P/T on land, then sea

Here is the timing of P/T. Permian ended, first, on the land; where Australia / South Africa record volcanic dust from the Siberian Traps. The deaths crept down to the ocean 200-600ky later.

Siberia wasn't any closer to these ancient kratons then than it is now, so its eruptions created a worldwide event, clearly.

251.9 Mya is the precise year noted; which makes little sense, so I recommend the open-access paper. This paper is more guarded. It just says, "higher" (in thickness) than Botha's 251.7 ±0.3 Mya radiation-date. So, lower in physical position therefore beforehand. But not much lower/after. Anyway Gastaldo 2015 seems overturned.

Politicizing the Ḳurʾān

Alphonse Mingana has a checquered reputation in academe, and indeed in academia.edu. Bert Jacobs provides the background for Mingana's article on the last third of BarSalibi.

For background I am un-fond of the genre "discredit the source to discredit the thesis". Wiker and Hahn played this game in Politicizing the Bible. So what if the Bible or the Qurʾān were "politicized"? Maybe these texts should be! At the least if "disinterested" scholars are so disinterested they won't deign to do the work, then someone gotta. And even if Mingana was biased in his translation, and in his interpretation; he might still be right. Are his opponents unbiased?

All this said, it may be that behind Mingana - and behind Hoegel - is a florilegium of selected passages, and not a translation. For us the Latins Peter of Toledo did a translation. Nicetas did a selection - as did BarSalibi, and the author(s) of the various 'Umar/Leo dialogues. Some secretary may have selected these passages for them. BarSalibi in particular might rely upon the Shurraya of Abu Nuh - which we no longer have. That content (I hear) also got into an Arabic Tafnid, more explicitly... albeit also lost.

I am reminded of Nicholas Donin's selection of Talmud excerpts on behalf of the Inquisition, or of whatever Louis IX called the Office in Middle French.

The question moves, to who was the secretary. Nicetas' source seemed, to Hoegel, early. Likewise BarSalibi's source might have been early; Jacobs is aware of Abu Nuh, whose Syriac work - it is said - got translated into Arabic and stored in Egypt.

3D printed rotating-detonation

So this came out a few days back, h/t Nyrath. It has at least two titles: "This rocket engine could save fuel on the long trip to Mars" and "Watch NASA test potentially revolutionary 3D-printed rocket engine (video)". The URL matches the latter.

The article concerns not one but three means to beat the Isp / Thrust tradeoff; the 3D-printed thingy is just one. Another is NTP. Although I agree that the 3D-printed engine is... interesting.

Although-although I do not know how well it will scale. It concerns the detonation of a volatile as against a steady burn; the thrust and Isp being mingled on account multiple detonations happen in sequence. This blog has dealt with the concept before; what I see new is the 3D-printing. Maybe they have accepted that the detonations will harm the chassis so are going for the cheapest manufacturing possible. UPDATE 6/13: A motive here is to make each thruster as identical to the others as inhumanly possible. I'd say it was a "clear" motive excepting that I'd only figured this out five months later . . .

High-thrust, to put mid-mass cargo into and out of Hohmann, on the cheap. Said cargo is already delivered to a midrange Earth orbit, by some booster or other. Seems like getting said cargo up there would be a fine job for the SpaceX SuperHeavy.

Jer. tr. Gk., 2 vols., v. 2 (ed.)

William Ross and Paleojudaica alert us to Miika Tucker, The Septuagint of Jeremiah: A Study in Translation Technique and Recensions. I don't own this book... but the work was done as a dissertation in Helsinki which means we can all read its first draught.

Where this really helps is in telling us what the book is/will-be about, on account the blurbs I'm reading are incomprehensible.

What's going on is this: before the text of Jeremiah got polluted, by the Masoretes, or by the lowercase "jews" if you're Tucker, someone translated an earlier version into Greek. This translation is best described as "semi-uniform". Chapters 1-28 were translated one way, the Old Greek way. The rest of it, 29-52 in Greek, was partially translated this way but subsequently got a revision. This revision has almost but not quite the features of the kaige translation of Reigns starting in what we call "2 Samuel", chapter 10 or 11 or so. Like the Psalms of Solomon...?

To me this looks like Greek Jeremiah got split into two volumes. We've seen similar cut-ups in ancient Isaiah, three volumes in Egypt [UPDATE 4/13 and two in Qumran and Syria]. And we've just mentioned Reigns which is 1-2 Samuel and 1-2 Kings for us Latins. For Greek Jeremias that first volume may or may not ever have got revised, before Theodotion and Aquila. And the second volume's original, after the revision, got discarded.

Tucker argued that said revision of this second Jeremias volume was done before the kaige in Reigns. Whoever fixed it aimed closer to the Hebrew in most cases; although, sometimes he slipped into more-koine Greek, perhaps getting bored with the affair on occasion. As to why the revision was done: it is after chapter 25 that the MT starts veering from the original. So, an anti-Masora faction may have felt that the volume overlapping 26f., especially, needed something closer to the original, for exegetic debates. The copyists agreed: the original would do for chs. 1-28, whilst chs. 29-52 could take the Second Edition.

Luminosity for cold Sudarskies

The source, I won’t say blame, for the equilibrium-temperature equation is Montalto 2021, arxiv version 2110.00489. This concerned the hot-Jupiter transiting TIC 257060897b.

Teq = T*Math.Sqrt(R/a)*Math.Pow(0.25,0.25). Or so it looks on the page; if so this Math.Pow(0.25,0.25) could have been printed 1/√2, although Montalto may have reasons why not.

T is the star’s effective temperature; R is stellar radius; a is semimajor. I don’t know if they integrated across the period over the variant values of r; eccentricity is simply not taken into account. R/a is the reciprocal of the distance in stellar-radius units, as opposed to AU. When a=R we are on the star’s surface. Yow! and note the reciprocal square roots again…

Also note absolutely nothing about the planet itself: no volume, no composition, and perfect absorption of light. It is a black dot in space.

I have little idea whence Montalto’s equation so I must guess. The stellar disc is not a point of light from a Hot Jupiter distance away. It makes sense, there, to have insolation as a function of stellar-radius units. Also with hot-Jupiters, as Sudarsky predicted for the fourth 900-1400 K range, albedo tends dark. Back in 2007 HD 189733b turned out Neptune-blue with 0.14 Bond albedo, half Neptune’s; this high, caused by its hot-spot, which might run over 1400 K into the class V range. Other planets in this heat-range – and distance from our scopes – are constrained even below this. I don’t blame Montalto whose team’s equations work fine for that paper. I blame those who’d cite this paper for the wrong systems.

For astrometric-calculated systems, past 2 AU from a main-sequence dwarf, Sudarsky is class II or I. Out here I prefer to estimate the star as a point with some fraction of our Sun’s luminosity. Because it’s easier, and because we’re actually told the maths.

The [Point] Luminosity is 4*Area*T*T*T*T*sigma, sigma being Stefan-Boltzmann. The stellar disc’s area = Math.PI*R*R obviously. I’d do this in Sol’s units so, when sigma = 1/4pi then L=1. Thus L=R*R*T*T*T*T. This T may be whence Montalto’s quartic-root… of one quarter. But who knows, nobody told me. I’ve sanity-checked this against (Wikipedia’s pre-DR2) Ursa Majoris 47, getting 1.487 against their 1.48 which I’ll call a win – for the equation. Actual luminosity can await actual data which isn’t Wiki data.

So first we make this Point Luminosity into an insolation-factor at 1 AU. Then multiply by Math.Pow(0.5, (a-1)). So at a=1, Sol-as-point delivers Earthlike insolation; a=2, half that, a=3, a quarter that and so forth.

47 Ursa-Major

I was awaiting astrometry for 47 Biggis Dipperae, alias HD 95128 or (in Siamese) Chalawan. The latest Msini constraints are promising: Rosenthal et al., “The California Legacy Survey I. A Catalog of 178 Planets from Precision Radial Velocity Monitoring of 719 Nearby Stars over Three Decades”, sent to arxiv July 2021. In part.

As for d (1.5+ M_j at 13.8 AU) you’d think it could be directly-imaged were it a brown dwarf even a T dwarf. As for overall stability d is here confirmed eccentric between 0.23 and 0.54, probably how c is (now) out to e=0.18.

Rosenthal’s Appendix B refers to a full Table 2, which is apjsabe23ct2_mrt.txt.

Idx HD        TempK   Terr  Fe/H  FeHEr ln(g) lngErr Rad   RadEr Mass  Merr   Vmag   B-V     DR2‘llax  
506 95128     5829.2  94.8  0.026 0.061 4.328 0.032  1.137 0.027 1.005 0.047  4.3575 0.56    0.07245

I say we can do better. From the Gaia Archive I was able to look up HD 95128 in Basic. That resolved to the following 2000-2016 ADQL query:

SELECT TOP 2000 gaia_source.source_id --never mind the rest
FROM gaiadr3.gaia_source
WHERE
CONTAINS(
              POINT('ICRS',gaiadr3.gaia_source.ra,gaiadr3.gaia_source.dec),
              CIRCLE(
                             'ICRS',
COORD1(EPOCH_PROP_POS(164.86655313,40.43025571,72.0070,-316.8500,55.1800,11.1420,2000,2016.0)),
COORD2(EPOCH_PROP_POS(164.86655313,40.43025571,72.0070,-316.8500,55.1800,11.1420,2000,2016.0)),
                             0.001388888888888889)
)=1

This returns the result and very quickly, too: id 777254360337133312, which I can now use for a SELECT *. I suggest viewing the results in the browser. A download will produce a vot.gz which cannot be “tar -xvzf”’d in Windows 11: “Unrecognized archive format”. I won’t download 7-zip or WinZip on this machine, I am running out of laptops as you know.

