The Dogger down under

This came in over Twitter this week, and yesterday Saraceni posted it so: Sahul's archipelago.

A common question in Australian prehistory is, "how come the Javanese and Islamic mariners never found Australia". Even the Polynesians may have been aware of the mainland; they absolutely got to what the Dutch call "New Zealand". I assume it a matter of time before they hit up Botany Bay from the east.

... and that's the problem. From the east, Australia's great bulk and mountain-range make landing not-horrible. The west coast of Australia is horrible: look at a map, and see how much nothing blocks winds between Malagasy and Perth. Speaking of, only the Perth corner is (relatively) human-habitable, I mean, if you're not into trapping small insectivores to survive. People do, today, live north, in the city of Darwin. Not many people.

So if Java, Islamic or Chinese-influenced or simply Javanese, had checked across the Timor Sea southeast of guess-where... they wouldn't have liked it. The landing was windy and treacherous. The local produce was bad, literally alien to a Javanese. There weren't many people there (anymore - we'll get to this) who could comprehend the concept of "trade". And there were shoals.

But. Once upon a time, those shoals were on the surface. They were islands - a chain of islands, parallel with Timor. The Tiwi Islands made a peninsula from Australia. Together they blocked a bay which is now "Joseph Bonaparte Gulf", "Malita Basin" on the gulf-floor. As for "Timor Sea": that was then more-like "Timor Strait". North Sea inhabitants might consider the Dogger Bank.

What was it like over there? Probably not far-off what Tiwi is like today - or even west Timor. With lower sealevels, in the Ice Age, the air might have been a bit cooler and drier. So less windy, at least. Kalumburu maybe? - either way, tropical-savannah with long dry seasons. October to May but more so December to March, monsoon.

Could people live in near-sea-level flatland with seasonal drenching, otherwise no water? With cisterns perhaps - but Ice Age people? @Paracelsus1092 finds this difficult to believe. There's where the Dogger similarities end; Dogger was eminently productive for birders and fishers, even for hunters when the full Doggerland Shelf.

It may be that these islands' main purpose was to make the climate less-windy and less-wavey for the inhabitants of what is now Darwin.

Maybe the Aussies could try this now. Build some artificial-islands and a submarine base or two.

The bow

We've looked at a few examples of south-to-north population movements up the isthmus - lately, bypassing Darien. Inasmuch as archery is a "Postclassic" introduction to the Maya and points north - that's another one [h/t saraceni].

Most of the Americas were doing fine with spearthrowers. Spears work better than arrows in taking down megafauna; and there's not much point in archery in a dense jungle where foliage gets in the way. Archery works for... well, for war. The Andes had war; the Huari and their Inca successors were (very) warlike.

Yes - the Huari were contemporaries with the postclassic Maya. But it is not like the Huari invented war. In this case the arrows point to Titicaca - which lake spawned that theocracy which the Hispanicised Inca will call "Tiahuanaco".

Tiahuanaco, perhaps, adopted the arrow for defence. They didn't like to face enemies in direct combat. But who needs to do that if their longbowmen turn your troops into pincushions from two hundred meters?

Resistance is futile

ToughSF has been essential Twitter reading lately! Here's Shanghai, bringing superconductors over 1.2 km. 2200 amps between two 220 kV substations. Resistance is, er, zero ohms. I take it that's power-delivery from the main grid to subgrids.

Mainly it's an economic problem they'd solved, namely they used their own stuff rather than buying it from, er, us. I still doubt if chilling a pipe with liquid nitrogen over 1.2 km is less expensive than just to run a current over copper and take the loss. Shanghai seem to think they've solved other problems: high electricity density and limited space. Next stop, Lagos, pop. 100 million, I guess...

As for deep space stations, this should be great, if only because heat-radiation is an inherent problem. And Jansen was going to settle millions of people on his spinning rubblepiles. Main problem I see is the inherent expense of nitrogen itself.

WREN

ToughSF is talking up Florida man Herbert Wertheim Wave Rotor Enhanced Nuclear... Propulsion. They've silenced the P so - WREN for short (powerpoint). I don't suppose he'd like to be called HerbeWert.

Wertheim offers 444 W/kg electric cycle, 1920 W/kg thermal cycle, Isp 1430 (N/N)s (thermal exhaust 1420s per ToughSF). Its propulsion is indeed bimodal, with the thermal side being good ol' NERVA. Otherwise it is nuclear-electric, when the Isp rises to 3000 with accompanying dip in thrust.

It's being earmarked as a 45 day trip to Mars in microgravity. Afterwhich I guess the Martians have to stay there.

Although the tech is ToughSF-approved, I approve it only as a ferry (and can't we find closer targets?). I repeat - assuming we want Mars at all - we should be setting a permanent spinning station on Deimos. With that set up, by robots, we humans can get spun back to good ol' 9.8 m/s².

EtaVolt's rolling solarpanel mechanic

ToughSF brings some Christmas cheer for those dealing with heat-damaged solar-panels: the Singaporeans can fix them now (pdf). Light and heat can be assured most of the damage if we're running these panels in the 0.7-1.0 AU band like I want. (Meteors remain an issue, yes.)

The device would roll itself over solar panels that are up to 2.3 metres in length. I assume that means under gravity. If the station is spinning, which any manned station should be, that means turning the panels tangent to the spin-direction, and rolling that device accordingly.

The eve of the anointed

We're coming up to the fourth week of Advent, so - let's post something. How about: when is the Nativity. This is coming up because Kevin Sorbo, a man I used to admire, lately tweeted that "atheists" shouldn't celebrate Christmas. Mike Cernovich and others have responded that it is a secular celebration of joy which we don't have to name "Christmas". Still more are commenting that most of this stuff is midwinter paganism.

Our local gym has menorahs, stars-of-david, and evergreen decorations with nary a cross nor manger in sight. Equity trumps inclusion, as ever. And they wonder why the young generation despises Christians and resents Jews. At least they've spared us rainbows this time.

