The Cronenburger

The younger Cronenberg's Antiviral is at hand, for a price.

At $17/lb, the lab-grown Cronenburger competes with the highest artisanal beef. We are all, at least, agreed that Impossible meat is evil. But even the Cronenburger does not compete with the $2/lb grade you get in Burger King. (You; not me.)

Casey Handmer may or may not be the undiagnosed megalomaniac he acts like but at least his business attempts to compete without regulators. What does the Cronenburger have - warm fuzzies from Cernovich and the crunchy-cons?

This looks suspiciously like various schemes as to provide "alternatives" to the stuff we already have... by jacking up the price of the stuff we have. So once again we plebs get stuck with something that is less nutritious and more expensive. Just like how McD's quit using animal-lard to fry their chipped potatoes. We'll likely not get to eat the Cronenburger either; it bist ze bugz für du, serf.

Hebrew within Aramaic within Mishnaic Hebrew

Adil Steinsaltz published the Babylonian Talmud in English. There is lately some JPostery on this. It mentions Rabbi Rocksalt in the present-tense where the man had actually left for the world-to-come in 2020. Also the much-touted Talmud study in Asia-Pacific is perhaps overstated, although one can get an education there if one is motivated.

It is, however, the thought that counts: Jews nowadays want goys to learn Talmud. The Donin extracts and the Shulhan have been making them look bad unnecessarily (and, by extension, me). So far, Talmud-study seems mainly directed to Asians simply because they're not as reflexive as are Westerners.

Anyway I stumbled into some notation that the basis for the Talmud, the Mishnah, has some Aramaic passages. I'm not exactly surprised to hear of it, but I did wonder - how much of it; it turns out, not a lot. So little in fact that I'm unsure we can even stick a "dialect" label on it, although Palaestinian seems most-likely.

I find here that the Aramaic usually comes with some Hebrew. The Aramaic reads like the lowest stratum of wherever the passage occurs, usually the saying of some sage, but sometimes an ancient legal-ruling. The Hebrew tends to be in an introductory formula like הוּא הָיָה אוֹ׳, "he'd say". Or obvious glosses.

But even an Aramaic speaker can utter some Hebrew - especially if he's Jewish, lô? Pirkei Avot 2:6's Aramaic is as you drowned others, you have drowned; בסוֹף those who drowned you, shall drown. The verse bears two Hebrew phrases. The first is how this sage saw a skull bobbing in some water; that's a midrashic commentary. The second is that conjunction בסוֹף; literally it means "in the end". Even here that סוף root means the same in Aramaic, emphatic סוףא. I feel like its Hebraism could be from the same sage, nodding to the Jewish eschaton and Divine Justice. Why wouldn't it be?

In that light let's read Mishnah Sotah 9:15, where some annoying bore of a sage bemoans in Aramaic how every sage (implicitly not him, G-d no) is like a scribe and every scribe like a student [blah blah]. Here again is external Hebrew and internal Hebrew. Its Aramaic reads like the Islamic hadith in apocalyptic. In the externals, it's R. Eliezer the Great and he's starting the countdown after the Temple. Internally we have בְּעִיקְּבֿוֹת הַמָּשִׁיחַ. As the Pirkei: why not the Hebrew flourish, as long as we're in an apocalyptic context.

None of this is to be taken to challenge the external Hebrew glosses. I mean, we cannot know their verity but they seem reasonable. In particular Mishnah Sotah 9:15's frame: during Temple times the sages were competing with the ... Temple; so, by contrast, righteous. The pericope simply makes more sense after the Temple even if Eliezer didn't, himself, mention the Temple.

... well, such is my gemara so far. I can hazard a guess as to where one could find some other commentary on these passages.

The God of the Whigs

Rabbi Artson has some thoughts about Process Theology: G-d evolves along with the universe and human action.

This theology assumes that G-d is sane and experiences time at least as far as cause-and-effect. This is my assumption as well. And I've never claimed the Torah is the perfect book; as a Christian, I believe Christ is the perfect Word.

But Artson assumes that G-d regrets His creation. Artson permits acts as are contrary to Nature, such as homosexuality. Or at least Artson fails to take a stand here where he is happy to speak out about labour-rights and overadministration of the death penalty.

Let's look deeper into one Biblical administration of that penalty, against witchcraft. Lewis thought that witches were disgusting quislings worthy of death. We execute traitors and the most egregious murderers. We do not execute fools caught in a sting, nor aggravated-assaulters who fail to kill by sheer luck. They'd failed to do their heinous deeds; one could say, by Divine grace, so by that grace we spare their lives. It is in that spirit we should not execute witches. California did not execute even Charles Manson, the cult leader. I do not however say that Manson was an innocent. I would say that Lewis is right inasmuch as witches attempt to contact the dark powers.

Many nonwitches also deserve death; hey, we shall all face it some day. Ultimately G-d is Judge and permits witches to poison... themselves, with the curses and hatred they would wish upon others. The above illuminates the wisdom of Torah, I think.

Despite agreeing on Artson on these narrow points I don't know that he comes to them from the correct standpoint. The rabbi appears to see G-d as the volonté-générale of modern Jewish liberals. Would even Spinoza dare this point? His rabbis certainly didn't.

BACKDATE 6/27

Just in time

Midsummer occasionned a number of press-releases which could be juxtaposed. Here were two more, on the earliest moments of our solar-system. First, the shields went up in the face of a nearby supernova. I assume this happened during the formation of Jupiter; Earth, forming soon after, finished forming soon after that. Theia and Venus too, by extrapolation although we have very little if-any of these two rocks left, within reach.

I'm somewhat interested in that supernova. We know of other suns formed in our formative starburst, like HD 162826 in Hercules. More likely, it went like this 5 billion years ago: two very large stars were formed nearby, one imploded to create our two suns, then the other large star - which hadn't moved very far yet - imploded. So the two doomed stars would have formed close to one another. Yes I said imploded, not exploded; Type I explosions are standard-candles as aren't as big as Type II can get.

It goes both ways

Hotez in 2020 was one of those who thought antilockdown protests were bad and antiracism protests were good. In this he accompanies Topol, who urged the pharmaceuticals to stop-the-count so as to deny Trump a preëlection W; and the pharmaceutical companies themselves.

Hotez figures that we shouldn't debate Kennedy, as Kennedy is a politician not arguing in good faith. This is, itself, arguable, as Ryan Grim notes with some irony. What is unarguably true is that Hotez and Topol are political activists first, medical activists never. Hotez doesn't even allow responses in his own Twitter.

There's no value in debating Hotez (or Topol), but we can assuredly remind ourselves why not.

Alpha for the motor

ToughSF brings to our attention, specific power 17 W/g. That's the motors, not the batteries. Aircraft would need both. Also the motor takes up only 57.4 kg so delivers, by my maths, not a full megawatt but "only" 975 kW.

As efficiency goes, a megawatt would leak out 50 kW of heat; that's 48.75 kW with what they got, I calculate. Some of the 57.4 kg mass is being used for the cooling-system. And for the electronics to control it all. All this, and they haven't assembled the final result. I take that the assembly would go to fit whatever shape of craft they need to fly it.

But, when assembled, this motor is certainly better than the 6-8 W/g proposed for commercial hybrids in 2030. It promises to breach that 13 kW/kg specific-power barrier which NASA expects of battery-powered aircraft as aren't framed in balsam and require appreciable cargo. Hey maybe they can put that battery to use as part of the frame . . .

They're talking EVTOL flying-cars.

