California 3250 BC

Now that the Chumash are in the news, causing trouble in Kansas City; the grown-ups amongst us might consider the Chumash heritage. That's the Channel Islands in California; more of them survive in Santa Ynez.

The Chumash language-family is extinct except for what Spanish and Americans taught their ancestors to write in Latin-script. Enough of that survives to affirm that Chumash is an isolate. It may well be a survivor of the great fires and migrations. As to the migrations...

Elsewhere in California, we hear that "5200 years ago" (that is, before all those 1950 nukes) a lot of Mesoamericans spread through the Sonora over there. The Chumash, I venture, fended them off that particular coast. The interest in this migration comes from the 3200s BC date: this predates maize agriculture in California by nine centuries. We learn elsewhere today that this approaches the age of maize itself.

One theory is that the maize growers spoke languages similar to those of the new hunter-gatherers. Looking at the map, Serrano and Tongva are on the Uto- side of Uto-Aztecan. Northeast of them are Shoshone/Comanche peoples, also Uto-. That north/south divide in Uto-Aztecan is basically the Colorado River watershed, which lower basin is a nasty desert. And, later, subject to depredations of Navajo-Apache and later-still the Comanche.

On-topic: Uto-Aztecan, like old teosinte, seems a feature of the western side of the Divide. Only the Comanche and the Aztecs got out into the Atlantic (and how!). And now the Chumash apparently have followed them [UPDATE 12/1 without license]. As for maize, 20% of that genome is from the highlands. Proto-Otomí? Maybe the first maize-growers pushed the Uto-Aztecans northwest, after which the Uto-Aztecans finally learnt the recipe.

Even after getting proper maize, the researchers don't see this agriculture along the Cinnabar Sea affording an expedition potent enough to crush the former wave of Uto-Aztecans. More likely, they think, is trade across the desert. The language-barrier should be not-awful with only nine centuries apart; that's like, what, English and Frisian.

It'd be interesting to dive back into loanwords between Serrano, Shoshone, and Chumash. Words for local fish and brush, maybe?

HD 110067's six hellworlds

Last night a few science-alerts got loose about HD 110067. That Henry Draper catalogue-number means it was among 225300 stars which Annie Jump Cannon catalogued as of 1905 and published up to 1924. So: it's nearby and bright, as these things go: about a hundred light years off and a K type. It is now in the news for having six (6) planets.

You'll not want to visit any of them. They were found not by radial-velocity of the star but by transit. Indeed, they are close to the star: the outermost orbits just under 55 days, which is near exact 5/8 Mercury. These will be superheated by their sun.

And they orbit in mutual resonance - close resonances, to the tunes (heh) of 3:2 for bcde and then 4:3 for efg. (Opposite from what I proposed between Europa and Ganymede; that was 4:3 then 3:2 within E:G's 2:1.) We need to consider tides. Somehow the innermost planet has managed not to get pulled inward by its sun. That energy is probably getting eaten up by tides internal to the planets. Yikes!

The good news about transits is that they deliver the radii (as a ratio of their sun) for all the occultations. They also have the mass-ratios of the inner planets b, c, d against their sun - hooray for Kepler. The three inner worlds seem puffy, which is impressive for such hot planets, as 4 Gy old as the system is. Further: the resonance is assumed to be a holdover from formation. Chaos doesn't normally resolve into 3:2 and 4:3 resonances. Without chaos in the system these close-in planets, further, aren't getting Theia - they aren't getting moons.

Much of the research was done by the CHEOPS 'scope down here. We all know the unfortunate rules; the longer the period between transits, the less well we know the parameters. They want to target the 31-day "e" planet, to constrain that one's mass. And maybe Webb can hit the system for infrared.

We are lucky to have this one in transit. I expect K or G stars exist, closer than 100 ly, as own resonant inner planets not in transit. That's a matter for closer inspection of spectral time-series.

Evangelical marginalia

A (Christian) Minister by name of James Snapp the Younger piped in, last year, at the ongoing Distigmai kerfuffle. I'm not here pretending to know anything about that; apparently I didn't miss much, anyway.

I am here to consider evangelical in-line tafsir by the evangelist himself. In Islam, there exists a tradition by which Muhammad commented upon the Qurân which Allâh revealed upon him. How about Christianity with its scriptures?

Snapp suggests similar for John 5:3b-4. Namely: someone whom Snapp assumes (for shorthand if nothing else) is the apostle John composed the first part of what we call "John 5:3", so v. 3a. But then people kept badgering the owner-of-the-text, as Snapp muses: why were these sick, blind, lame, and paralyzed people waiting near the pool instead of swimming in its water?. Snapp sees John 5:3b-4 as an interpolation, yes; but as an interpolation by the final editor of the Gospel. For Snapp that means: by John.

Evan Powell had in the 1990s actually argued for John as the author of John 1-20 at least. Powell went harder into the Johannine Gospel as multilayered. Powell figured that John 21 wasn't even John's, but Mark's. Maybe there was a "John Jr." (Polycarp?) who added that coda at around the same time that one added vv. 3b-4 to John 5. Problem: we don't own much external evidence for any John explicitly without ch. 21. I do recall Tertullian claiming ch. 20 as the terminus, once; although he was aware of a John with ch. 21, also. Snapp is big on Mark 16's longer version, against Powell; if he accepts that, he's hardly about to abandon John 21. Snapp might instead count John 21 as the Evangelist's marginalium, after the thought, appended to his own text.

Snapp brings in 1 Corinthians 1:16 as a Pauline marginalium as got inlined into the text without editing, and nobody ever came along to smooth all that over. This would be a stronger case in my opinion.

Another stronger case might, in fact, be Mark 13:14. The whole chapter is Mark's summary of Jesus' mission as the Christ of God. This v. 14 refers to an abomination that desecrates at the Temple; the text herein interjects let him that readeth understand. That author cannot be Christ; Christ is speaking, and we don't read an audition. Then the text in some codices says this comes from "Daniel the prophet". Everyone is fine assuming that the former gnomic invitation comes from Mark's first edition and presentation of Christ's word. The questions cluster around the subsequent asterisk; saying basically, "you goyische n00bz out there are to understand that this means the Book of Daniel, go read it if you haven't".

Was that asterisk by Mark? Well... Mark is said to have spread his gospel to Rome and to Alexandria. He is also known to be a follower of Paul, who was famously big on preaching to goys.

I find plausible that Mark himself had permitted copies of his gospel to go out, to gentiles, with additional annotations.

Gunung Padang

The usual crew of Hancockians and QAnon theorists are making a thing of this pyramid in Gunung Padang, Java. On principle, note, I am not ruling out a Neolithic society in the old Sundaland. I mean, if Anatolia could do it . . .

But on principle I need the evidence to come from someone more credible than Daniel Natawidjaja. Natural processes can create geometric structures, without human input. Colavito points to the "giants' causeway"; I might consider those pyramids, faces, and smileys over on Mars we'd seen in the 1980s.

Nature is today calling shens on Natawi - Natadi - Nottabepublishinpapersforawhile.

As a sidenote, Avi Loeb is now looking for derro. Maybe he can do what Carl Sargent did and write Dungeons & Dragons content, I might actually read him then.

You stood with Sheol

If anyone is still wondering when/if Kiev will be erecting statues to Boris Johnson, as the Kosovars have honoured Clinton or the Israelis and Indians Trump; the answer to that is probably never.