DR3 parallax is 72.00696109116399 mas. So 13.9 parsecs away not 13.8. Temperature is dimmer too: 5763.587 K, with only 2 K errorbar either side. Ln(g) is 4.2777 which isn’t much less than the 4.328 in the R’thal DR2-based table: I suppose because to be as bright as it is, the radius is more than was thought. I believe I have netted the right object.

In search of d, a circle at 0.02 offers id 777254562202782848 as the closest object in our field-of-vision. That’s 1455 parsecs away so an obvious background spot. d did not get found in DR3.

As to astrometry I am told that the smart people can cross-check this to Hipparchos: How to write ADQL queries for Gaia data - Gaia Users - Cosmos (esa.int) If you’re smart, not dumb like people say, and you want respect.

This 47 UMa system is Solar mass albeit bigger (so older). Its jovians are large and distant. Never mind the Hill Sphere; Kirkwood should impose mass-constraints upon b (2.438+ M_j at 2.059 AU) and c (0.5+ @3.4) at least. Their periods and masses resemble Jupiter:Saturn 5:2 but, like, more so.

As to luminosity DR2 R was 1.137; DR3 T at 5761-5 K is (barely!) subsolar, such that T⁴= 0.995. But I think R is higher than DR2’s result. L=1.137*1.137 which I’ll round up: 1.3. Wikipedia had pre-DR2 priors so different (higher) L.

On behalf of SF authors

Please do not speculate upon any planet’s equilibrium temperature, assuming a zero albedo unless you have imaged the thing in the infrared.

Few planets (or moons) have zero albedo in the first place. Au contraire: over here most have clouds or are made of ice. Sure: clear-sky Neptune is 0.29-dark (blue); and maybe there's a Sudarsky III down among the Veneres, dark hotter Jupiters beneath these. But these days we're finally detecting the long-period Jovians and these should be cloudy and icy.

Inspiration for this rant: Sreenivas et al. on HD 103891 and HD 105779, not supplied with Gaia astrometry. The word "inclination" isn't even in the paper. I don't know if this means these are both close to edge-on; Yiting Li took a set biased to low sini. But some high 80s° are showing up now.

We should be discussing insolation (or "irradiance", "flux" even): which I will accept from luminosity, distance, and the inverse square rule. The speculations on appearance as requiring composition will demand proxies, such as density and stellar-composition. Without transits or imaging we need proxies for density too. So: the age of the system, the dynamical evolution of the system (whence did the planet form?) and oh yes the real mass of the planet which we're not always getting.

SOLUTIONS 1/29: Pointy haired managers have told me that when you float a problem you should suggest a solution. In that spirit: a point-source solution, to get insolation for bodies around or past the liquid-water-line. It's quick, and it's dirty. But from 2 AU from a G star it's not filthy.

Epsilon Indi

Yiting Li, incontent with rewriting all we thought we knew about nearby gas-giants, has carried on to the best brown-dwarf twin: Epsilon Indi B.

The DR3, joined with this systems' massive parallax (3.638 parsecs!), and the two decades we've had since B was found to be a BC itself, have all allowed Li and Chen and the rest to constrain masses for the B and the C ("Bb" in this paper): about 66 M_j and 53.25 M_j both T-class although the larger one is almost L. The dataset 2005-16 covers the eleven years the pair take to orbit their barycentre.

It is found that the big one is much more luminous than the "small" one after the 3.5 Gy proterozoic age of A. The larger one might not be burning deuterium for much longer. Possibly why it took until 2004 even to know that BC was a binary.

This hints that T dwarfs will be difficult to spot against the brighter stars if those systems are further from us; especially if they roll closer to those stars and/or are sub-50 in mass.

This also suggests Philipot to revise his team's priors, for A. BC together is not Dieterich et al. 2018's total 145 M_j; it is 120 M_j. At 1460 AU between A and BC, this might reduce the error-bars for Aa.

No space

LEO is a wonderful laboratory for experiments for conditions as won’t apply on Earth. ZBLAN for optic cables is one example. Except… every now and again we find discoveries on Earth which means we don’t need that work in space anymore. I have in mind the muons at the Arctic which means, no more need for that Polar Lightning satellite.

If the work only needs a few minutes to get done, for another instance, we can just do this in our “vomit comet” aircraft in freefall.

I’m considering here Earth-bound microgravity. UCLA have mocked up sound waves in superheated sulfur. These waves act like gravity, they say.

Any experiment we don’t ship to LEO leaves space for other experiments so, there is that.

The progress last year

Upon “Precise Masses and Orbits for Nine Radial Velocity Exoplanets” Google Scholar cites eleven followups... so. Far. Let's look at some.

The later of these like Philipot et al. can enjoy the full DR3 from Gaia STL2 which release, still, is not (yet) a time-series on its own; they must do against Hipparchos like Yiting Li did, or else wait that long wait for DR4. Meanwhile the data for all the nearby stars are only getting longer and better (phnarr).

Thus now HD 83443c: A Highly Eccentric Giant Planet on a 22 yr Orbit probably the most descriptive title we'll see outside isekai manga. b was a hot-Jupiter. In between b and c is nothing Saturn-mass; although exists stability-space for habitable Earth-size planets. To that: the dynamics of b and c suggest much violence and scattering in their pasts, to inspire skepticism of anything left in-between.

Next up is Joshua Winn's solo effort Joint Constraints on Exoplanetary Orbits from Gaia DR3 and Doppler Data. As a solo, he's not recalculated Msini or stellar masses, contenting himself to whinge about nobody else revisiting these stars since their initial tags as planet-bearing: thus HIP 66074 and HD 175167. He flags HD 111232's data overall as pointing to a multiplanet system which equations Winn, likewise, won't trouble himself to solve.

Most annoyingly Winn doesn't tell us semimajors. That would require accurate marks on those masses. I mean, sure: HD 111232 as multibody is arguably nonKeplerian but, how about those others? Winn does give us Kepler's equations including this one, I suppose so we can serve ourselves.

So, per Winn: BD-17 0063 (HIP 2247) is a K dwarf at a distance of 35 pc... star's mass to be 0.74 ± 0.04 M_⊙ (the value adopted [by Winn] here) and reported the planet's minimum mass, period, and eccentricity to be 5.1 Jupiter masses, 655.6 days, and 0.54, respectively. Gaia's DR3 points to 81±4° near-edge-on so that true mass is 5.16 M_j. Without running maths I feel this might sweep the HZ.

HD 81040 is near-solar in mass and its Jovian is 7.53 M_j, at maybe 1000 days' orbit so probably at about 2 AU. Similar eccentricity, which looks bad for any 667-day Hilda. HD 132406, even more solar, has a Jovian at about 6 M_j at 900 days. e=2.5 so might allow that Hilda at 605 days.

The habitable-zone's supermoon

Against my better judgement I peeked in at 4chan Tuesday, whose /sci/ sometimes has a "spaceflight" haven from the usual malarkey. After some banter someone asked about exomoons. Neil Comins' second book had commented about an alien starsystem, with a Jovian in its habitable-zone. So let's check in on Comins: could there be life on that planet's moons?

If we are talking exomoons we need space for the Hill Sphere / L1. To give time for oxygen-emitting life to evolve in lunar oceans (I'll GET to oceans, don't YOU worry...), stellar mass needs G... maybe low F, so 1.2 sols. The HZ then runs, say, 2 of our AU. The Jovian is Sudarsky II.

We do I think sometimes get Jovians with major planets down to 1/4 that semimajor, or above to twice that. Exoplanet.eu offers a few of these with the warning that it doesn't get updated as well as we'd like. For Jovians around G and F as are close (≤30 parsecs) the Gaia DR3 has constrained inclination; here's a take. Our own Jovian carves out space against massive inner planets. So I'll play G-d and rule similarly.

Another worry: Jupiter spawns Galilean-size moons. To get Venus-size moons - plural - we need a double-Jovian. Or triple-.

This watergiant will ionise its inner moons such that atmosphere go bye-bye. Even for us here around Sol, the Jovians are a tough call. Jupiter's radiation starts getting ugly around Ganymede although Ganymede might be able to resist it once we've landed. So - watergiant needs a superCallisto(expialidocious).

Also: watergiant has drifted in from the icier parts of the system.

SuperCallisto expy even allowing a superGanymedean iron core will be a water moon. It has no dry land. Its fauna is fish and sharks. If that; as a F system I'm unsure its evolution will last long enough before its redgiant.

Msini without the sini

In the “wish I’d read it a year ago” file here’s Yiting Li et al., “Precise Masses and Orbits for Nine Radial Velocity Exoplanets”.

Our first 1990s look at extrasolar planets caught nearby systems with a radial-velocity wobble. Their masses were not M but M times the sine of inclination (i); they were biased to Hot Jupiters. After a few years we saw some of these transit their stars so we knew their inclination to, like, 87-90°. As we kept looking we found more Msini’s at longer periods. The longer the periods – so semimajors – were, the less likely we’d be lucky enough to spot a transit; we need the inclination from other means. At least the long periods rule out signals from stellar rotation, on account no G mainseq star rotates once every Earth year or more.

Now we’ve been watching some of these for long enough that the periods are set to swing the star along, facewise. Here the Hipparchos is being tested against Gaia EDR3. That gives us astrometry good for 25 years – thereby (sine-of-)i. I imagine it also ensures we’re not mistaking multiple resonant planets for one big eccentric planet (we’ll get to this…).

Yiting Li’s crew have picked nine nearby (high-parallax) systems whose stars don’t clutter the readings with flares and general instability. These are G stars plus old K0 HD 87883. Some are in binaries so their total perturbations must be accounted; HD 196067/8 is called out as a possible Lidov-Kozai unto '7b. One mitzvah is that the team recalculated the stellar masses and Msini both based on the updated data. Gotta start somewhere! They are all Jovians on up, with HD 87883 b having the smallest Msini as recalculated 1.54 M_j.