Previously I'd been aware of Hippolytus insisting on 25 December - with the assumption of the 25 March Easter. I'd also been aware that Clement in Alexandria had been aware of several dueling days for this Mass.

What Andrew McGowan is larnin' me here is that Origen... gave up. Origen anticipates modern Salafists on Muhammad's birthday: G-d is eternal, He has no birthday. Leave these things to the pagans; leave these things to the liberals. The Puritans, later, would agree.

If Sorbo wants to be play Puritan then he'll likely not even see evergreens allowed anymore.

...sheep a'lambing

I've got an 'Eve poast upcoming but in the meantime, let's get a jump on Easter. This is the real Christian holiday as you know. When's that?

Passover - duh. But there remain some questions on when, exactly. The Johannine Gospel presents Jesus as the Lamb; as do John of Patmos, and Paul. Jesus would have died on 14 Nisan/Artemisios. Mark disagreed and said, 15 Nisan; the other two follow Mark.

But what if... Luke didn't? I have in mind that Luke's Nativity has (famously) shepherds in the field. This is when lambs are born in the first place: that's before mid-Nisan, but not long before. Certainly not midwinter.

A few points follow. (1) Luke did not compose the manger scene himself since his Jesus is the sin-offering, not the Lamb. (2) The L source here, clearly neither Mark nor Matthew, agreed with the Johananaym that Jesus is the Lamb.

These would tempt Johannines to prefer Easter shifted forward in spring; they could possibly get some L/protoLuke-believers, like Marcion, aboard with this as well. Clement (who was not a Marcionite) recorded Nativity options to run late with the singular exception 25 Pharmuthi (21 March), rendering Clement unserious for the Passion. Orthodox Passion, by contrast, looks credible: 14 Artemisios, 6 April (7 in Armenia).

This has... implications for Bcheiry, incidentally, as Isho'yahb bishop of Nineveh celebrated an Easter miracle in the very day-of-month of that original Easter. Bcheiry assumed 25 March. Should it be 25 March, in 630s AD Nineveh?

The magnetic map

In additional magnetic brick news: h/t Saraceni, the old Mesopotamia and Beth-Aramaye got a map now. They've continued to tag magnetic strength and direction with bricks stamped in specific kings' names.

We learn here that our planetary core was very strong indeed (over the Babylonia) from 1050-600 BC. Under NabuKudre'sr II or however you spell that jerk's name, the magnets weakened. Or at least we would learn it if the article wasn't paywalled.

Luckily, I think, the ~660 BC cosmic flareup happened before that guy. Would have been awkward, oh, later 500s BC, at least for the invisible Atlantean aliens Colavito hates so much. (Sorry. Couldn't resist. I hate 'em too of course.)

BACKDATE 12/26

Interplanetary communication

One service which George O Smith has provided is to force us to question our assumptions on how communications work up to Earth/Mars aphelion opposition. Round up to 3 AU.

Smith figured that communication would be beamed to us - that is, focused radar. Unfortunately he also figured that the communication would be by telegraph and Morse, basically; "QRM - Interplanetary"'s MacGuffin is just a short request (from Venus to Earth) for some trivial supplies. If that's all we need then Voyager 2 - speaking from interstellar plasma - is still talking to us (not so much V'ger-1). There's no "beaming" from that distance. Anyone in our inner solar system can listen in. Admittedly this is done at the 2.3 GHz or 8.4 GHz "S Band", more microwave than true radio; this limits bandwidth to 16 b/s (never mind latency).

So Smith didn't have to beam his signals. For Earth his station just has to aim in our general direction. If we're concerned with secrecy then we can share a cypher: "message start, use this key, transmitting, end transmission". Although, yes, I can agree the Sun interferes with this frequency.

A high-bandwidth solution might be for lasers. This has been done from 0.2 AU: we can get 267 Mb/s cat vids.

This craft is en route to 16 Psyche; the recipient is here on Earth, scil. Caltech: Palomar, Hale Telescope. If we have an interworld Web then this can be scaled indefinitely. Also in space we're not restricted to the S Band; although if so, something in orbit - maybe a GEO chain - will need to translate all the beamed messages into S band for wellwalla consumption.

To sum up: beaming is great, but to make SVL4 worth it, the communicants need to be beaming more than telegrams and telemetry.

NASA's new engine

NASA has tested their rotary-detonation. How does it compare with the 1337?

1337 is supposed to have 320 [metric] ton[ne]s of thrust from 450 bar in the chamber. That's not much more than the Raptor 3.2, and I_sp holds steady at 327 (N/N)s. 1337 makes up for that by not being as heavy - it's only 1100 kg (1.1 tonnes). Deletion rampage.

The present Starship prototypes are on previous generations but, SpaceX is working other angles. Like getting the thing to orbit.

NASA promise 2.636 tonnes of thrust; and it runs for 251 seconds. And we're not told the mass of the beast except that it, like 1337, is "lightweight". By a factor of a hundred?

I take it that NASA isn't considering this engine to take off from Earth; this is about correcting trajectories once already in space. Or maybe NASA're just counting on the Harvard grads in USG to do what they do.

BACKDATE 12/21

The kilonova next door

Today gets the hat-tip to Petrov: the most-recent of those supernovae which Wallner reported may, in fact, be neutronstar kilonova like GRB 2005221. See, as of the end of November and independent of Wallner 2023: Leonardo Chiesa, Albino Perego, Federico Maria Guercilena.

... with an unfortunate question-mark at the title's end. I can attest, chat; the arXiv might not be formal publication, but it remains not a Discord server.

The event is - here - constrained to 110-200 pc from us, 3.5-4.5 Mya. If you call that a constraint. What is left behind, in a kilonova?

Heavy elements do seem the province of neutron-stars more than of standard O-star (or even dwarf-star) blowups.