They're not cutting NASA's budget enough

So let's see. We have a SLS which is vastly inferior to everything SpaceX and now RocketLab are doing; and there's a Saturn mission being planned years before a useful tech exists to get there; and now there's a Mars sample return mission that just passed the eleven digit dollar mark.

Hey: at least the contractors are happy. And the Senators.

NASA needs to be disbanded.

Measuring time-distortion

Some experiments are planned to constrain Einstein's general-relativity.

These will be using ESA's EUCLID space-telescope (launching July!) and Arizona's DESI in operation since 2021. DESI is phasing out in 2026; to be replaced (so I gather) by the massive Square Kilometre Array radio project across South Africa and Australia. Assuming South Africa still exists by 2028.

Einstein will be facing off against Euler among whose equations was one to measure galaxy-movements. Up for measurement is the acceleration of the universe and the presence of dark-matter. Or, I suppose, if we need to be using Modified-Newton Dynamics "MOND".

At the same time (kek), another experiment is in the works: NIST's synchonisation. Again this tests Einstein; also - they are promising - dark matter. Why not dark energy too? NIST is designing for lightness on the rule of Every Gram Counts, possibly planning on the Falcon Heavy to bring the experiment up to where they need it which is terrastationary (NIST too vaguely says "geosynchronous").

Stockton Rush did a manslaughter

I apologise for joining a media circus but today it occurred to me that the same tech as visits Titanic is the tech we'll want for Venus' surface / low altitude, once we've got through the cloud deck.

In that light, Venereans will want the best tech and the best people available. Did Stockton Rush get the best people? Did OceanGate use the best materials?

Cernovich is right on this much: the tourists themselves (who weren't involved with the company) did nothing wrong. It is good to explore; it is so much better to explore on one's own dime, leaving taxpayers (as far possible) out of it.

But OceanGate, it seems, did not give good value for the dollar. At least the captain went down with the ship, I suppose.

DOWN THE WELL 8 PM MST: Oh, so we knew since Sunday.

On those school closures

Much touted in the usual sites is how test scores fell when school was out, school being out due a plague going on and stuff. Is (aptly-named) "HotAir" the best place we can get answers?

Against such gaseous opportunists, @julia_doubleday yesterday poasted: COVID causes cognitive damage, we’ve known it for years, and while outlets like WaPo blamed dropping scores on “lockdown” with zero evidence, the kids continued to get reinfected. Winchell Chung has repoasted that to his @nyrath account.

Julia Marie added the rhetorical flourish / tantrum How much worse is this gonna have to get, above which I'm hoping to rise, because that stuff is obnoxious. More: these flourishes hint that the preceding take is going to be a hot steamy smelly one.

Anyway: I am not denying that Long Covid has neural effects. Part of the ongoing Kennedy controversy is that the vaccine has effects. Think what the actual virus could do.

As for those test scores - some thought might further go toward the Floyd effect, where we are simply gliding over such discipline upon such students as, shall we say, take up more resources. So their grades suffered. On the plus side, the closures kept the more-vulnerable students away from their bullies who, as noted, simultaneously weren't being disciplined. It's been noted that suicide-rates fell. Assuming that deep-depressives' grades suffer, if they remained alive during that time this - also - stands to lower the average test scores. But at least they lived.

@julia_doubleday and the rest of the HECKIN' LERV SCIENCE crowd might, in any case, ask how come Florida's tests didn't decline. Floridan children should have caught more Covid and, thereby, lost more points than (say) Los Angeles children.

DeSantis, I think, falsifies @julia_doubleday's thesis. With much more than "zero" evidence.

UPDATE 8:40 PM MST: Which is not to say I'm supporting DeSantis. He's antivaccine, not just antimandate.

Two mercurylikes at TRAPPIST

I was at Nederland yesterday; the library had an exhibit on-loan from NASA, aimed at the kids. As a not-kid, I can report that the exhibit was a fine one. If it seemed incomplete, most of that is from the pace of discovery being so swift.

Venus is, to some, our very own exoplanet. Courtesy (now) the James Webb: Venuslikes should be visible elsewhere, through the scattering their large atmospheres and cloud-decks would force. We appear to be searching the Venus belts in earnest. Like LP 890-9; but we're here for TRAPPIST 1.

The atmo is detectable through repeated transits; temperature, through when they revolve furthest from the stellar disc. The closer-planets have repeated those transits more-often. (Also, the warmer worlds shine brighter; although being closer they might be canceled by the star's brightness.) Accordingly, the data is coming to us from the inside-out.

One Nederland diagram had insolation against stellar-temperature; Venus held the 1.9 S_⊕ left-hand edge, TRAPPIST 1-b and -c apparently being too hot for the graph. 1-b lately got ruled a supermercury but, most should have expected it would be. Now it appears 1-c is airless too.

1-d and 1-e were on the Ned chart so - they might be JWST's next target. 1-d is closer to Mars' radius and density, and gets more light than Earth gets; I've every expectation this one is airless too. I guess we'll need to await 1-e.

UPDATE 6/22: Paul Gilster weighs in. LHS 3844 and GJ 1252 are similar: their planets have been marked as airless too. That TRAPPIST is a flarestar may have something to do with its planets' airlessness. Proxima b (and d) would be in the same boat I think.

As long as here be liars, there will be censorship

There may be something in the "Elliott" name which impels the clan to affirm lies; here is Thomas. With deep thoughts on June 19. I was more-profitably employed on that day.

We read here the common The South Was Right! apologetic, which honestly I had thought we'd abandoned a decade or a century ago; but creationists still exist, and in a decade from now we'll still be hearing about THE VAXX!.

I'm on-board with Elliott points #1-4: Lincoln was a politician leading a war, and in war we make compromises. Lincoln wasn't yet ready to free the slaves in Delaware (very close to DC) nor Kentucky (recently neutral). This foreshadows #8 - when DE, KY (with MS and... NJ) opposed Amendment XIII. (NJ looks like a proxy for NYC and Long-guy-land, also.)

It's #5-7 to which I object:

5) Lincoln was racist and thought blacks & whites could never co-exist. He told a group of free blacks who visited the White House [blah blah]
6) Virtually every slave in the U.S. came from slave ship operators based in Northern states. For example, between 1755-1766, Massachusetts imported 23,000 African slaves. After importing slaves was made illegal in 1808, northern states continued importing approx. 40k/yr.
7) The South's leading men morally opposed slavery & believed "the influence of Christianity" would eventually cleanse the south of the institution

On (5), of course the #woke know this and have pulled down Lincoln memorials as a result. Against that, the very-#woke Professor Loewen has pointed out that Lincoln became antiracist over the course of the war, and had architected [if that's a word] some version of "Reconstruction" which programme was later carried out by the Radicals in the late 1860s. "He said things" as a politician in context of a political struggle, after which said struggle ends up shifting, is hardly a "Dunk". Look at Obama's stance on "gay marriage" in 2008.

On (6), the slave-trade had been banned as an international concern, bankrupting the town Salem in Massachusetts IIRC. States like Connecticut and New Jersey also suffered from this ban. The slave-trade then became internal. Virginia had a "buck" system, per Tariq Nasheed; breeding new slaves in-house and selling them downriver. Historians if ethical should not elide an early 1800s situation with the late 1850s.