Of these HD 81040 turns out edge-on, possibly a transit opportunity after all although I’d not bet on “0.9%”. Several more are face-on so their masses are much greater than Msini would suggest. Like that HD 87883 b: whose real mass turns out 9.7 M_j. As a result “superJovians” HD 106515 Ab and HD 221420 are herein reclassified brown dwarfs, with HD 196067 b at 12.5 M_j borderline.

Gaia EDR3 isn’t DR3 so the team did some number-magick around the edges, leaving to the future fine-tuning some base assumptions. Also although the “sini degeneracy” is no more, there remain “bimodal” models, such that i might be one or the other. To constrain this the team suggest another telescope-sweep at four of the radial-velocity targets: HD 87883, 171238, 98649, 196067. HD 221420 having a 10 AU 0.16-eccentricity 20.6 M_j brown dwarf stands to be Webb’d. Although at 6.6 Gya at this insolation the dwarf might not be warm enough anymore.

Semimajors run 2-10 AU. Nobody is suggesting, beneath them, Hot Jupiters nor, for that matter, those deep blue Sudarsky III’s. Terrestrials are possible downbelow; lookin’ to cooler HD 29021 L=0.66 or HD 87883 L=0.34. But. The eight planet-planets are all ridiculously eccentric (0.35+, on the 0-to-1 scale) such as to sweep the HZ of its material and I’ve not heard that a Hilda or a Lagrange-Trojan will work.

The exception is HD 221420’s dwarf out at a Saturn orbit. By inverse-square, HD 221420 b gravitationally would approximate a 5.15 M_j at 5 AU. The star’s luminosity is 3.85 for a 1.28 mass so ~2 AU for a reasonable HZ. Jupiter as of its first gigayear had, I believe, cleared 1-5 AU of everything larger than Mars and didn’t bring in anything larger than Ceres. HD 221420 might have accreted an Earth-mass in its 3:2 Hilda 18.467 year period… but that’s going to be, er, cold. Same goes for HD 98649’s 9.7 M_j at 6 AU against near-solar 0.97 L especially considering 0.85 e (wut). HD 171238 is L=0.627 with a 8.8 M_j at 2.52 AU… e=0.36.

So, er. Exomoons? HD 29021 b 2.3 AU from its L=0.66 star is claimed “just outside the habitable zone” but from those data I can read only “outside the HZ”, unless we count Hilda as a bound-object, which at e=0.453 I doubt exists. The true Sudarsky II here orbits HD 106252 L=1.33 which (10 M_j) planet is out at 2.655 AU. e=0.48 with summer every 4.2 Earth years.

So the dataset offers poor pickin’s for worldbuilders. It works better as a snapshot of systems-with-jovian.

Habitat Bennu won't be all that

In 2019 Maindl considered a hollow solid asteroid around “radius 300 m that is spun up to provide 0.3 g_⊕”. Maybe 4 Mega-Pascals would do, for hard rock; compare 1 bar = 100 kPa. A year ago Peter Miklavcic et al. pointed out that near 1 AU we just got rubble-piles as fly apart at 10 Pascals. Take Itokawa and Bennu: 500m-diameter of trash rock each. We now learn Itokawa is a 4.2By pile, since its parent asteroid shattered. Rubble piles are hard to destroy past that; any further collisions just burrow their way inward and stop – adding to the rubble. I assume Bennu similar: 125 cubic megameters.

Each pile of debris should therefore own some iron-nickel meteors buried down in the silicon and KREEP. That’s good news for the local miners and, later, blacksmiths. But.

The bad news for us with near-Earth asteroids is their location… near Earth. The jumble cannot be hoped to disassemble itself on its way in. And the chunks of iron within them stand to be hefty. This new one in Antarctica is 17 kg – after it fell. What if it had been shielded on its way in?

Miklavcic et al. propose better “Habitat Bennu” with 800 “grains” of broken rock and regolith in a high-tensile bag. That bag needs 200 MPa hoop-stress so: “carbon-fiber”. Picking on Bennu I guess because it's already spinning and also has water (UPDATE 3/22 unlike Diomorph).

By the way I entirely endorse Don’t Look Up to do something with all this debris as long as we’re shifting it to a friendlier location. Power is supposedly delivered via solar: they say panels, George Smith will suggest mercury. The usual cosmic-ray and flare worries apply. So: inner location; we use a big magnet against solar ions and, of course, there’s lots of rock here. Earth-crossers can do STL4/L5. It’s not enough mass to raise tides over here; our tides hopefully won’t raise tides over there over the life of the habitat.

Much as I’d like settling a big centrifuge of ancient dark, 3 ms^-2 isn’t even Mercury/Mars tier. Also the pressure against the bag – they calculate – will be 7 kPa even without the 100 kPa of nitrox we like. Inside the finer dust stands to scrape lungs like lunar dust. Maybe the architects can spray most of the inside dust with goop so it’s mostly clay, before landing any colonists on it. So I don’t think we’ll be walking the surface. I’m seeing a canister buried in the regolith with its own means to seal in the air: a campsite. We do however get a radiation-shield and 3 is better than 0.

Humans want something up to 9.8 m/s² and space to walk around on. The next phase is a larger 2.8 km diameter, 3e+8 kg. Bring Itokawa along to Habitat Bennu, and more. Piece by piece, we must assume; which pieces we’ve agreed to fuse into grains once there. Venereans can bargain down to 8.7 m/s².

I concede with SFF Chronicles that this is a “Tough SF” blogpost or even an incomplete syfy story. The bag of 200 MPa “carbon-fibre” for the 0.3 g partial-habitat is, yes, skirting unobtanium. Although: we might just be able to get it done with present tech. The lower levels should be fused first into something that doesn’t rip the bag. As we spin up: fuse all those rocks even harder. Also I wonder about making the cement something more rubbery, itself. Then when more meteors ping it from below / outside, all our dirt doesn’t spin away. On this assumption, a few more small craters won’t hurt anyone and Bennu’s in-house astronomers should be able to spot anything comparable to Bennu itself.

I am more unsure how well the classic O’Neill or torus-wheel actually works in space; on Earth we assume a fixed hub. Although a 60-degree part of that torus might spin nicely against a counterweight, starting modestly at 200 doodz.

HOW? 3/1: David W. Jensen says replicating robots, twelve years for Atira. Huh. Maybe.

Move over, xenon: II

That Hall thruster is still being worked on. Here's the krypton Hall. Parallel to the argon Not-Hall.

These Hall-ish designs all share the same constraint: electrodes do not last under raging ions. That argon drive swapped out electrodes for propellant-efficiency (30%). Efficiency is a problem we can handle with argon on account there's so much of it. At least, over the major inner planets.

There isn't a lot of xenon - nor of krypton for that matter (1/5 the atmospheric fraction of helium). University of Michigan, competing with that argon alternative, are making the most of what noble-gas they have. By using a 9 kW Hall at MAX POWER 45 kW - not possible with xenon - they got more efficiency, with krypton. Ten times the force per unit-area.

Krypton was krap-ton at lower energies, so it's a credit to the team that they wondered what it might do at higher energies.

And 45 kW is just the power the university allowed to the team. What if they had more...?

All this said, I'll fault the article for flinging percentages around. 80% of its nominal efficiency got me all excited until I read further to an overall efficiency of about 49%, not far off the 62% efficiency. So "nominal" is not "100%"; it's 62%, and 49 is indeed 79% of 62. 49% is however better than 30% and that's a bar which competitors must clear.

Ares 13

Spaceflight History / No Shortage Of Dreams recalls his concerns about aborting a Hohmann mission, here to the Mars system. A. A. VanderVeen ran the maths: three phases.

You might be back on Earth in a few weeks if you abort days 1-60. Past that, you swing by the Sun on a 0.7ish AU perihelion opposition-class fryby. Days 180 through 270, matters get a bit better and you can hit up Earth as before.

For "Earth" read "inner planet A" and for "Mars", read "planet past 1 AU in A's units". The same basic three-phase maths apply for Deimos-to-Ceres or for Venus-to-almost-anywhere: it's just the length of the intervals as will change. If the main base is outward and the problem is inward, the calculus will differ. The maths for either must await another day and, mayhap, another laptop.

Ultimately the Equations remain Cold. Where Apollo 13 was a story of heroism and engineering; Ares 13 stands to be a horrific tragedy.

This is why we need Castles on cycler-orbits; because then there's a ghost of a chance someone might come to you with rescue-supplies. A set of bases along Venus and SVL4-5 should also help for supplying Ares 13.

The mantle and the core

Zimmerman posts on The Core. It used to spin faster than our mantle and crust but, now... doesn't?

I'm pondering tides: lunar, solar, Jovian, maybe Venerian. Milankovitch comes to mind. (Not Velikovsky. Sigh.)

As Zimmerman ponders, the very readings we'd taken in the 2000s could be bad. I expect tides would do this to the readings more than to the mantle.

Bricks off the wall

Last July, the last time my Lenovo demanded an update then broke, there was talk that our galaxy has a light central mass. On this day we're hearing instead that the Milky Way is too large for its surroundings, a "cosmologic wall" called Local Sheet.

To reconcile these data: we started out in a cluster of smaller galaxies like that Kraken. The Local Sheet is an artifact of galactic walls at formation. We gobbled up the Kraken's stars; lost our original black-hole to the merge.

Let's not LUVOIR yet

h/t ToughSF (Nyrath is back too, woot): LUVOIR. This was designed in 2019 as a successor to Webb, or perhaps as a replacement on account Webb wasn't flying then and was touch-and-go if it ever would fly. Now Webb is flying so there should be some lessons-learnt here.

As a 2019 project they hadn't considered the Superheavy Booster. This should be good to get this cargo up to LEO for cheap. As for the second-stage, er.

I honestly would like some reason to care about LUVOIR in its 2019 form. I don't know if LUVOIR will be doing high-priority work.

High-priority work - to my mind - would be a low-parallax 'scope docked beyond our 1 AU, for astrometry. In English: lower the error around midrange stars, and get real parsec values for farrange stars like Betelgeuse. It is a scandal that we cannot constrain the luminosities of the 600-lightyear-range supergiants on account we don't even know how far away they are. Maybe park this thing at Deimos; give human mechanics a reason to go there.

