The new Apophis

Meet the new Venus-crossing asteroid 2022 AP7. 1500 meters wide; bigger than PH27 and a potential danger to Earth. Not counting the latest (and last) data from Puerto Rico.

Apophis got a lot of hype a few decades ago for almost crossing Earth but it has been ruled a "ball", to use the baseball term. They haven't constrained the AP7 strike-zone as yet. This latest article discusses PH27 as if it were new which it is not, although maybe we've constrained its orbit better. 2021 LJ4 is also noted in passing.

AP7 is big enough I'd recommend it for hollowing-out and pushing it into a high Venus orbit, as a station there. Or into "Venus Equilateral". I'm not picky.

It took some doing to catch a low-aphelion asteroid visible - from here - only when the Sun is rising or setting. Congratulations to them. Although I'd be remiss if I didn't remind my readers that if SVL2-halo had a telescope, we'd not need to point it sunward to spot Earth-crossers from 0.7 AU.

Whilst we're here I'd raise a worry about gravitational ricochet. Could a Venus-crosser take some momentum from that planet which pushes it to be an Earth-crosser?

Snowbraking

On topic of blasting telescopes out to distant worlds, has anyone considered ramming a telescope on such a world?

Some of our system's planets, I assume, are rocky or icy, and have high surface-gravity. I'd not recommend this for - say - Mercury or Mars. But we've had suggestions to skate craft into the fine regolith of our own Moon.

Into an icier world I am unsure. Would the skates rip the underside of the craft? What about melt and refreeze?

I am looking particularly at the Plutinos (including Pluto) and at Triton. We know two of them own nitrogen snow and I suspect similar for Orcus and the rest. I think these should present a softer (and denser) floor.

Aeroshell update

ULA's aeroshell idea, which Indiana Jones tested at maybe 6 km altitude, is set for testing in space next month. This nonablative aeroshell is built for high 1800s Kelvin (1600°C) and the low atmospheric pressures as found in a Martian atmosphere = Terran exosphere.

More being tested here is how well the six-meter-across 'shell will hold with a large mass behind it. So far our Martian landers have been fragile and small because, well, our rockets have been small (compared to SuperHeavy / Starship) and we don't assemble in space. As we come to a Starship era we'll be able to build more infrastructure in space (economically) and just to get more cargo up there in single jumps. So larger-mass interplanetary shipments will become a Thing.

Starship is also designed for landing on Mars, with propellant. But maybe we don't want to waste a Starship, or its propellant. There's also an accordion lander in development but, hey: over Mars, that can be used in tandem with the shield.

I ponder additionally about using Venus' higher-altitude atmosphere for practical aerobraking, when bringing cargo from outer planets to inner. Starting with Mercury missions.

UPDATE 11/14: Success.

Miyake

I wrote up a project in 2019 about the Miyake Event of AD 775ish. I thought it had been recorded in an apocalyptic work by Walid bin Muslim, which survives as Nuaym bin Hammad's excerpts in the notorious Fitan. I assumed: solar-flare. Since midweek I've seen news articles that they are not flares.

I don't know what the solar-cycle looked like 663 BC, AD 775, or AD 993. But they're saying that the carbon-14 events don't match the cycles in any year. What is expected in a solar maximum is less carbon-14 because the Sun's increased output reduces cosmic rays. Flares of Carrington or Miyake magnitude would show up strongly here.

What seems more likely are events from interstellar space. This is what Robert Brakenridge has been discussing. I've been unkind to him on account I couldn't see a correlation between aurora and nova. But I may need to reconsider.

Martian tectonics

We had a firehose of reports from the fourth planet, starting with a Hesperian (3.5 Bya) ocean. The InSight lander has been delivering the best of the goods: magma under Cerberus Fossae, that Christmas Eve quake now spotted as a meteor upon Amazonis, and a a 1810 km radius liquid core also known to us from InSight (and perhaps partly because of that meteor). Update reference materiel as necessary.

According to Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has the before-and-after: the meteor gouged out a hole 150 m wide and 21 m deep. The rock was probably between 5-12 m wide assuming standard (also Mars-intersecting) composition; this wouldn't have survived Earth's atmospheric passage (nor Venus'). Its impact excavated several boulders out to 37 km away, some water-ice which surprises me given its 25ish° N latitude which the Chinese had marked in the desert band. But then: our robots don't dig twenty meters down. I have to ask if our colonists can dig this far but maybe they can just settle near another crater and use... a ladder.

We're lucky we have this seismic snapshot on account InSight - starting November 2018 - doesn't have long left to it.

UPDATE 10/18/23: 4 May '22 on the other hand was not impactful.

Dark skies for CWRU

The astronomy department at CWRU, two years ago, put out a "unanimous" statement including this text:

Victim-blaming is an excuse closet racists use to dodge engagement with the real issue of police misconduct. “He was a career criminal! He deserved it!” and “Riots are bad! Police must keep order and protect property!” These are distractions from the real issue. Property is not as important as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Black Americans are not assured of any of those. When they peacefully assemble to petition the government for a redress of grievances, they are met with masses of police in riot gear hurling flash-bangs and teargas. Even if a few of these assemblages lead to riots and some looting, so what? That is nothing in comparison with existential threat to life and liberty suffered by all too many Americans because of the color of their skin.

Recently its department chair Dr Stacy McGough (he/him), who forced that statement through, has reported a number of retirements from the older staff. This will likely result in the merger of Astronomy with Physics at CWRU. h/t Turtle.

Whatever the merits of that cause which the department chose, theft at an equipment-heavy department is a risk to CWRU's assets and, therefore, its insurance. The statement overall meanwhile made the department look weak in the face of other departments at this university. Some departments only exist because of a constituency which has historically been cool toward space exploration. In addition, if I were a 61 year old professor in 2020 and been cordially invited to sign a statement such as McGough's... I too would have to ask myself, especially if I'd been signing "diversity and equity" statements for the past decade, how my retirement benefits were looking, and what might be the status of my reputation if I didn't sign this one more personal insult. Yeah I'd probably sign too and then start preparing for my golden years.

In short: CWRU was never a safe space for honest scientody, McGough was always a thug leading his department of cowards, and every man Jack is getting what McGough asked for.

Urban golf cart

This is a pro-electric blog so has been unkind to ignorant detractors. We do admit that we are in no hurry to purchase a Tesla or a Volt for ourselves.

Penn State says they've made some power-cells with faster recharge. This because they're smaller - cheaper, too. However that also means they're 50 kWh rather than 150 kWh. Unsure how it compares with solid-state, implicitly faster recharge with the same weight.

That means they've reduced mass and pump-time by... a tank with a third the capacity. And I think they're still using lithium (and cobalt) rather than more-powerful and cheaper sodium. On the other hand the smaller cells do seem (much) easier to modulate so require disproportionately less surrounding electronics.

To go across country, EV-owners are already reinventing the diesel-electric train which, as Stephen Green points out, is stupid.

Although, less stupid: a smaller cell as charges faster might find use in a hybrid vehicle - already widely found on the road, but with similar MPG as a 2010 Honda. Also brought to mind is the difference between a "cell" and a "battery": three smaller cells should restore to us the 150 kWh with less concern for modulation. And they should recharge in parallel, during the same overlapping timespan.

INSURANCE 3/28/23: If batteries aren't cheap, they can't be insured. I don't believe any way exists to fix a powercell.

Ezra / Esdras A

Before we attend Dr Leuchter's talk, let's look at Ezra. Maybe Nehemiah.

Ezra-Nehemiah has something in common with the Book of Daniel: the Greek version is different. "Esdras A" is, in fact, very different. ("Esdras B" is just a translation of Ezra-Nehemiah; and there's some "Esdras II" in Latin which translates the "4 Ezra" and "6 Ezra" apocalypses, sort-of.) Josephus - mostly a MT bro, like Paul - for this side of his Bible used the Greek version. Wikipedia owns a helpful chart.

Over in Cave Four, 4Q117 is called "4QEzra" because its text parallels Ezra 4:2-6, 9-11; 5:17–6:5. Ezra 4:6 does not exist in Esdras A; Esdras also would sort them 4:9-11 then, after chapters 2 and 3, 4:2-5.

As these versions go, Esdras A spends more time over the return to Jerusalem. Anything after that is pretty-much an appendix. Qumran, perhaps, was ambivalent to the city herself; as was the Jewish diaspora. I am unaware of a consensus as to which was composed first, beyond the general prejudice toward the MT over alternatives.

For my part, that Esdras A limps along after its Jerusalem section implies that its final form depends upon Ezra's final form. Ezra as it exists finishes the Temple, exiles us Mischlings, and - in Nehemiah - builds the wall. It is, then, preoccupied with purity; Nehemiah is a natural conclusion, omitted in Esdras A.