On (7), two words - "Reactionary Enlightenment". ("Confederate Constitution" would do, as well.) I repeat it is an unethical move to mention anyone prior to 1860; but here, I certainly would not have mentioned Washington, who went to some lengths to chain his escaped slaves back into bondage. "Ona Judge", man. (Reed moar.) Moving to the Unpleasantness: 'twas noted in the Twitter thread that Jefferson Davis believed in the institution as much as did Calhoun, and as Fitzhugh. The CSA had a few thinkers who planned forward to the phasing-out of The Peculiar Institution. I wouldn't have mentioned Lee and Jackson; I would have gone more to Longstreet and (not-a-Christian) Benjamin. But that's if I wanted to help Elliott out, which at this point I really don't.

Blacks know, hereby, that there still exists a market for this tripe among the huwite population. So do reasonably-educated nice white midwits.

That Elliott feels free even now to spout these easily-debunked lies (even where he didn't have to), and that Cernovich will link to the thread... well, that's why #BLM still finds recruits, and suckers. And that is why the non-Right sleeps well at night supporting censorship against the Right.

SAILER 6/21: The facts, as we have them.

The Comma

Looking around today I came across one "Berean Patriot", a Christian student of that Bible. Internally I brace myself when I see "Christian!" and "patriot!!" in juxtaposition; but this time I thank He Who Is Above All Things that I chose tolerance, on account the BP knows his stuff.

Given that the Patriot knows his stuff, of interest is his defence of the Johannine Comma in that first Catholic Epistle. The Patriot is not a KJV-bro; if the Patriot defends a reading, it is because he honestly believes in it.

You know "orthodox corruption of scripture"? Claromontanus and Bezae (on opposite sides) have taught us that corruption can extend so far it stretches against orthodoxy. The Comma is Trinitarian, sure. But - the Patriot points out - for some generations under the first Constantines (excepting Julian), the full weight of Empire went forth on the Eunomian side. The "Alexandrian/-ine" (Ephesian?) text might actually be a Eunomian project, or at least subordinationist; this Epistle's Latin translation, as it happens, is from the Alexandrine text. The oldest surviving Latin of 1 John is the Fuldensis, which omits the Comma. Theodosius, for all his support of the Antiochene (fuller) text for the Gospels (including John), might not have dared put the Comma back into John's Epistle. And the Church of the East never included the Comma in Syriac, to this day.

We can quibble this or that. I think more highly of Nestorius and of the Oriental Syriac Church than the Patriot seems to. Some commenters have pointed out not only that the Fuldensis omits the Comma but that claims that Jerome knew it appear forged. UPDATE 7/8: Also: the Alexandrine tradition - e.g. Vaticanus - approved high-Christology Hebrews as Pauline, which not everyone did, a skepticism Theodoret of Cyr noted of the Eunomia. I should add that Latins, even where unaware of Pauline authorship of Hebrews, tended to accept it as from Barnabas, with equal apostolic authority. It's a bit much to blame Alexandrine deviations upon heresies, at least on this one.

Back to 1 John and the Comma: this too entered most the other Latin MSS. Also if the subordinationists under the Vandal Kingdom accepted the Comma, that's a strong hint that Latin MSS with the Comma were normative in Africa before the Fuldensis.

The Fuldensis codex may well be a monument to a forgotten strain in Christendom. I'd thought I'd heard of it and - sure enough - the BP notes that it contained a Tatianic harmony, "Western Recensionist" per Barker and now Zola. In Armenia the Marcionites, also subordinationist in their way, were adopting a parallel harmony in their Grabar. Marcionites and Paulicians might not accept 1 John, any of 1 John. But Eunomians accepted what they accepted of it, and Nestorius and the East never questioned that Comma-less version of it. Might Tatian have been a subordinationist before Arius and the Eusebii?

Why was Stargate Retaliation so bad?

Waaay back in the 1990s I saw (and much enjoyed) Devlin-Emmerich Stargate. I didn't bother with the novelisation but I did pick up its sequel William A "Bill" McCay's Stargate Rebellion and - honestly, enjoyed that too. So I eagerly bought Stargate Retaliation but did not finish it. I forgot last week why 1996?7?-me got "filtered" so, seeing this book again at a library-sale for $4, I tried it again.

That McCay was following the demotic papyrus, and not the moving-hieroglyph, explains some discrepancies between what we all saw on screen and what I've been reading. Such as this frump being drawn as forty-year-old Jessica Rabbit from Texas. Might also explain why McCay's vision contributed so little to SG-1 which first season was 1997.

McCay's first book in the series, which again is the book after the novelisation which he didn't write, concerned Abydos if the US military, US politicians, and US mining-interests all jumped in on the pie of magic-minerals and FtL tech. I generally believed that the characters we met in the first movie all got justice and that McCay did well with the politics and economics of it all.

Then the third/second book happened. I can't really improve upon bullethead; I'll just say - now I remember what tossed me off the book. Mostly: it was Daniel.

Suddenly the self-insert for all us Bronze-Age mythology nerds had turned into a selfish jerk, a dumb "Foxtrot-Bravo". Now: I wouldn't actually mind this; we've all got rough edges, and Dr Jackson had got isekai'd having been just kicked out of his university and - further - wasn't necessarily everyone's buddy in the Air Force, either (or was it the Marines?). Jackson has moments of snideness in SG-1 too. My problem is that this particular character-arc belonged in McCay's first sequel-book; not after having saved Abydos a second time, this time from American Capitalism.

Shauri hadn't exactly made her case, either.

A cascade of "idiot balls", to use bullethead's term, were rained upon the plot; mostly around how trusting all the urt-men are about those two gates-to-vengeful-gods. (This will be a recurrent plot-point in SG-1. Which handles it lightyears better.)

bullethead overall thinks that the book which McCay wanted to write was the next one: Retribution. McCay acknowledges Devlin (and maybe Emmerich) for giving advice as to what sort of story this movie would develop into. Interestingly McCay had offered no such acknowledgement in Rebellion.

It's arguable McCay even needed to follow Devlin's advice; we've learnt from the Independence Day sequel what fools Devlin and Emmerich be. Mind you back then we didn't know that these two were fools; Independence Day had just come out and was just as much silly fun as was Stargate. But I wonder now if [the third act of] Independence Day was intended as that Stargate sequel. The technologically-advanced aliens are now coming to Earth.

- but that means we need a reason they're not coming to Abydos. So... was Stargate Retaliation the interquel? Suppose: McCay, simply to keep Devlin sweet, needed to bring an uneasily-peaceful Abydos to a point where Everything Falls Apart.

Ehh. All I know is that McCay did it bad.

Toaff our Donin

In the spirit of Nicholas Donin, Ariel Toaff aired out some dirty Jewish laundry which the counter-Jewish outposts quickly discovered. Toaff then came under pressure but, where Donin simply jumped the Tiber; Toaff revised his own book. Meanwhile the goys had Saved Receipts. Bernard M. Smith a week ago reviewed the Receipts. (I don't know what's up with the URL.)

Between a Donin and (say) a Cofnas: I am personally more of a Cofnas, despite being a Tiberjumper myself. I'll grant to counter-Jewish rhetoric a respectful hearing; I find much of this rhetoric overblown. This may mark me as a "marrano" to my peers on both sides of the river. Toaff, I gather, might be sympathetic to the marrano position, inasmuch as the marrano was a creature of the Sephardic experience.

