so, we're just getting an update here.

Although we can read the glyphs as Choltal the people there may have spoken then-mutually-intelligible Tzeltal. This because of the nearest village, apparently a ranching hamlet founded as "Lacanjá Tzeltal" by the Gomez and/or Sanchez family/ies. The ruin was found at Jacinto Gomez Sanchez' ranch - or, at least, some loot was traced back there. Sanchez then called in the archaeologists and has been doing his utmost to save the site (which was open to the elements). He considers himself a Maya and has much pride in his heritage, which pride he absolutely deserves.

Chiapas has long been considered a difficult part of the Mesoamerican isthmus, with jungle and badland. Other Classic-Maya cities recorded that the Maya even then considered the White Dog to be annoying. Several accounts record warfare over there. Apparently those cities nabbed a king in AD 628, almost a century after that civilisational "Hiatus".

Chrysalis

A family-member directs me to Saturn's Rings. Probably formed from the breakup of a Saturnine moon: maybe 200-100 Mya, during our late Triassic or Jurassic. The question is, why did this moon break up so [geologically] recently, and not during the Grand Tack it shared with Jupiter.

For some years we've seen the inner-from-Titan moons as young and in fact dynamically impossible.

h/t to WSJ since I have no access to Maryame El Moutamid's "editorial" DOI: 10.1126/science.abq318. To the editors, I recommend not claiming Saturn (9.5 AU semimajor) and Neptune (30 AU) to be "nearby" - to us, nor to each other.

Jack Wisdom et al. claim that resonances between Saturn and, er, Neptune account for the jostulation of Saturn's moons at the time, running "Chrysalis" into the subMimas orbit so dooming it to fragmentation.

It is however true that these two outer icy planets are close to resonance, 5:28 at a 1.9° mismatch per 5 Saturnine years. This compares well with Earth:Venus 8:13 claimed 1.5° per 13 Earth years.

MIT (and not WSJ) argue, assert anyway, how a Iapetus-class moon could disrupt that resonance. Elliptical interference between Titan and Iapetus - they claim. Possibly driving Iapetus to the distance it's now at. Possibly devouring more ice moons.

I'd look more to Uranus, which is almost Neptune's mass and flies almost exactly between Saturn and Neptune at 20 AU.

Diamonds-plus

I've been aware of (or at least assumed-possible-of) carbon structures harder than 10 on the Mohs scale. I just didn't think it practical to make such in the lab, as artificial diamond is made, cheaper than digging it out of a mine. Now, meet lonsdaleite - which Nyrath Chung has (figuratively) dug out of a mine 4500 million years ago.

That is: the "ureilite" rocks in which such are found once belonged to a dwarf planet that got shattered by a Pallaslike, way back in Hadean times perhaps even before Theia met Gaia. It wasn't Vesta or Mars, most of which survives; it was something else, now a disintegrate. Presumably 'twas carbon-rich - so maybe formed in the 4 AU region, before Jupiter started its grand tack, which tack started all those pinballs down here like the aforementioned Theia.

The implications of finding these slivers of lonsdal[e]ite isn't that those slivers are, themselves, fit to be forged into a Tutankhamun Blade Of Heaven. It's more that they hint at some chemical means of creating these slivers as we hadn't thought of using down here on Earth today. Which means we can make artificial lonsdaleite, which would be good for drilling deeper than we have been drilling and through more-difficult rock. This would be great for fracking of course - also, more importantly, for geothermal, which (at the end) trends more to the igneous.

Be interesting if gemstones could be made, also. I was never keen on diamonds for engagement-rings.

The Dormition

Still on Shoemaker's Dormition. In Greek that's Coemesis. The term is deliberate - this is a superset of Assumption (to Heaven). Some Dormitions exist wherein Mary is not Assumed. Even where Assumed - as we Catholics now believe - we're still unsure if Mary were assumed alive or dead.

Although Dormition does not intersect Christology, the Assumption might. If Christ had a human nature, as Nestorius posited, and if Christ truly died on the Cross, then he had a perishable body. Why should his mortal mother not, also? Here the issue which the Vatican has not addressed - if Mary died on Earth such that her dead body was Assumed to Heaven.