Putin upon observing the Kiev régime's attitude toward the Russian-speakers of the Donbass concluded that Kiev commanded too many people who hated Russia. Putin's response was to occupy the Donbass and to provoke a limited war. In a war of attrition the larger army wins. Russia had the larger army. Russia invited Kiev to expend its men in a meatgrinder.

Russia will exit this conflict with the only army. Now the Ukraine simply is short 1.1 million Russia-haters as it used to have; Russia-non-haters having found ways to slip out of the conflict. 1.1 million is a lot of dead haters; but consider the number of Israel-haters as existed in the Gaza Strip as of 7 October.

1.1 million didn't have to die. They simply had to not hate, and not fight. And not listen to faraway Westerners, "Standing With Ukraine".

DOCSIS 4

Having recently spent a lot of $ on a new modem, it's coming onto holiday-season so I must ponder when I'll need to do that again. The next version promises 6 Gb/s upstream. (Same 10 downstream.)

Comcast, for its part, started a 4.0 rollout last month - over the high hills south of here, where's aerospace. It's phased per-city, if only to ensure the punters get the new modems.

This suggests 4.0 around the Denver-Boulder corridor next year. But maybe early next year. I expect the modems to be priced for the universities and space companies, who need the upload bandwidth most. 3D uploads might care for Gaussians.

I just hope these uploads won't strangle the rest of us.

Sulaym revisited

I've lately been redirected to Sulaym bin Qays, rather to the Shī'ī tract (kitāb) ascribed to him. Today I found Tamima Bayhom-Daou, "Kitāb Sulaym ibn Qays revisited", Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 78 (2015), 105-19. (That DOI is 10.1017/s0041977x14001062.) The title refers to what happened to the text before our version got loose.

TBD assumes Patricia Crone that the kitāb is composite, compiling earlier content. Building from that, TDB goes into the second section. This deals with the tract's Qur'ānic epistemology. In fact here are two -ologies: in one, the Aimmāt (without hamza) own perfect knowledge of God's Word and transmit that to their sons, each an Imām upon adulthood. The problems for Sulaym's Imāmate start with 'Alī the Ridā, "Reza" to Iranians. When Reza died 203 AH (AD 818, AG ~1130) his oldest son was a child. Bring on the second -ology: a secret tafsīr in written form existed, available to the Prophetic Family - which we plebs didn't get to read. Problem solved: the son can be Imām without direct Imāmic instruction. TBD believes that the second -ology is, indeed, secondary; tacked onto the original take.

(Note how this neatly explains how come Shī'ī qirāāt cluster in Ibn Mas'ûd codices far more than in codices ascribed to 'Alī or to his family directly. It just hadn't occurred to the Family that a written codex existed. That's the problem with an apocalyptic movement . . .)

Crone had figured upon a basic tract in which the 'Alids still approved the 'Abbāsite dawla. This tract had forged some documents of its own, like a letter from amir Mu'āwiya to his walī Ziyād (pt 4 hadith 23). But this was an early forgery! Such a forgery would not be possible after the Hasanid failure 145/762.

The whole sect, Hasanites and Husaynites alike, might allow for the secret-teaching doctrine. That much isn't easily datable. Only the replacement of secret-teaching to a secret-writing would be constrained; for the Imāmīs who gave us Sulaym, to the third century.

NAHJ 11/28: Amina Inloes found, not long after TBD, that the Nahj is antiwoman by contrast to Sulaym, so probably shouldn't be cited as canon.

Cut to the heart of the matter

There exist a few secular works on Muhammad's last years, like Stephen Shoemaker's The Death of a Prophet. What Shoemaker hadn't noted was Islamic sources relating Muhammad's end as being ignoble, to poison. David Woods gives us that summary from Islamic sources (albeit still skipping Sulaym) - and relates the (Sunni) accounts to sura 69.

I've had a decade-long fascination with sura 69. Like other suwar it cites earlier content. But I cannot find Q 69 citing later content - as Q 68 and 70 cite. On the other hand I rarely find those later suwar citing sura 69 (suwar 18, then 13 and 76; later, 81); it even gets omitted in some masahif. My "Blasting the Caliph" project has taken on a number of revisions in an attempt to clarify the argument, but... there's little argument as can be clarified.

Perhaps the reason the qurrâ kept sura 69 at a distance is that sura 69 posed a problem to them. The tradition that a Jew[ess] poisoned Muhammad (and his buddy Bishr) is as old as the Sira itself. And it's always associated with the Prophet's main chest vein; usually considered the aorta (and not jugular). Q. 69:46 refers to the slicing of al-watîn, a rhyming term which the mufassirs also considered the aorta.

Admittedly it's poetry all the way down, when dealing with Islamic literature. When I hear Muhammad lament, at the end, that he is suffering from a meal he'd eaten at Khaybar; this reads like regret for annexing Khaybar's property. An allusion to sura 69, to Woods, suggests further he'd lost the wahy there too. The Imam Malik and others always disliked that Ibn Ishaq was using Jewish sources. The Jewish sources might have taught that Muhammad was a Jewish-approved prophet until he did what he'd done at Khaybar.

Against that, some Muslims these days suspect that the Khaybar atrocities were overblown. But Muslims were different under the Umayyads. Such Muslims seem to have spread Khaybar stories, like John of Nikiu told Cyril stories. Earlier in Iraq, when Christians were out and about over there, Jews told the Toledot Yeshu'. If earlier Jews might spread their counter-stories against Jesus, later ones could certainly do similar against Muhammad.

UPDATE 12/12: Hasan Bitmez. I don't wanna be like this, I don't wanna hurt no feelings.

The prosecution is called to the (space) bar

A City on Mars is illustrated by Zach Weinersmith, a cartoonist. His wife Kelly did most of the text, I think - but its moral sensibilities are still cartoonish.

Over the last fortnight I've been looking for additional reviews. Jeff Foust was one; but more serious is Peter Hague, who's not done yet. Hague calls out this book for using left-wing sources like Dark Skies overmuch. Hague is right.

"White flight" makes an appearance (admittedly in quotation). When Black people in Darfur flee partisan militia of an invasive ancestry, they are refugees. When White people do that in southwestern Michigan, they're racists.

And this blog must issue a health-advisory, especially for minors. Do not - at any cost - make a drinking-game out of the land-acknowledgements of North America, nor of the mentions of global-warming. For the former redditism: I have not yet read Fynn-Paul's Not Stolen, but do feel free to.

If your wine bar will even allow such contrary links. Aim to find a shop (somewhere somehow) as lacks the rainbow-flag and/or anti-"racism" posturing. (For my part, I stay out of Seattle's Best where possible.) For this review's purpose, I must request this of my readers on principle; your coffee site will certainly allow Weinersmith work.

As to the Gretaïsme, many excesses could have been stymied had the Weinersmiths simply refused to speak of "climate deniers" in the same paragraph as ex-cosmonaut Putin-propagandistes. The authors could even have stated up front that they, personally, believe in The SCIENCE Which Is Settled. Their book prefers to moot climate-change in its worse cases, scenarios shared - we must note - also by several libertarian-leaning advocates, such as Elon Musk. A worst case suffices for the Weinersmith's argument; the book needed to leave it as argument.