For Toaff: the Jew in the Mediterranean was truly a man of both worlds, Catholic (not - by then - Orthodox) and Islamic. This Jew disliked Christianity but also disliked Islam. Christianity if an evil might be a similarly-survivable evil. Across the Massif, Alps, and Danube: Jewish life was harsher. Jews there interfaced with German Catholicism and Slavic Orthodoxy; then later the Lutherans in their Prussian expression. Anyone who was willing to become a Christian up there became a Christian - and never looked back. The Jews surviving Norwich fled; so did most of the Rhine. The Netherlands took in Sephardic Jews like Baruch d'Espinoza before Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazim. The marrano was impossible in northern Europe.

Ashkenaz survivors were left on their own, with few means to play off "both sides", since surrounded by Christians any such sides would be in closer concert, against the Jew. Ashkenaz hostility to the Cross descended into hostility to any crucial symbols, even unto signing their names with "X" if illiterate in Latin languages. The Balkans tell us that putting up a cross on their stores would keep away "vampires"; this, I think, might be a joke, if not one as amuses me. Over here immigrants into Ellis Island had to mark something; they were told "keikel", so they would draw a circle like tic-tac-toe. I could go on but I am beginning to feel as if I shouldn't.

Toaff went on.

Toaff documented that East German and Slavic Jewry came to Italy with much less tolerance for Christian culture than the natives did. Toaff also noted that the great northern steppes and forests hosted some superstitions, some Jewish but also some pagan. Vampires drink blood; Jews had come to the north not drinking blood. But what's an antisemite (like Mike Enoch back in the day) without caring about semites? A taboo can easily turn into a fetish. And an ostensible convert from paganism might become a vodoun.

It is into, exactly, voodoo that we should understand what happened to Simon of Trent. Or into Ed Buck or Bryan Singer. UPDATE 6/20: Or in Southie.

Egyptian Christianity was wild

We last heard from Mina Monier alongside Joan Taylor, in reference to the Arabic / Dura synopsis, on the Passion. Now Monier is on the case of the sequel to Mark which, in Arabic, comes after the Passion. That's right; we're getting into the Longer Ending, but more: some MSS survive with a coda yea verily even unto that.

First comes a scholion defending that Longer Ending, as available to Irenaeus's πρὸς τὰς αἱρέσεις and (correctly) ascribed to its third treatise (chapter 10 if we're counting). Next comes the Ascension, with the Egyptian date "Παχών 10" in year 32 after the Nativity. Monier asks: why note the Egyptians? Monier then brings Cairensis 10735, concerning exactly the Nativity, starting with John's conception in the month of Thoth.

The concern with dates in an Egyptian calendar strikes me as a challenge to other calendars, starting with the Hellenistic and Jewish calendars. Whether or not they come from the same source, they come from the same community. Monier further transmits Elliot 2006 that Cairensis 10735 although synoptic with Matthew and Luke brings in lore outside Matthew and Luke.

Overall Egypt came to copy orthodox Christian texts, late. The Sahidic Gospels are translated from Alexandrine and not from any flavour of "Western"; and the Greek papyri don't really start until the end of the second-century. (Which is a longstanding annoyance to historians of the Christian text, on account Egypt is the best environment to preserve this stuff.) But Egypt did love to copy nonorthodox text.

Which leads (back) to Joan Taylor. Taylor ponders the Cerinthus tradition. After dismissing Epiphanius (Taylor could have gone still further, against that one's goofs concerning the "Alogoi"); Taylor narrows down Cerinthus' teachings. Which go against Orthodoxy on whom, exactly, should Christians venerate as the Ark of the shekinah.

We've been hearing rumbles elsewhere that the Church preserved as much Mark as we got, precisely to keep it away from the heretics. Yes yes Matthew and Luke exist; but Matthew came with its own heretics in the form of the Ebionites, and as for Luke's partisans - over in Sinope, they spawned Marcion. There seems to have been no choice but to accept both, adding some version of old Mark as well and hey why not John too.

Old Syriac, on Mark

The Evangelical Textual Criticism blog has posted a collection of free papers on the end of Mark's evangel. This is going to be a content-farm of the most blessed order.

Some we've met already, like Anne Boud’hors and Sofía Torallas Tovar on the Sahidic Mark; a Markan conference could hardly keep those two away. Some we are not meeting, like those Palaestinian lectionary-palimpsests; a pity, that. For now we'll talk David G. K. Taylor, on Syriac; with some intersect with Nicholas J. Zola on the Diatessaron. Taylor and Zola are cautious about "Tatianic" readings: they allow mainly that a harmony did exist in Syriac (and in Armenian translation of Ephrem) and (especially Zola) that this harmony included the Longer Ending vv. 9-20.

One point here that I think we're all coming to appreciate is the vast improvement for reading palimpsest, since the days of Dunlop-Gibson, her twin, and Harris. Taylor has pointed out that the 1910 publication of Sinai "S" was just wrong in many places, to the degree he's promising a new edition. Exciting news!

One thing Taylor's not changing, relevant here, is that "S" Mark stops abruptly at v. 8, translating phobountai gar as "because they were afraid" [of the vision]; gar ending a sentence is so rare in Greek (or in Coptic) that most interpreters assume it's a truncation as in whatever Cain might have said to Abel before heading to the field. This implies "S" had a base text which ended with gar. Given Zola's findings, I find difficult to doubt that "S" knew the longer-ending. Maybe "S" had lost direct access to Tatian - per Joosten, "S" or its sources sometimes corrected the basis away from Tatian. If I may speculate: the base texts upon which "S" relied had posted - like many Coptic manuscripts - a warning that what follows isn't universally accepted. "S" duly dropped those verses, without comment.

Taylor observes that the other Old-Syriac, the Curetonian, has suffered adulteration. First its base-text was updated toward the Greek. (Somewhere around here is the Matthew palimpsest recently published. Taylor doesn't cite Joosten, but they're in agreement.) Then C itself lost many sheaves; in AD 1222 the missing pages got replaced by Peshitta. And finally, I guess, C got published, hopefully in a better state than S got.

Because Taylor avoids Joosten, Taylor expresses surprise that P maintains harmonies in the Longer Ending which agree with Ephrem and the Arabic, without correcting them toward Greek like S did. Joosten had an explanation: P was an independent project with more tolerance toward the old harmony than S did.

Personally I am now wondering if the Longer Ending came to Mark and to "the Diatesseron" from some other source entirely. I am thinking of Justin's harmony. He used one. He taught Tatian. This harmony would simply be adopted by Tatian; contemporaneously, it got into Mark which was the only gospel by-then capable of supporting a post-tomb appendix.

BEBOP

Here's a Transit Of Interest: BEBOP-1. The weebs who named this project were looking at "Binaries Escorted By Orbiting Planets". They used the TESS so, on that serial, it's TOI-1338.

So: the point to it all. The main star 1301 lightyears away is 1.13 M_⊙ F8, so hot; a 0.31 M_⊙ dwarf tightly orbits that. Back in 2020, TESS found a transit at 95.2 days. Given the total mass of the inner stars, Kepler suggests 0.4607 AU. BEBOP did not find a mass for the transit; the radial-velocity aberration fell below parameters. (NASA is dumb.) Planet was too light, and not dense enough. The BEBOP crew set out to constrain the mass. Well... they've constrained it to very light indeed, because they still ain't found it. In a binary system, the red dwarf drowns out a lot of fluctuation.

But they did find some regular fluctuations - at 215.5 ± 3.3 days (they could probably refine this). Also although the radial velocity is only good for msini, here 0.217 Jupiters; much more than that, given the constraints on the inner planet's (low) mass, allow BEBOP to peg a range around the outer planet just for dynamical-stability. That's 65.2 ± 11.8 M_⊕ so, Saturn range. I don't know if this signature means they need to adjust the claimed Marslike eccentricity 0.09 for the inner one. (Probably not.)