That is however as far as I am willing to take the sources. It may be that Esdras A's 2:30-5:73 preceded both, to which a continuator lifted Ezra-Nehemiah. But as far as I know we lack witnesses to Esdras A before Qumran.

The enormity of variation in Ezra and in Daniel, both, implies a volatile text not quite canon as of the first century BC. We see the same in Esther - and even in Jeremiah, and in Exodus, and in Joshua and Judges. I don't find such variation in Isaiah or the minor-prophets (or Genesis really; and the Samaritan text is often secondary).

Relativity's Raptor

This blog has followed other blogs in not taking Tim Ellis' Relativity Space seriously. Today such blogs must concede: Ellis hasn't absconded with investors' cash like Branson just did. Yesterday they submitted Terran 1 for launch.

Terran 1 remains the prototype, with the actual rocket coming late 2024. Scraping the edge of the Mars window. But hey: there's plenty of stuff to do in space that isn't Martian, like making fiber-optics.

Also we're learning that Ellis' roggets are methane... like SpaceX's Raptor 2 (and not the Merlin). Costs are cut by using 3D printing. Although: what's to stop a 3D printed Raptor? and what's to stop a Falcon 10 with a Raptor engine? SpaceX might move thataway anyway just because USG is frowning upon kerosene anymore.

I am happy to see some competition in this market but SpaceX seems like it can keep a step ahead even if Starship never flies.

THE BUMBLEBEE FLIES 3/23/23: First stage.

The post-Shoshenq age

From Paleojudaica: Earth's magnetic field in baked clay.

This has been used to validate several events in the later books of "Reigns" - or "Kings", for Masoretes. It starts with the invasion of "Shoshaq", "Shy-Shack" in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Here Tel Beth Shean; UPDATE 1/6/23 Gath fell later, to Damascus.

Other Latin spellings are possible from the defective Aramaic consonants which the "Kings" version has brought to us; the Greek "Reigns" calls him Shoushakim. Back home the Middle-Egyptian hieroglyphs sometimes dropped the N; I expect demotic dropped it all the time and that's whence the Hebrew.

Because Israel's datings start in the Shoshe[n]q era, they haven't touched that whole David / Solomon thing. Mostly what we got here is validation of the method itself for the first-millennium BC in the eastern Med.

I suggest using this method in, er, Egypt. If the dating of Biblical events is problematic (I personally think better of it, post-Shy-Shack) the chronology of contemporary Egypt is a total mess. Over the many first-millennium dynasties surely some city or other might have been abandoned and/or destroyed.

SEE SEE SEE?? 10/26: The boomers are on the case: a growing body of evidence that the Bible is a true, accurate, and a historical text. Sigh. This is better evidence for the propaganda of the later Pharaohs: Sheshonq listed his conquests accurately - omitting Jerusalem - which the books of Reigns do not. Also we hear nothing of the Elijah-Elisha cycle. All that is vindicated is, I repeat: the post-Shoshenq age in the narrative framework of Reigns.

Look. I am a Christian too. But some of us really do need to Slow Our Roll.

Vindicating George O Smith

I'm considering more fun with Farrukh Balsara's favourite metal. Once in a safe orbit we're storing the beast. But as the Japanese tell us in AGILE training, storing is boring. In less poetic translation: inventory is waste.

It turns out that mercury has uses in deep space. It's hydrodynamic. George O Smith considered a space-station in Venus Equilateral, that is the SVL4 trojan halo. Smith wanted quicksilver as a power-generation mechanism. This, because although writing after the photoelectric effect he despaired of photovoltaic technology.

To restore Smith to his well-earned glory as a Grand Master of his art, instead of massive vats of propellant, which just sit there taking hits from micrometeors, we'd store the mercury in the power-generator. It could work alongside solar-panels, especially when those panels are being taken down for repair. Also the heat-transfer could serve as a radiator to keep the inside cool.

The quicksilver gets drained to supply interplanetary missions but those happen at specific launch-windows, giving plenty of time for resupply. And all that 19th-century amalgamation we don't do on Earth anymore can be done out there.

If someone has a hankering for an extra telescope, like as a hobby, there's also the mercury mirror. Although we might want a gravity-well for those.

UGH 12/10/23: In 2022, I should have been able to ctl-F on the text. I'd just worked from hazy memory, here. Smith, of course, did exactly the opposite of this poast; he'd used an "atomic pile" (until he digs out Martian tech in "The Long Way"). Lester Del Rey was the man who considered mercury.

Haifa December

Davila marks a symposium coming to Haifa over midwinter. This deals with the communities of YHW(H) under the Achaemenids. It's in honor of the late Shaul Shaked but it might as well be in reaction to Russell Gmirkin.

We currently have the book of Ezra quoting - in Aramaic! - a royal proclamation by ?Ahlasueros I, Artaxerxes Longhand for fifth-century Hellenes. Or maybe it was his dad Xerxes. This is the lineage of Darius the Achaemenid. It turns out that "Ezra" was not the first Jew who transmitted an Achaemenid proclamation on religious affairs. TAD A4.1 records Darius' edict 419 BC. So how did that not get into our Bibles?

TAD A4.1 reads as if Darius - not Jerusalem - is the acknowledged legislator of Pesach halakha. I say deliberately "pesach" inasmuch as this has nothing to do with any problems in Egypt much less a "passover" or a "haggada"; which we might understand given the addressees who are Jews with their own temple at Yeb-Elephantine in, er... Egypt. (But upstream Egypt!) Also to the extent local Jews bear Egyptian names none of these names include those which Dr Freud (no less) called out: Aaron, Moses, Phinehas or Miriam.

Looking at a wider picture, I'm also tempted not to term an "Achaemenid Empire". This is Darius' propaganda. Cyrus never called himself a descendate of Achaemenes... his famed cylinder cites a genealogy from, instead, Teispes of the kings of Anshan. For more Achaemenist propaganda see also Herzfeld's gold tablet. Let us speak instead of a Teispid (or Anshan) Dynasty followed (and in many ways usurped) by an Achaemenid Dynasty.

Gmirkin and, lately, a motley of "counter-Jewish" ideologues in alliance with counter-biblical skeptics have been making much hay with TAD A4.1. In fact they're saying there was no Torah until the Ptolemies.

It is well that a conference is happening, to sort this out.

Where to ship the mercury

I took a gym break to ponder the morning gonzo. I am now considering: where to use it. Assuming maximum exhaust velocity if only to work with Tsiolkovsky, the exhaust will be hyperbolic relative to Earth. Although simple stationkeeping with crude engines might lower this velocity.

Given that, Earth's whole orbital-range up to Earth/Moon gravitational-balance - TLL1 - is out. Don't even stick a depot up there.

Further that Earth/Moon libration halo is out. Stationkeeping means mercury might get squirted at not-enough-speed so, down here. That goes for TLL3 too. And although the trojan haloes around TLL4&5 don't get stationkept, they might be taking on cargo for outside journeys; no depot for you!

TLL2 on the other hand starts on the dark side of the moon so seems better. I don't see much of it ending up in the TLL4-5 haloes; maybe STL4-5 but feh. Also there's just not as much room around TLL2 for thousands of satellites.

Nobody's using the Moon and if we were to use it, we'd be buried under a meter of regolith anyway. In lunar orbit, I admit that an equatorial circuit is dangerous for Earth. Polar, less so.

Past the Moon exists an orbit over our shared barycentre. This shouldn't be a problem for Earth at all. Here's where Orbit Fab can keep their various toxic propellants. None of the solterran libration-haloes worry me either.

Moving on to planet-to-planet: Hohmann is more a thrust thing than an I_sp thing... normally. But we often hope to shave time and this often requires planetary-assist. These in-flight adjustments use propellant. Mercury might work between uninhabited planets like, er, Mercury and also Venus. Admittedly that rules out Earth-assist trajectories, like Cassini's.

Hohmann also approaches a cycler trajectory for Earth-Mars (VISIT: 7 synods, 15 years) and Venus-Earth (Hop David: 5 synods, 8 years). Between approaches does come an offset so requiring adjustment. Same for the various other cyclers except that they need to be thrusted even more to reangle them per run. In fact the idea was to do this in midrange inner-planet orbit. We can inflict mercury upon Venus for the Venus-Earth cyclers (especially such as don't quite intersect Earth) but we're not allowed it for Earth-Mars. In theory sails might assist the offset; probably not any Earth/Mars but I do ponder Venus/Earth especially Hohmann.

COLD FLUID 11/8: For nuclear waste but will apply to any other elemental toxin. Anyway we got better plans for nukes.

Mercury thrusters

All that extra mercury we got around the place, that we can't sell? How about using it as a propellant!!

Fine: it's cheap. Lewin Day claims it's free - some companies will even pay to get that sh!t away from them. It's liquid at Earth-equatorial/tropical surface temperatures where you'll do most launches. The molecules are massive so the energy in that Rocket Equation delivers more thrust along with the exhaust-velocity (I_sp). And the propellant-tank will just be shorter. Won't need to be pressurised either. This removes mass from the cargo.