A book we needed in 1950

Yesterday at a pub (watching the Texans and Colts take the day off too apparently) I took time to read the bulk of Stephen Shoemaker's first work, The Ancient Traditions Of The Virgin Mary's Dormition And Assumption. This cost $140 back in 2002 but is now on archive.org.

This book's thesis is (or isn't) "should the Virgin Mary have an Assumption Day". Her feast has always been popular among the Balkan Orthodox on account of the Leo/Virgo season - perhaps seeping over to the Hrvatska. Over the 1940s the (still-)Latin Church had inherited several strains of tradition that the Virgin was bodily assumed into Heaven upon her death. This in 1950 became the Assumption dogma which, as a result, Catholics must believe. Shoemaker is here to figure out how it all got started. These collect all the records of the end of Mary's Earthly life, together Coemesis, which is Dormitio in Latin.

A lot of Christians - we learn - approved Coemesis if only as a unifying point of Christendom: theotokos for obvious reasons, but also anti-theotokos because then they could venerate Mary without even asking about the divine-or-human nature of Christ.

So: how does the book do? Well, I learnt a lot.

If you don't want to read the whole thing, several reviews exist. Most of them are paywalled, but Bryn Mawr's is free and usually best anyway. Author Adam Becker admits not to read (in order) Ethiopic, Coptic, Armenian, or Georgian but I might suggest he give at least Coptic a crack (he's probably learnt it since penning that review).

Shoemaker made the... interesting choice, in the book's own introduction, to complain that he didn't want to write it. I have to admit - his reluctance doesn't show. This really is a fine book. It's just that it is an exercise in marshalling data rather than in arguing a thesis.

One of the book's undigested publons concerns the Virgin Mary's most important role which was birthing our Lord... at the Kathisma in Judaea. This will become a classic article - but it's not there yet, in this 2002 book. Better that this material had been sequestered.

More shuttle shenanigans

The exrocketman has redesigned the Space Shuttle as "No Shortage Of Dreams" would do it. It occurred to me that the Shuttle is... already being redesigned. So let us check in on Sierra Space and their Dream Chaser.

'Tis still a thing. In fact Sierra are projecting 2023, to dock with the existent International Space Station; rather than with StarLab or Orbital Reef or those other theoretic stations.

As to how the Dream Chaser is not a shuttle: it's launching on a non-reusable booster... so far. Sierra are shifting to a more-reusable model. Still not quite there yet.

The truncated version of the Epistle of the Romans

Among Peter Kirby's later posts concerns Marcion's New Testament. Which NT is, like Martin Luther's NT, an exercise in preference. But not always of revision. We're tonight Beyond Zebra, Zebra being Romans 14:23 per Marcion apud Origen.

As I read the full Romans (English translation), I don't see much that Marcion would efface. That the Church should support "the poor in Jerusalem" is something that John Crossan might flag, as specific to Paul's time with no relevance to Marcion's. On the other hand - as noted even by his opponent Tertullian - Marcion allowed copious Pauline material as didn't help the mature Marcionite theology.

As, indeed, perhaps-Marcion-contemporary Luke was not allowing. Crossan is clear that Luke refused the early Christian definition of "the Poor" as James defined them. (Or as Matthew might define them...) We are all, I hope, aware of Luke's propensity to pound Peter into a Pauline mould.

As to Romans' ending looking toward a visit to Spain - does Luke's own text reach that far? I don't see it. 1 Clement assumes Paul went that far pace this guy.

Kirby further points out that Tertullian didn't quibble Marcion on the last two chapters of Romans. Tertullian's own (Latin) copy perhaps lacked them. Again: my blog does not question the present text of Romans as a first-century production. But we might at least ask about the texts in the middle second-century.

Was "Marcion's New Testament" actually Marcion's? - or did Marcion inherit Luke's edition of the Epistles, simply developing his thought from that?

For stopping Paul's letter short, Luke has a motive which Marcion does not have: the Advent / Parousia of the Holy Spirit, from the Temple Mount to the Seven Hills. Paul's hope was for Spain. This hope was not Luke's hope; wasn't Marcion's either, obviously, but Marcion didn't care. Just like Tertullian didn't care. But Luke cared.