So that's one planet with a radius but only a maximum mass, and another planet with a mass-range and, anyone's guess to its radius. Some minima and maxima might be considered; and if the inner planet is fluffy then the outer one should be considered a Saturnlike. One should think.

The BEBOP crew do think that the JWST might be good for this system. Specifically the inner one.

As to potential worldbuilders: Fitzmaurice has reported that a 2:1 resonance is unstable. The moon Ganymede might dispute that; but then, we haven't found any other planets in this system yet. A third planet - if not the 3 in 4:3:2 - might be the 1 in 4:2:1 outside both so in the habitable-zone. So I'm reserving judgement on BEBOP's longwinded look at this system's history. Early system-histories are notoriously chaotic and violent.

Future of the system: if Io is guide, the inner red-dwarf is raising tides and spiraling closer to the F8 main-sequence. I don't give it even to the end of the F8's life. Adding that mass to the F8 will speed up the F8's own time of death. The two planets will be further away than they are now; but not far enough away, so this red-giant is going to swallow both.

The hard pass

Here's a SF by Owen D. Pomery about the end of nonrenewable resources in... a galaxy.

The Expanse was sus-enuff in its claims that Ceres would run out of water before Mars was terraformed. (Phosphour would have been a better macguffin.) "Galaxy" implies FtL travel. What's the nonrenewable? Dilithium crystals?

Apropos of nothing I've been enjoying some comfy Firefly SF on RoyalRoad. Not the hardest SF but it's got to be better than the bien-pensant I-HEART-SCIENCE stuff on Twitter. (If you step past the LitRPG lorry-victims.) "Hard Luck Hermit" is okay if a bit fedora on religion; this one develops a plot about a, er, plot. "Flights of the Addax", which I'm reading betwixt the first one's updates, has a (too?) human universe.

I concede "HLH" is arguably on the isekai side itself inasmuch as the main-character is about the only human who's managed off of Earth. But at least the m.c. seems a believably imperfect soul; and the aliens around him aren't all 2.33m amazons and/or catgirls like some other SF authors this blog shan't be naming tonight. Pomery in-fairness seems resistant to this temptation; his wankery goes more to the political. (I suppose the resources aren't sufficient to feed the purple amazons.)

Stratospheric nuclear balloon

Apparently before I was considering Venus the Soviets were considering Earth. (At least it was not a Pluto Ramjet.) Anyway in 2015 somebody blogged it but I missed it.

Shielding requirements can be lowered if we agree not to have humans on board. As for the fuel: I assume it was plutonium. We can drop that mass by using something with lower mass for criticality. Americium-242? Curium-247? ... antimatter . . .?

Still looks like a big blimp to nowhere. We haven't even mastered the blimp without nukes.

Although... how about a superstratospheric balloon?

The lifting gas can just be hydrogen over oxygen-starved 30 km, and we'd need less of it on account we might just heat its balloon with a black or gold-painted coating. There might be questions on - where is this thing travelling to. Less atmosphere; difficult to use propellers. But it's nuclear powered so maybe the propellers go real real fast.

Absolutely looks like something for Venus on account it's unlikely we'll want it for Earth (and antimatter is cheaper in space anyway).

A better MOXI?

Say we have lots of energy and lots of carbon-dioxide; and you want to, like, breathe. Like if you're down a mine. Or in bad air on our own Moon. I would add Venus but, well, you saw THAT coming. Mars is a possibility as well on account the thus-far tested tech, MOXI, may well be less-efficient as straining out Mars' free oxygen like we do on Earth with noble-gasses.

So: Warwick's semiconductor photosynthesis. Especially if we're not bothering with light for plants. I don't know how well it goes with the regolith method.

INTERJECT 8/22: I believe I have found the original paper, with the barest thanks to Warwick inasmuch as they named Sophia Haussener and Katharina Brinkert (but not even the lead author Byron Ross). This scheme still leaves carbon-monoxide as a byproduct, which admittedly is great for doing reductive chemistry elsewhere like getting metals out of oxides. Otherwise it will be soaking up water to create pure hydrogen or methane. Overall I recommend this less to humans so much as for rockets. Humans in a long-term colony will prefer acetates with their oxygen.

I'm meanwhile seriously wondering about collecting carbon high in Earth atmosphere and shipping it up to LEO and beyond. As you may know I don't give a rat's about "climate change"... as yet. But we do have lots of carbon here, arguably more than plants and chemists need; and rather than bury it in the ground, mayyyybe we could lift it over to carbon-poor environments, like space-habitats in nearby rocky planetoids and oh look at that moon we got.

What to do with floating rocks

Hopefully we'll be building a space-economy. It were best not to rely upon the Musk monopoly - more to the point upon Musk's enemies - to move refined ores up from Earth. 'Tis cheaper to move ores from our own Moon. Problem: our Moon hasn't got everything. Volatiles remain a sore point, oxygen aside. Also, how about clearing our vicinity of dangerous meteors?

If the rock is full of volatiles, here's how to pluck the volatiles so as not to lose them again as propellant. "Electric sails" are proposed (woot!). As for how a volatile-rich rock even gets close to the Sun: that would be a comet, or small Ceresoid after nudging eccentricity such that a 67P crosses down here. Also lately we've been hearing that even the "rocky" rocks aren't wholly dried out just yet.

For the actual asteroids: some ponder a Bennu hab. A team of humans, I suppose, could respin it into livable dirt and then live in some sealed compartment in the dirt. Problem with that: it's on an orbit to nowhere. We'd like something with regular visits to Earth or at least to some colony with women in it.

Nyrath has been hyping Daniel Suarez - a lot, so I might as well put a marker in here. I may or may not get around to reading Suarez given his climate-change position, namely that he has one, which he shouldn't (it drives men mad). Suarez would even base his economy on carbon-credits (like I said: mad). But anyway.

Back to Suarez's astrophysics, which - Gell-Mann aside - can perhaps be evaluated independently. He suggests disassembling the rocks, moving the rocks to orbits more-convenient to near-Earth, and manufacturing habitats from the raws.

The scouts' speeches

TheTorah.com posted - very recently - two articles on Numbers 13-14, the Account of the Scouts. Interestingly they're opposite what one might think: David Frankel the rabbi is doing a higher-criticism whilst Sarah Schwartz the lay professor is explicating the text we got.

Numbers 13-14 presents two speeches, both propagandal if that's a word. For Schwartz, the first displays Aristotelian rhetoric, which is fair-enough; but the second descends to demagoguery. Meanwhile the latter speech foreshadows Ezekiel 36:13, suggesting that they're blaspheming the Golden Tablets of Elohim. Also in the second, Caleb - paragon of the best spy of the first speech - must enlist Joshua-bar-Nun to counter the demagogues. Finally - Numbers 14:10 - the LORD Himself delivers the smackdown. And it's forty more(?) years for the rest of us!

... well, so it went in Septuagint. It had to be 42 years in the desert in that famously-harmonic text on account Numbers 13-14 seems to be an interweaving. The Priest P figured the four decades as Divine Justice for the demagogues. Another account started the wilderness-stretch earlier; so the first speech is just... a speech. LXX is a late stage of harmony but earlier stages had interposed; Joshua, for a start, serves to foreshadow Joshua's own book upcoming. It'd be interesting to see what the Samaritans made of all this (or even the Samareitikon).