I'm unsure what they were hoping to use for that tank; liquid metals anneal with other metals. Maybe they hose Teflon around the insides first.

They were proposing mercury for stationkeeping and orbital-adjustments over Earth. We're, like... using this planet (pdf). Also if one sat-company is allowed it they'll all want it. As Day summarises the pdf: 2,000 satellites with 100 kg of propellant on board would deposit 20,000 kg of mercury into the upper atmosphere each year for a decade. Once up there it literally snows out into the clouds. But the sunsets will be lit.

Yeah that's... not good.

I do however wonder about shipping mercury past Earth... That's for the next post.

Webb's lessons

As we observe the steady decay of the Webb, let's consider how to do it better next time.

Overall the mission has grown on me, as it has Zubrin despite that he's had other ideas. NASA folded up an excellent craft and got it out there, and unfolded it. Next time should be cheaper at launch with a reusable booster. Or to be assembled in orbit. If it's not a ProjectRho law it should be: all handcrafted missions are prototypes.

I heard yesterday that the mirrors can be improved, also.

Interstellar radiation, solar-system snow

From Nyrath's twitter: "Adam" quantifies interstellar dust. This is to constrain starshot-like journeys to Alpha Centauri. If we could actually, like: do that.

No less a blogger than Centauri Dreams is saying that we should start smaller that is, closer. If we are resigned to low-mass high-speed flybys, we might as well strike out to - say - Eris. Or to Sedna, which clearly started out much further than its perihelion. We could mass-produce several of these and rideshare them on a Falcon 9. Several dozen if on the Super-Heavy / Starship plan.

Beyond the 30-100 AU Kuiper region, Centauri flags 550 AU as a sweet spot for using the Sun for a lens. (Yay Einstein!) These craft would fly hyperbolically to that point opposite the target system, turn around toward the Sun, and take their snapshot. Although such missions aren't inherently ecliptic; near-ecliptic trajectories are preferred for time-shaving planet-boosts. So: expect zodiacal or near-zodiacal initial targets. Like 55 Cancri.

I don't know how we quantify 100s AU dust which is not interstellar, although heated more from interstellar radiation than from solar. Although I can take some initial guesses, from trigonometry. (Yay Euclid!)

Out in 550 AU we get interstellar medium in radiation but not in dust. The dust - ice flakes mostly - would be orbiting the Sun, like Sedna does, so (on average) at slightly-less than the right-angle to the craft's near-straight curve but very slowly. (Yay Kepler!) Its sensitive equipment would be facing Sunward, so not in the line of the snowflakes, which I expect will be ramming the back of the craft with a (very) slight angle. Non-ecliptic missions will be taking that dust at larger angles and perhaps higher speeds if they aren't flat taking longer; another reason to start ecliptic.

Unconscious bias

I had some spare time a'twerk yesterday as you may have surmised (although, that day's content was percolating in my head this past week, in between Astros games). So I found time to help my corporation meet its ESG goals. Like "overcoming unconscious bias".

I hear that some of these courses are done by true-believers against whiteness. I suspect other companies just hope to skate because they're run by Market Dominant Minorities who wouldn't like the results if they were found to be a "privileged" subset of the whites, as Kanye West has found them (obligatory disclosure: us).

Our course is to be filed among the latter. It let me skip through the video and go straight to the quiz at the end. That quiz actually marked me wrong when I answered that bias (as such) was always bad. (I suppose it had to, if we're to concede Kanye's point. Or The Gift of Fear.) So I don't think First Liberty would handle the case. I don't know that First Liberty ever will handle a pro-white case as it handles pro-Christian cases but, anyway . . .

UcBT remains a mindgame encouraging employees to speak the Black Tongue even if they aren't asked to lie directly. UcBT remains a demand to Christians that they pinch the incense before Caesar; to Jews that they sign the Cross.

Marshmallow

Yesterday I read about a planet as is transit-close to red dwarf Gliese 1252. This planet has lost its atmo. Same time, I read about the marshmallow around TOI-3757, which - clearly - hasn't lost atmo.

Yeah, "TOI". TESS has been back in business for a week now, for those concerned.

As to the difference between airless lavaworld and fluff world: I expect a mass-constraint. TOI-3757b is 85 Earth-mass; this makes it a subSaturn (< 95). Saturn himself used to be presented to children as "could float on water!!".

So when and where did TOI-3757b form? Sure, the 1 AU region is chilly around this red dwarf now. But the very act of stellar-creation - you'd think - would have blasted all the system's hydrogen out to 3 AU. Earth hydrogen came from outside and even Ceres is thought to be a migrate from outside 5 AU. Maybe red-dwarfs form more quietly. Maybe the Saturnlike in 1 AU formed first and held onto its hat whilst the dust collapsed into a dwarf.

The legacy of the flea

BBC relayed a few articles about Yersinia lately. One was ERAP2 - this is an immune-system tweak which improved your resistance (to the AD 14th century version) 40%.

ERAP2 has also led to Crohn's. I think the latter is common to us the Ashkenaz although I might not have ERAP2 myself.

I've been reminded also of this. In 2018 was claimed that the disease spread amongst humans via lice, not fleas: that is, among humans rather than between humans via rat. At least: once brought into a city. This at least was done via computer-model so should apply to any plague outbreak including Justinian's, even the Neolithic's.

I expect that if the vaunted Jewish purity had helped, they'd not need the ERAP2 mutation. To me all this implies that Jewish neighbourhoods (and shtetls) were hit just as hard as were Gentile neighbourhoods. My nonERAP2 ancestors might have been more exurban than urban.

I also must wonder if ERAP2 had first expressed itself in Justinian's time. I suspect not, if Crohn's had not appeared before the 14th century. That plague kept resurfacing - relevant here, in the AG 940s / AH 630s Plague of Ammaus. Then most densely-populated cities became suddenly less dense, also more-suspicious of incoming boats and caravans.

RATS 1/17/2024 A nonreproducible.

I hope Ann Killebrew doesn't review my books

James Davila having posted about Brian R. Doak's Ancient Israel’s Neighbors now links to Ann E. Killebrew's review. The book may or may not be competent - I haven't read it. I can however read Killebrew and I must report she is not competent, to judge this book at least.

My first annoyance: The Edomites survived into the Roman period, during which time this [Jordan-Negev] region was occupied by the Nabateans, a nomadic desert people who created the famous rock city of Petra. Anybody following the graffiti and inscriptions of this region knows that the Nabatis weren't some generic or mysterious nomadic desert people but literate Arabs. We have direct Safaitic and Hismaic attestation (in the myriads!), plus loanwords into Nabataean Aramaic. Petra - Reqem - might even count as infamous given Dan Gibson's independent scholarship, widely read (if not academically-cited) as of Doak's composition of the book over the last 2010s. If Doak's blurb is accurate that this book is animated by the latest and best research then Killebrew has not informed us.

Passive-voice weasels its way here: major Philistine cities were destroyed, though Gaza, Ashkelon, and Ashdod continued to be inhabited. Inhabited by whom? I'd been under the impression: by Phoenicians, this book's term for the classical-era Canaanites. Several seventh-to-sixth-century Mesopotamian and Transpotamian empires were big on transplanting populations often under the guise of "restoring" those populations, most-famously the Jews. That wouldn't be a continuation of habitation; that would be a takeover by foreigners or a reconquista, depending on your viewpoint at the time - either way doesn't matter to us today. As applied - or, if applied - to those three cities my point is: their habitation was not continued, from the Philistines there at the time. Assuming Killebrew has accurately transmitted Doak's content.

All this brings me to wonder how in a 176 page book the publisher couldn't expand space for a coda about the Arabs. We don't have to discuss "Midian" or "Ishmael" - that's a Problematic, given late-antique Bible-informed propaganda - but we should be fine simply talking about the Nabataeans, with an aside on Saint Paul. Since as mentioned they're mentioned. Or maybe the book did discuss the Arabs? Killebrew doesn't tell us, either to complain or to affirm.

The dry Martian spaceports

The cheap way up from Mars is underneath the Phobos tether. That's the equator. Note that if we're not paying Phobos its vig then we have to hit the Deimos tether, more expensive; or just run up to the ecliptic directly. Same if we ever get the Iron Ring. Problem: desert.

How to get water to the surface spaceports will be a problem, I believe. We can imagine all manner of mining-camps and self-sufficient towns up by the mid-latitude glaciers but trade with the outside Solar System will be a pest.

At the equator non-hydrogen fuel to boost to the tether will be a near-commandment; as, I suspect, will be the tether itself. Some hydrogen might be salvageable from the perchlorate poisons in the soil. Mostly this stuff must be recycled.