Weinersmiths are Concerned Scientists who don't say much about nuclear power on Earth, nor (more relevant here) beamed-solar. They want us to eat ze bugs. Yes, we need rules on Earth. But do we really need as many agencies as we have, to sandbag enterprise, often just because they don't like what Elon poasts on Twitter? Is China going to nuke us because of a rocket that doesn't go near China?

So now we must discuss the book's take on spacemadness (which I guess a Moon station might actually call "lunacy"). For the ISS, Serena Auñón-Chancellor is unmentioned. I find difficult to believe that the Weinersmiths missed this - in fact, here is another anecdote which would have served the book's overall Decel cause. The story is perhaps mediated by their lawyers. But if SAC didn't sabotage the station, the story then moves to false accusations on-deck. LEO can handle the drama; maybe a Moon station can handle it. Can a Mars mission?

I have found that the Weinersmiths' little lapses tend to point in one direction, and rarely point in the other. Those lapses fall in the Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson direction. Disappointing, I posit.

Between Starship Flights

I got up on Saturday just in time to watch Starship's second test on the SuperHeavy. Ideally we'd have seen the SuperHeavy return to launch, as Starship went into orbit. That much, didn't happen - as Reuters gloats (normally big fans of rockets and antisemitic content, much more so than Musk). To remind Reuters: those goals were "stretch" goals.

The primary mission was to prove to various USG agencies that South Texas remained a fit place for testing rockets of this scale. This much succeeded: the launchpad is almost intact and the flight-termination systems both worked.

The test was also meant to prove to USG's military, and to other space companies like Astrolab, that SpaceX was making progress not just on the ground and on abort-state, but in the separation-staging: hot staging being new. Clearly this has been shown as well.

I held off on poasting last weekend (or Monday) because I wanted to see a little more of what the space economy and ambient culture would make of all this. Thus: the followup. Astrolab seems more confident as well. Elon thinks he can get another bird through the air by Christmas.

The adiVerse

I've been on the Yes Men list since, I suspect, I wrote those Alinskyites to gloat about how hard "Yes Bush Can" failed. Their usual shtick is to infiltrate a #wokecorp to make them look even more #woke, usually on climate or against such "fascists" as, er, Trump. Then the #wokecorp is stuck with explaining to the media that they don't mean all that guff and that they're really just cowards. That's exactly the opposite how I'd push #wokecorp - at least, in 2004.

I am this decade a different man and a different blogger. Okay... still not #woke; and with the various Chaikins and Bichlbaums running the Yes Men, many baileys share one motte. But. I am amused to see how the 'Men just punk'd "adidas" (sic), at the Web Summit.

Last week - you may or may not have noticed - I'd read Ezekiel Faux' (sic) book, Number Go Up. It was mostly about the Tether money-laundry, which Faux and his friends were hoping would fail. Tether hasn't failed; but in the process, Faux stumbled onto a front-row seat (alongside Mike "Big Short" Lewis) to a number of sh!tcoin and exchange failures, not least FTX.

FTX claimed to be all about Effective Altruism (which just hasn't been correctly tried, right?). Somewhere around those circles is Nick Land (the xenosystems NRx d00d), whose acolytes are proposing instead "E/acc", technologic accelerationism basically. The Yes Men crashed that Summit as "adidas" flacks, showcasing how "adidas" was going to provide its third-world employees (i.e. slaves) with virtual vacations in the metaverse or some such rot. E/acc in action!

Of course, "adidas" is doing no such thing. As if they'd do anything to help! My stars-n'-garters, if some corporation actually had to pay their overseas employees then they might slink back to the US and/or Europe to pay our citizens here. (Don't tell the Yes Men that Drumpf's been making similar arguments.)

As an aside, LOL at the copyright-strike. Typical of a major corporation to claim "copyright" on content as makes them look bad. Like how movie-studios hit bad reviews with copyright-strikes - not hitting the good reviews.

Overall, I gotta hand it to the Yes Men for their latest trick. This is the content we need. Pity it took them almost two decades to do it.

WHAT SHOES I WEAR 7 PM MST: New Balance, yo; all the way. I just got a refresh last week.

OpenAI

I don't pretend to know wtf is going on with exCEO Altman nor with the company he'd headed. I read (I think from eigenrobot at Twitter - who is obtuse on Hamas) that OpenAI was founded, explicitly, to do Artificial Intelligence such that it obeys the Asimovian Three.

I must lay out my marker that ethics in futurism is a thing. I do not think that Microsoft is sufficiently-ethical to do AI.

Pixy Misa likes to call this guy "Sam Altman-Fried". That's... a bit much. UPDATE 11/23 - especially if EAs were involved in his ouster.

Either way we agree that CEO-for-a-day Emmett Shear is not a rapist. I can't believe I just had to post that; but that's where we're at, as a culture. Make waves and they'll call you names.

RESEARCH 11/25: Nah; it's OpenDEI and needs to D.I.E.

Collective guilt, collective punishment

The latest Tiktok challenge is, apparently, reading what Adam Gadahn ghostwrote for Osama bin Laden two decades ago.

"Humane" arguments for bombing a population into the stone age go more toward, we aim to bomb only [thousands of] the top people, and the rest are just collateral-damage we're not going to think about. Gadahn went that one stage further; like Rabbi Dov Fischer has gone.

Gadahn's line of argument is ... well, it's based and NRx-pilled. The theory is that the Islamic State is accountable only to Allah. Under a Hobbesian sovereign, civilians are innocent. The régime's enemies will concentrate on the sovereign, leaving the kids alone. It's a take, I guess.

It's not the best take. I find common in mediaeval war for Baron A to ravage Baron B's peasants, to prove that Baron B couldn't do his One Job of protecting peasants (and wasn't favoured of G-d). Or maybe your real problem was with Baron B's peasants, who speak the wrong dialect of Old French and are doing Mass bad, to which peasants Baron B is just in the way. But hey: that's just me.

Trump, hamhanded as ever, hoped to ban TikTok. As oft-noted, TikTok is hardly the problem. Where's the counter to this line-of-thought, including on TikTok? Mike Cernovich points out, the same place as where's the Republican Party advertising on Twitter which is nowhere. Hrrr we'll get thrr votes in chrrrch. How's chrrrch doin'?

BACKDATE 11/23

The least effective expression of altruism

I cannot say I know a lot about "Effective Altruism". It seems a lot like the practice of Secular Humanism; in its turn a philosophy which atheists often take on, so as to find meaning in their god-free lives. Ayaan Hirsi Ali found meaning mostly in being anti-Islamic and pro-Western. She didn't have much to say about what "Western" meant. Now Ali is a Christian (likely mainline). Samuel Bankman-Fried was an Effective Altruist and, inasmuch as his life is cautionary, perhaps succeeded at it.

This blog has noted Richard Hanania as aligned with EA. He is also contrarian, which lends him to utilitarian thought-experiments (occasionally sexual). He maintains that EA still has a future. His thought is that EA exists by being anti#woke. On that much he is probably right. But.

I am reminded of the secular Right, middle-2000s. This existed by not being Atheism-Plus. Ali was secular and aligned with the Right, by default; her worldview has collapsed.

I do not see EA's soulless utilitarianism as having any more future than the Secular Right's blog had.