The MacGuffins have taken the station!

I have read George Smith's "Venus Equilateral" series, which I shall abbreviate "GOS-STL4".

To clarify - I have read the series up to 1945 [plus as of 12/20 4 AM the 1947 "coda"; that night was one of THOSE nights]. That is the edition I got. The exists a coda after the coda, like when that more-poetic Smith pulled himself back into Hyperborea; decades after quitting the field.

Also some story called "Lost Art" exists, which you gotta read elsewhere. Maybe I'll read these one day but today is not that day. I note the first appearances of Barney Carroll and James Baler; these characters do make some impact in later stories, but honestly not so much as any readers will care, because 1940s-era George Smith simply isn't good at protagonists.

James Nicoll has a précis of the whole, a fair one as pertinent to what I've seen.

In my view the MacGuffins get annoying as the series stumbles along. "The Long Way" and (I'm told) "Lost Art" involve sucking energy out of the sun (which the Martians had figured out). "The Long Way" is about patent-law. Do these storylines need this particular means around energy-production? "Beam Pirate" involves FtL inasmuch as the villains (having teamed-up) are communicating stock-tips minutes before anyone else can get at them (like Stross noted - this time without attribution). Does this storyline need FtL?

Hard-SF might be able to edit these. For my part I can't recall denying even Piper's "Omnilingual" was salvageable. Nicoll muses that "Lost Art" might itself be Piper's inspiration. Interesting that the editors didn't want it up to 1969.

I do not believe that Hard-SF can salvage courtroom drama "Special Delivery", in which the STL4 crew invent the Replicator... and the Transporter, simultaneously. [CALLED IT 12/20 4 AM: As we carry on, "Pandora's Millions" and "Mad Holiday" carry on, musing upon the social consequences of these inventions. Complete with Goldpressed Latinum, here "Identium". Also, heat-transfer teleportation.] Hard-SF must accept 3-D Printing and 267Mb/s SpaceCats and AI and, oh, Gaussian Splatting. But Smith can't envision these baby steps; he's writing in 1944. Once Smith gets to "Special Delivery" he is basically writing Star Trek prequels.

And there's the problem. He's got a wonderful science-fiction setting for exploring how near-future humans might handle intercourse in near-Earth space. But he's used it to explore science-fiction tropes, as well. Choose the one... or choose the other and blow up your setting.

Smith seemed to know that, given he'd lost interest after 1947 - at least. He shifted to writing other stuff.

BACKDATE 12/20

From south to north

Over a year back I got wind of the Maya being a Costa Rican people who'd migrated... and then the Huastecs migrated further. That looked to have happened along the Atlantic. Lately I've been hearing murmurs about visitation along the Pacific.

Observe, this thread, heavily footnoted. This argues that Mesoamerican bronze was a thing as of the Spanish arrival. Gary Jennings ... sort of agreed, with that. It's just that Jennings thought that bronze was known only to the Pure(m)pecha of what the Aztecs were calling "Michihuacan". It's generally assumed, further, that Tzintzuntzan independently thought it up; being a sort of new-world "Steam Engine Time".

Thesaurus Rex says: oh no. This stuff came from the Andes, AD ~1200. Moreover the Colombian Pacific had, since 100 BC, the tech to trade up the coasts avoiding the fabled Darien Gap. And they had the trade-goods: they'd used seashells. 100 BC is before much of the metallurgy so, this trade was how it was done. If you were Xinca or, later, Maya; you could trade jade and turquoise back at 'em.

As a Pacific trade, the metallurgy got to the Mesoamerican west first. Guerrero, and those Purepecha. Not quite as far as the UtoAztecan heartland.

T.R. is saying, though, that the Aztecs did know bronze. It's just that, in the Valley of Mexico and points each, bronze was expensive. The very mines were west - where the Purepecha were squatting. They weren't about to sell those particular wares for cheap (although, yes, smugglers happen). Also the Valley, like a lot of Mesoamerica, is rich in obsidian; obsidian is, yes, brittle, but it is also hard and holds an edge.

BACKDATE 12/21; 12/29 and now the bow. 3/9/24: Chocolate.

The Hanukkah Bible

It is that time of has-Shana for my erstwhile Tribe.

The first book of "Maccabees" wasn't called that in antiquity; it bore a name which Origen's copyists corrupted into "Sarbeth Sarbanaiel". Elsewhere a précis of Jason of Cyrene made it into (Greek) Bibles as the "Maccabicon" or something like that. So a slew of books got into Christian Bibles as "Maccabean" books; "Sarbeth Sarbanaiel" became the "first" one, probably because it was composed first.

1 Maccabees - as a Greek text - seems to owe something to the Greek tragic style, as in the death of the Epimanes (pdf). But Jerome implied that he'd seen this one in "Hebrew". Indeed, the idiom in the Greek is Hebraic not just a Septuagintal pastiche like, say, Luke. I've suspected it was commissioned by John Hyrcanus before the family took the crown; the Encenia ritual and palm-waving which the Johannine Gospel remembered may owe something to it.

There never was a Danielic-era Aramaic version. The Syriac translations (two survive) come from the Lucianic edition of the Greek. The Latin also comes from the Greek as does, directly or not (this post doesn't care), the Grabar. Seckel Isaac Fränkel will use the Greek too, to backtranslate it.

In the tradition into which I've now stumbled, 1 Maccabees was never as popular as actual, "2" Maccabees. 2 Maccabees had more focus on martyrdom, a big Thing for Christians. Besides John our Sermon For The Hebrews cites Greek 1 Macc 2 but, that's about it (unless the timing of Advent counts). In the Jewish tradition... well, not everyone approved what the Hasmonaeans turned into; Qumran refused any of their stuff and the Rabbis didn't want it either.