Is Peter Kirby still active?

I haven't heard from PeterKirby.com since 2015 and there's no "Peter Kirby" tag on Vridar.org since June that year.

I wanted to inform his "2 Elijah" page of John Reeves' Sefer Elijah translation which, I think, translates Buttenwieser's Hebrew (I don't find a German translation here).

I mean, if he'd hear me out, which in 2014 he likely would not have.

"Saturn Rising", six decades later

Nyrath has directed us to Arthur C. Clarke's minor work "Saturn Rising" which we may read in Fantasy & Science Fiction 20.3 (1961), archived. How's it doing in 2021? (Or in 2023.)

Clarke was of course over-optimistic about how the US (or USSR) space-programme could achieve any of this. I am unsure this is NASA's fault; we needed much better robotics than anyone had in the 1960s or even 1990s, to re-use the rockets so's to make spaceflight practical. Well okay; a bit of it is NASA's fault, for letting Congress design their "Space Shuttle" for them . . .

Also Clarke got Titan wrong, imagining a methane atmosphere with ammonia snow. The inner moons were, likewise, deemed fluffballs which they are not. And you'd think somebody would have mused about Enceladus as an ammoniate Europa-ulterior.

On the plus side: the rockets do use methane, which was science-fiction at the time, but now being successfully tested at Boca. (It's the launchpad that needs work, down there.) And heck with pulling methane from the atmosphere; at Titan, you scoop it from the lakes.

TKTL1

Since NYT and the original paper are paywalled, let us all thank the Turtle for Anneline Pinson's "Human TKTL1 implies greater neurogenesis in frontal neocortex of modern humans than Neanderthals". So let's think of a reason why we got TKTL1 and the Neanders didn't.

I would guess at abstract thought over memory. Neanders would have to own good memory simply to survive a Pleistocene winter. On the other hand, once they learn (or physically evolve) how to survive in (say) a Pyrenees valley, a Neander tribe has little incentive to innovate. Innovation takes time away from hunting and gathering.

Modern East African TKTL1 perhaps arose where the enemy wasn't "General Winter", a vicious enemy but a predictable one; but where the enemy was other humans and also cunning beasts like the jackal, the lion, and the baboon.

I'm somewhat reminded of the Germans at the point the Romans first met 'em. The Romans thought the Germans were a pack of dolts. I mean, yeah; racists lol look at what they thought of West Africans. But the Romans didn't think that the Iranians or (especially) the Greeks were dummies.

Another question we might ponder is whether the TKTL1 mutation had evolved in such modern-humans as expanded into Eurasia and then simply failed to take hold. It seems untraceable in the hybrids as of 2020 excavated. If I'm right then Eurasian conditions selected against this, so their absence in the hybrids doesn't prove much.

Marginal Earths

I've got a couple posts here about whether we really are that lucky. First up was that Goldilocks thing: if we'd be better off closer to a more auburn (i.e. K) sun. Lately Eccentricity, where the Jupiter analogue is closer too or else maybe just bigger, but either way eccentric, thus pulling the inner planet to an eccentric orbit too.

Eccentricity can lead to yeeting. In a longer-lasting system (like a K system), the inhabitants can wait that bit longer; their sun might not catch up with them until the dynamo runs out. I am here for the shorter-lasting system. It has taken our Sun 4,567 million years to develop us - which span would rule out an F system. Some of this delay came from various physical setbacks; the worst delay may be an accident of plate-tectonics which just... did nothing.

An F system might luck out, if it escapes a Boring Billion (and, incidentally, also boils off the nearest comets). This can be extended to G systems with close-in heavy planets; they might eccentre the planet's orbit too far, but not too late for life to emerge.

I am unsure that eccentricity will help a K-system Earthlike however. It might exacerbate the infrared warming.

If Earth were Mars

A few months ago I pondered HD 60584 CC1 and HIP 21152. These are F stars ~1.4 M_⊙, so aren't likely to have planets with Cambrian-plus life on them, unless some alien terraforms it all. They also each own a browndwarf in the low 30s M_j over 16 AU out.