Malinformation

Let's consider misinformation (lies), disinformation (a Soviet term, calqued) and lately malinformation - which best I can tell is truth which governments don't want us to know. I saw a few books around the Barnes this past week. Two concerned policing: American Autopsy riffing on George Floyd (among others); and Sedition Hunters. If you read these, then you might think we should run our police from the new building which our new Christian Speaker of the House wants to build.

You don't hate Jesus, do you?

Anyway, George Floyd might have died from an abnormal adrenaline spike, mostly caused by his unhealthy body, not by the restraints.

And of course we got Media Matters playing Killgore Trout, planting Nazi memes into search-results to make X look toxic (when X still hasn't reinstated - say - Vox Day).

January 6 is admittedly a tougher call. The 2020 election was "fortified"; there remain serious Questions about Maricopa's balloting. Trump's base had every reason to smell a rat, and some reason to visit DC for the ratification. Maybe some of the "paraders" were let into the Capitol. Sure, the cops fired teargas at the wrong guys. To all that I (continue to) say - so what? Bad actors did dwell in the crowd and, if Epps might have been a Fed, at least Brian Mock was a spear chucker (h/t Hanania despite himself). The whole event looks like the - well, like the Floyd protests: where the peaceful protestors are human shields, wittingly or unwittingly, for terrorists. That teargas should have been taken as cue, not to riot, but to leave.

I think that we should be allowed to discuss these things without the corporate tech cartel yanking advertising from wherever these things are discussed. Kosseff's Liar In A Crowded Theater looked pretty good as a corrective.

BACKDATE 11/20 My blogging slipped again, so I'll inject this timewaster to whenever. How about "today"?

The real tech bubble

As we're backstopping last week, here are a few articles as came in, to explain why THE SCIENCE is having trouble. On the one hand: fraud is issuing forth (often produced by mills). On the other hand "prosocial" scientists refuse to risk their interpersonal relationships by calling out the fraud.

As to generations to come we're no longer sending our best into college.

Luckily, AI can do their jobs better than they can. AI can do basic lawyering, and air-traffic. AI may be our only hope from Equity, wilful ignorance, and flat incompetence. More reason by the way to pull out of OpenAI.

BACKDATE 11/23

Canceling the South

Wash Park Prophet, alter-ego of the Turtle, proposes the what-if of Super Radical Reconstruction. Like: maybe Johnson is killed alongside Lincoln, and only Seward is left alongside War-Secretary Stanton and the likes of him. Basically WPP proposes swift executions for most of the CSA's élites and Southern Baptist clergy; the rest get disenfranchisement. If CSA assassinates USA civilian leaders; USA can do whatever to CSA leaders.

The Surratt/Booth plot was, perhaps, a case for laws-of-war, given that Lee's army had surrendered but that other armies - Native troops and Texians - had not. WPP is considering the postwar. Some of the CSA's top men had done what we'd call war-crime; usually cited here, Forrest at Fort Pillow. Sherman did some war-crime at Atlanta, himself; but Sherman, like, won. Vae victis!

Forrest, who had a religious conversion after the war, is getting the rope anyway; G-d might forgive him but WPP won't. WPP might find some space for general Longstreet who at least tried to emancipate slaves for the war-effort, and went on an apology-tour after the war; but, even if so, these exceptions will be public, rare, and spread over time and space.

And we are not talking here about what Israel plans for Gaza. WPP wrote all that in September. To be understood is that the Turtle hates the Right's voters... a lot. He imputes the foulest motives for Trump's voters and we're not even that far Right. Just that Trump brought pro-family and tradition-minded voters to the bargaining table, means these voters' concerns were validated. To WPP that is bad enough. As WPP is pondering mass graves for the CSA and the old SBC, I see the shadow of similar for Red State politicians and the modern SBC.

Anyway: we lately have the example of "Hayti" when we consider a territory purged of its élites. I don't remember the site but I did remember that Wilson ordered the US to occupy the island's western third in 1915. Wilson, whom I doubt enjoys the endorsement of WPP, found Hayti to have attracted (very-gradually) a German élite. Someone had to do the trade, and Hayti did retain some Poles from the revolution; Germans, meanwhile, could be found who were Catholic and able to deal with Poles. The US occupation laid down some infrastructure but at the cost of removing a more-or-less organic educated subset. In the US wake, came Duvaliers.

Back on this side of the Gulf we own some eyewitness accounts of the "prostrate states". It used to be that these accounts were collected into "Dunning School" histories. In WPP's world, any local making sympathetic record of those years would probably suffer military prosecution. We also have Nordhoff, from the North, however; who recorded gross mismanagement and crimes in New Orleans.

(I'd quibble with WPP whether Reconstruction would have allowed the Native tribes back. They'd supported the CSA and had slaves too. On the other hand: maybe Reconstruction is to force as much diversity and equity upon the local whites as possible.)

Without a local white (or Cherokee) élite, I expect the prostrate states to fall into chaos. That's possibly part of the plan; I've seen maps where Reconstruction assumes "state suicide" and redraws borders. To that, as Sam Houston said of an earlier crisis - "but I doubt it". More likely we'd see mass migrations out of the whole military-occupied region - and not only whites. Would the North stand for the refugee influx? - would the US Army? What about foreign navies? Can disenfranchisement from Louisiana carry over in practice to disenfranchisement in New Mexico Territory, or even in Missouri and Kentucky?

Around the time the US is facing chaos in this scenario, which I peg at 1866ish, we must note that Mexico is facing chaos. Juarez' term had run out whilst he was in exile; he'd come back and made himself Presidente anyway. Up here in El Norte we could see a junta in DC, of Seward and Stanton and probably general Grant.

I don't think, in this contrafactual, the South is getting reconstructed to be a harmony of multiracial Quakers. I think it's getting mass graves. That's good enough, for some.

BACKDATE 11/23: It can be revealed - I had the week off this week. So: I can fill in the gaps.

Sotah

Richard Hanania has been getting into it with the pro-life movement lately, saying that Republicans have completely lost the single-female vote because of Choice. This much is true (used to be more true). He advises Republicans to abandon the issue entirely, maybe even run against it.

It's not like we can start a theocracy! - or even want one. Why oh why can single females not, like, get over it. Why oh why can they not just trust us?

Some pro-lifers deny they actually intend, no-exceptions. To that, they need to explain why they use the term "murder". If I can see the motte behind the bailey, then so can others.

Christians, in particular, claim the Bible told us so. This blog can, on other topics, be faulted for not checking. I like to think it has some credibility on, say, Near Eastern precedent for halakha. Christians for our part have opposed The Procedure for feminist reasons; the Christian Empire came up with a legal-fiction of "ensoulment".

Ancient Jew Review points out that maybe the Christian stance is not biblical. The main argument, which I didn't know, was the Sotah ritual.

Sotah was one of those trial-by-ordeal Iron Age thingies [UPDATE 2/17/24: from pre-Leviticus-5?]. If you, Jonadab ben Ephraim, suspected your wife of stepping out on you, you could challenge her to drink some Bitter Herbs. If she does and nothing unusual issues forth, she didn't cheat (alternatively she did but nothing happened; which doesn't count for what counts).

On the fence-around-Torah principle, the woman consents to Sotah - perhaps not as much as the man, but we'll get to this. By Torah, adultery is sufficient cause to execute the foetus. If consensual adultery suffices... try nonconsensual. The wife might then insist on the Sotah cocktail, as she's denouncing her defiler.