This blog has often questioned how hard the Palaestinian Jews ever forgot this Hasmonaean propagandum; like, Pesikta de-Rav Kahana starts the calendar at the same time as Catholics do, around Hanukkah. Lately Reuven Kimelman is arguing Al HaNissim was edited to take 1 Maccabees into account. Both events could be from Julian's time; better, from Khusro II's occupation. Looking at the Al HaNissim text this is in Hebrew, not Aramaic.

The making of a superEarth

The extended Kepler transit-detection mission, "K2", looked at the ecliptic. Two clusters along the way are Praesepe (alias Beehive) and Hyades, in Cancer and Taurus respectively; as clusters, they haven't moved much since the stars in them formed. Those stars, so planets, are considered about 600-800 My old.

JPL a month ago lumped together fifteen transits in the GKM range and posted some findings. The theory is the drain of a subNeptune into a superEarth over time, as tested at HD 63433. In large part due to Kepler's earlier sweep we know our universe - for older stars - has clusters of each, with a gap between 1.5 Earth radii and 2 Earths; two Earths may as well be the four Earths of Neptune-proper. A period of high heat would burn away the ices and gasses as make up a Neptunelike, leaving mostly the silicate/water core. T Tauri, the star-in-making, bursts high heat; the initial formation of a planet would have its gas burned away. Some of it, at least.

JPL were testing if a long term effect existed as well. Praesepe and Hyades stars aren't T Tauri. After 600-800 My, most are still on the main-sequence, heating up but gradually. (Heck, most stars are K or M, on that track for longer than our sun will last.) So: any patterns?

Turns out: yes, patterns. If Praesepe and Hyades stars - younger stars like HD 63433 - have planets detectable by transit at all, they are of subNeptunes (or hot Jupiters). Like: these planets are all subNeptune. For stars outside those clusters, with older (3-9 Gy) ages: only a quartersixth are subNeptune, the others being 1.5 Earth or less. This means planets are losing atmosphere over time - it is "saecular". It further suggests that wherever we see a 1.8 Earth it is becoming a 1.5 Earth; hence their rarity.

I confess surprise that so few 1 Earths were found in these clusters; I do not think our own planet (nor Venus) to be Neptunelike at formation. The Hadean rocks formed at 27 bar, which is high; but less than Venus' 93 bar.

For some scorched planets, maybe atmo-loss can continue to happen from the solar wind after 800 Mya. But those planets would have to be like 51 Pegasi's. Too large; not in scope.

I think JPL, in the wide K2 field, were mainly seeing old K stars with longer time between transits; so getting, like, Venus irradiance. Venus hasn't lost its atmo and it is a sub-Earth. The transiting older-planets' loss of atmosphere must then be happening from a noncatastrophic cause, therefore (for a start) nonstellar. That cause must be internal to the planet.

One cause might be a change from a nongreenhouse atmo to a greenhouse. But how often does that happen? Methane, carbon dioxide, water, CFCs, and ozone are all greenhouse. The preference of the research, for the source of the near-constant heat, is the core. We can consider nuclear fission, crashes by Theia-planetoids, and differentiation. All these are more likely in the planet's first years, which we've already exited. The JPL is left with: it's just overall slow to cool, so larger and more massive than Earth's.

When do less-massive planets stop boiling off their own air? Above a certain mass/density, the hot core is overridden by the mass, which explains how Neptune (for one) exists anyhow. As for the 2 Earth mass range, I suspect: about when they reach Venus' equilibrium, or that of a steamy waterworld or hycean. Once the world-ocean (at least) stops boiling, the planet might get habitable - but maybe never on land. On our own Earth, our very bones evolved to keep marrow-production protected from lateSilurian Earth's residual radiation. That's at 4.1-2 Gy age.

I bring all this up now because just a few days ago another team presented some October speculations on some seventeen under-insolated earthlikes, mostly detected by transit but also including (far side of?) Prox b. These were treated as if they were icy-crust waterworlds, like Europa; their properties reconstructed according to that density. They ruled out Kepler 11 b, 18 b, 60 bcd, and 414 b. At least Gliese/GJ 514, and I'd add Keplers 441 and 442 and 1229, as under 3 Gy, should have all their planets ruled out, also. Prox b meanwhile looks to be like Io. But of the others several, like Kepler 296 f, sit in that 1.5-2 Earth gap. Should they?

That team proposes we look for geysers on some of them. If geysers spew or do not spew, then these planets can be re-constrained. I wonder if Boulder's CUTE 'scope will check in on some of these, or if it is just for Hot Jupiters.

The Phaethon myth was Doric

Apropos of nothing I looked into the Phaéthon myth, until OldEuropeanCulture gets to it. The name means "enlightener" in Greek (cognate with "photon").

The myth goes that the lightbringer was a bastard of Helios - a truly ancient god, for Greeks, sometimes alongside the Titans - who came home to claim his birthright. Helios granted this much. Then Phaéthon fitzHelios demanded to drive the Chariot (a famed IndoEuropean trope). In the tragic tradition, Helios warned against that. Either way he could not deny his natural son and potential heir. Helios, ancient as he was, was conscious that he was replacable. Sadly - not replacable by Phaéthon. The unworthy son subsequently lost control of the reins so brought Earth into raging summers and freezing winters, until Order was restored.

Several tropes are shared in other legends, like Bellerophon (who turned Pegasus to Olympus) and perhaps most-of-all Icarus. What brings this one to my attention is that everyone down here suffered from Phaéthon's hubris. Plato claims that the myth was known in Egypt. Nowadays we're using its name for a harshly eccentric asteroid.

Velikovsky would probably tell us the myth had to do with a different eccentricity for Earth; Milankovitch could perhaps make the better case. But I question the IndoEuropean memory here.

Phaéthon bears a similar name as the Phosphorus of Isaiah's prophecies... but I think they drove different chariots. Isaiah's Lucifer myth is the "star of the morning" which is just Eosphorus - that is, Ishtar-Venus. Sometimes Ishtar tries to usurp Baal but is sent to Sheol instead. This may help to induce seasons but hardly irregular seasons.