Then there's the lunar-base, and the Uranus orbiter . . .

But really the high-priority work is get a LEO infrastructure such that whatever delivers cargo to LEO, can be boosted further. Deimos, Ceres, Hilda, Jupiter-trojan: anything. Even that STL2 where Gaia and Webb are at.

More Amurru

These are the five examples we're given, laid out in tabular form:

ti-nam me-e la-a-i-de-ni	ten mayim al yadenu	Give water on our hands
ia-a-a-nam si-qí-ni-a-ti	yeinam šiqiniti	Pour us wine
si-ḫa šu-ul-ḫa-nam	habe et haš-šulhan	Fetch the table
la-aḫ-ma-am bi-lam na-a-NAM	habe lehem eleinu	Bring us bread
bi-ik-ra-ti-ia za-ba-a-ḫa a-na DI ĜIR-ia la-am-[ti]-in	et zebah bikurai lo eten le’eli	I will make a sacrifice to my GOD

Some Sumerograms are here: ĜIR stands for El. But not many.

As for the ḫ character that's a known problem in cuneiform on account Sumerian was not good for distinguishing all the "H" stops, and on account Akkadian may have given up trying. Consider that even in English we reserve the chi for Scottish and Welsh loanwords. Same goes for the long -am in "la-aḫ-ma-am"; it's not long, the script forced the length after the absent vowel in la-aḫ-m*.

Clearly we have a Semitic language given the object-suffixes and possessive-suffixes. And it's not Aramaic: the s and the š were already joined to the shin character in the Imperial script. But might it be protoAramaic?

If these five sentences belong together then we have here an altar for a table - an impromptu blessing as the Babylonian emissary arrives at the Amorite court. On that topic Hebrew yeïn is a major rabbithole in rabbinics. Setám yeïnam means "their wine" and is generally forbidden for fear someone like me will be born nine months after one of Them should drink it with one of Us. It gets worse with Yeïn Nesech, poured out precisely for such Sumerian ĜIRîm. The word for wine is hamar in Biblical-Aramaic and ḫamr in Qâric-Arabic.

la-a-i-de-ni probably goes to la-îdenî; me-e, mê. Looks halfway between the "Canaanite shift" and... Arabic. Pre-Qâric Arabic would I think have these as li-yadinâ and mâ', with hamza.

lehém is Aramaic for bread as well although, in Amurru, the accent fell on the first syllable. Aramaic sacrifice is debáh so... how did this first syllable get aspirated? I do not read "la-îzenî". Emphatics?

There is gender in laḫmam and yânam and šúlḫanam all masculine. mê would be feminine if she's accusative. I guess in Hebrew the -iat preserved the old Semitic -t unlike most feminines, became -ith as Judith and Shulamith.

I detect i'rab! The dative, if you will, is expressed in la-îdenî; accusative in all that -am.

As with North Arabian and ancient Hebrew and Ugaritic I see no definite-article. si-ḫa could be si ḫa- but I doubt it. Unless šulḫ-an is in that emphatic-state of South Arabian and, perhaps, of Aramaic. Except that šulhan appears some seventy times in our Bible.

We might have (?habe) a problem in the article's transcription. In particular Give water on our hands makes little sense. I call shens that tinam means imperative "give". I mean, sure: yu'tî in Arabic. But the -am points to an accusative noun; such are placed at the start of the sentence elsewhere. This could be "he waters tin for our hands", whatever tin be (clay?).

I deduce siḫa and siqíniati as imperative verbs. So: yânam siqíniati and siḫa šúlḫanam has "us" in the former but just "the" in the latter. Is -iati the object-suffix for "us"? I'd expect -iani. And for this to be oblique with a la- in there. Is zabáḫa a noun or a verb? Can't tell without looking at the published article.

Upload #206: parceling out authority

Last Monday "The Bankipur Dissent" was the star of the show. A wee bit overstuffed; especially around Q. 4:59 and v. 65. A new project was in order to sort all that out, and to focus "Bankipur" some more: "The Grant of Command". It is more speculative than most; it goes with "Book of Nathan" (not altered tonight).

"Scriptures of the Women" got more tweaks as I was going along. More to the point "Sodom's Elephant" got a fairly-heavy expansion; apparently back in 2020 I'd forgotten that Suyuti had joined sura 105 (the topic) with sura 106. Before 2020 I used to know that. Sigh. Well, now it's fixed.

Madrassa.

Babel's strength considered hideous

I, like Richard Hanania, have a soft spot for Megaprojects and a, er, hard spot against silly humans. But Hanania might be a silly human.

(Yeah, the metaphor kind of got creepy, I realised; but... let's not overthink, here.)

Far be it from this blog to #cancel a fascist for being fascist, or a eugenicist for being eugenicist; but Christopher Wray is a fascist, and the whole Davos crew oh-so-concerned about Overpopulation is eugenicist. (As for antisemites... ehh. How much does any Palestinian at that link care more than I care?)

All of us should consider that the megawealthy at Davos, exactly by their concern for Overpopulation, has Disdain For Plebs. One set of regulars over there was the Soros family. Sure the Soroi absented themselves this particular year. Doesn't matter. The Soroi were there previous years and it was in those years they stuffed America's cities with district-attorneys who have made them at least as uninviting as Mars. Can we be assured that the remaining attendees would Effective-Altruist us differently?

I suppose Hanania and I, Semite-to-Semite, can agree upon journalism as such. Although there's journalism (independent), and there's Journ-O-List (a no-irony messaging conspiracy). On that...

Real journalism would see that Stalinist boondoggles cause dislocation. Yes, even if Josif is playing the capitalist and speaking Arabic. Maybe those hajjis who outstayed their welcome deserve that dislocation. Are we going to have that discussion? A journalist might raise this for discussion.

To sum up, I don't feel like Hanania has organised his thoughts sufficiently to offer any real plan (or "alternative", if you like) on how we can help humans in the present and propagate humanity in the future.

Amurru maybe

Today Andrew George and Manfred Krebernik have presented content - albeit unprovenanced content. Davila offers a warning on account forgers are much better at imprinting Akkadian than they once were. Although - were forgers this good in the early AD 1990s / AG 2300s?

The tablet is in the cuneiform style of [Zimri-Lim and] Hammurabi; offering a phrase-list for speaking "Amorite" as they called westerners. The language here looks like preBiblical Hebrew as best cuneiform (designed famously for Sumerian) can handle it. DOI is 10.3917/assy.116.0113.

My first concern is that, between Canaan and upper Babylonia, was Ebla. Ebla was apparently being sidestepped - fine, Eblaite didn't survive the Late Bronze Age, we know that. Zimri-Lim and Hammurabi both should have enjoyed some direct contact with North West Semites. But to put a finer point on it all: there should be protoAramaic, nu? How much did George and Krebernik delve into what in their tablets looks like Canaanite and what looks like Aramaic? And where's Ugaritic in this?

Next question: the microscope, as Davila has foreseen. We can use this to get the lost provenance of the clay. Were these Amorites being met along the Ramadi / Tikrit southwest edge like the Chaldaeans; or were they being met along the northern Jazira between Nineveh and Nisibin? The 1991 Gulf War origin would suggest the former and lower region. So now I'm pondering Taymanitic.

Pills

The Left lies. The Right believes lies. But the Left is rewarded; the Right not so much.

The Right's supposed tribunes make excuses for people no longer accepting basic facts. At the same time, they host outright obscurantists.

Meanwhile scientody stagnates.

I suppose that's why influencers matter. And economics.

The super-earth conundrum

A couple papers are out about how come the systems we see have so many Earths and even super-Earths within and beneath the HZ, and the occasional Hot Jupiter; but few hot Neptunes.

On systems generating super-Earths: Batygin. The western Swiss canton meanwhile offers ideas on the "desert" of Neptunes-chaudes down there.

The Swiss article isn't great. There's talk of the inclination going all wrong when the planet(?s) get too close to the star. Is that just for the few Neptunes we're seeing? It seems like there would have to be interference from Saturn-plus planets further away.

As for the takeaways for would-be science-fiction world-builders (best I see): these articles go to Bayesian analysis of likely K or G class systems where they don't transit. If we don't see planets' shadows, and don't detect their mass; are they there? Answer: there might be an Earth there; these are hard to detect if we don't see the shade. But inasmuch as we detect Hot Jupiters easily, we can probably give up on Hot Neptunes.

I'm interested if super-Earths down the Mercury-Venus levels should hog the material for planets at the HZ level; or, if they don't hog enough, such that HZ is stuck with a superEarth - like to be Venuslike, or an ocean planet.

Another question is if a cluster of biggish planets below, oh, 1.5 AU should enter a Laplacian. How would our planet's tides work if Venus be thrice our mass, and we didn't have a Jupiter above us? Although - sure - here in the HZ this might not matter for tectonics. Maybe we can bargain superVenus to 2:1 (16:8) beneath the nearby 13:8 it is. Inasmuch as a superMars over us would probably squeeze us, Europa-style; I recommend adding a superMercury 2:1, beneath superVenus.

We might have to make that bargain. Venus-as-Neptune 3:2 (12:8) would be... interesting, for us: Earth-Luna as superVenus' own Pluto-Charon. If I am reading the Swiss right we'd be inclined even more than we are, and quite a bit more eccentric - even dipping beneath superVenus' semimajor once a year.

Y Kant Brazil Reed

Reynolds points a survey of 5,500 Brazilian and Italian school students aged 14-16, on Evolution. Some of these kids don't buy it. That's... a little concerning, since Evolution is about the least I expect of a fourteen-year-old or, for that matter, of an adult, before I'll respect a thing s/he says about anything else. The survey asks: where is the illiteracy and whence does it come?