The Judaic courts would assuredly judge the woman's claim. False testimony is bad too! But if she claimed justly, then Jews would never judge her Choice.

Why should Christians?

ROMANS 12/15: For the other side of the Latin tradition, here's Carrier.

Claromontanus bleeds

For evangelical (and other) critics: JBTC 28 is released, free-to-download as usual. The article herein that jumps out, to me, is Richard Fellows', on a "sexist" tendency in ancient transmissions of John 11-12:2 (thankfully not in KJV, nor beyond). I rate Fellows' term as fair so I shan't be "scare" quoting it, further.

Marcion was not a sexist, although he also was not a transmitter of John. Also non-sexist (albeit making up for it in antisemitism) was the "Western" Bezae codex which carried this lack-of-sexism to its copy of John. I will scarequote the term "Western" - because contemporary with Bezae, was the Claromontanus, which absolutely warped its Pauline quotes, to run against the feminine. These divergent tendencies simply do not belong together under the same rubric.

Fellows believes that John's original author was like Marcion: not a sexist, or at least (like most of us) chose where or where not to deal with early Christian women. John 11-12:2 concerns Mary, Martha, Lazarus, and a sister-relationship... somewhere. Usually John, as an author should, defines a secondary character by his or her relationship to someone hitherto more important. John, as of the Aramaeo-Greek Near East, tends to have that superior person as male. But here, at Bethany, the first-mentioned was Mary. Fellows notes that some manuscripts say Martha was her sister; others - here 𝔓⁶⁶ - that Martha was "his" - which we must read as Lazarus'.

Fellows thinks that this would also affect 1 Cor 14:34–35 and the Pastoral Epistles, as also spurious. I would counter this affects 1 Cor 14:34-5 as in sexist misplacements of vv. 34-5. We see this misplacement in Tertullian and in the Claromontanus. Lately, 1 Timothy skeptics (starting with Marcion, admittedly) are supporting the Corinsian canon, against this branch of "Western"-ism.

Even so, I will note that Claromontanus proper does not include the Gospels. Might, in 𝔓⁶⁶, we see the Claromontan John?

Oscar Viñals gets high, and fast

I'd thought I'd commented over the last two years on supersonic commercial craft; but apparently, not. So! today is as good a day as any to check in. Today, The Sun is promising (at least) two of these craft. These, via the same press flack, one Oscar Viñals.

The two in question are promising Mach 1.5 which isn't as fast as the Overture (X-59, to NASA), what United Air had ordered up. Viñals' advantage is that they fit more d00dz. The Hyper Sting last year (which I skipped) was promising 170 of us. Sky OV - today's news - promises 300. And then there's some other stuff he promised last year like a concept which would become a ramjet over the Atlantic and fit 500. Being an Oscar he's calling it - sigh - Big Bird.

Putting more people onto a craft at once does, indeed, cut costs on fuel in addition - obviously - to saving everyone's time.

I must however ask about where all the luggage goes. Like: you're in London, and you brought your handbag. That'll work for the corporate suite, who might want back to New York in time for the mayor's turkey roast. What about tourists? Should they run back to Heathrow to pick up their luggage? Is it forwarded on, by - I dunno - Amazon?

Cold water for Mars

Over the weekend I finished up A City on Mars by the Breakfast-Cereal Weinersmith powercouple, biologist Kelly and cartoonist Zach. They pose this book as a corrective to Ayn Rand in space; E/acc would call it a "decel" manual. Please don't bristle at the authorial sequence, fellow chauvinistes; this seems mostly Kelly's work.

As to how fair this book is, it does hit up that the oversupply of tampons was chosen by one with XX chromosomes so was hardly a problem of NASA SEXISM (it was more a problem of NASA's culture of overcompensation). They also admit that Biosphere 2 wasn't nearly the failure most think it was.

As for honest omissions too much weight is placed upon supposed lack of shielding and gravity in space [UPDATE 11/26: now cf. Peter Hague]. I question that the Weinersmiths should have been so cavalier about asteroid or space-colony settlement. The two seem to have composed the bulk of this text before Jensen and without Janhunen. Rubble-pile settlement and mining - especially if settlers start with Near-Earth C-types, several of which come close to us - may well be more-viable than Lunar settlement.

I cannot comment upon the international law underpinning space work. Crichton / Gell / Mann aside, people gonna have beefs. I expect the authors are right to point out that treaty-law is A Thing.

Another semi-high point is where the authors deal with space-settlement ethics. They don't like the Latinism colonia; upon further thought, I may have to abandon that term as well, unless and until the Space Force grant a civic charter to some decommissioned asteroid-base. In the bibliography Robert Zimmerman appears for Leaving Earth but for not his definitive Apollo 8 book; also Conscious Choice would likely have helped.

I had more to say in this post's first edition, but I'm holding my fire for this initial list.

BACKDATE 11/13: busy weekend. UPDATE 11/24: I split off my ethical concerns.

Tandelou

On this day I bought Kelly and Zach Weinersmiths' book A City on Mars. I have sufficient content for its own post, on mimesis.

René Girard defined this: that if baby A is seen to desire a thing, baby B will desire it too. The most-valuable-thing need have no value in of itself. The Weinersmiths (correctly) point out that Jerusalem is hardly the best site, nor the most-strategic site, between the Nile and the Orontes (much less Euphrates). Moving Jews and Palestinians onto their own planets will not make friends of them, not in space and not on Earth.

In fact, space will simply add more MVTs. Frank and Abraham, in this book's blurbs as "Corey", had invented a MVT for their own plot but, for Weinersmith purposes, our system owns plenty of real points-of-contention.

We must note that the Weinersmiths aren't necessarily picking out the most-likely points of contention. The duo worry much over southpolar ShackleWeiner^TM as the Only Game In Town for Lunar settlers. ... right now. Consider, however, ices imported: from comets and C-types, for the drier spots of the Moon. Also consider that the Moon has low gravity so does not need to burn hydrogen or carbon in fuel (au contraire, they'll impose a ban). That might lower the polar real-estate values perhaps excepting orthogonal Orions.

The exact best spot on the Moon is a quibble. For me the best colonies cluster around the meridian points. And more: which Earth nation gets (say) the TLL1 spaceport and elevator if/when our home planet is banning Lunar massdrivers? Who gets TLL2?

Was The Expanse Venus left abandoned because nobody could agree who got to shade it?

EXTRACTION AND BACKDATE 11/14

The middle men

On summarising the last decades of Visigothic rule, let's consider the social implications of a generation-long drought. We're looking into the kings Egica 687-702/3, then Wittiza.

I'd start the clock at Heraclius' adventures, including edicts against the Jews.

As long as Spain was trading with Carthage and Sicily, Spain was trading with Christians. Problem: Spain's Visigoths had started, like the Vandals, as "Arian" Eunomians; Spain's peasantry was Catholic. The Catholics were well-entrenched in North Africa also, no longer under Vandal Eunomians. Heraclius was creating the polar opposite (dogmatically): a Monothelete Mediterranean. Constans II even moved his capitol to Syracuse in Sicily. The Greeks, on occasion, attempted to get Baetica back; or at least to impose Monothelete bishops upon the local "Arians". Even if they were Dyotheletes they could be called Arian or at least Nestorian.

You know who can trade across confessional borders? The... sigh... Jews can. Crypto-Jews would be their interface around the ports. Whatever the wealth of Christendom, trade came to be monopolised by the children of Abraham; and their charity did not flow to Christians.