I also must call shens the myth is Egyptian. Plato, famously, liked to tell stories and to claim them as known in Egypt just to slap a (forged) certificate upon them, Atlantis being the most famous. Plato elsewhere recommended that the well-ordered Republic do exactly that, make up stories and pretend they're ancient.

In defence of Plato: propaganda works best when... true, or at least Truthy^TM. Even if Egypt wasn't involved, some of Plato's stories did enjoy antecedents, Atlantis owning several parallels to Minos' Crete so its downfall oft-considered a recollection of Thera. As to Phaéthon the Greeks had long known of him from their tragedians. Ancient lore about the earth and the sky became Moral Exhortations.

In Phaéthon we may have a memory of when Greeks suffered climate disruption - but that seems vague to me. A better suggestion is that some Greeks remembered when summers were hotter and winters colder. That is called the Continental Climate or, as Americans call it, "North Dakota". In southeast Europe such is not Mediterranean, but can be "enjoyed" further north in the Balkans. Erratic weather is a feature up there too.

The myth would hold its best salience in the northern Greek mainland. These were the Dorians. Some of them trickled down south as far as Thera and Crete. They would have kept such stories; perhaps adapting them to local lore of disruptive climate because, well, Thera and Crete.

No Romans below the Jireček

This came almost a week back, so - why not post now: the Late Antique Balkans, as geneticists see them. As ever, pots ain't people... pots are language, DNA is people.

Some of it, we already knew. During the AD 250-550 side of Late Antiquity, the Balkans got migrants with mixed ancestry from Northern Europe and the Pontic-Kazakh steppe. That'll be the [East German] Goths and [Ossetic-Aryan] Alans, respectively. After the 400s we should be seeing Huns; but maybe we are seeing Huns, buried in the Alan signatures.

After AD 600, which the EurekaAlert is stupidly marking shortly after the fall of the Western Roman Empire (unless we are talking the post-Raptor Lombard invasion of the Justinianic Italia): major influx of individuals from Eastern Europe. And that's... that. What we are calling "Bulgaria" and general "Yugoslavia" - and to be honest "Hungary" - is now, in genetic fact, yugo-Slavic. And so the region stays, neglecting some irruptions, mostly cultural, from Magyars and from proper Germans and such.

One point I'd thought I'd known was the Avars - absent from this study. Other studies put a full-on Mongol population in the Slavic-era Balkans. Either way, the Avar signature is gone now. If they were nobles I must assume they preceded the Magyar nobility into the netherworld. Basil II - like the Horde after him - slew fighters, sparing taxpaying farmers. The farmers kept being Slavs (or even slaves), speaking Slavic and sometimes Romanian. The Avars didn't even pass their language to their serfs, as the Magyars would.

The paper mentions a different surprise, from the actual Antiquity of the Principate. Actual Romans didn't venture into the Balkans; instead, they came from eastern Anatolia. Those people would have spoken Greek or maybe leftover Phrygian.

Which leads me to ponder the famed Jireček Line, still in place today separating old Albanian plus Romanian; from Greece, Macedonia, and Bulgaria. I'd thought that the Dacian / Dalmatian north was Latin - still basically is, despite (Catholic) Croats shifting to Slavic. Did the research simply fail to sample north-Balkan sites? Are Bucharest, BudaPest, and Zagreb not Balkan?

Ryugu used to dive further down

In more research on the Ryugu/Bennu set of C types, now delivered to Earth: Japan have marked their sample as CI if heated ~575 K in a "reducing" environment. Wiki still thinks Ryugu is Cb although, maybe now we can define Cb itself as "CI when heated with oxygen-poor volatiles". (We can't even unscrew the Bennu samples yet.)

This is, of course, from the asteroidal surface. It looks to me like it got baked with hot Sun - partly by protons, but I expect at first more by its own ices. Like by carbon-monoxide and/or ammonia.

Our own Moon's surface-regolith temperature runs up "only" to 400 K. So, assuming Ryugu shares albedo with the darker patches of our Moon - round down, 1.43 insolation. Reciprocal square-root, so, not so long to calculate: perihelion 0.836 AU.

That interests me given that the Ryugu perihelion was 0.9633 AU when the Hayabusa went there. As to the baked-CI, a Phaëthonesque perihelion assuming more-or-less constant semimajor suggests, in the past, a higher aphelion. Clearly Ryugu and Bennu both came in from Beyond.

Wiki is telling me different things as to where the two rubblepiles come from. Some say 495 Eulalia or 142 Polana. Some say comet. Mind: 495 Eulalia and/or 142 Polana could have drifted in from out where Ceres came from. They sail now in unstable resonances, 1:2 Mars and 3:1 Jupiter respectively. I don't even think the 67P "comet" was a true comet.

More impositions between Luke and Marcion

Richard Carrier is bringing to attention, 1 Thessalonians 2:14b-16. This pericope develops vv. 13-14a into an aside against the Jews. Carrier has an interest in omitting vv. 14b-16: the pericope marks Paul as a witness to the tradition it was the Jews in Judaea who slew Mar Isho'. That's an historical event, thin on the ground with authentic Paul; otherwise Carrier accepts 1 Thessalonians as authentic.

Carrier points out the lack of a witness for the 1 Thessalonians 2:14b-16. He's been pointing out that the state of the text is bad, especially for (initially) less-regarded texts like that Gospel which Saint Mark compiled. But: where are our witnesses against? Besides what contradictions Carrier marks from Paul himself...

I can consider at least one, maybe two: the first Gospels. In Mark it's the Romans who do this deed; Mark elsewhere accepts Paul. In Matthew, although the Jerusalem mob accepts the curse for it, the deed is likewise Roman. We must await first Ep'Barnabas, then Gos'Peter and Gos'Luke, before we see narratives as set the Jews to set the cross. "Barnabas" although assuredly writing after Paul did not cite Paul; one imagines the author should have found space for our 1 Thessalonians 2 if he'd known it.