As for the second speech: the people whipped up by this awful speech want to stone somebody. For Frankel, the second account is Priestly; it has no respect for other accounts. These people can aim their slings at no other than at Moses and Aaron. It's the redactor who has interposed other characters, like Joshua. Frankel would add: he's added Caleb too. Caleb, standing in for the first speech, had done some rhetoric but wasn't the liar of the second speech. Frankel figured that Numbers 14:38 was a redaction also, to spare Joshua from the wrath - and Caleb too because why-not.

Differential vector control

This blog has mentioned Stoke Space twice; first on reusing roggets, which needn't detain us. Four months ago we heard about their methane burner. This last one, Stoke say, may be made lightweight enough they can do without gimbaling. "The best part is no part" as Elon taught them.

I'd not known they'd needed the differential thrust vector control in the first place. Well I suppose that's why we blog, to track our learning-process.

Are they considering detonation (rotary or not)? Or, since all the engines need to be same-as-possible: 3D printing?

The nineteen-hour day

In more boring-billion news: the day was nnnnnineteen hours. Over the whole 2000-800 megayear span postHuronian.

We have some good calculation of, say, the 23:30 hour day in the late Cretaceous; but these records get sparse before all those trilobites. For the Precambrian, Ross Mitchell et al. were working with Milankovitch cycles, in this case precession and obliquity. It seems these data appear in the fossil-record, at least recently. Thence calculation of solar tides.

Earth did have an ocean back then. However when this blue marble was spinning 19 hours (we already knew it was spinning at 19 hours at a point) the tides are weaker. They were weaker still when this was a white marble, as in Cryogenian. Solar tides are in the realm of Milankovitch and these were stronger. So the sun pulled, as the moon was dragging (weakly): they canceled out Earth's spin. That point turned out to be the end of the boring-billion span.

This was already predicted in theory but, you know - cool theory bro. There wasn't the fossil record for it; other constraints could have counteracted Milankovitch. Now we know they didn't.

I suppose Milankovitch didn't cancel the moon's rise to a higher orbit. I'd thought that would have made the lunar tides even weaker. But the solar tides got weaker first. At 800 Mya the resonance broke (before Sturtian / Cryogenian) and, since then, the moon has been rising in pure concert with the day's lengthening.

On to constraining Theia (for real) now?

Why Jews didn't copy The Exagogue

Next up (well, for this blog anyway): Miriam Ben Zeev Hofman in Daise & Hartman. This deals with Ezekiel the Egyptian's Exagōgē, a Greek play about Moses, who would then be the "exagogue" I suppose. It is NOT the haggada!

By which I mean - Moses is the protagonist. God isn't. When Moses has a vision about Sinai, he doesn't receive the Torah; God sits him on a throne and supplies to him the sceptre of Hellenistic royalty.

Of interest is that many Jews, even some (not all) Egyptian Jews, clearly did believe that Moses was a lawgiver. Ezekiel already had recourse to this second book of Septuagint. Gentiles agreed that Moses had delivered some precepts and ordinances. This much, irrespective of whatever goys thought of the laws in question - Apion thought they were terrible, Trogus (for one) defended them. Usually classical authors like Trogus approved of orderly laws just for being laws. So I guess I'm asking why Ezekiel isn't backing up Trogus.

Are we just missing Ezekiel's take? We have Ezekiel only from what Eusebius relays... and that, from Alexander Polyhistor. Eusebius, a quasi-Arian Christian whose very name implies the fear-of-God, had no problem with Moses-as-lawgiver. Would Polyhistor have thought otherwise? I don't see Polyhistor as an antinomian, nor as one who thought these particular laws were embarrassing; and he certainly wasn't hostile to the Jews as Jews. I'll go further: Ezekiel's throne vision takes the place of that famous Charlton Heston scene.

One thought is that the Torah is absent as simply being an anticlimax to the epic of Moses; especially as an epic as translates to the stage. The sceptre is the Torah, in symbolature. We can compare the Animal Apocalypse now in "1 Enoch".

But here's another thought. Ezekiel does not mention circumcision. Sure: he's Egyptian, and everyone be snippin'-willies by the Nile. He is speaking the Greek language and thereby appealing to Greeks, perhaps to do some "entryism". Another appeal to Greeks, mayhap, is in substituting Libya - that is, Cyrene - for Midian, elsewhere figured in the northwest Arabia. Hē Exagōgē isn't an argument for full Torah; it's an argument for Moses, against detractors like Agatharch and maybe Manetho.

Honestly I wonder if Ezekiel even bothered to snip his own sons. 1 Maccabees is coming, for him and for his.

BACKDATE 6/13

The first man in Jubilees

Paleojudaica has posted pointers to a few (legally!) free books on his blog; here we'll look at Daise & Hartman. First up is Eric Noffke's fascinating take on the primordial human.

Namely: there was a primordial human. Genesis 2:5+ is retconned before Genesis 1, basically; as to make this human, Adam. Sirach 49:16 would be that stage. Lilith seems unknown as yet, or to be ignored. Ezekiel 28:1-19 and Job 15:7-8 might exist before Genesis One was even composed, which might appeal to Russel Gmirkin who's been arguing that Genesis One belongs to the Greeks.

Mostly Noffke is interested in the Enochians. The Book of Watchers assumes that man and woman are weak in the face of angelic temptation; but the Dream Visions in its Animal Apocalypse form proposes man as a white bull who, unfortunately, sometimes breeds false. This, AA implies, because Eve had come out of the earth, not from Adam's rib and not from Divine creation. Spicy!

- so I checked in on Jubilees 2-3. First God created all the angels on the first day, Eden on the third, and man-and-woman only on the sixth. Jubilees 3 has then-unnamed woman (re?)created on the following week; Adam names her "my-wife" (lol). Adam only grants to his wife her own name (Eve) after leaving Eden.

This reads, to me, that Jubilees follows Watchers (and the Torah); not the Animal Apocalypse. Jubilees' Adam is just, well... a man. He is not a luminous being and he can sin like anyone else. Add that Jubilees 4 has not been found in Qumran and I'm seeing a bolster to Dugan, that Jubilees might not even know the Animal Apocalypse in any form.

If Dugan is right or, at least, arguable then Noffke, I suggest, could have postponed his take on Enoch 90 (also not Qumranian) until after his take on Enoch 93 (Qumranian).

BACKDATE 6/13

The Jewish Reliance of the Traveler

Averroes is widely lauded in the West for his philosophical work. Ibn Rushd wrote The Reliance of the Traveler. These authors were the same man. So now, Erich Bischoff and Thomas Dalton have brought Joseph Karo's שֻׁלְחָן עָרוּך from the Sephardic world to the Germans and the English (respectively).

The article I've linked comes from Bernard M. Smith, a Catholic. As a Catholic I expect Smith disapproves Dalton the NSDAP apologist. Smith still approves this book, inasmuch as Dalton appears to have transmitted Bischoff faithfully and Bischoff the original text, from mediaeval Hebrew.

I bring up Ibn Rushd because what he'd done was to summarise Sunnite fiqh in a more-or-less readable fashion, by which the average Muslim could abide. In Islam, fiqh is had through a bewildering array of ahadith (traditions) and practical "sunna" (how righteous Muslims are actually navigating life). Nobody can memorise all of it; a lot of it argues with itself; the majority of it is outright fraud. Ibn Rushd meant his book as a manual for the Muslim-on-the-go, so the Grenadan didn't make a total ass of himself at some port on his way to hajj. Karo likewise (if later): Shulhan `Arûk, for the North African Jew.