Indeed: why would Jews help those who don't help them? Spain (mostly Toledo) reacted by various Church councils; the policies of Wamba and Erwig are oft-noted as antiSemitic. The Doctrina Jacobi remained fresh in the minds of the borderlands along the western Maghreb. Anastasius of Sinai had issued anti-Jewish texts; plenty others were around as well. And there were apocalyptic texts; I don't know that the Pseudo-Methodius was as anti-Jew as some, but the Jews had their own pseudo-'s, in the names of Zerubbabel and Bar Yohai. Egica at least didn't suppress conversos, like that Jacob; but in AD 694 he created more of those, forcibly baptising Jewish minors.

I think the AD 680s Visigoths would have been pro-Martin / pro-Maximus dyothelete Catholics and, anyway, Constantine IV and prince Justinian had returned even the Greeks to communion with Rome and Africa. Spanish / Carthage trade should have been fine, as of the later AD 680s.

Starting around AD 698, things get a little more in-flux. There's another 'Abd al-Rahman - Ibn al-Ash'ath - keeping the Umayyads from pushing their advantage; so Spaniards at least are not suffering raids. But the Greeks aren't in the game either, with the naval admiral Apsimar having taken over Constantinople as "Tiberius III" and, likewise, dealing with the east. I wrote a whole book on this, Throne of Glass.

In Spain, the drought just kept worsening. Also even if they're not needing to defend the kingdom they still aren't doing a lot of trade, eastward. Now the Jews were middlepeople again. But under a drought it was worse. In the cities, it was Jews who could afford food.

Clement, and Mark

I have some Christian commentary today, so this may be the place to just unload on my favourite topic, the reception-history of Mark's Gospel. Peter Head at the Evangelical Textual Critics had a counterintuitive take lately: that Clement Alexandrine didn't care about Mark. I don't really have any real content to provide here, so... treat this as a "Reaction Video". And imagine me making silly faces at the screen.

Head's take seems to go against interest. As an Evangelical, aren't you on Irenaeus' side on the fourfold canon? I mean, yeah; the facts are the facts... one reason I respect that site, because they (frequently) take sides as aren't necessarily Evangelical sides. Like with Oxyrhynchus-5575.

Now, POxy-5575 might actually be the Gospel of Peter, and in any case is assuredly dependent upon Mark and Matthew. I am still entertaining #5575 mainly inasmuch I don't trust Luke. Anyway. Back to Clement!

Peter Head does have one important point, behind him. In pre-Irenaeus Patristics - Ignatius and Justin and "2 Clement" (no relation) - we do not see the fourfold canon. Ignatius cited outside that, for his take on the postResurrection appearances (Jerome claimed it from the "Gospel of the Hebrews"). Justin used... I don't even know what; Mark and Matthew (at least) were probably behind it all, but Justin's Gospels seem to have been digested for him by his teachers, like a bird. As for "2 Clement", at this point I think he'd used Peter / POxy-4009.

As we get to Clement of Alexandria, the post-Christian decades are becoming centuries. So the proposal that Clement is ignoring Mark, by his time, seems... aggressive? Unsure what the best word is.

Luckily Jacob Rodriguez is on-point in the comments. It seems that Clement did use Mark. He tended to do this in harmonies. Like Justin did, and Tatian afterward. Possibly Clement did his own harmony, rather than relying upon others' like Justin did. Rodriguez may have answered most of our questions in Combining Gospels in Early Christianity.

We all seem agreed that although O. Stählin did fine work in collating where Clement parallels Mark, Stählin probably should have held off on compiling full statistics before ascertaining where a Markan parallel was not a simple Matthean parallel. Matthew was more prominent in Clement's Church.

The feminine religion

We are hearing more about a "year of the woman" after last Tuesday, where abortion was on the ballots - and won. It won so overwhelmingly, it carried a lot of other policies along with it, including (in Ohio) the castration of minors without parental notice. Whilst it is true that Romney-McDaniel is an ineffective and divisive leader of the RNC, whilst it may be true that some pushback might have convinced some married mothers in suburbia to hold their fire; ultimately, unmarried women want what they want, and voted for that. This is not Susan B. Anthony's time.

On topic of Anthony and the (UK) Pankhursts and other early suffragistas, many of them were Christian, or even further Right than that. Mikhail Cernovich is commenting that Christianity is a feminine religion, or superset of such.

But but but most of our texts were written by men! ... this is true, and nonfeminists had got entrenched into Corinth (at least) by Paul's own time. John's Apocalypse is particularly sus here. Then there's the "gnostics", really a set of neoplatonic takes on the early Christian canon. But.

Sometimes one finds a pro-woman text in the NT - starting with Paul, lambasting the Corinsians. Luke's two volumes go still further. Even if Luke (who wrote as a man) was not secretly a second-century George Eliot, he'd dropped hints that he'd taken ahadith from women, notably in that story of Mary and Martha wherein Mary is taking Jesus' instruction - implicitly dictation. Contemporary with Luke, we hear of seers like Prisc?a and Maximilla - from no less than the nonfeminist Tertullian, who approved their New Prophecy despite himself. (One might scent the influence of the Didache.) Marcion is on his way as well, alongside the Bezae. And then we get the martyrdom of Perpetua. And "Paul and Thecla".

To this day Christianity in its more traditional strains, like mine own Catholicism, hosts a near-cult of Mary as the virgin mother of God Himself. OnePeterFive's rationale for retaining males in the priesthood is because they are entering the presence of the Tabernacle as if the region was, itself, feminine.

You may, as a Christian, reject Marcion, the "Montanists", the more-excitable saints' lives, the fan-fiction, and even the Bezae. Perhaps your "mileage" may vary (I hold some respect due to the saints and to the Bezae). Still: these voices were powerful in early Christendom. They couldn't exist unless Christendom already had a base of women and of such men as loved them.

We find in pagan authors like Celsus and Lucian copious sneering at early Christians precisely because they promoted women. I wouldn't say that classical paganism wholly lacked space for the feminine, but we do see some misogyny in the philosophy. That's what we can see in the gnostic texts as well.

Overall, though, Cerno is right again. Christianity is more feminine than not.

Note that the Didache, which assumes little of whether women could go so far as to run the Eucharist, is anti-abortion. If you read "2 Peter" as an endorsement of the Apocalypse of Peter (and you think "2 Peter" is legit), then so is the NT itself. If you are looking for a pro-choice movement in early Christianity, I believe you will end up... disappointed.

Shuttle shens III

It's been a year since we chased the dream last time and we've just discussed another important innovation for the upcoming ?station(s) so - how's Sierra doing? Since they're, like, right here...

Turns out: pretty well. They're readying the Tenacity (a prototype, basically) to Plum Brook over in Ohio where they'll do "environmental testing". That means a space environment; Ohio's got the vacuum chamber.

As the article notes, one holdup would appear to be the destination, as Bezos is draining funds from Blue Origin. Also I wonder why they are using ULA when Starship could get it done for cheaper. Oh right - it's Bezos, meaning the corporate-captured Deep State.