Back to the Pauline corpus proper, the Thessalonian duo of letters isn't the core. The core scroll had Romans, 1-2 Corinthians (minus the intervening Lachrymose), and Galatians. It would be easier to "tweak" the two Thessalonians in codex than to alter the core scroll. Indeed the forgery of "2 Thessalonians" (unknown to, say, Ephesians) demonstrates one drastic tweak.

Even the core suffered alteration; and not just the loss of Lachrymose. Already known is that the Pauline epistles attracted a bid to truncate Paul's mission, to end at Rome.

I may even have a culprit for the anti-Jewish insertion into 1 Thessalonians 2. It wouldn't be the Johannine or Barnabas factions; although they despised Jews (on their way to excommunicating fundamentalists), they also didn't care for Paul - who does not disown Jews as such, instead treating gentiles equally. A Johannine would simply neglect Paul's letters instead copying 1 John.

The Romans deletion agrees with the Gospel of Luke which - hey look, already pulls the Divine Favour from the Jews and from Jerusalem, toward Rome. The epistle to the Romans might not be edited against the Jews as a race-cum-nation, but we might expect that of other epistles. In 1 Thessalonians 2:14b-16 we are looking at that anti-Jewish tradition, as well as Luke-aligned and pre-Bezae.

If this smells like Marcion - remember that I think the Romans deletion preceded him, as a Lucan-party corpus. Marcion would simply have inherited this library. (Bezae will postdate even Marcion, containing other evangelists beyond Luke+Acts.)

That the insertion preceded Marcion might explain how the insertion escaped, say, Tertullian's notice. Tertullian followed the Claromontane tradition of the Core Scroll, against Marcion. Marcion cared about feminism, which Tertullian didn't approve; but Tertullian wasn't about to challenge their mutual text where he didn't have to, especially not for the sake of Jews, accursed in Matthew as well.

Venus Equilateral is in public-domain

Last year, Gutenberg posted the 1947 collection of George Oliver Smith's 1942-5 SVL4 stories (1949 reprint). I found out over the past week, after purchasing a used copy of the 1970s69 reïssue. That issue sports additional content like an Arthur C Clarke foreword.

75 years later - public domain, all legal, w0000t. I don't feel too suckered; the copy only cost me like $2 and it's good for reading while walking.

As ACC notes, GOS is seminal in hard SF. Which has its drawbacks. I've read the first three stories so far: "QRM: Interplanetary", "Calling the Empress", and (last night) "Recoil".

Smith was a telecom engineer during the War so that's the plot for the first two stories. First, some despot in northern Venus (Alpha Regio?) is sending a message to Earth; then, there's a plague on Venus (cue the "venereal disease" jokes) so ships in-flight to Venus need to be steered around it. These Macguffins are, of course, bogus. But Smith seems to know they're Macguffins, Smith might even know the word "Macguffin".

Accordingly I don't quite read when Smith predicts these events be occurring. I can suggest one constraint, in "QRM" - if we steelman the necessary communications to tightbeam. Earth and Venus are not in line-of-sight. That constrains those events to the early-2000s (or to some cycle afterward). Ordinarily our Sun shouldn't block mutual communications.

One misstep is that Smith - at least in "QRD" - seems unaware that a Lagrangian is a halo orbit. The station should be lazily crawling fore and aft in a long (three-dimensionally) curved ellipse. And it should be dealing with rubble. Later Smith does note meteors, which help the "Recoil" story so -maybe someone mailed his magazine?

On the social side of dynamics some might care that there's borderline xesualhassarment going on, between the big men and the female secretaries. I might even be one of those who care. Probably those stations in our day, which is not 2012, are getting Grok-powered Alexa, so the misfits and nerds on those stations can go flirt with her. A problem for 2117 mayhap.

By contrast Smith has a keen eye for male dynamics. Dynamics like how engineers use tablecloths for blueprints because they're not allowed paper - they'd just fly aeroplanes from them. Dynamics like that micromanaging midwit Burbank in "QRM".

As to the physics, that matters in explaining how Burbank's wellmeaning, GCSE-tier understanding thereof is destroying the station in "QRM". That might well have inspired Pournelle's "High Justice" stories, along with knockoffs like L Neil Smith (who famously does away with Venus itself). Our Smith brings an Asimovian "atomic pile" to power his station, not a mercury boiler as I'd dimly (mis)remembered others saying of this oeuvre. Which comes in handy when Smith's lads are electron-'cuting a pyrate in "Recoil".

As noted: our boy is a Maxwellbro.

As other zeerust goes, everyone smokes - on an oxygen-rationed and air-filtered starbase. I gotta assume, they vape instead. And they use FREEDOM units not metric. Sigh.

People get from place-to-place in these inner planets by non-Hohmann high-thrust high-impulse beasts. Neukart fusion, maybe. Ideally brachistochrone trajectory, although Smith doesn't spend as much effort around launch-windows as, say, Harry Bishop did.

The science gitz a little less gud in "Empress". This goes around - how do we find a 200-meter ("six hundred-odd foot") bucket of aluminum in space, and contact it. Any brachistochrone must emit massive energy in the infrared so - it can't be that hard, down here. And the Empress hasn't got any receivers tuned to Earth, Venus, or the Equilateral which, I'm sorry, is highly irresponsible. Over on the Equilateral's side why ain't it got some 'scopes on the Gaia or Webb tech-level? Where's Gaia or Webb themselves, or the equivalent on (say) Deimos? Maybe the Burbank mess might account for some of these shortfalls.

UPDATE 12/20 - when MacGuffins take over. Yeah, I'd call the more-important stories for these first three; plus, "Off the Beam" and "Firing Line" I daresay. On the second “Calling the Empress”, Porcius couldn't into the math. So we nerds'll want to read "Another 'Deadline'?".