The heading, clickbait, says it's not religion. Since the late 1990s I've observed American creationists claim up and down how they're not based on religion. (Ben Stein's Jewish you know.) Although only religious people buy their books and watch(ed) Expelled. For these Latini teens, though, I might accept this disavowal. Abrahamic capital-R Religion isn't doing well nowadays, anywhere.

The survey suggests no real difference across sectarian bounds. Italiano Catholics accept the scientific consensus. Brasileirão Catholics, less so; they side with the Protestants there.

I am reminded of the church of Saint Cyril in Houston, west-side; which had the ...turned into dinosaurs meme (frequently plagiarised) in a frame. Without irony; pastor Mario referred to it in homilies. Also I am reminded of Scott Hahn's contributions to Benjamin Wiker books.

The Church, I gather, sees Evolution/Creation as a fight they're prepared to leave between protties and infidels.

Upload #205: the Shi'ites' critical-koran

Robert Spencer for his footnotes on Shi'a variants used St Clair-Tisdall's 1913 scholia upon... an unpublished text. Ibn Warraq in contact with Spencer could have directed him to Which Koran?'s essays on the topic but did not. Last Monday I took upon myself to run interference: was this Bankipur Library MS for real, or what?

On Monday itself I pulled a PDF from Muhammadanism.org, which I soon realised had some Problems; I got burned out fairly early in the cleanup. On Tuesday I set to incorporating commentary, from the late-1990s commenters Salamah and Gätje. Also from Rahbar 1960+ which, in turn, led me through Jeffery 1938. And I was blogging... too much. That was a long night; I turned in at 8:30 PM.

Wednesday I wanted Muhammadanism's source at The Moslem World; before I found that, I stumbled upon Lawson whose work (pdf) helped fix an early one of Salamah's poor references. Then I remembered... Which Koran had meanwhile reprinted Lawson - and more to the point Bar-Asher. Mind, after getting this merged in, I tired myself out a little earlier. Also I felt some responsibility that it may have been in part my fault, inasmuch as I'd 2/5'ed Which Koran, that Ibn Warraq (apparently) hadn't reminded Spencer of Bar-Asher either.

On Thursday I found English Kulaynî also late 1990s. With isnads. Another late night...

I wanted out of the late 1990s, and I had new motivation to pull Ibn Warraq out of the middle 1990s, ultimately to pull Spencer out of the 1910s. I needed Sayyârî. I started this undertaking Friday evening and continued through... pretty much all Saturday, from 7:45 AM on. That evening I observed that Sayyârî's publishers Etan Kohlberg and Amir-Moezzi had already accepted Bankipur as a real MS. From the footnotes. Which footnotes I had to incorporate, Sunday 11 AM to 6 PM. Today I picked up Goldziher and called a halt to the job.

To show my cards: "The Bankipur Dissent" does not accept Bankipur as a real MS. I think Tisdall used a Sayyârî-base transmission from the Bankipur library; not the physical paraQurân which Tisdall claimed. But - I'll have to admit - who cares? The Shî'a didn't care; they merrily copied Sayyârî and several more around his orbit. Based especially on Sayyârî I consider Tisdall vindicated; and by that standard also Kohlberg, Amir-Moezzi and, yes, Spencer. On the narrow question of these qirâ'ât.

Madrassa.

Thermonuclear assisted Geothermal

Eddie Teller figured out fusion power generations ago: nuke the underdark. Title h/t Alex Knochel @Quantensalat.

The "Peaceful Nuclear Explosion Reactor" was to do, Orion-style, 20-50 kT nuclear explosions every couple hours in a 100 m salt dome. The steam would give off >1 GWe. Project Gnome tested this with 3.1 kT - under New Mexico, as usual. President Ray Gun revived the concept in the 1980s as HEDEF with subGnome 2 kT nukes.

... which, as noted, violates that Test Ban under treaty. So that Administration backed off, over its second term.

But inasmuch as Russia, Iran, Israel, and North Korea laugh at treaties and as we're not seeing much interest in them from China or Pakistan either; we look like suckers for not just doing this anyway.

Looks really good for Ceres, Callisto, and points outward.

Eriador's Amarth

A few years back I noted a map of Earth temperatures Palaeocene-Eocene. The Palaeocene where we find it was already 5 K warmer than now; it was upon that baseline the temperatures spiked, the "PETM" event. This was mused due to a volcano. But where?

h/t Reynolds: North Atlantic, from Iceland to the Eriador Ridge 1000 km away. The ocean already existed but was 56 million years younger. (Same with South Atlantic really, hence the American monkey.) Also the plume had already been active 63-54 Mya which by-the-way helps explain that 5 K warming before the spike (worldwide or just hemispheric?).

BACKDATE 1/16

Variola

On the most-infamous pockylips, the geneticists since at least 2016 have been at odds with the historians - and with the archaeologists.

That's VARV to the Microsoft Excel junkies: who hopefully are rethinking their decision to use Microsoft, especially today, since Windows Defender had its autoimmune disaster. Generation-X and up, vaxxed for VARV, remember this as The Smallpox. No vaccine yet for Microsoft sadly.

Historians saw this (VARV, not Bill Gates) as a plague for the ages. The archaeologists saw the lesions on some of their remains; Rameses V, cited here. But no no no said the geneticists; it recently came out of cowpox in AD 1580. That made little sense to me given the symptoms plaguing the New World in the Apocalypto era. Some might bargain down to late-antique camelpox.

Lately we've heard: 1800 BC. Pre-Thera Bronze Age.

Goodyear's edible tyre

If you won't eat my rubber, the squirrels will. h/t "TooOldToWork" over at Insta, but not too old to think.

I kind of get it, that petroleum tyres are a massive waste problem. Burning tyres ... stinks. Goodyear's new tyres should burn cleaner. Or the waste-department can just feed your worn out treads to the rodents. Oh right ... the rodents and ants will probably steal your wheel first. Goodyear could add toxins to the tyres but now we are back to what happens when time comes to burn them.

The other problem with "renewables" is the problem Michael Moore's lads raised in Planet of the Humans: renewability means farms. Maybe that's a plus in the case of soy; better to farm something that can turn a profit, so we're not subsidising them (excepting the inherent subsidy in banning alternatives). I am not seeing the upside in the case of pine, which acidifies the soil and makes difficult to farm - or to grow - much else.

I'd recommend the soyatyre for some autarkic province as cannot import petroleum products or would rather export such. And doesn't have hungry rodents. I have no idea where that might be. Mars?

Let us also note: as Goodyear is clearly thinking little of actual middle-class drivers and cars, so it goes for the soy boys at caranddriver. This is another E.S.G. metric. The Davos clique do not want you driving cars. They want the roads clear for themselves.

TOI 700

Sooo much ScienceDaily content yesterday. Here's one that rolled in last night: TOI 700. Transits, 100 light-years out so: high double-digit parallax.

b orbits 10 days, c 16; now e is 27. There's a d out at 37. d is considered HZ; e is in the "optimistic HZ" so, at 95% Earth mass - Venuslike. At this point I have to assume no eccentricity and that all are tidally-locked. Also I expect that's a wrap for more planets beneath d.

I take it that this new planet has constrained e's mass. Emily Gilbert: Planet e is about 10% smaller than planet d. So, d is 1.06 M_⊕ - in the inner zone of the HZ. That runs the risk of Venus too.

I assume that since the star is light that anything 2.5 the size of Earth i=90° every 16 days, like c, has got to be rocking its light-curve. I assume, further: c is too hot to be much gassier than Venus. Like LP 413-53's dwarfs and Proxima b, the TOI-700 star was probably hotter, earlier.

The planets don't look resonant. Well okay - for b:c I'll buy 8:5 (compare V:E 13:8). Beyond that, uh... no.

LP 413-53AB

Last night Northwestern University talked LP 413-53AB. "Ultracool" red dwarfs, in a binary hence the "AB".

A very close binary: 0.01 AU apart, 20.5 hour period. Like HD 114762.

The stars' age is estimated to be in the high billions - galactic halo, mayhap? Anyway as I've been hearing for Proxima Centauri, the older the reddwarf, the smaller and dimmer; the cold dying star trope doesn't work for G stars' systems but absolutely works for M. Nobody's told me where K stars fall in this, if they get hotter like G before ballooning out. For all I know it's a function of time like how T Tauris cool before bouncing back again.

NWU told us in which direction this binary lives - Taurus - but not the distance. It's nearby; but we could have guessed this, as it was dug out of data painstakingly interpreted, as emitting radiation mostly infrared. On the other hand if it be close as Barnard's-Star or Luhman 16, I'd expect much more hype about the short distance. So it's further than six light years from us. At least it's zodiacal so if we wanted the 550 AU Solar lens, we could use it.

We don't get masses - but they did let us ask senpai Kepler. Normalise μ such that Sol=4π²; assume LP 413-53 semimajor 0.005 AU for A or B. μ of LP 413-53AB 0.005³ (1/8000000) and 0.0023385². 0.022857 x 4π² = 28.723% M_☉ - together. Van Biesbroeck's star 19 light years away was 7.79%. EBLM J0555-57Ab likewise; wiki tells me 2MASS J0523-1403 (40 LY) is 5%-7%. But do note that the LP 413-53 system is split between two 14%/15% M_☉s and that it is super old.

GAIA DR3 2/1: Maybe someone could look up the name in Hipparchos then the general-area...

KECK 2/23: Per Zimmerman Keck have belatedly commented - this time linking the arxiv. Apparently it was 15% M_☉ together. Not sure where my mistake so I'll just need to learn to read moar. PUBLISHED 3/2: The final release to the paper. Oh look - it's free! - still with no parallax. Screw-this; let's go Simbad: Gaia EDR3 36.87 parsex. Hardly neighbors of our sun, Dr Hsu.

Galaxies' border

ToughSF linked to Deason et al. 2020, on "the edge of [this] galaxy": 1.9 million lightyears. I wonder if ToughSF took inspiration from these RR Lyrae's: these stars orbit us (slowly!), 1+ MLY so almost halfway to Andromeda. Which is 2.5 MLY away. Er.