It was my thought that, if they did have an Earth-mass planet at 2 AU (the habitable zone), the eccentricity would be a problem even for Ediacaran life.

Per Jules Bernstein, eccentricity might be good. Pam Vervoort et al. poses the constraint of a closer and eccentric Jupiter. Right now, Jupiter pulls Mars into an eccentric orbit but not (so much) Earth. A closer Jupiter is presumed to have yeeted Mars away so it's now looking to the next planet inward: Earth. The eccentricity pushes irradiance on summers more than winters. Warmer summers mean better crops.

There's no "global warming" on account Jupiter hasn't changed our temperature overall. For the winters - which will be longer given Kepler - we suppose everyone just hunkers down.

Anyway I expect the Earth would, actually, get more eccentric as time goes on if only because it can hardly get less so. Maybe a big rock might help us along. I however doubt any influence from Jupiter; the giant is not as vulnerable as is, say, Neptune. So by the time we get to enjoy the extreme-r seasons, the hotter Sun has already done for us.

Hence my interest not in this system but in others', like HD 60584 CC1 and HIP 21152.

Mantle water worlds

I am unsure this is the vehicle to explain the low-density smaller worlds we've found in-transit. This notes from a sample size of 43 worlds (very close to very cold stars) that although the density is low (and probably not from carbon as we used to think of 55 Cancri e), the transiting worlds aren't big enough to be vapour-shrouded Supervenera.

Solution: sublimation of water underground.

The article suggests something like Europa but, would the ice of a warm world really be on the surface? It would just melt and boil off, making that steamworld.

More likely is hydrates in the (rocky) mantle, I think. As we have here 'neath Earth and, perhaps, Venus.

Queue, jumped

In the double-digit parsec/parallax range: Amaury Triaud's LP 890-9. It's got a transit and the orbiting TESS saw it, so it's now TOI-4306. A hundred lightyears out.

LP 890-9 is the second-coldest dwarf known to host planets after also-Triaud's TRAPPIST-1. The planet's year as usual with transits is swift: 2.7 days.

Personally I might not care but today a second planet was found, at 8.5 days, perhaps not transiting. That is habitable-zone. 'Twas found by land telescopes at Tenerife and Chile.

This makes LP 890-9 a candidate for the JWST. Although as the article notes, TRAPPIST-1 will likely come first.

Dating young dwarfs

If we can see a brown dwarf, it's probably (1) high-parallax as seen here = close (2) also high-parallax from the star(s) = far (3) which lightsource be dim and at least the dwarf (3) young. This combination allows our non-JWST telescopes to separate its light from its star's. Like this batch.

JWST isn't the survey-'scope. It's the 'scope we point at objects we're already interested in. VHS 1256 b was one of our earlier objects-of-interest, ascertained 2016 on account it's "only" 74 light years out so with high parallax. Now the Webb is in.

The press-release claims 360 AU and 17,000 years, elliptic orbit. I assume they got that year-length from an estimation of the main stars' mass, rounding the browndwarf's mass to zero. Indeed VHS 1256 (sans dwarf) is a binary, so its mutual dance and the two bodies' parallax have been measured for some time, constraining the barycentre mass nicely. It's all much like the Centauri triplet although much much less massive - the dwarf is constrained under 20 Jupiters.

I do not find in the paper how the press-release has ascertained eccentricity - the third body has only been measured since 2016 nu? Maybe it's too near (or too far) to match the ∼8" parallax. In this case, too near, given the paper's 150 AU.

We learn that the dwarf's composition is variable. All the elements in there, it seems, churn about. In fact they might even be combining and disintegrating into new compounds as they rise and fall in the "atmosphere" - which we should probably keep calling a Convective Zone as we call such on our own Sun. Although they don't know yet if this one is still burning deuterium.

As a young browndwarf as orbits beyond the snow-line it is a proxy for the dozens of other objects like it, including the 34 new ones. Which means if we find similar convection in other dwarfs, given allowances for mass, we should be able to guess at their age. Especially if it's a steal so not part of the original.

BACKDATE 9/10 9:20 AM MST - well poop, I had to drop the 6 September poast. Ah well.

Venus is dangerous

Carrington hit Venus today. The STEREO-A caught it like they caught a similar event end of last month. (Wednesday or 31 August? Pick one, media.)