Exomoon detectability

I hadn't even seen those reports over the past year about the candidate exomoons. Last night, we got told the observers hadn't seen the moons either so, good company, I guess.

Some German mathematicians and modelists did what they do - making up fake moons. (Null-hypotheses, bitchez.) The fakes tend to get drowned in the noise. To avoid that, and to count a signal as a real moon, Earth observers need superCallistos: something larger than Mercury, with a long period/angle of separation. Physically larger, at that; we are talking transits. As for lightcurves from their sun, nein!

SuperCallisto implies wide Hill. On the plus side, if the star is G or even F, I'd figured - could be swimmable. But Earth would have to be near-impossibly fortunate to spot a transit from, what, 2 AU out from some other star.

CATCHING UP 12/16: Not me; ToughSf - he's linking (mistakenly at that) to 6 December. Someone needs to comment at him. SUNSPOTS 1/11/24: The Germans should consider improving their "noise" with fake sunspots; we might not need the full Mercury in such cases.

Silver stars

Some 42 stars in our galaxy have taken on debris from an earlier generation of now-exploded stars. Kind of like how some white dwarfs are polluted by full planets; but these stars' debris is not planetary: it is rhodium or silver or massive metals like that.

Whence all that? from fission. So who's blasting Orions near those old stars?

Nah: fission happens naturally. Lots of neutrons jack up the atomic mass. If the process is rapid enough then some yuuuge element will result. You remember - like in Oppenheimer, which you can watch in the kinoplex this weekend if you didn't catch it last time. Natural reactors exist such as in Gabon and, I suspect, Ceres. In these stars' case the process is, or was, an "r-process" for "rapid neutron capture".

This process involves neutron stars: birth or merger. (Or death, but I know of little that can destroy a citywide quarkless ball of neutrons - black hole collapse?) The magic number, if you will, seems to be 260, before the atom cracks apart (and fires off more neutrons).

If the capture is rapid enough I wonder if neutron-stars can cook up something in the 290s (now we know Oxygen-28 doesn't work). Since the alchemical synthesis of lawrencium-266 a decade ago; work continues on finding the fabled isle of Stabilitas. The island may still be mythical however for other reasons involved with their colossal mass. There's your synthium.

Mercury rising

I was looking at a station radiating 13.1 MW. How would it get that energy, before all that?

Here at 1 AU, photovoltaic powercells are best below 20 kW - like on the ISS. These post-Einstein days we're asked to envision fission for large stations, over 100 kW. According to Lester Del Rey (not Smith pace, er, me): big tanks of mercury would get the job done in between (so the pre-1955-SF lack of photovoltaics isn't as "zeerust" as you'd think).

Recall that Smith's station was at the preceding Venus equilateral so Del Rey's quicksilver there could beat out nuclear up to 200 kW. Also if the station has no nuclear physicist on staff then they may have to default to the mercury plan. Or gallium, at a 1.911 flux.

Why starve a station of nukes? I wouldn't take a space nuclear war seriously. More worrisome to the space legal-department would be energy so cheap it fires unsolicited railguns, even an Orion pulse engine. Action... reaction. Say we leave aside DAY OF THE ROCK. A station with its orbit adjusted to intercept Atíra or to take some Laplacian is now king of that region, so henceforth must be bartered-with.

Now the station has to get the mercury. First up, this element is a pest metal in our post-Potosí age. A series of efficient Starship flights could get this into LEO and then out of here entirely. Of course we don't much want it in LEO either.

Failing that, I was struck by the lack of any Hg on H rocks over here. Proportions seem to vary. The Orgueil rock has the most spotted thus far, at 14 ppm. Orgueil is a carbonaceous chondrite, like Pallas and beyond. I expect that our Sun treats mercury as just another volatile, so S (and H) rocks lose it. Bennu might still have some, buried in there.

Why the Earth/Venus Laplacian?

This week I'd been considering a brand new MacGuffin in the Earth/Venus space - the 10 in the 13:10:8 Laplacian. I focused on the least eccentricity, as having the best climate if nothing else. So: let's figure out what it even is for. Although it is close to both planets, so delta-V is not-terrible; the launch-windows make Hohmanns a rare treat. 1/2 meton our way, 1/3 meton Venus'...

I have been planning Venus for the hub for the Solar System at-large. So as a rule I think that, in Earth/Venus interactions, Earth should dominate the space.

Its main advantage is that Earth (or Venus) won't be limiting how much mass the station can accumulate, as long as the station uses the mass and isn't stockpiling it for dino-killers. And it should use that mass; for when layovers go for, what, 2 2/3 years or four years.

The station can serve as another waypoint to ship out rescue-missions for whatever cargo is going into sub-Earth trajectories. Better yet, to take on passengers between various Hohmann shipments to and fro; a little variety would be healthy.

The Earth/Venus interim station

To continue my musings on the interim 8:10:13 Earth/Venus orbits: what if... we had a 292.2-day oasis of stability as wasn't necessarily Hohmann? I recall doing this last year, elsewhere. Monsieur Laplace informs us that such orbits exist - which always return to the same longitude, relative to the bracketing bodies.

The interim Keplerian semimajors swing 0.86159-0.86177 AU; inclination ~1.7°. I doubt Laplace cares. So, on the 0.8616's; let's find which coördinate to plant the station(s). Say that λ₁ is the angle for Mercury. Planet Two and Planet Three have this Laplacian between them . . .

φ2s = 10λ2 - 13λs        + ϖs
φs3 =         8λs - 10λ3 + ϖs

Subtraction! φ_2s3 = 10λ₂ - 21λ_s + 10λ₃. So, when λ₂=λ₃ at conjunction which we'll define as zero, λ_s = -180°/21 = -8.57° so, behind the planets in their common rotation.