Deason cannot be implying that the border between us and Andromeda should be 1.9 MLY. Andromeda is, like, bigger than us. Did Deason intend stars opposite Andromeda? It wouldn't seem to follow a Lagrange pattern.

The distant RR Lyrae stars were found from Next Generation Virgo Cluster Survey data, which as the article notes was not a survey for RR Lyrae stars; so they were dug out of the dataset. The best sort of discovery!

American Judaism's fatwa against Mel Gibson

Jonah Valdez on the LAT via Yahoo. Read it; it's fair.

There is a lot of talk about how war is politics by other means, with "terrorism" lying somewhere in-between. El Guapo says Santa Poco is no longer under his proteccion; violence ensues. Or maybe some of El Guapo's men just anonymously says something. What we have here is El Guapo endorsing what has happened, without directly mentioning the means by which it happened.

Blah blah blah not-all-jews blah blah I'm Jewish too (legally). You've been reading here; you get it.

I've spent some time on Islamic texts - not so much on whether they are violent, but more on where they are violent; and when, and on what occasions that might matter. (Actually to me their social "problematic" doesn't even matter. I am a late-antiquity historian at heart. I'm most interested in when and how the formative texts were written whatever their content.)

It seems clear to me that some Jewish texts prescribe violence when an example needs setting. And that the leadership of America's population of Jews applauds the results when the example is set.

I'd say Judaism needs a Reformation - but then, as a Christian (now), I'd say they already have had one, and rejected it. Probably the real reason the chief-priests and scribes hate Gibson so much.

Gotta keep spinnin'

ScienceDaily got off its duff and posted a pile of content today, much from Atacama's "ALMA" 'scope. We might as well start with NASA instead: this gamma burst. Way over the 1.7 solar mass boundary; in fact over the boundary that should keep it from eventhorizoning.

Sometimes neutron stars gain more mass; this happened to J0740+6620. Too much mass, they implode. If two of these merge, they usually spin around very fast on their way inward. So the neutron star is spinning just fast enough to keep it out of the mass limit!

But the music stops and when that happens, fooop.

The GRBs - two of 'em - came from Compton's Burst And Transient Source Experiment (BATSE). Which experiment isn't even running anymore; the data were 11 July 1991 then 1 November 1993. Glad they didn't delete their backups eh?

Laplace 6:5:4

Last month we considered a first-order intermediary between (stable!) 2:1 orbits, the 3 in 4:3:2. Can we squeeze something more into that 3:2? That would be a 6:4 so, we're putting the 5 into 6:5:4.

Now, we haven't seen many 3:2s in the wild let alone 6:5:4. There is no one Planet Hilda under Jupiter's wing; just many asteroids there. HD 45354 turned out not to have a true 3:2; HD 204313 was laughed out of contention. Those systems as I've found with a 3:2 planetary-duet do their do inside a sequence of other planets. For the sake of the longterm we're going with that last option. Including where I've injected an intermediary sat which I'm trying not to jostle away.

5:4s exist; 6:5s are... pushing it. I intuit we'd be running up against Hill Radius. To whit: Europa goes six times for the five times this secondary goes; my central sat goes, meanwhile, four times. Ganymede thrice; and Io twelve times for as long as Io is with us.

For unit central-mass Kepler a is cube root of T squared. T looks to be 1/p. So: Math.Pow(4.0, -2.0/3.0) and so on. Semimajors 0.3, 0.34, 0.4; we're looking for the mass we may inject into 0.34.

I'm going with: not much mass. I'd solve the whole dynamical problem of Io and Ganymede, on all bodies, before proliferating sats between Europa and the midway-station.

Turtles will make good lunar pets

Freshwater turtles can last months in anoxic conditions. h/t hbdchick

As I've considered lunar colonies, they'll start as temporary camps. The visitors stay for a week or two, in daylight. Then they rocket back up to some orbit - probably back home for the high-grav.

Longer than a week we have to start with dust. Then there's the low-gravity issue. Only after studying these, and their mitigation, should we bother with keeping the lights and life-support over the fort-night.

But since these turtles can handle the stale air in the dark - why not? Just don't let the air leak out.

Top Gun

Obviously Top Gun Maverick was last year's best movie. If you were wondering if those aircraft were even possible: if not they will be. Hereus presents turbojet to ramjet in the same chassis. h/t toughSF

This blog, we admit, is more space-focused. Such speeds as might take a payload to LEO/exosphere skim are Mach 10+ so, maybe - scramjet. You'll be sending the freight to the hypersonics by whatever means; maybe railgun. If that jet needs to abort the mission it slows its jets and coasts; the main mission (to scramjet speeds) is over. Tho' we might hope to keep the booster; so single-shot ramjets might work for passenger flights.

Anyway if you are going from slow-to-scramjet: Hereus isn't your choice.

You need this engine, rather, if you are going from aeroplane-to-ramjet, and back again, and back again. That means military.

The infinite helicopter

A couple years ago when I was doing the Venus-helicopter thing, a proposal came for an infinite solar-powered 'copter over Earth - which I missed. h/t ToughSF again since Nyrath seems on break lately. Claim: 20 m/s indefinitely (windspeed and sunlight permitting).

I'd add, the lifespan and relative-mass of the panel, permitting; and the gears spinning the blades, permitting. Although: we're doing better at panels. If we're talking Venus then windspeed is indeed an issue, but if we stay over the (acid) clouds we're in clover for sunlight.

BOOST 5/20: cyclocrane?

The Milky Way spins too slowly

Last May, but only now approaching ToughSF's notice, we got enough data from other galaxies to evaluate the spin-rate of this one. Our galaxy's "super-massive" point mass in Sagittarius is more like a kilomassive. Galaxies like ours - starting with the one in Andromeda - have bigger black holes. Like fifty times bigger, for a total stellar field of not even twice bigger.

Over time this galaxy has gobbled some smaller galaxies; "Kraken" at 11 Bya (so 2 billion years after the Milky Way formed) being the most relatively-massive.

The question here is whether one of those galactic mergers led to a black-hole merger. These raise up gravitational tsunamis which, perhaps, roll black holes out of a galaxy entirely. Then some other point-mass might take its place and gather up its own additional mass. But it will have started from a much lower baseline, thus leading to the lightweight we see today.

UPDATE 1/10/23 Although we lost the original, Atacama is reporting a binary of black holes, from a past merger; and they're looking at mergers elsewhere. Also JWST can see all sorts of two-billion-year-old galaxies, eleven billion light years distant.

Upload #204: go tell Pharaoh

Upon hammering (more) that sura 17 beat, which I now know is a 30+54 beat, I could no longer ignore sura 73 which parallels ... all of it. So! new project - "Moses to ʿÂd". "Misquoting Qurân" accordingly has sura 17 mention sura 73.

Meanwhile "Witness to Sura 17’s Qurân" has improved its take on that later sura 17. As noted before: first-time posts are subject to change. In this case - immediate change! At least [this time] I hadn't totally fallen over myself...

Madrassa. Which I've now updated links on! Over the last few years Google dropped my sidebar and Amazon gobbled CreateSpace, so ... no more procrastination.

Upload #203: can I get a witness

As I was banging my keyboard about ancient references to the "pre-Islamic" Qurân I realised said keyboard was running away with W3. W3's content deserves its own project as the "Witness to Sura 17’s Qurân" which it is. I won't argue if W3 is a post-sura-10 contemporary with W1; but I will argue it quotes a shahada as preceded (or at least ignores) sura 10.

Meanwhile - sigh - bugfixes, to the last batch. "Jesus’ Arraignment" now notes the Latin parallel in sura 89 and fixes a botched section-header. "The Balance Restored" adds, to sura 83's library, sura 75. "Misquoting Qurân" got a little more content but nothing as important.

Madrassa.

Following the Basic-Class

Now that I've read Scripts and Scripture it is time to visit editor Fred Donner's contribution - of that same title. As its title and position imply this is an introduction and summary; much of the groundwork being done by al-Jallad, Nehmé, and MacDonald who all have their own contributions here. It ends with "two puzzles" which I'll handle tonight.

In 1996 Yehuda Nevo emitted his preliminary comments upon the "Basic Class" versus "Muhammadan" and "Muslim" classes, in the Arabic inscriptions primarily in Negev. This he and Judith Koren tied to some local archaeology which, as Jeremy Johns documented, was cods. And Crossroads to Islam annoyed the hell out of Byzantine scholarship, from its first chapter, which mooted that what now-Istanbul calls the derin devlet was equally active in then-Constantinople except actively treasonous. (Back in the middle-2000s I was getting some of the email. It was quite personal.)

So this book's editors have set that book at arms-length. The contributors, each for their own purposes, have taken cue. Newby p. 121 footnotes Nevo-Koren to represent critical scholarship (which he scorns); Longworth, 185 adds the book to a general list without comment; Lindstedt, 208 relays one inscription but retranslates it.

I've never wholly written-off Nevo-Koren; not least, I accept their eviction of sura 48 from canon and hope more scholars (and more Muslims) would follow. As for Nevo's main thesis it lately turns out that Nevo was right at least that we may classify Arabic monotheistic inscriptions. Lindstedt's article serves to validate Crossroads to Islam, 332: a jihad class exists in this piety, not found prior to Marwânî-heyday AH 70-110 (and rare afterward). This seems as good a post as any to express disappointment with Dr Lindstedt that he did not refer to this Nevo-Koren paragraph.

As to the basic-class, it looks like funereal Coptic: expressed is a worry about death and the life everlasting to follow it, with pleas for forgiveness and mercy, made to a singular God. The main difference is that a Copt might mention Christ; the Arab will instead plead with God that He intercede for Christ - or other prophets - whilst He's in the forgiving mood (usually by the sly root). Arabs might at most hope for the prophets to intercede as on the Dome of the Rock (here shafa'a) but even here, as Nevo pointed out, we're no longer in the basic-class by AH 72. [UPDATE 2/22/24 see now Tillier.]