EVA

Extravehicular actions (EVA) in unbreatheable space mean that the astronaut is leaving the station. In low-orbit that's the International Space Station (ISS); this applies also to the Moon. Apparently preparation-time is a pain in the arse (PITA). I didn't know that suiting-up took nearly this long. UPDATE 11/11: I actually did know that, a couple years ago. OW MY JOINTS

I have to imagine that, where there's regolith, they'll tack on cleaning costs.

ToughSF is bringing to attention, B. Griffin et al. (2020) SinglePerson Spacecraft. Genesis Engineering are modeling this after single-person pods in submarining. Bezos wanted it for the Orbital Reef but lately it's unclear if that's even going to happen.

I have to ask if astros even need to go outside if they own VR headsets, and the pod can manoeuvre with its own propellant.

Gliese 357's consolation-prize

We got copious bad news in from UCR last week; we'll deal here with that from GJ 357. Its innermost planet transits. There were some that hoped so did c and d - constraining their masses. But c and d do not transit.

If c and d are inclined relative to b, and to us, then their masses are large. On assumption of a large inclination and mass, c runs well over 3.4 Earth masses and d over 6.1. Planet d, at 0.204 AU, messes with this M system's (tight) habitable-zone. I don't think there is any question of decent moons or Trojans down there.

But hey - M stars suck anyway.

Stephen Kane and (here) his coauthrice, Tara Fetherolf, are looking 'pon the bright (and hot) side: c. This one gets 4.45 Earth flux means 2.34 Venus flux. This is still less than Mercury's, and c is much heavier than Venus besides. So c has likely retained its atmo. This hellworld might be worth a space-based mid-infrared low-resolution spectrograph.

HD 141399's colonisable asteroids

Last month Stephen R. Kane did a dynamic on HD 141399. He chose this because it is a K-class "goldilocks" with a 0.644 sini M_j giant out at (dynamically-generated) 4.5 AU. Which would be its Jupiter!

This system's young: that "K0V" weighs in at 1.091 M_⊙ (I'm unsure how they figured that, absent Kepler) and shines bright (per GDR2) 1.637 L_⊙. Habitable-zone is presently 1.233–2.190 AU as a result (conservatively). I expect its HR path to subside to G like our own Sun as it ages; that HZ should shrink down to 1 AU as that result. If the system does own an Earthlike, that Earthlike will be Hadean. Maybe it can get some ice delivered to it . . .

...except that this HD 141399 outer planet is "e". The system owns three other superSaturns and superJovians. These three are all inbound; the "c" is at 0.693 AU (like Venus) and the "d" is 2.114 AU (like Vesta). We don't have such monsters bookending our green Earth and we never did. Eccentricities roam around 0.04-0.053, also; not quite as oval as Mars' 17kBC minimum 0.079, but still worse than Earth's today. And the inclinations came to Kane absurdly ill-constrained 10-85° so we don't even know their masses, not really. Both c and d are certainly over 1.3 M_j.

There might be a problem allowing for Earthlikes in-between. That's right: it's MMR time, if we can squeeze something into a Laplacian or maybe a Trojan.

Kane calculates that the innermost (and smallest) superSaturn "b" librates its orbit with giant c's, around a 2:1 resonance. The whole system is stable - so if these planets ever did a Grand Tack, that tacking is done. But Kane is skeptical about stability for whatever other planetoids are within 4.5 AU. I doubt that "b" or "c" are attracting much in the way of Trojans, either.

As I read Kane, we can allow for an asteroid-belt of S-types in the 1.2-1.7 AU range, currently on the hot side, but not forever. Also "d" can attract stable Trojans in SdL4 and L5 (nobody cares about "e" here). Giant d likely has tides, on which Kane didn't speculate. But out at 2.19 AU, which by simple geometry means the haloes centre 2.19 AU from the planet as well: these tides are most unlikely to exceed the d Hill-sphere. Some of these "asteroids" could well be larger than our own Ceres (especially this early in the system's life).

As to d's Hill... one possibility, also unspeculated by Kane, is that this could capture sufficient mass in ice and silica for a moon. I might go up to the size of Mars. Mildly irradiated, if this aggregated at a Europalike distance; but if there's a core, like Ganymede has a core, that might protect it.

LOL FRONTDATE 11/5 - yeah, I'd some stuff lined up over the last weekend. So y'all got to enjoy this one a little earlier than my usual after-work hours

Professionals study thermodynamics

The Stanford Torus, of 10000 souls, requires power and keeps 10000 souls from contracting fevers. In short, the Torus generates heat. A lot of heat. Which Stanford needs radiate away.

Martelaro assumes a full torus 900m radius-from-fulcrum and rotating 1 rpm; slinging a 430m-diameter tube around. I think we can start with a lower rpm and a shorter r-f-f, if I feed my d00dz calcium (maybe strontium). And I'm more into a shallow parabola. But I'll gladly work longer-term to belay the ropes for 900m. I need to do that anyway to reduce Coriolis, terraform gravity, and increase living-space without losing balance.

Still: I won't need the whole circuit. Will I really need 30MW of electricity use, and 66MW of raw solar for agriculture, and 35MW for illumination and heating? My dumbbell will use only a tenth of Stanford's volume for, of course, much fewer people. I don't demand a tenth of all the above power. So... I'll radiate 13.1MW - pessimistically. Martelaro reckoned 941000 m². Radiation works by W/m² so - I need 94100. At very most, I think.

This monster is symmetric so, first divide them into two 47000 m² sections. Where to put 'em next? I've scheduled the inner, fulcrum-facing curve for industry and recycling; outside curve, for massdriving and trade. So those two radiators - fins - need to go on each side of the parabola. I'd bias them on the inner/upper parts just because the radiator-fluid will rise in heat. Good news: the longer I can stretch my parabola fore-to-aft (if energy reqs stay the same), the narrower I can allow for my radiating fins. In practice I'll divide them further and scatter them in various angles so I don't have to gimbal them as the station rotates. And I won't need near the full 94100 m² until after I've hollowed out the whole rockpile and put a thousand d00dz in there.

I wonder meanwhile if radiators could be used as (crude!) ice-detectors. Where heat is not leaving the station, that implies the heat is melting something the colonists haven't found yet. The lowest layer stands to get a bit, er, muddy.

When the plains in Spain didn't get rain

Middle September, an article came in from Spain about a drought in the late Visigothia. The article is en Ingles; I suppose Spanish versions exist as well.

As of 60 in the dispensation of the muhajireen, which may even have been AD 680 out in the Latin West, Mu'awiya and perhaps-more-so Yazid had decided upon peace in the East (AG 993, I estimate). Carthage was quietly Byzantine. To the west I don't know about Baetica, but I don't think the Greeks and Romans over there were bothering the Visigoths - by then. The old transalpine Gaul was, I think, Visigothic as well; the Merovings being wholly ineffective at the Loire, Marne, Seine, and Rhine. And then the Arabs had a civil war which allowed the Byzantines some comeback - up to Justinian II.

The article claims that the Med-facing Iberia had problems of its own AD 695-725 ("1250 BP"). The Artemisia plant was at its highest pollenation then; basically Spain's answer to the cactus. Lake Zoñar was getting low, too; with concomitant rise in Gelasinospora spores. This drought was on par with the calamitous AD 545-70, AD ~700 being the driest year in the last five millennia. The paper labels the later drought, accordingly, "Period II". Historical sources notch the start of poor weather in Anatolia AD 670 which spread to Spain AD 680.