Venus has little protection from this. Hence why I recommend SVL2 and the upper-atmosphere; and not so much satellites. Until we get an orbital-ring with a magnet up there.

Tilted kilt

Per Keith Cooper: 3D Orbital Architecture of a Dwarf Binary System and Its Planetary Companion. The binary is EQ Pegasi alias GJ 896; the planet orbits A. Both are red dwarfs. So the planet orbiting 284.4 days is COLD. You hardly need ask Kepler to know this.

It has helped that the system is near us - 20.3 lightyears - so has been observed for some time, since 1941. Long observations and a big mass mean good constraints. Even without JWST.

More concerning is Newton. How can a planet in the M_j range even... form, here? Without the B star stealing all the planet's gas, before yeeting its core into deep space. It seems that here the planet is best modeled if it tilts at 148°. Incidentally yielding that exact mass: 2.3 M_j.

SYFY 9/15: How it was found. That might be the most-interesting part of the story - radio-astronomy from all over this Earth.

Halo Evolutions

Noonish today I was in Breckenridge (or Breckinridge, spelling varies). There at the Ole Man / Old Man bookstore, which hosts many many used books, I found Halo Evolutions.

Only eight dollars! Plus the eight dollars spent parking there, on account of the Duck Race. And the five gallons of petrol to get up there and back which set me back $15-20. Well at least I got to see some scenery and be out of the heat. ANYWAY.

I have played Combat Evolved but not very far into it, just so far as to hear of the Cole Protocol and to enter the eponymous Halo, also to see some of the Covenant - the setting's Dominion, for Trekkies. So I was looking for lore but avoiding spoilers, best I can.

I got as far as "Headhunters" before I found the Lutheran Column. As usual with such writers I find their views intriguing but will not necessarily subscribe to all their theses. Here I learn that "Headhunters", involving the "Spartan III" as it does, constitutes - technically, to me - a Spoiler. Although: not much of a spoiler. The story would work about as well with earlier models.

The Lutheran (who does his best to avoid spoilers of his own) did warn me sufficiently to beware mention of "Cortana" and "High Charity". That means I don't yet get to read "The Mona Lisa", which is as he points out 120 pages: almost a book in itself and 20% of the content here. So I skipped from "Blunt Instruments" right to "Cole". Which unfortunately had some MAJOR spoilers at the end.

As to overall quality these stories are good, rated by military SF standards. They stack up well against Warhammer 40k literature; more Abnett than Mitchell. Personally I'd rather read a Mitchell book over an Abnett book, but for the shortstory form I can take some grimdark grit. The main theme in such stories as precede the Halo games is that the grit is grimdark: the hoomies are losing. That sets up the stakes of that first game (which I haven't finished).

Standouts are Nylund's "Cole", which uses the scattered-document frame of Bram Stoker and HP Lovecraft; and O'Connor's "The Heart of Midlothian", which Isaac Asimov himself must now be wishing he'd written first. Evenson's "Pariah" gets us started with a look at the Traag Draconian of the Spartan project - also at Mendez and Halsey. I also appreciated Buckell's "Dirt" as a take on how Starship Troopers might end up Firefly to the extent that Minear and Whedon hadn't done that already.

Sabbath v. Sanction

Finished it.

Hudson will quibble Crossan on Luke, where Crossan believes that Luke is a pro-Roman drone who - unlike Paul - didn't care about slavery. Luke, in Hudson's reading, holds that Old Testament thought that the ruling saecular powers should undo debt. Given Crossan's (incontroversible) argument that Luke is pro-Roman, then Luke wants a new Rome, through which the Holy Spirit will inspire the Princeps to... undo debt.

Stephen Shoemaker documented much hope throughout the ages for Hudson's project. This could mean an outside army, but it could also mean the return of a righteous Roman king - or at least a populist king, like Nero. The Macedonian kings of the Byzantine Empire, in fact, performed this act on behalf of their people.

Crossan himself gets to that theme in the last chapter comparing Sabbath Theology to Sanction Theology. Sabbath is the Jubilee restoration of debt, from Genesis One and Holiness Code; Sanction is from Deuteronomy and the Revelation. As do most Baby-Boom liberals, Crossan prefers the former without fully grasping the implications.