So: Donner, at al-Ḥanâkiya, W1 (and W3, W7 ... others) p. 13. His following page muses if, here, we have Qâric language before Qurân. In W1 one Rafi' bin 'Ali wrote âmantu annahu lâ ilâha illâ alladhî âmanat bihi Banû Isrâîla hanîfan musliman wamâ ana al-mushrikûna.

W1 as usual Basic lacks hamza, which hamza will be seen of Classical Arabic (probably contemporary Iraqi Arabic); and no orthography to force the long â in *âmana. The personal names are Arabic not Qâric. W1 reads as to follow the instruction of Q. 10:90, qâla âmantu annahu lâ ilâha illâ alladhî âmanat bihi Banû Isrâîla wa-anâ mina 'l-muslimîna then v. 105 / 30:30-1, hanîfan / walâ takûnanna mina 'l-mushrikîna.

To that I say sura 10 follows sura 30, which went on to note "muslims" v. 53. Sura 10 injects its own concern about the history of Israel (as Nicolai Sinai has observed, in Egypt). Simplest is that W1 depend upon sura 10. If W1 be "pre-Islamic" then, how do I put this... why was Rafi' calling himself a Muslim (alternatively aligning himself with Israel the Muslim)? Also "pre-Islamic" would thus be sura 10 itself; its source sura 30, likewise. Maybe we can make this claim for sura 10's other sources which (by my count) include 17, 54, 56, 80 and more. Although sura 17 depends on sura 30 for its own part.

Still: Donner is onto something. The truth is that although W1 is sura 10 / sura 30 Muslim, it remains nonetheless pre-Ishmaelist. Our Qurân prefers that the one god be that of the "Banû Ibrâhîma". W1 does not care for suwar 3-9's movement to Abraham (much less Ibrâhîm) via Ishmael. W1 is pre-Muhammadan as well, clearly.

Quasi Resonance in HD 45354

Having gone into resonant-orbits, and orbits (like Uranus') as just look resonant: here's HD 45354. This is an orange K0V in the Monoceros constellation 34.3-.4 parsecs away. Its two habitable-zone but 0.19-and-0.55/sini sub?Jupiters were, at first, deemed 3:2 and eccentric - like Jupiter and its Hildas. Like HD 204313 b:d before d got shot away. Hinting at speculations upon HD 45354...

Now Zhexing Li et al. have ruled their orbits circular; with a nonKeplerian dynamical model improving on the mass-estimate now marked 0.19-and-0.55. This means i>40° such that the sini is ~1, woohoo! As to the orbits, although they look 3:2 today; they veer out, and in again. They've constrained-away anything of note within b's 0.6784 AU orbit - which includes the stellar tides obviously. They're not seeing much outside c's 0.9026 AU, neither.

Inner b runs in the "(very) optimistic HZ". As I remain unaware of any rebuttal of Sudarsky's I-III classifications, I'd say b gets sufficient infrared to run it over 350 K into Class III. It looks like Neptune. But bloated out to Saturn size, and stormier, and basically moonless.

Outer c could be a Class II Water Giant, by contrast. Li et al. deemed c as promising for exomoons, also having more Hill to play with. In this much... er. If the two biggies are wandering in and out of mutual proximity... I'm seeing an analogue with Jupiter during the Grand Tack. So HD 45354's moons should look like Jupiter's, likewise in their own mutual resonance - but rockier. And certainly smaller. Less planetary radiation tho'!

Li's crew, seeing room outside c in the HZ, further (or alternately) considered a cold Earthlike. They say such can persist with semimajor 1.22, 1.24, certainly 1.28+ AU. Did I mention this star was no G but K? Such a world would have formed as an iceball and migrated in, less Mars more Ceres. Li might hope that a later impact has boiled that excess into a silicate/ice moon. Or, Imagined Life won't rule out advanced life even in an iceball.

We're gittin gud at Lithium

ToughSF links to Hannah Ritchie on the lithium we just found including under our noses; then reminding of a 2009 article on lithium battery with the energy density of gasoline.

September (er) 11, 2022 I'd heard of a sodium layer-cake as could oust lithium. Sodium, coming with chlorine as a wasteproduct of desal, should cost not much less than that of otherwise-generated energy. Sodium also should promise energy-density (lower alpha) better than lithium. Where's Chalmers?

The jihad ideology

From AH 70-110, Arabic graffiti started (and ended) talking up the Jihad In God's Way. Lindstedt's LAMINE-3 piece, made possible by more findings of said graffiti, attempts an ideologic profile. 'Tis a good followup to Longworth's inasmuch as it details the Arabic thought which succeeded the mostly-penitential Basic Class. Lindstedt sees Blankinship's Jihad State at work.

I do not see (and Lindstedt does not assert) that all the graffiti as mention these themes were, in of themselves, violent. Several of them ask that the inscriber's good deeds count as righteous-struggle. Where graffiti talk of God's sabîl they are often near Jerusalem pp. 212-13, so on pilgrimage-routes (Lindstedt and I agree also that Mecca existed where it is now, by the AH 70s: pp. 207-8). Thus, some inscribers hoped their death during hajj, if it happened, should count sufficient for Witness.

Violence did exist. In the Hisma pp. 213-14 one Sa'id son of Dhakwan mawla of Mu'awiya begged God "for the honour of being killed (sharaf al-qatl) in Thy Path". Then one Ibn Talut (his father presumably a follower of the Baqára) asked God for the same sharaf. We also have one who believes in "His apostles and scriptures" requesting the same pp. 210-11.

I see here (and here Lindstedt might agree) that AH 70-110 was a window in which jihad was ascendant as the ideology of most Muslims. Even if they found violence personally distasteful, they conceded it tasteful to God; so tried to match their nonviolent deeds with Divine Will. After that the régime dialed all this back, so that personal jihad became the minority opinion of pro-Umayyad diehards like Awza'i and Thawri, and in the Spanish/Moorish far west (until it withered there too).

How about before AH 70? There was certainly some Arab violence then; the Arabs weren't exactly invited into Egypt. Most suwar which detail jihad and (violent) qital, I think, precede the Dome of the Rock's arcade, if for no other reason than that the Dome quotes early sura 3 and the end of sura 4. Still. It challenges theories of general acceptance of suras 3 and 4, that the jihad isn't noted. West-Syrians (at least) heard "Allah rabb" and Q. 112 and other such battle-cries but not this one. Might we be missing something in some cave in southeast Anatolia? It may be that the resurgent Byzantines will hack it away in the AD 900s.

Some of those struggles were internal, as the Zubayrids fought the Umayyads and the Mukhtar. Here too I wonder why the "fitna" is not noted in graffiti; we have suwar concerning this concept, as well, looking to sura 8 here. It may be, again, that we have not found such yet.

Heis Theos

In happier happenstances I've now got to Longworth and Lindstedt. These pick up the traces from mid-1990s Nevo, Koren, and Hoyland on Arabic tombstones (Longworth) and jihad-graffiti (Lindstedt). Longworth aims rather to provide the late-antique control-set for Arabic burial-inscriptions. That means going where the graves were, which was Jordan and Egypt. And not the #$^& Ḥijaz.

Intriguing here is the Greek heis theos - as a Christian slogan. In fact it is so Christian that most Copts introduced their gravestones with the same phrase, even if the rest of the work was in whatever Coptic. Why not (say, for Akhmîmic) OUE NOUTE? This insistence on Greek would, I think, explain why most Jews refused it (or, if they had it, they carved it with a conspicuous menorah). Also the LXX Deut. 6:4 would suggest kyrios heis; maybe a reference to Qaddish.

Later on, Longworth notes at least the Copts started emphasising the Trinity. This responds to the nonChristian monotheism foisted upon the Copts as recorded under Isaac.

What to make of heis theos before Isaac? I find suggestive the postIslamic "Trinitarian" slogan "Heis Theos and His Christ and the Holy Spirit". This represents mature Monophysitism; which points its Roman-era, shorter instances to popular resistance to Dyotheletism. This ran especially along the Nile but also into west-Syria; first, under the Eunomians; then, following the Councils of Ephesus.

Although the Greeks and Copts agreed upon doctrine, Longworth does see a different emphasis. Greeks tended "don't worry, nobody's immortal" or contrariwise talked of Christ's "victory"; Copts didn't. Starting AD seventh-century Copts started begging mercy. So Copts were now talking like this guy. What's the cause/effect?

Arabian Jews in Late Antiquity

In Islam-studies Gordon Newby is known for extracting (probably) the Ibn Ishaq bible Mubtada from its later reëmergence in Tabari and Ibn Hisham. I'd only found out about Making of the Last Prophet from Conrad's negative review which review, a few more years later, in the late 1990s, Ibn Warraq republished. Shortly thereafter in 2001 Newby signed this vapid petition. The review and Newby's general silliness, I suspect, had an effect; because Newby's book soon ended up at the Half Price Books in Houston.

Newby is still around. He's got an article in LAMINE-3 Scripts and Scripture; here arguing for a Jewish presence in the Ḥijaz. Newby had written a History of the Jews of Arabia so feels a need to defend the earlier parts thereof. He is here to carry Robert Serjeant's torch.

Other articles in LAMINE-3 had already noted that, as of 2017, we own in the Ḥijaz no Qumran. MacDonald, 28-9 notes instead a pagan Arab para-sukkot over in Dedan. Nehmé, 51, 54, 55, 62, 79 (also al-Jallad, 99) accepts that some Jews wrote graffiti in Ḥijaz but Nehmé, 51 debunks that the Ḥimyars' "Lord of Heaven" should refer to anything particularly Jewish (so Nehmé agrees more with... Durie). There's also Donner, 13-14 - if we accept his pre-hijrî context.