The last kings were Ervigio 680-7, Egica 687-702/3, Wittiza until 711 and then the civil war and invasion. Egica was contemporary with Justinian II's failure and exile; then the loss of Carthage, in the later AD 690s. This last generation is about the only generation for which I'd allow a historian to cite the "invisi-goths".

After AD 711 the Umayyads had fourteen years to consolidate their victory, after which AD 725 Allah once more opened the firmament and allowed the waters to return. (Although insufficient for supply of the ghazwa October 732, aka Hammer-Time.) AD 755, when came 'Abd al-Rahman al-Umawi, the weather turned bad again for Period III; until AD 770 ("1150"). 'Abd al-Rahman could at least enjoy his last eighteen years, after that.

Zoñar reached its lowest point in the last 2500 years, AD 650-750. I note this is not Period III. I must presume that the irrigation had got trashed during the depopulations and then invasion, so the Period III didn't hit the lake as hard.

One nit I'd pick, or perhaps clarification, is that, when 'Abd al-Rahman assumed the Andalusi amirate, he did not do so as the caliphal heir. He bowed - however nominally - to the 'Abbasids. I would not name the Umayyads' AD 711 invasion of Spain an "establishment" of that decades-old Caliphate. That Caliphate wouldn't be (re)declared (in Andalus only) for some centuries later.

Two Pliocene supernovae

I haven't found the arxiv for this, but Anton Wallner in Germany has at least issued a press release. This is looking at iron-60, an isotope nobody is making here on Earth. Supernovae make it; and Wallner has measured some. The assumption is the implosion of a giant, not the Type 1A "standard candle" explosion of a dwarf.

Based on iron-60's halflife, I guess Earth got this iron over here 7 Mya and 3 Mya. The supernovae can't have detonated within ten parsecs, or we'd never have been born (probably). But they can't have been all that far away; so the material is presumed to have been created not geologically longer than 7 Mya and 3 Mya.

Note: not the Local Bubble creation. That formed 14 Mya. We're in the middle of it now. The solar apex is toward Hercules (north of zodiacal Ophiuchus) so, we're moving more orthogonal even toward zodiacal Hyades than away, strictly-speaking. Back 14 Mya, that supernova was in or around Hercules, relative to us. The bubble's creation could well have formed the giant stars which went boom 7 Mya and 3 Mya.

I don't think giant stars move very quickly from their "stellar cradles". The two stars as supernova-generators would not have formed in the first place long before 7 Mya and 3 Mya. Were we, ourselves, closer to such a cradle? Close to the Bubble's edge...?

As to these two neutron-stars or even [12/20: for the 3 Mya] black holes - I don't know how far they've travelled since.

Space vikings

Zim has news from either side of the Earth. Norway now has a spaceport on Andøy Island, and Iceland has signed the Artemis which suggests they'll want one too.

Meanwhile Argentina is building a rocket, unfortunately still from the Manuel Belgrano Space Center which is Bahía BiancaBlanca. I expect they'll want to launch down in the 'Fuego too, but that'll have to come later. Bit much to hope for Antarctica.

I like polar spaceports best of all because we launch the Bang BangBoom Boom from them. You know what that means, Piper fans: SPACE VIKINGS. To Atíra maybe.

The Brits don't seem to want one in Shetland although they are allowing Sunderland. South Georgia might be better.

Zirconia got precious again

Cost is a function of supply and demand. Power-cells are expensive on account the supply of their material can run high. I'm interested in increasing the supply of rare-earth metals. But... what if their demand was reduced? I mean besides "make ze proles eat bugz".

The Koreans have an answer - they can make zirconium behave like the rare-earths. Zirconium isn't all that rare; I remember when jewelers were selling cubic zirconia as an alternative to diamond. Well, now jewelers can just sell industrial diamonds (or lonsdaleite, lol), so zirconium is even less expensive.

Their Engrish translation may require some work, by the way. Is the author's name really KANG Kisuk? This got as far as ScienceDaily.

They still need the lithium and chlorine alongside the zircon so, you know, there's that. Have they tried sodium and chlorine? We up in the high plains have too much salt which we'd like to ship elsewhere.

3200 Phaethon

ToughSF links 3200 Phaéthon in abstract. This rock is a Near Earth asteroid (although not like the one which almost sucker punched us); Molniya-tier 0.14 AU perihelion (hence the reference in its name). It is a chondrite whose spoor gives us the Geminid meteors. Eric MacLennan and Mikael Granvik have narrowed-down the nature of the rock: definitely carbonaceous, Yamato / CY. "Borderline CI", per wiki.

ToughSF is most-interested in that Phaethon still holds frozen volatiles within itself. Perhaps it is not all coal? Although even coal is useful to settlers...

I am interested, for my part, in shattered S-types. They don't start with a lot of volatiles; and if they are shattered, I imagine most of what volatiles they have, will be lost to space. But if what shattered such a rock includes something alien, here being a C-type (or B like Pallas), those inclusions might remain within, hidden from us.

WAIT 11/8: Destiny+ is supposed to go there. That supposition is delayed - to 2025. It's the fault of the rocket, Epsilon-S, which is not a good rocket. Anyway: I have to assume that Phaethon was chosen in the first place because 2024 offered a launch-window where it took five years to get there - Hohmann, most-likely. Since this rock has a period 523.6 days, I calculate our mutual synodic period at 1207.8 days. If they are delaying this launch by one year, I expect longer than five years to get there.

How a shot clots

I've pretty much 'phoned it in, the last couple days (from space!). I should have been paying attention to the VAXX news... against interest, perhaps.

Sometimes vaccines are associated with auto-immune blood-clots, called Immune Thrombocytopenia and Thrombosis. Birmingham have a pathway: Platelet Factor 4.

With this, the Brummies feel safe in calling it Vaccine-induced IT&T.

The VITT is... scary, for those of us who took the newer shots, like those for CoVID. (I didn't get boosted; I just took Pfizer's original duo.) I propose we deserve to know what we're in for.

Best I can garner, any vaccine makes the body think it's under attack, so creates antibodies. Per the news-release, VITT victims' antibodies had adhered to the PF4 protein (somehow). This creates a big raft of molecules, an "immune complex". Other(?) platelets interpret this as damage and inflame the circulatory system, activating more platelets and - here's the clot. Which clot, then roams around your body to your kidneys or your heart or your brain: Thrombosis.

That summary isn't great for explaining if PF4 was naturally on the antibodies, or if it's on the platelets. Maybe Birmingham didn't know either. Anyway, the 26 October article says that some "c-Mpl" thrombopoietin receptor is on the platelets. Activating a platelet, releases PF4, from the platelet's α-granules. c-Mpl then receives the PF4, which reception activates the "Janus kinase 2" cytosolic-enzyme (a nRTK to be exact; it's involved in T-cells). It looks like platelet-on-platelet action. Anyway all this stuff will stick together.

There already exist drugs as can limit the c-Mpl / PF4 reception. Ruxolitinib, for instance. Normally this is used in treating blood-cancers. It may be that it goes to preventing the cancers, or even the chemotherapy, from inducing immune-complexes and thereby the clots and inflammation.

CoVID is called-out in the release but not in the abstract. I don't know if other vaccines run the same risk. I don't see where the releases point to whether CoVID itself - or any other disease - might also induce IT&T via this pathway. I also don't see if JAK2 has some genetic basis; I presume so.