Beyond that, I'm unsure about aqueducts. They'd run for an unreasonable distance to get to the port. Furthermore keeping the water in liquid form will be more expensive per-kilometer than a pipeline would be on Earth. Do we do pipelines for LNG here? I doubt it; I think we just burn the gas near the spout and export the electricity to the grid. Or truck it.

Trucking ice from midlatitude seems a waste. I don't see aircraft of balloons working to scale.

Hurling ice from base-to-base, in Mars' low gravity and air-pressure, might work. As spears. With series of mass-drivers. Or catapults?

Also to be considered is draining Phobos for its hydrogen - I mean, we don't even really want that damoclevan sword up there.

OR JUST DIG FOR IT 10/28: The big ice blocks from 20 m down, 25° north imply ice 'neath th'equator, too [UPDATE 1/18/23 called it!]. I'll leave this poast as a monument to my lack of faith. Although: other midlatitude ores can be hurled over here for transport upward.

Acts of Thomas

Paleojudaica is pretty much where the biblical-scholarship blogosphere goes to die, but among its linked barely-updated blogs we do have one recentish piece from, er, January. This concerns the up-to-2021 status-quaestionis for The Acts of the Apostles. I'm interested in Thomas.

All the Acts were popular literature and, absent a publisher (or sometimes present a publisher) they are moving-targets. Gilgamesh was famously similar in the Bronze Age - if you were (say) an Anatolian, you wanted to read about what the hero did in Anatolia. With religious fiction come questions about censorship for orthodoxy.

It turns out that although the text of all these works is godawful and barely studied in academe, censorship wasn't such a problem as you'd think. Once the Church ruled these books as too silly for Church services; people just read 'em at home, for fun. So who cared if they made Problematic doctrinal assumptions.

Acts of Thomas piqued my interest as a potential Syriac text. Syriac became Church Aramaic but I do wonder, often, when. Also where exactly - Hims / Emesa, for instance, is getting dangerously close to Palaestinian Aramaic territory if not Arabia. Ditto Damascus. The titular saint is known to be a hero among the greater Syria (and not Palaestina).

Also of interest, to me anyway, is to what degree this work used our Gospels (Peshitta, perhaps) or the Diatesseron (pre-Peshitta in Syriac form).

Hipparchus' content

As we pore through what is preserved of Hipparchus, Paleojudaica points to the paper. Basically it's northern.

The palimpset - of what we got - concerns "the Crown (stephanos)" in the Boreal north exclusively. The paper goes on to a second look at the Aratus Latinus which translates other parts of Hipparchus' catalog despite not quite understanding it. That's Draco, Ursa Minor, Ursa Major (here we get to use the Latin). Draco has the north pole of the ecliptic today but Hipparchus likely didn't care. Anyway none of it is zodiacal nor subzodiacal.

It follows that hopes of spotting faint ecliptic planets or asteroids must be postponed. Hipparchus would have loved to spot anything like this, so here absence of evidence must count as evidence of absence. Of record, that is.

As for proper-motion (read: Alpha Centauri), or the appearance of stars as might look different today (read: Betelgeuse) - those famed examples are subzodiacal, I think.

Hipparchus

With a hat-tip to Nyrath, the star chart that started them all. It's a Greek palimpsest overwritten by, er, late mediaeval Syriac.

Why that Syrian didn't just buy some new parchment or paper instead of his act of vandalism is something that he'll have to answer to, at the Qiyama.

The original chart is nonPtolemaic on account it uses the celestial equator rather than the ecliptic - read, zodiac. It's also late second-century BC on account of the precession of equinoxes (-noces?). The best solution is that this is Hipparchus. (It further exonerates Ptolemy from plagiary-charges; although, not from the ancient charge against him that he just wasn't a very good astronomer.)

If this MSS is verified (it probably will be) and correctly translated, we might get a baseline for later charts as used Hipparchus and not Ptolemy. Central Asia seems promising. The stars in the chart itself will be checkable for, say, relative motion in antiquity.

Hey maybe there's a comet or even a Uranus sighting in there. Probably not Neptune I'll admit. WHERE 10/19 the sequel. This palimpsest and the Latin partial-translation (mutually exclusive!) don't discuss the zone of planets, which we call "the ecliptic". But -

Khromosom Beta

Our second-largest chromosome is two chromosomes for our chimp relatives. They merged - but when? Cue Barbara Poszewiecka, Krzysztof Gogolewski, Paweł Stankiewicz & Anna Gambin: about a million years ago.

Note that where a chromosome be merged, this makes an animal with that chromosome infertile with those animals without. Consider the donkey and the horse. Sometimes there might be issue, but the issue will have (effectively) a trisomy; that issue isn't breeding... at all. This separated our ancestors from... whatever else was there. We separated our selves into tribes against the others because we had no choice. We became human.

This merger was already in effect for Neander/Denisova. Both are sequenced well-enough by now, I believe. The modern-human / Neander-Denisova split is here also dated: 812,000 years ago so, like, 810 kBC.

To be asked next is the merger between Denisova and yet another now-relic. Did that relic have our Chromosome 2? How about the archaic ghosts in the West African genome today?

BACKDATE 10/18

Habbakuk's Babylon

Habakkuk has two dialogues, H. 1:1-11 and H. 1:12-2:20. Despite some MT errors the book seems, overall, legible and free of deliberate redactions. I do incidentally wonder - as with John - if our prophet meant literal Babylon.

The first dialogue is short and basic, and is what mentions Babylon by name. The sequel H. 1:12-2:20 has no illusions as to the conquering power. This sequel is longer. In fact I don't even think it's a sequel.

Suppose us that we set ourselves beside the desk of the second chapter's author. Habbakuk - leave alone if that's his real name - was writing under a foreign occupation. He wrote H. 1:2-11 imagining how some earlier pre-Babylonian prophetic faction might pine for, exactly, that occupation. Jeremiah was caricatured in his lifetime as such a traitor. Jonah exists as a caricature of prophets generally. The book doesn't contest the stereotypes; it strawmans "Habbakuk" as a para-Jeremiah, to set the stage for the real prophecy.

This much I lay out for consensus upon the first chapter up to H. 2:1 - Habbakuk's author has inserted his avatar upon late-seventh-century Judah and is spinning-out the avatar's second-thoughts under the early-sixth-century Babylonian occupation of same.

In the second chapter, which vv.2f concludes the second dialogue, God tells Habakkuk that the evil empire - Babylon by context - shall be plundered by those she used to plunder. This didn't (at first) happen to Babylon; Cyrus treated Babylon as liberated, from the Chaldaeans. Although time would come, I think, when Babylon separated herself from Iran, that Darius the Achaemenid would be more brutal.

Habbakuk - if real - might be hoping for God's revenge upon literal Babylon, which (historically) God will provide - but in stages: first the loss of empire then the sack. Inasmuch as modern scholars know that the prophet is wrong, those scholars tend to take this book's word for it, that it was composed under a Babylonian occupation of the Levant. Habbakuk was a real prophet; albeit perhaps a Samaritan (hey, nobody has told us which Temple...).

But there's wrong from the past and there's wrong from the future. In the latter alternative Habbakuk's author is drawing upon lore about Babylon at a remove. He named the wicked empire in the first dialogue - but not in the sequel. In the alternative reading, that silence is a rhetorical device. The new (wicked) empire is implied as Babylon, but is abstracted.

I'll point out here that Habbakuk's MT text although imperfect doesn't reflect nearly the volatility as, say, Jeremiah or Ezekiel, or even Daniel. Maybe the Jews were just really really good at transcribing this one.

Or maybe it's a Ptolemaic text praying for the Seleucids. Or a Seleucid text praying for Parthia - or Maccabean, for Rome. It has ambiguities as can apply to any period; This Too Shall Pass.

Habbakuk's text

I figured I'd roam about the place, having looked at some Biblical literature yesterday. Today I'd talk Habbakuk 1-2.

Full-Habbakuk (there's a poetic coda, which we're not discussing) is among the twelve canon "minor" prophets today and likely was counted among them in Ben Sira's time. Ben Sira himself was of a more Priestly bent, seeing Aaron as a foreshadow of David; but being pro-priest didn't stop Qumran from including all twelve prophets.

Somehow Wikipedia has taken the old, fundamentalist view of the text; that Qumran is Masoretic here. Against that, Qumran may preserve a copy of a preQumran commentary in its 1Q pesher. Csaba Balogh, writing in Hungary but perhaps by birth a Syrian, has provided at least three divergences in Qumran against the MT, which divergences map to the Septuagint and Peshitta. Here's 1:8 and here's 1:5 and 2:5.

In all fairness I can see why the MT scribes had trouble. One hint: if Habbakuk (any version) attracted a pesher, this implies even the Jews had trouble reading it.