The "counterjihad" makes much of Ibn Rushd - because he was Averroes, a first-class intellect, presenting Islam as honestly he could, to fellow intelligent Muslims. Islam is still revealed, in this work, to be violently antisocial. Karo experienced Maghrebi Islam as it interfaced with dhimmi classes, Jews there being the last caste even allowed the dhimma. Karo reasoned that inasmuch as the sultan oppresses us; we must cheat the sultan, for our very survival.

[INTERJECT 7/17: Joseph Hertz pointed out that Shulhan `Arûk bans wifebeating. Christianity doesn't condone this; the Christian concept of marriage is that man and woman are one flesh in matrimony, so abuse would be selfharm. There is however wifebeating in Quran and in Maliki Sunna . . .]

Given that situation, I hold more sympathy to Karo than TOO holds. Imagine if the ruling caste is an evangelist for this egregious nonsense. What does a hapless Christian do - fight? Nah; best he do what the Shi'a do under Mamluk dominion. Consider The Benedict Option: hide under the radar, and subvert the authorities where possible.

If I am reading these translators and reviewer correctly: Karo went too far in Shulchan Aruch inasmuch as it subsumes the average citizen of a goyische (possibly tyrannical) nation, with the oppressors themselves; even if his oppressors were Barbary Pirates and Ottomans. Smith for his part is careful to warn that opposing a Merrick Garland is very, VERY different from being a jerk to dear Dr Rosenthal your family paediatrician. Perhaps Karo would have benefited from an Algerian Catholic editor; sadly he had little access to such, in his time.

It seems to me that rather than attacking this text, we who share Torah would do better to revise Shulchan Aruch, and then adopt it.

Davis Kedrosky is repellent

I'll link to his piece anyway, but I must warn my readers that Prof. Davis Kedrosky is playing dirty pool. I've done Kedrosky the grace not just to spell his name correctly but to link the original.

These are graces which Kedrosky did not afford to Jeff[rey] Fynn-Paul, whose essay I'd found two years ago. This essay and its upcoming book Not Stolen, Kedrosky does not link; instead footnoting This book is actively repellent, so you’ll have to find it yourself if you (for some reason) feel the need to read it.

Worse: Kedrosky misspells him "Jeffrey Flynn-Paul". This makes difficult to search the book in any engine, especially in somewhat-bad ones like Brave's or outright politicised-ones like DuckDuckGo.

Fynn-Paul in fact describes himself as a "centrist". Kedrosky portrays his-own-self as a fair man defending Diamond from critics who happen to be on the Left. These critics include Restall (moderately) and we could add Covey. But being a "centrist" in academia today is a dogwhistle apparently.

So Kedrosky throws F-P, to his Right, under the stone wheel. At least Kedrosky, the inethical one, has alerted us all that his own books are to be avoided. So, there's that.

Mauretania

Last night I caught wind of this genetic article on the Maghreb. Three populations merged to create the Mauretania as of the Punic era.

Mauretania rolled off the LGM / Upper Palaeolithic as the usual dirty bunch of foragers, culturally not so far off those "WHG" in Iberia whence they came. But these foragers never resumed mutual contact, after the warming. About 5500 BC, Early Neolithic peoples (not just practices) came in from Europe; which peoples had originally, themselves, migrated from the Levant. Some mixed with the locals and others didn't, although the latter happily accepted Neolithic practices. We're about at the onset of ceramics, maybe even goldworking.

Middle Neolithic occasioned another influx. This one was from the "east" more-directly. The paper thinks pastoralists; I'll say early "Berber" groups, like Kabylie / Canary / Zenaga. Still not any sort of camel tho'. Razib is questioning if the Sahara was insurmountable. But this is green-Sahara time. West-Africa might not be reachable but I do wonder about Fezzan and Chad.

We haven't got into that Punic era; for that, see here. The Canaanis and the Romans, concomitant with the introduction of the camel and the rise and fall of that Garamantian kingdom, upended Africa at the most basic level. So what we see as "Imazighen" today is mostly a late-antique phenomenon.

Zenaga and Kabylie are about all that's left of the older strata, of Middle-Neolithic pastorals. I doubt we have anything left of the non-Tamazight either native or from Iberia (possible those last survivors swarmed back into Tartessus).

Proto-sterol

Cholesterol is a fatty substance - a "sterol" - in modern eukaryotes including plants and animals. During the Boring Billion we had fossil evidence of eukaryotic algae (~1340 Mya, adopting chloroplasts) but not of the expected sterols. Now it seems the timespan has got a bit less boring: they went looking for something like a sterol, and found it.

These protosterol lifeforms might actually be an uncharted bacterial lineage rather than eukies; keeping in mind that sometimes bacteria and eukaryotes can form symbiosis, as with the aforementioned chloroplasts, or for that matter mitochondria.

At 800 Mya the para/protosterol was replaced, by a more Darwinian breed of life. The researchers are unsure on how the modern form was any improvement over the earlier form. I wonder if they'd considered nitrates.

The gypsy moths are annoying

We have a moth problem here in Colorado. Gypsy moths (which I recall had a different - prettier - caterpillar) were a problem in New England. The 1950s-era cure for the gypsy moth was lead arsenate.

Lead and arsenic have conventionally been considered as poisons but the compound was not considered a poison for reasons. New England went ahead and used that pesticide; then they used DDT, which conservatives love for reasons. Meanwhile Jonas Salk injected everybody against viruses which humans weren't catching.

(I'm not getting into the HIV / polio-vaccine theories in Africa; Wikipedia focuses on the oral vaccine, which Wiki correctly dismisses as an HIV vector.)

I think I prefer the moths. New England might likewise reconsider the moths: as a means to thin the forests and, thereby, also ticks and deer and Lyme. I suppose there's the kindling for fires to consider but, hey, that's what forestry is for. Maybe send the excess wood to Japan for satellites.

2-D TMDC for solar-power

As our space-presence grows, we need to scale up our power-generation, and in space ~1 AU that's best done with solar. Problem: solar-cells are bulky for the energy they deliver. The Starship could probably take what cells are used in space but the Starship isn't flying yet. We could use solar-powered cells as can be folded up (like the shield in the JWST) and deployed on a Falcon 9.

Zekun Hu, Da Lin, Jason Lynch, Kevin Xu, and Deep Jariwala via Cell Press are talking solar-cell minimisation.

As I dig into Hu's arXiv, one idea is organic polymers, currently at 19% powerconversion efficiency and "approaching maturity". Hu is more talking two-dimensional transition metal dichalcogenides. These - the paper claims - could get to 9.22%. That might not be awesome but it's lightweight and flexible, so can be delivered into space in volume.

As generation-per-mass goes: they claim over 100 W/g ("157 W g^-1" in the lab). I don't know how that depends on incident flux aka, how hard they're shining the light. At Venus that should be, what: 191 W/g and in its atmo we can slap it on our manta. Or, over Earth (or on polar Luna): just shine mirrors at it (bro) - like the MAPL-Experiment.

They did have a challenge manufacturing this stuff at-scale. Maybe they should manufacture it in space?

BACKDATE 6/7

When Jews disliked their own Torah

Checking in the anti's of Unz, we witnessed end-of-May a dustup between the counterjews and the countersemites. Michael A Hoffman II argued (against Dalton) that Jesus was a Jew who objected to what was about to become the Rabbinic consensus. Jesus would be a protoQaraite, if one might project; in tension with at least Paul, who later had to explain to Christians (not to Jews!) that "the letter mortifies but the spirit vivifies". Hoffman's piece goes on (and on) to discuss how nonQaraite/nonChristian Jews compiled the Mishna, whose successors commented upon that - in preference to Torah.