Newby concedes the paucity of direct evidence p. 118. P. 121 lays out this article's ethos: the problems with texts and the solutions to these problems are not sufficient to drive one away from assaying our available evidence to make tentative and plausible historical claims. So at least he's no Wansbroughian nihilist; Crone and Cook (and Nevo) couldn't have put it better themself. This blogger wonders what Newby'd make of House of War. Let's investigate to what degree the rest of us may consider Newby objectively plausible.

Newby p. 120-1 is further aware of Gabriel Said Reynolds and Emran Badawi. He rates them as successors to Crone and to Wansbrough c'est-a-dire, not well.

Against these "new biblicists" Newby relies first on Devin Stewart. Newby also cites Lecker, "Conversion of Ḥimyar". And Azmeh, Emergence of Islam in Late Antiquity and, er, Bowersock. Newby might further recruit fellow-contributor Robert Hoyland, e.g. "The Jews of the Ḥijaz"; but Hoyland goes uncited! There's no Sidney Griffith here either, maybe to suggest the existence or not of an Arabic Psalter (this is an argument that needs having, cf Christmas in the Koran).

We shall grant to Newby his due. Unlike Hoyland's article here which assumes Newby's consensus (for all Newby's reciprocal non-notice), Newby is making that argument; unlike Bowersock, Newby isn't claiming his droit du seigneur to Settle The Science.

On to the argument, pp. 122-9. Lecker demonstrated [that] the conversion of Ḥimyar to Judaism in the fifth century CE was under the influence of the Jews of Yathrib/Medina. The rest of its paragraph goes on to the larger story of Christianity and Judaism in Yemen, Yathrib having done its work.

As to what Lecker intended to "demonstrate" luckily we - you and I both since I've linked it - can read the original. Lecker's only(!) source was Ibn Ishâq. Ibn Ishâq cited Abû Malik b. Tha'laba b. Abî Malik al-Qurâzî. Lecker: His grandfather was a Jew of Kinda, i.e., a Yemenite, who emigrated to Medina from the south. The remainder of that six-page article (biblio makes seven) argues to swap "al-Qurâzî" for "al-Hadlî". So: Abû Malik was indeed Kindite and Jewish. That doesn't mean that Abu Malik was correct. I must point out that the Kinda although of Yemenite ancestry had - by the time of Islam - settled heavily in the Sawad of the 'Iraq, indeed sometimes supplanting the more-famed Lakhmid monarchy. Lecker goes no further than arguing that, yes, Kindite Jews propounded that Yathrib proselytised the Yemen - especially after arriving to Yathrib. Lecker admits that the Muslims in Yathrib found that this story flattered their Islamic monotheism against the pagans and muskrikoon of antique Yemen and Arabia. Lecker refers to that account as a semi-legendary story. So: Lecker did not demonstrate, and Lecker did not intend to demonstrate, what Newby says he demonstrated.

Moving on, p. 123-4 offers the Jewish poets, such as Samau'al b. 'Adaya, al-Rabî' bin Abû [sic; Abî] Ḥuqayq, and Ka'b b. Ashraf, among others. I'd strike Samuel; he looks like a contemporary to al-Hajjaj in bolstering the mythos behind the Quranic Solomon.

As to Qurân pp. 124f presents its more-celebrated Hebrew loanwords. (This is the part which is of real value to us.) Here are suwar 2, 7 (bûr), 5 (behima), 12 (jubb), 25, 48 (hitta). Witztum "Joseph among the Ishmaelites" informs that sura 12 is Aramaic Christian (or Samaritan!) more than Hebrew Jewish so, strike that one. The other suwar are late and might have taken on their Hebrew either via Targum or, like sura 12, via Christian intermediaries. Certainly the mere plural of "rabbi" Q. 3:79 / 5:44,63 can be had from anybody including a Gospel-reader.

All I see left over is p. 126's note of Q. 89:12 sawt. Maybe Ka'b and al-Rabî'.

Ultimately what Newby offers here is speculation; bolstered by authoriteh but not upon solid authoriteh.

Bounding the Feynman Integral

Feynman's Integrals are now more-tractable. The Turtle relates them to high-energy particle physics, where C=1 such that velocity-values are relativistic. Mostly he's talking quantum. Might we generalise this past quantum?

Stefan Weinzierl wrote the book on these integrals, which book is now free and - well, might be worth it at that price, at least for the later chapters on how to solve them. Up to that point it is almost comprehensible!

Chapter 2 gets everyone up to speed on the usual 4-dimensional spacetime, rather timespace with the spatial dimensions not necessarily numbering three.

There's some metric here called the Minkowski where the first dimension is +1 with the others all -1 (or -1, 1,1,1&c). This reminded me of vectors on a computer where y increments downward. Also of quaternions where three dimensions are spatial and the last dimension some function of an angle. That last dimension as a function of change is a delta-V so, I say, be a function of t. Anyway whenever needed, you can transform the Minkowski to Euclid. Maybe with a quaternion.

Mostly chapter 2 teaches graph theory. You are at point a in space and time. After the collider-experient, you get b. What's b? This book concerns the connected-graph, so that's the "simplification". Feynman adds: an orientation (thus our graph becomes an oriented graph), a D-dimensional vector p (the momentum) and a number m (the mass). Turn that graph into an equation, says Feynman. That means a horrendous integral. We can't even solve an integral for a Gaussian or an ellipse. So, turn it into something a computer can solve. Here this means: turn it all into differential-equations. Profit!! So, back to the integral: if you want a single number at the end, you need boundaries on that wiggly line on the left. Apparently this is the step where the gnomes stole everyone's underwear.

Yan-Qing Ma and Zhi-Feng Liu have solved the boundary problem. It's linear algebra - and a lot of it. Physicists will need a computer for this too. FASTER QUIETER 4/1/23 Analog for diffy-Q.

Upload #202: in controversies born

In with the new; and here's why I pulled back sura 77 and cut down her project.

A couple years ago I'd tried, but got bogged in, a side-bar mission for "Jesus’ Arraignment". That "Arraignment" project proposed a now-lost sura perhaps known to a Latin scribe and to John Damascene. The sidebar was going to look into Nicetas’ own Greek Quran.

I'd based my work heavily upon Christian Hoegel. I figured I should at least look into Patrilogia Graece. This, I think, has made a real project out of the Greek Quran: "The Near-Faithful Greek Qurân". Also it helped me organise "Arraignment" better.

Also sorely-needed around here was a peek at sura 17. I've not really explained all sura 17 in one place yet but "Misquoting Qurân" should serve as that peek - where its relationship to earlier work. In the meantime "The Balance Restored" on sura 83, I've decided, must use sura 17 which means also 77.

Madrassa.

Proxima Centauri b used to be even worse

Now that we are fairly-sure that Proxima b has its other planet on the inward side and not the outer, we have a handle on this system's history, at least over the last few million years. Based on PBS - it's not looking good.

A system with a fluid centre and two orbiters exists right here: it's Jupiter. Io (with Amáltheia) is being pulled inbound. The other three Galileians are taking that energy to go outbound. To the extent Phobos is Mars' fluid centre similar is happening to Deimos.

Proxima b, then, used to be closer to the dwarfstar than it is today. Back then, said dwarfstar flared more and - says PBS - was warmer. (I didn't know this last was true.)

It was also closer to what they're calling "Proxima d" so I imagine the local tides were godawful as well.

In short, if there ever be life on b, someone must seed it from outside.

ParaNabataean Spanish

THERE's a clickbait title! Anyway - I am reading UChicago's third volume of the Oriental(ist) Institute's "Late Antique and Mediaeval Islamic Near East" series.

They seem to be free. The third one, despite that, looked awesome, so I bought (more exactly got my bro to buy for me) this. I seem to be a sucker like that. Anyway.

I was struck by what Ahmed al-Jallad had to say about transJordanian protoArabic. It is Semitic of course, using the Aramaic script - and the Nabati elite in fact used the/an Aramaic language, albeit with a full stock of recognisably-Arabic features. This form of Aramaic would fade away from the northwestern deserts over the centuries. In the next chapter Robert Hoyland is coming to describe how, starting AD 570ish, the next form of Aramaic which Christian Arabs shall hear, be Syriac. The LAMINE-3 authors seem unaware of Christian Palaestinian Aramaic but, to be fair, so were the Arabs.

Back to al-Jallad: Nabati Aramaic had the advantage that it jostled with Seleucid-koine Greek. The same names which the Nabataeans wrote in Aramaic, the Greeks also wrote. So we know how these Semites' vowels worked. How the Arabic nouns worked, then and there, was that a masculine name tended to end -o. Al-Jallad then must record how the practice decayed around northwest Arabia. This, al-Jallad conjectures, ends in the Ghassân phylarchy: whose official script treated the -w suffix as orthographic at best, as how we see "'Amr_un" to distinguish against "'Umar", and whose graffiti simply dispensed entirely, as at Jabal [U]says and the Harran.

On the other hand... we have Spanish. Portuguese, too. Where Latin had -us and old-Latin plus Greek had -os; the Romance in Iberia have -o. Assimilation with the Byzantines? Archaism from that Latin which came to Iberia first (dwenos -> bonus v. bueno)?

I'll call that this is speculation. I assert my blog's right to counter-speculate. Maybe the Arabic which came through North Africa was not the Qâric dialect, but held to some of its own archaisms.

The most famous Arabic name in Spain is Ṭāriq bin Ziyād (daddy Ziyād being a Berber mawla himself). This has come down to south-Spanish placenamery as "Torija"; or "Tarixa" or "Tarija". I also see "Torrez" as a given name to conversos and claimed to be like Norman-English "tower" but - I dunno. "Torrico" is claimed Piedmont and Argentine but again: I dunno; I see it in California.

I suspect that some western Arabs still ended the nominative-singular-masculine in -o, beneath the radar of the Quraysh; and certainly beneath that of the classical-Arabic from Iraq, who never got this far west. These met the Latins in Africa and Baetica fresh-off a century-plus-long Byzantine occupation. As creolisation happened, both sides agreed to end a noun -o.