If H. 1:5 should read "the wicked", as LXX and Peshitta; MT's transposition "the goys" doesn't hurt the chapter. The reader knows that vv. 2-4 refers to the local Judahi wicked inasmuch as vv. 6 brings the Babylonian upon them. H. 1:5 would, if "goys", present vv. 2-4's Judah as a warning to all the nations. Yes: 'tis clumsy, and that's why Luke's Acts didn't want it, and why Csaba Balogh dislikes it today. But no Jew is dim enough to read the MT and to think that its v. 5 is letting (say) Bibi Netanyahu off the hook. As for H. 1:8, Csaba Balogh's correction seems (even more) a matter of aesthetic.

More problematic is H. 2:5 MT's reference to wine. This reading anticipates the theme of wine vv. 15f. Although: vv.5f, as v. 8 shows, aims to the Empire which is Babylon. From vv. 15f., Babylon is not drunk herself; she is offering her wine to her subordinates, making them drunk. So the MT reading is here just bad. I might even call John's Revelation to witness.

CODA 4:05 PM MST - Thomas Renz, emend[ing] Hab 2:4a in the Light of Hab 1:5, needs to revisit his 2013 article, based as it is on bad readings.

Genesis One as a Platonist myth

Over a decade ago I picked up John Walton's The Lost World of Genesis One - what the Masoretes have divided as Genesis 1:1-2:3. In parallel with Empedocles of Acrágas, êlohîm without hâ- assign function to the base materials of creation. Implicitly the materials are scattered around the formless void, as chaos.

Walton saw the pericope's audience as those Near Easterners who spoke a Canaanite language and believed in êlohîm. Given that, Walton looked to the pre-Hellenistic cultures of Egypt and Iraq whose parallels were involved in Temple consecration ritual. The Temple on Earth was supposed to mimic the Temple in Heaven. The Creator would do his/their work in Creation and then would "rest" in the Temple - that is, "assume his seat on the Throne". So: Priestly. But is it "P"?

Starting on the 25th day of this September, Vridar is reviewing Russell Gmirkin (whom we've literarily met). Gmirkin has mooted - no, Genesis One does not belong to any West Eurasian "P". Godfrey yesterday notes a parallel Genesis One translated in Greek as "the Septuagint" / "LXX" - which (contrast several Greek Psalms) does not derive from the Jerusalem Temple; although pace Godfrey this looks secondary [p. 20]. Other texts flitted about including in the Judaea most notably a Samaritan Torah, kept in Shechem at the Gerizim Temple. Qumran hosted a third priesthood venerating Aramaic documents like Levi and Enoch; their Genesis-One [exempting 4QGen^d and - more so - ^b, both MT, perhaps brought from Masada in ^b's case] hewed closer - says he - to the Samaritan text and to the LXX. One more priesthood was requested for Elephantine up the Nile; these Jews owned a seven-day week but it's difficult to say what the last day meant for the incoming priests.

Vridar/Gmirkin further points out that post-exilic Jews, no friends to the Samaritans to the point of antiSamaritan scripture, in that scripture referred to a pre-Genesis-Two legendarium. It wouldn't just be pre-Genesis-Two in the sequence of narrative; it hews close to Babylonian stories of some ba'l deity fighting against the reified Chaotic dragon. Even if no Hebrew proposed the myth for the Torah directly, this trope would precede all the Hebrew references in the Tanakh. And the trope lingered: among Gmirkin's examples I think most scholars would count Psalm 135 and Isaiah 66 as Persian-era, even Achaemenid.

Letter of Aristeas, claiming a Torah hot from Jerusalem, is dismissed as "fiction". Overall Genesis One is a document of a Jewry so Hellenised they were citing freakin' Plato specifically Timaeus ~360 BC. Probably Alexandria since unlike, say, Antioch, Alexandria's where we got the best record of Hellenistic-era Jews. Although hey, Babylon had a Greek moment too.

Overall I would quibble that if Elephantine could request priests of Judaea, Aristeas cannot be (wholly) dismissed as it claims Alexandria requested books from those priests. Discrepancies are explicable insofar as the Judaean correspondents might not have been working with what is now the Masoretic Text. Or maybe Aristeas was arguing, as "LXX", one of those later Greek text-types (starting with kaige) made from the MT to supplant that older translation. In my moderation here note that I am following... Gmirkin himself.

We might also ask if Plato (or Empedocles) is the source or if Plato, himself, was working with translations of "Phoenician" scriptures, which Empedocles would have known as "Punic". Greek-literate Jews if Ptolemaic or even late-Achaemenid would have Timaeus as a vocabulary-reference for translation.

To sum up: I agree that Genesis One is a lately-composed preface to a lately-assembled Torah. But I remain unsold that it's fourth-century BC. Fifth-century will do just as well if we allow for Walton's theory.

THE GOYIM KNOW 10/20: Didn't take long for TOO to get on it. My Jewish side is thinking: oy vey iz mir. If only in the hope for better discourse on the Internet, perhaps a vain hope, I ask of (let's be delicate) countersemitic advocates not jump too hard at all this, because they already look silly for other reasons, e.g. that Khazar hypothesis.

Mesozoic mammalian evolutionary news

I missed this one last month - the genomic common mammal.

It's only a model. The model is slanted to the marsupial-placental commons; I don't know how well it does for monotremes. There's mention of sex chromosomes which ... don't apply to the platypus.

One point that rings truer to me is how, exactly, Chicxulub forced selection upon us placentals. That it did is known - but some selection went stronger than others. The herbivores are called out, here.

I keep hearing that the horse and camel are Parias. The damage hit hardest in the North American continent. This implies that the mammals there had to adapt, hardest. The rat and the primate were both European in origin; far from the impact (although maybe not the tsunami). We were also tree-dwellers and burrowers, so could weather this storm better. (South) America's marsupials - likewise. The "Afrotheres" whose descendants are elephants - I suppose they were equatorial and noncoastal.

India's Justinian

It's been awhile coming, but yesterday I finished Richard M. Eaton's India in the Persianate Age. It's had plenty of favourable reviews including some desire by reviewers that more people had read this than, say, Dalrymple's The Anarchy. I am here for Aurangzeb 'Alamgir.

I've read Dalrymple too. That was done over August and early September - at a library. I had to read it, to steel myself to finish Eaton.

The best hit on Eaton isn't from the Europeans; it's from the Hindus in India. The magazine Open has several hits on 'Alamgir - one hitting Eaton's take.

Whilst this is all fresh in mind, I'll say this: I first heard about Aurangzeb from an Indian Muslim, going by the moniker "Ibn Warraq". This man did not approve Aurangzeb. Eaton, to me, was a "corrective". It may be that Eaton corrected too hard. 'Twas difficult to read him on Aurangzeb without reading, between the lines, that Aurangzeb actually was a devout Sunni who took seriously the Sunni approach to law, especially.

Aurangzeb reads to me as a parallel life of a similarly-controversial king amongst us orthodox Christians. This was Justinian, king of Constantinople and a true Man Who Would Be Emperor. Both men believed in the Law as Divine so transcendent over king and commoner. The Church or the Mosque, by contrast with the Court, was something they hoped to control. Both fought wars against Iran, Sasanid or Safavid, if on opposite frontiers; neither wars ended to satisfaction. Both men lived long - longer, we might admit, than was good for their régimes. Where Italy wrung out Justinian, the Maratha did for Aurangzeb.

Overall the dance which Eaton dances around Aurangzeb's sincerity as a Sunni Muslim leads me against Eaton's take as, in fact, apologetic. As of the late 2010s no Western academic dared the "Islamophobe" label. I suppose nowadays matters might be different.

Lagash in the marsh

In Iraqi near-history the lowlands near the Furat of Mayshan / Basra were marshes. These marshes had few Bronze Age ruins on account the marshy earth was of post-Bronze-Age silt - yeah, it was Sumerian Gulf, in those times. Upstream is where were we find the cities of myth: like Tell al-Hiba, whose name "Lagash" SF fans remember from Asimov's Nightfall.

The lower marshes since got drained by Saddam of unblessed memory. So it goes.

Anyway to the extent the lowlands of the Bronze Age were upstream, it stands to reason they might have been the marshes of that era. Sumeria didn't get a Saddam to drain the whole swamp - until Lugal Zagesi perhaps, but he didn't reign long.

Bruce Bower says - yeah, Sumerian-era Lagash was a canal city. Like Venice - I'd actually prefer, like Tenochtitlan with a mix of Laconia and Rome. These were four hillocks as banded together 2900-600 BC. Whether by treaty between tribes or by violence; or by a mix - we might never know. But when the Akkadians found it in the later 2000s BC, it was a city of four solid mounds upon canals.

Lagash went out of business 1600 BC. That's about the Hittite / Hani-Rabbat sack of Babylon, ouster of Hammurabi's line, and ensuing invasion of the Kassites. Honestly the place was probably not a concern by then.