[INTERJECT 3/28/24: This is the same Hoffman who did A Candidate for the Order, and uttered similar comments over the late 1980s, which he doesn't much talk about these days.]

Some of us were awaiting E Michael Jones to cast the deciding vote. [UPDATE 1/12/24: hold on for the punchline] He hasn't (yet?). Instead, at the end of that month, Rebecca Scharbach Wollenberg came to AJR to promote her book saying the exact thing as Hoffman. Seriously: try to spot the daylight between these articles. If Hoffman's post were put beside The Closed Book in space you could deepfreeze a superconductor in their shade.

According to both: the rabbis, after receiving the Masoretic Text, decided they... didn't like it. On this I'd speculate: because the Temple was rubble and nobody had direct use for the "Tabernacle" text anymore; nor, we suppose, for the Temple-relevant traditions in Mishna. In fact that sort of talk tended to spark rebellions which Jews couldn't afford, especially after Trajan and Hadrian. At the same time the rabbis never dared "fix" their Bible, as scholars have endeavoured in our own times. Hoffman (now), Jones, and I would prefer that they had embraced Christ but, well, most didn't.

The rabbinate's solution: raise up Mishna as oral-Torah. Many traditions were related about how - for instance - Ezra "re"-compiled the Pentateuch (and others). Only later, in the Middle Ages, did Jews commence formal commentaries upon actual-Torah, as opposed to upon "oral-Torah". Or at least Jews in nonQara orthodoxy, as other orthodox might deem worthy of preservation.

As to Wollenberg's article: I might take those Ezra traditions a bit more seriously than she seems to take them. Ezra-ascribed apocalyptic was popular in Jewry, maybe even late Second Temple Jewry. Ezra's own book has (famously) two major recensions. Ezra's stature doesn't seem something which Torah-ambivalent Jews would simply latch onto, after the fact. And (as she seems to accept) modern Biblical scholarship tends to bolster the Ezra hypothesis, inasmuch as Holiness Code is generally considered a Second Temple interpolation inspiring a revision of, for instance, the Noah and Solomon-Temple cycles. If the Jews forgot that these editions happened, the very state of the text might have inspired them to speculate, as it would for Spinoza and Wellhausen.

BACKDATE 6/7. Also consider Piero Capelli ed. Daise & Hartman. Deuteronomy 20 after Hadrian was abruptly... no longer cited, for Jewish military revanchism.

UPDATE 1/12/24: I admit: I became Jones-curious between March and June 2023, Keeping An Open Mind afterward. No longer.

Catena Palestinensis in tripartite form

h/t Longacre and Ryan Sikes: Felix Albrecht thinks he's found the Old Greek Psalter. The first two-thirds of it anyway. With Patristic commentary.

The Greek Bible comes to us from Greek Christians, for the most part; Greek-speaking Jews having abandoned the old Alexandrine and Palaestinian translation(s) for the literalism of Aquila. Origen, basically just trying to sort out the translational mess in his (third) century, compiled various readings in his Hexapla. The fifth column was the Old Greek. And then apparently we Christians lost track of that. Such "Hexaplar" readings of Greek as we have tend Lucianic, that is revised from the OG.

Albrecht finds that the Greeks didn't quite lose the tradition so much as mislay (most of) it. Some of it can be had in Latin - that "Gallican" tradition, in whose lections we've found "2 Colossians". Albrecht further finds some witnesses to the Catena Palestinensis likewise untainted by Lucian.

The Catena is preserved in two forms, tripartite and bipartite. By "tripartite" we actually only have Psalms 1-100 so far; third volume lost. "Bipartite" runs Psalms 77-150 so first volume lost. Albrecht dismisses the bipartite tradition. The tripartite form, by contrast, is what is making him jump up and down with joy. MS Ra 1121 preserves OG for 1-50; Ra 1209 for 51-100 (and as noted 101+ is gone, for all we know might have gone on to 151-155 or beyond).

As for what even is this Catena: that's not a "col-lection" of psalms for liturgy, so much as a catena of commentary. But as commentary it must quote from the source. This metacommentary, then, gathers Origen, Eusebius, Didymus, Apollinaris and Theodoret. Origen is hardly a surprise. Eusebius and Theodoret interest me more: they would point to moderate-Arian use, so middle fourth century under Imperial oversight, I think. Might we be seeing this in Syriac one day...?

The tripartite catena later became subject to Lucianic revision. I see the hand of Theodosius at work, he who commissioned (again: I think) Jerome to do the Vulgate out West.

BACKDATE 6/7

Muratorian Canon: early-enough

Bouncing around Google Scholar as one does, I've run across claims that the Muratorian Fragment is late. The Fragment itself claims a date not long after the Shepherd by Hermas. But - maybe five years ago - it was noted that not all Christians are always honest. Also: it's a fragment. We're famously missing parts of the text, including mention of Mark and Matthew, of which at least Matthew should be noted by a post-Luke and post-Hermas author.

In favour of an early date, I'd raise absence of James and presence of Laodiceans and Alexandrians; pointing to a time when the canon was in dispute with a need to nail sh!t down. Irenaeus had perhaps started that process at least for the four gospels we all now accept; and Marcion famously had his Apostolicon, and his version of Luke (maybe also with Acts). But serious concern with the full "New Testament" seems later than the Murator, hence why scholarship (and Josh MacDowell) so care/s about the Murator.

I recall that the Murator parallels Papias, also. Murator is, in fact, mined for what Papias may have said about Luke; since Eusebius omits this, likely because Eusebius had no Papias, thus reliant upon Irenaeus and (maybe) Pierius.

But yeah: people care about the Murator, one way or another.

For my part I don't care as much as MacDowell et al. care/d, what Murator was up to, nor when. That it was able (in Latin) to pull from Papias is useful for what it says about Papias, whom everyone admits as a second-century muhaddith. I dislike the corner-cutting implicit in any pseudepigraph - if Murator is one. But it does seem to be transmitting its sources honestly.

BACKDATE 6/6

The inflatable aeroplane

Here's a fun design [h/t ToughSF]: the Venus stingray. Javid Bayandor from SUNY is acronyming it "BREEZE". Last I heard, there's a grant for it.

It's an inflatable aeroplane, so not your typical stodgy airship. It flaps around, so stays airborne that way; solar-panels and batteries would keep it aloft as long as the panels and batteries last. It should be light-enough to be launched from Earth. The main selling-point is that it is testable in Earth's atmosphere.

In practice I suspect that a big stupid zeppelin will last longer than the electronics, panels, and batteries will; especially if the clouds are made of, like, acid or something. Although: why not have that competition.

BACKDATE 6/5

Mars as Theia

Richard B. Firestone [h/t] thinks he's figured it all out, without the need for additional planets ejected from our System entirely. Velikovsky smiles.

One main takeaway is that Mars is Theia; Mars is what is left after the Moon-creating impact.

As for the other takeaway, Mercury was once a Venuslike but scraped into the photosphere of [then T Tauri] Sol. As a result the tilt of our Sun was caused by protoMercury so we no longer need a "Planet Nine" to explain that.

IT'S CRAP 6/17: Mars formed with protoEarth, all prior to the Theia impact. WORSE 11/3: Look not above... but below, for Theia's mantle and core.