Gregory Cochran might be blogging again soon

Doctor Adam Rutherford, who has a PhD you know, is bravely standing up against racism. Lately on Twitter he's been talking the Norwich DNA. This proves that Jews (on average) aren't smart, or at least weren't in the late AD 1200s. Thus he leaves us with Kevin MacDonald and with Ron Unz, who impute Jewish success to tribalism and to gentile gullibility.

Er. Based?

Gregory Cochran, who alongside the late Harpending in The 10000 Year Explosion had touted the mid-2000s-era Ashkenazi genetics, has taken this as a challenge. He's looked into the genetics of the Norwich victims. He finds that the four mutations in question don't fall in the brain. So conceding the AD 1200s to Rutherford (and to MacDonald).

I'll replyguy that we are here talking direct genetics. A gene retarding puberty to (say) 14 years should force a scholarly career even upon an IQ-100. If only on account the kid can't work the farm and/or get married off.

Also (Cochran does note this much) nobody's looked for the non-deleterious mutations as affect intelligence.

Crossan's take on the Revelation

I didn't much like Jonathan Kirsch's book on John's apocalypse - or "prophecy" as John preferred you called it. In part it's because Kirsch struck me as a bit of a jerk. Now here's John Dominic Crossan to opine upon what January Six means.

As has been said before (paraphrasing): either one approaches the Revelation a madman or one leaves it so. For my part three years and a half seems a fitting waiting-period between revisits.

Crossan argues that John must be read in the context of Nero-As-Elvis. Nero was stabbed, like the Lamb was crucified. John casts the Lamb as real where Nero was fake, alive where Nero is long dead.

Like Kirsch, Crossan sees John's book as a late-first-century Turner Diaries for para-Christian local bigots. There was no persecution, says Crossan. This was only - in John's mind - paranoia, and a lust for bloody REVENGEANCE!. Crossan is probably... right, for Domitian and Nerva. His sources are Ignatius and Pliny, who between them sketch a Christian community whom Roman governors tolerate where they toe the line.

I am less certain of Crossan about Nero. The Nero-fanclub out East can be assumed pagan and anti-Jewish (and anti-Christian). Even if John be a paranoiac of the mid AD nineties his paranoia may be post-traumatic of the sixties.

As far as other takeaways, John and the Neronians agree on hoping the Parthians will swoop in to wreck the illegitimate Flavian Imperium. They differed inasmuch as the Neronians hoped for the reinstatement of Nero. John just wanted blood; for him, only Christ is legitimate. This may explain how come the Revelation (UPDATE 3/19/23 outside the Nile) never quite got its Greek audience, much less a Syriac one. Greeks and Syrians were in the way, like to be the battlefield.

It was, counterintuitively, we the Latins who kept this book alive. (Also the Copts.) Perhaps a reaction to an increasingly Oriental Empire which culminated in Arian-then-Miaphysite Constantinople. A Nestorian Shah will save us! Prester John, anyone?

An additional point is John's take on diet; he refuses meat sacrificed to idols. When you couple that with his attacks on "Jews who are not", this means he's kosher. Here John reads like the Pseudo Clementines. And like Athanasius of Balad, as Holger Zellentin pointed out. Syriac Christendom was never much for Revelation but I am now wondering if Palaestinian Christendom may have been more receptive. More Jews, further from the Mesopotamian battlefields... closer to the Coptic and Latin north-Africa. Closer to the Hijaz too whilst we're on this beat.

Also here: John's narrative of the Lamb's birth, to the woman crowned with the twelve stars, reads like the Leto myth. There was a whole temple to Leto at the time, in Damascus. Mary-as-Leto proved popular in Syro-Palaestina, where will stand the Kathisma Church. This contradicts Luke's infancy-narrative as is well known - here, Stephen Shoemaker 2003.

Overall Crossan is set to compare John with Luke-Acts (I'm not there yet). So maybe this is all an afterclap between James and Paul, which Luke will (famously) paper over. John's "Nicolas" and "Jezebel" will be in the Paul-to-Luke faction.