Mischlings lost

Igor Djakovic in Leiden has a model, or something. With Bayes. Neanderthals in the region went extinct between 40,870 and 40,457 years ago, while modern humans first appeared around 42,500 years ago. So... they mixed - effectively swallowed into our gene pool ... When you combine that with what we know now—that most people living on Earth have Neanderthal DNA — you could make the argument that they never really went extinct, in a certain sense.

Someone else will have to make that argument because Djakovic sure hasn't.

Firstly we already knew Neanders and postAfricans met in Europe circa 40k BC, and mixed; from Oase and Bacho Kiro. More to the point those mixes are not the ancestors of modern Eurasians whose Neander/human forebears mixed ... in Eurasia, southeast. The Balkan mutts got wiped as, we must assume, whatever happened northwest of them. The hunter-gatherers of the Germania up north weren't from that mix; they were from our Near Eastern mix and/or not mixed at all (Basal Eurasian?).

I hope Djakovic knows this, that what he's found has no bearing on the article's conclusion. This might not be Djakovic's fault so much as Lawler's framing.

BACKDATE 10/14 - Caught this one from Saraceni.

Himera

I can't say I've paid attention to the contest in pre-Mamertine Sicily. Apparently a large grave or three have been found at border town Himera. Eurogenes has found the Reich lab's genetics.

The paper, focused on genetics as it is, goes light on Himera's history. I had to go Wikipedia to get the gist. Best I can tell, Sicily got COLONISED but not by the same colonists in every place. By about 500 BC the Greeks there had split into an "Ionian" north and a "Dorian" east and south - I'll explain my scarequotes, soon. Doric Syracuse held particular ties with Doric Corinth. Himera was middle northern coast so dangerously close to Phoenician outposts to the west. Hard to say exactly what dialect any Sicilian Greek city preferred or if they all shared a "pamphylian" patois, maybe with some Ionian or Dorian affectations here and there.

Or with Etruscan. The city Acrágas is a case in point. The paper calls it "Agrigento", its Italian name. The Romans knew Greek well, especially such "Romans" who might have been actual Greeks who'd taken Roman citizenship. I can easily see *Acrcns being its Etruscan name; which Romans then took as an easy basic neuter thence voicing the consonants.

We're talking about Acrágas because as of 480 BC, Acrágas' tyrant Theron was running Himera too. Some Himerans called in help from oligarchic Carthage - yes, that Carthage - to "free" it that is, to restore their own earlier oligarchs. Theron in response called upon Syracuse. The two tyrants won; they won so hard, in fact, that Carthage figured that they'd be better off securing Africa than meddling in Sicily for a bit.

The paper notes an event which isn't marked in the graves, best I can tell: Theron's expulsion of the "Ionians". This is dated 476 BC. I don't find this date in the wiki but there is a Doric constitution sometimes dated around then, after a local oppression. It might be that those killed in the oppression weren't buried with the (Theron-)honoured heroes of Himera; it might also be that most of them were expelled to die elsewhere.

The paper admits that although it can tell what an Archaic Greek looks like - a descendant of the Late Bronze Age Helladic peninsula - it can't tell an Ionian from a Dorian. To show my cards: I suspect the terms are holdover political categories from the prior century, whether you were leaning toward oligarchy or toward tyranny, if you preferred trade with the wider world (read: Carthage) or with Corinth and the Pelopponese.

Eurogenes' interest is in the 480 BC event because that's the international conflict, pulling in mercenaries. Carthage was big on mercenaries, as we all know. Given the [proto]Slav here, this man is assumed transBalkan so a Theron hire. Skipping over "476 BC" the next mass burial is 409 BC when Carthage went back for seconds. This time Himera was on its own - excepting maybe Syracuse, who didn't help. This despite the well-noted aid which Himera had given to Syracuse during the great Athenaean invasion. The five soldiers which the lab sequenced were locals. Presumed non-mercs.

Anyway Himera was burned down. Those who survived reconstituted their polity at Thermae-Himerenses, that is the Himeran Hot Springs. As subjects of Carthage.

Magnetic lube

F'ing magnets, here's how they work - providing lubrication. h/t ToughSf.

ToughSf asserts that lower alpha can be had through higher r/s or "rpm" for al-Biruni's base-sixty phonograph. That r/s depends on frictionless ball-bearings. But ball-bearings are NOT without friction; hence, lube. But-but whut-whut oil-based lubrication is, like, greasy and gets outside of where you want. Sometimes you want a good grip. In the meantime the grease has left the bearings. So they don't use this in - for instance - spacecraft. At least not easily.

If you could enforce boundaries without KY Jelly (or whatever), you can get your bearings to roll for longer. Inasmuch as "longer" is a function of total rotations - the "r" - they might also roll faster.

Celeroton see the previous magnetic limit as 2000 r/s and are promising to push over four times that; maybe even 10000 r/s.

Neutron skin

Every now and again someone asks a question that hadn't occurred for me even to ask. Lead-208 is the heaviest stable isotope, at least since Bismuth's isotopes have all been spotted in decay. Here's how a nucleus looks inside. Absent metastability of course.

I'd assumed the 126 neutrons are all jumbled with the protons in a quantum-state. Turns out the neutrons assemble themselves on the outside so, shows what I know. The news goes more to measuring how thick is the neutron-"skin".

These incidentally used mathematics also used to simulate the possible spread of the coronavirus. We're not told to what degree those methods worked in practice.

Also the method can be extrapolated to other nuclei, like gold. Except that these are just means to get another model for each. Reproducible mathematics but, perhaps, not reproducible physics.

The real test would be astronomical measurements of neutron-stars especially if they are caught merging and emitting detectable elements. I'm more wondering how well it would work in finetuning nuclear reactors.

Reusable upper stage

I'd thought the SpaceX Starship was the upper stage which could land back on Earth. But Zim is pointing to another design - by another company.

As these pressers note: the upper stage is already out of the Earth's atmosphere, mostly, so plays by different rules than a Falcon 9 or a Heavy Booster. Stoke Space inform/s us that upper-boosters have a larger "bell shaped" nozzle. Which is great for space but not so much if you are trying to land it again on Earth. That's the part I didn't know.

I am unsure how Starship accounts for all this apart from just making everything out of stainless-steel.

Other ideas I've seen (elsewhere) include reusing the tanks for additional storage-space in LEO at which point the mission does, what exactly, with the engines. Toss 'em? Sell them to other space-stations in LEO, for point-to-point transfer? Anyway there's no economy for preowned second-stage rockets in LEO, as yet; so, Stoke (like SpaceX) are working to bring them back to Earth.

Balloons underway

The Venerean zeppelin is [h/t Zim] on the way.

I didn't actually know that the French had tried it already, in the 1980s (on a Soviet rocket). It was a Bourbon technology in the first place, so... I should have guessed.

The French balloon lasted two days which record JPL is hoping to beat; since we have more knowledge (much from orbit), better materiel, and better rockets.

Aforesigned: LGM

There are plenty of signatures for life that we've been looking for and haven't found yet.

The obvious one is oxygen which is reactive so doesn't get replenished absent life... or, absent surface ice being ablated by solar and ionic winds, UPDATE 10/12 especially if sulfuric - like Europa does. Ooof. Then there's phosphine, or ammonia. Venus might have these. Venus also has volcanoes which eject all manner of nasty-smelling stuff up there.

Last week I got wind of nitrous oxide without nitrogen dioxide - if the planet is very watery, perhaps more so than Earth I admit. Today I'm reading about the Methyl Bromide.

It be all well-and-good; but as we've seen from Europa and from Venus, which are not habitable on their surface and in their clouds respectively, I should like assurances that these compounds in those concentrations cannot be produced by processes astronomic or geologic (again respectively).

UPDATE 10/25 Don Wilkins @Centauri.

Spinlaunch for propulsion

ToughSf / Matter Beam promised yesterday and today, has delivered: Hypervelocity Tether Rockets. (Upon a perhaps-dead poast from May 2020 on the Water Disk Rocket. But anyway.)

The Spinlaunchers however sketchy their history actually have something going. In space ToughSf has noticed that what can push cargo can also push propellant. Thus he sketches out a literal floating saucer - although it won't work in atmo as a flier.

This is possible because the tether-material has only been improving since Kevlar no Zylon no T1100G. We're coming up to the UHMWPE age.

One issue which is noted is that the propellant has to go somewhere, and in Earth orbit it will be drilling into someone else's satellite. So ToughSf recommends it for deepspace only. Also - when not propelling, maybe the exhaust could be used to drill into those rubblepiles we call "asteroids".

I guess they fixed it

A few days ago we heard sad news about a helium leak preventing Intelsat's Galaxy-33/Galaxy-34 from launching up as planned. Today we're reading about jellyfish.

I gather that it launched, so anything else that goes wrong isn't on the Musk end.

As for the leak: I'd as soon they use something less cryogenic and rare than helium, like, oh, argon. I accept they'll probably still want something inert for coolant. Currently helium is in use as being best-rated for the kerosene reaction in a Merlin.

Raptor is on the methane so, I dunno. It's even burnier - that's the point, exhaust-velocity. They might need coolant MORE inert and COLDER. UPDATE 10/24 Relativity Space is methane too.

In a post-Heavy era is there a plan for a "Merlin 2"? Same sort of rocket, but argon-cooled so cheaper? Maybe this is the rocket best for a colder planet where argon is cheaper... like Mars.

The ideology of plagiarism

I hadn't got involved in the Dr.* Kevin W Kruse, Ph.D.* Princeton plagiary scandal. Until now, when we are looking at plagiarism.

Some time ago this Kruse character lifted a lot of content from Rick Perlstein's Nixonland but In His Own Words. Last spring Philip W Magness caught Kruse in the act. As noted up until now I didn't care, because I'd figured some dumb jerk got caught and Justice would rule lest the Heavens fall etc etc, let's leave this for others. Except that nobody in Princeton is touching this as we type in October.

Disclosure: your humble blogger applied for Princeton with - I swear - 800/800 in the US mathematical exam back in the early 1990s which application was rejected (Math SAT went 730/800). I admit: I got the exact answers as the other guys who scored 800/800. I think, though, social-science essays don't quite roll like multiple-choice scantrons.

Lately Magness presented Ronald Bayor with evidence that "someone" had been stealing from Bayor which Bayor agreed was bad. When Bayor found out it was Kruse again - in his dissertation no less! - Bayor... attacked Magness, and not Kruse. So Magness has to clear his own name now.

I'll engage mine own blog in a little unauthorised content-mirroring as I quote Bob Jeffers: Brad the jock doesn't pass his AP History class because I told the teacher it was OK that he copied my essay on Gettysburg. Hey: at least I credited the guy and used the Q tag . . .

I try not to use Isms here. I figure Ism belongs in ideologies, if not in physical ailments ("rheumatism"). But here I believe we've upgraded to ideology - of ripping off work as long as the ripper scrambles words around, is a good little wokie, and his victims don't (dare) complain. They'll be defended as ekshuelly it wasn't an exact copy and "now do [some leftover academic Republican, and if we can't find one then TRUMP]".

As for this blog's header, I suppose I'm playing off Veronica Beechey 1978, but you can see similar titles everywhere. It's a frequently and tiresomely lifted trope such that it might not even be plagiary anymore.

Richter 25

Richter's scale is exponential. A 9 (Boxing Day was 9.1) is twice as bad as an 8. Chicxulub released 50000 Boxing Days in a minute. If 16-bit is 65536 then Chicxulub was a Richter 25. (Hey: they round their numbers, I'll round my numbers.)

And it came with its own tsunami. Mostly in the Gulf (what's now the Austin hillcountry) although, since Panama was then a strait, some waves hit Australia-Antarctica and bounced up to Beringia. Scouring Zealandia en-route.

Yeah, we need to look up.

Mercurylikes aren't habitable

Around our Sun, the planet Mercury used to be thought as tidally-locked. Instead it has a day-year resonance leading to some very weird sunrise / sunset patterns. Also its orbit is eccentric such that it floats 0.3-.46 AU.

Mercury isn't considered habitable excepting maybe its poles. Even electronics don't do great down there. Off and on, though, I've been wondering about such stars as do own habitable-zones encompassing up-to-0.4 AU. Those would be the K stars. Plus eccentricity is supposed to be good now.

Except that K gravity is 0.5-0.8 M_☉. The 0.3-.46 AU range would be more like 0.21-.32 AU if half Solar; 0.27-0.41 if skating G. 0.4 AU is on the inner bound of K's red-heavy emissions. For reference a K5V (0.70 M_☉) stays Venereal out to 0.68 AU. Goldilocks planets will have rotations and revolutions on their own, nonresonant schedules just like we do (and like Venus does whilst we're at it).

In sum, I doubt any Spaceman Spiff will be observing a Mercurian sunrise over any planet anywhere. Unless he's under a dome in a Mercury-mass planet with atmosphere and temperature swings like our own Moon.

THE BLACK HOLE LIBRATION 11/4: Consider a 25 M_☉, with a G class 1 M_☉ around that. A L4/L5 planet's oscillations in orbit could well force a 2:3 (or 3:2) rotational symmetry. If the central mass is a black hole, after clearing its vicinity it gives off negligible heat - given how we've not found many directly. That planet should get Solar irradiance.

Eris in a decade

ToughSF points to Edgar A. Bering III and others' "Solar and Hybrid Electric Propulsion to the Kuiper Belt and Beyond". Rather than gravity-assist "slingshots" this one uses a two-stage operation: hard thrust for Crazy Hermann, then a long high-specific-impulse deceleration. They're talking VASIMR ion-drives; close enough to the Sun, energy is sufficient to run the propellant so fast that the Oberth is possible. Two stages... but only one rocket!

Note that by Oberthing the SUN for initial thrust, the launch window is "whenever ya want" - at least for the AU 30 sphere. Okay technically "when the planet is perihelion" but, if they're going to some plutino, that's some time into the future. Otherwise they could use other planets and, for Kuiper missions, they still recommend this. To get to Eris in 9.6 years(!) they propose a Neptune (@3.5y) boost - which is great for other reasons, namely that we've not been there since 1989.

My first quibble would be to boost the thrust which we pay off by boosting I_sp. We can do better than VASIMR, I hope. The solar-Oberth initial thrust is so high that, if this be a manned mission, we might need NERVA. Still one-stage tho'.

Although, keeping it inorganic does lift other constraints - especially if we don't mind returning to some modest launch-windows. For instance the first burst of thrust - to fall sunward - doesn't have to be carried on the craft. That thruster can be set up as a railgun or spinlauncher from Earth high orbit or even from our Moon. The main ship just has to end on a trajectory as falls toward the Sun, that is slower than our own ellipse. There's one engine we don't need to schlep around or jettison. If more savings are desired then how about skating the atmosphere of Venus.

For electronics we do have to shield them near the Sun (ablation?) but, not for long. For orbit-insertion we might propose atmospheric braking at Saturn, Titan, and/or the ice-giants. Titan's probably best.

UPDATE 10/20 Ion propulsion. UPDATE 11/19 Biëlliptic is where it's at, saving delta-V. After this turn we might prefer a sail up to the planet whence we'll borrow momentum; the ion propulsion can then be used to decelerate, as to get into orbit at the final destination. Maybe to Haumea before we ponder distant boring Eris.

The percentage of water worlds

Paul Gilster announced a hiatus last month at Centauri Dreams, excepting visitors, but the proprietor seems to be back on a near-daily schedule lately. Last week he posted speculation about land or water Earthlikes... and yesterday he stuck an asterisk by the M-dwarf planets up to half solar M_☉. UPDATE 10/11 - and now this.

The former presentation by Tilman Spohn and Dennis Hoening was looking at 80% land planets (like Aldiss' failing New Earth) and 20% watery, the latter of which they break out 1 Earthlike : 19 full water or worse. I'm in the "Worse!!" category on account visible "earthlikes" in the HZ could well be postNeptunian migrates from the Ceres belt - tiny rocky cores surrounded by many kilometers of water and steam. Keep in mind we won't get a density reading from an invisible Earthlike.

An important factor to remember about M-dwarf planets in their habitable zone is that they're ribbon worlds, also known as eyeballs. They are sure to be tidally-locked. Wikipedia tells me we have to upgrade to K 0.5-0.8 M_☉ before a planet might get away with Mercurylike orbits UPDATE 10/8 and they're not habitable either. Of course at that distance around a smaller-disc star we cannot count on transits thus the concentration on M's.

M-dwarf planets often do transit for us. Per Tadahiro Kimura and Masahiro Ikoma in the latter-cited paper, 5% to 10% of these eyeballs should have water sufficient for us to observe it - through blue diffraction at the edges of the disc, for a start, but more from spectral-lines. But as is so-often noted, ribbonworlds will own solid land. Ice mainly; on the far side from their sun.

It's telling that the latter was supposed to be good news against earlier estimates for M systems, which - we may assume - were worse than what Spohn and Hoening are promising.

UPDATE 10/20: TRAPPIST 1e is too hot. Well yeah: we knew that. The point is to quell speculation on Proxima.

Essex-Kent, and Updown Girl

I just got emailed this from a Times sharetoken. It builds off the Anglosaxon dataset from a fortnight back and, more so, from Carly. DIVERSITY! in post-"Jutish" Kent. ...but maybe not, exactly, Equity.

Updown Girl had relatives buried nearby so we know mostly she was Belgian/Picard. The Lancs article says early AD 600s for death so earlier 600s for birth. Grandma (I assume not Grampa) would be the Yoruban (or Esan). When Grandma became a Ma takes us to the late 500s. How'd she get to bear a halfrican?

Catholicism in the northwest was rapidly abandoning slavery. East Anglia was Catholic, in the Frankish orbit. Diverse Updown Girl was buried (surrounded by 459 skeletons of very little other Diversity, lest we forget) in Not-Anglia - at a young age, at that. Kent's king converted AD 597 but (with east-Saxon Essex) went "pagan" (again) right after AD 605.

We've centuries to go before the Norse reëstablishment of thralldom, owning trade-networks from Dublin through the Azores; but who needed the Azores, with non-Frankish kingdoms along the Atlantic. We can start with Cornwall [and Brittany], no friend to pro-Anglian Augustine; Kent had, perhaps, reverted to a Celtic form of Christianity.

Even where the hinterland was nominally Catholic - like Visigothic Spain - we have to ask about the port cities. It has never been easy for a corrupt port-authority to trammel what we're now calling "Human Trafficking". To that, er, you know... Jews. My pre-Norwich ancestors didn't keep slaves but we did sometimes trade 'em.

The Anglian phylarchy

The oldest Yankee capitol has been found, where the Venerable Bede said it would be found: Rendlesham. The Anglians held this capitol from AD 570 to 720 after which, I guess, they moved it. Rendlesham's hall was made of wood, being in an unstony part of Britain, so wasn't easy to find.

The kingdom is most famed these days for Sutton Hoo, which is close to Rendlesham but not in it. Probably because Sutton Hoo was... a grave, for king Raedwald to be exact. Although, based on his grave-goods: "king" and "rex" might be pushing it. Malak would be the best Semitic term, or gwasileus in Linear B because he seems to have bent it for the Merovings, the true sharru / wanakes of the sixth-seventh turn of the Century. A monk naming himself Augustine came to Cantwareburh and converted them to the Anglian rite in AD 597 - although, interestingly, made less headway among then-divergent Britons. (Also of note, perhaps, is that the Cantware king Aethelbert wasn't calling himself a Jute by then...)

After Augustine's ascension to the saints AD 605 the Merovings lost control of a lot of things, including, like, control of the Franks; Kent and Essex - the Anglians tell us - broke from all Christianity. East Anglia stayed loyal to Christ (read: to the Franks) which bought them political autonomy, to end in independence after Christianity didn't require Continental control anymore.

After AD 720 the Anglians would trundle along until the 800s when the Norsemen put paid to the whole place, possibly forcing today's division Suffolk and Norfolk. I don't know why there exists no "West Anglia" unless it's just Massachusetts.

Shades of Akītu

Tonight, Jews worldwide begin the process of purification which is Yom Kippur. Davila has pointed (at a remove) to the history of this holy day.

As so often in modern "Judaism" the meaning of this day has shifted. Sukkot(h) was the holiday for which Yom Kippur was a mere preparation. One major reference to Kippur comes within the Holiness Code - Lev 17-26 - which postdates the core of Ezra. (Nehemia / 2 Esdras, I dunno. Qumran semifamously dinno either.) Thereby Lev 16 looks sus, as well: postEzra preHoliness?

The priesthood of Torah sans Lev 16/17-26 is Egyptian if you follow Freud; counterEgyptian if Manetho (nowadays Carmichael). But akītu was Bavli and its Kuppuru, not all that different from the Judaeans'. Ezra didn't play up "kippur" but, these scholars argue, maybe his successors did.

Congratulations to Svante Pääbo fitzBergström

If anyone deserves a Nobel for Physiology it's Svante Pääbo natural son of Nobel laureate Bergström.

Twitter replyfolk are pointing out the Nobel is for Physiology or Medicine and saying the RNA vaccine deserves it more. Other replyfolk are saying the jury is still out at best, which it's not-out for the discovery of the freakin' Denisovans. Then there's the tosh about "LGBT representation" which, I think, Pääbo would rather not the scientific-community consider. (He's "B" - if that.)

In all seriousness and with all due respect, Pääbo is about the most-deserving recipient of a biology-Nobel in my lifetime.

Project Hail Mary

Yesterday afternoon I bought Andrew Weir's Project Hail Mary which this evening I have finished. I didn't buy it last year; I had the suspicion I could get a used copy soon-enough. Last weekend was soon enough, $10 hardcover.

I don't like this book enough to avoid spoilers, but I like you dear reader enough to forewarn you that spoilers be forthcoming. Also I am sequestering the Kulturkrapf upon which other reviewers have insisted.

Weir for this book takes themes from Asimov's B tier of novels, of which I caught The Gods Themselves (language translation, alien genitalia, a new energy-source for good or for ill) and The Stars, Like Dust (dying suns, forced amnesia). In their spirit, I guess, Weir's science depends on some conceits as are likely unlikely, like a star-eating chemical organism that absorbs... neutrinos. But if you're watching any "kino" with faster-than-light travel or alt-universes then you don't get to complain.

More unfortunate is that 40 / ο² Eridani (A) seems not to own the advertised planet. This prospective superearth was un-found during the runup to publication, which is how come the Wikipedia page looks messy right now [UPDATE 2/20/23: and how]. It was always unlikely given 40 Eridani A shares its space with a binary of smaller stars revolving a common barycentre; one of them is white-dwarf so has blown up and imploded already. Thus, you'd think, nuking A's planets. Thus, before any of this even formed, making a hash of A's disc.

As for novel quality: it's just The Martian In Space. ο² was likely chosen in the first place only because of Star Trek lore re: Vulcan. The book's protag is Weir's self-insert who loves science carnally, whose interpersonal relationships revolve around work - here with an alien rather than with a crew across dozens of millions of km of space. Where Weir's avatar is left to himself, he solves all problems by himself. This worked for Matt Damon in The Martian - perforce; it does not work where Damon (or Gosling I hear) is on Earth with some access to staff. Later we do learn of this character's personal flaws but not before we see how AWESOME he is, at SCIENCE. Some editor needed to stop there, flip back to the beginning, and Aristotle the sh1t out of the earlier chapters.

I am glad I did not pay full price for this.

Andy Weir is called out

I bought Andrew "Andy" Weir's Project Hail Mary today and in advance of a review, I'll discuss how #woke it isn't.

Mary Robinette Kowal came to The Bezos Blog May 2021 to float problems - which, she insinuates, be Problematics. To whit: the main character instantly genders the alien as a male, even though it's herm. And there's not enough rainbow in space. Thus, Kowal.

I noted independently of Kowal - because she doesn't even notice - that the main character doesn't ever call the star 40 [ο²] Eridani "Qayḍ", that bogus Arabic name which the IAU has foisted upon it. As "ο²" implies, the dot we 40°N'ers see over the long winter nights is an asterism of not one, not even three but four stars; the Arabs, with their lens-less observatories, called the whole mess "Bayḍ" like Bayer called it "Omicron Eridani". Well now Bayḍ is the big star behind the three small stars.

Kowal, I believe, has noted that Weir might be a fat target. He's not a Protected Group. Kowal by contrast has access to Washington Post. Also Weir didn't take a lot of chances with this book, which is not a very good book (as I'll note tomorrow); but it sold units.

ISLAMOPHOBIA 10/12 Why didn't Kowal think of mentioning Qayḍ?

Oxygen fugacity in six ex-planets

With h/t ToughSF: Oxygen fugacities [pdf]. This is by that trick by which we can look at planetary compositions after their star has gone red-giant and cracked them open. We looked at 23 of such pollutants almost a year ago.

The 2019 list incorporated 1) SDSS J1043+0855 [WD 1041+092?]; 2) WD 1536+520; 3) GD 40; 4) SDSS J0738+1835 [alias WD J0738+1835 probably]; 5) WD 1226+110 [=SDSS J122859.93+104032.9]; and 6) WD 1145+017. Of these I cannot find the fifth in the November table and I'm guessing on the first, although each had got some hype elsewhere 2015-16. WD 1145+017 had the Olivine Websterite so was the Earthlike. Wish I could've met you...

Alexandra E. Doyle et al. tell us why we like Olivine Websterite: Oxygen Fugacity. 1) Periclase Clinopyroxenite, 2) Periclase Dunite, 3) Periclase Wehrlite, and 4) Dunite have this; as did whatever made up 5). Note that these three Periclase minerals are alien to us. Still, Doyle's crew noted from the proportion of iron rust in the dwarfs that the planets used to be generally similar to the terrestrial worlds here including Vesta excepting Venus (whose surface rocks are unreachable).

I repeat: these stars skewed A and F in life. The planets were Hadean, caught before their mantles were right. Don't count them out, says Doyle; if the star gives it a chance, so should astrobiologists. It might be that exotic periclase degrades to an Earthlike mineral as the planet cools and maybe even after some chloroplast takes root.