That position should cycle for (its own) Hohmann windows. Synodic period with Earth should approximate four Earth sidereals ("Julian years") = half metonic; with Venus, 972.7 days = third metonic. For minimum eccentricity, the secondary Hohmann's Earth-perihelion and Venus-aphelion are together just the station semimajor.

As Newtonian solutions go, I must now divulge that Laplace is not Kepler. Terms like "semimajor" might not apply. I don't know if Laplace allows other stations at eccentricities up to the Venus-Earth Hohmann's. The usual resonances I see at Jupiter and at other systems are near-circular. Even if eccentric Keplerian orbits did exist, they'd risk bumping into each other every metonic. Also such stations like the Hohmann cyclers get variable insolation. The minimum-eccentricity station is the least variable. That one's "year" matters only inasmuch as this station is radio'ing the cyclers.

G-type suns get approximated to a point source from ~0.7 AU on up; that's how NASA pegged Venus' irradiance to 1.911, by inverse-square. If I round up, this suggests - for the 0.8616 AU low-eccentricity station - 1.35 Earth insolation. This admittedly is an annoyance to thermodynamics (and Venus isn't occulting this place like, ever) so we must build a shield. The shield might even double as a radiator, adjusting its orbit to stay exactly between Earth and Venus. The Hill radii of Venus and Earth are each small-enough, relative to AUs, that we could build almost a planet between them.

Every conjunction, such a station is not exactly 1.7° from the Sun (although again I am not bothering with exact maths). Earth might worry about a shield so large an eclipse happens. I would calm such worries. The 0.8616+ AU range is short of rock, excepting in Apophids as cross Earth's orbit. The sub-Earth prospects I found orbit further down, closer to Venus. Most material will need to be imported/adjusted from up the well. On the other hand up-well material should include more volatiles (hydrogen especially); we'll likely have to import most of that to (say) Atíra anyway.

Taking out the trash

I really should watch Sandra HamburgerBullock's Gravity again. Last October, a fine got levied against the Dish network for not boosting a GEO high enough. I hadn't paid attention in October but, yes; legalities and ethics are increasingly A Thing in space.

Anyway - we are getting better at finding this trash. Bad news for those who make it; good news - longterm - for those who avoid it. The two houses of our own Congress are still working on the problem. Which is a real problem unlike what Our Betters prefer.

Summary of the Venus/Earth Hohmann

This week I am revisiting those orbits between Earth and Venus. For now let's summarise Hop David's Hohmann cyclers (like Mars/Earth VISIT). I'd link the clowder.net page except that its site is very erratic this week. So, this post is to assemble the information I remember from Hop's site alongside some maths. Some of it, new maths!

Earth and Venus are in near-resonance. This blog has already done Hohmann semimajor, and the formula for Venus:Hohmann:Earth which is 13:10:8. That eight-sidereal-Earth-year swing has a name: the "metonic". Hop would run ten Hohmann cyclers at once.

The full Hohmann ellipse runs somewhere around a 292.2 day cycle, which is absolutely a "year" for calculations of insolation. That irradiance is 1-1.911 Earth if we assume (like NASA) the sun for a point. At least summers are short. Half that year is the trip between Earth to Venus - then the husk just drifts back and forth (with an interim flyby Earth halfway), before hitting Earth again for the next metonic's clutch of Venus passengers.

If Hop wants Hohmanns-as-cyclers, he requires thrust sufficient to tweak the orbits so they actually intersect Venus and (twice) Earth. We all know (from Venus transits) that the 13:8 resonance isn't exact and, also, takes in some drift from Jupiter and Saturn. The interim's very semimajors should span a range.

Go Kepler! This offers between cuberoot[0.64] Earth AU - 0.86177; and cuberoot[1.69] Venereal units - 1.19 which is 0.86159 AU. Note that the true halfway mark is 0.86166 AU. The difference - to me - doesn't seem a problem to a station as compared to, say, what jostles it might get from visiting craft.

The cyclers bisect Venus' inclination (3.39°) relative to Earth so ~1.7°. That position should cycle but we'll not care too much how, here. Synodic period with Earth should be four Julian years which is half the metonic; with Venus, 972.7 days at a third the metonic.

Why (re-)do all that? I have reasons I'll get to... but for this post's purpose, the Hohmanns are semipermanents. They get supplied, too; and they might need a special run. Like - I've got a redditor on my maintenance crew, who Needs To Go Back. Maybe he needs off station at the 0.86177 AU point. There should be an equation around that, which might be fodder for another post.

Scalar-field solutions

If Milgrom doesn't work, then what? A few more papers have come in over the weekend concerning non-CDM solutions to various problems we got. I needed a few more days on this one.

One paper last Friday fingers exactly Milgrom, to resolve the Hubble Tension, of that constant there named Hubble-Lemaître. I do wish the press-release had pressed the authors harder against Milgrom.

Overall (h/t Turtle) Tonatiuh Matos, Luis A. Ureña-López, and Jae-Weon Lee offer a fresh summary of the non-CDM, er... "field". (Pun not intended.) Where Milgrom dared modify Newton, these theories would modify Einstein. They have in common, to introduce a scalar field, like the Higgs. Milgrom actually turns out to be one solution to the problems engaged in the scalar-field models, so those models don't rule Milgrom out. (The data rule Milgrom out; again, this paper doesn't engage all that...)

Johanan Moffat wears his "MOG" on his sleeve. MOG would add to general-relativity, two gravitational degrees of freedom. First, the gravitational coupling G would no longer be constant; it would be 1/χ where χ is his scalar field. The second-up is a new vector field, φ_μ. This is the bit I don't understand: The gravitational coupling of the vector field to matter is universal with the gravitational charge Q_g.

Apparently Moffat's two new fields don't fail the wide-angle low-mass test. Moffat insists, in lieu of "a₀", the system size and length size scale. Other theories should likewise stand or fall on that test. But how does Moffat do against Hubble-Lemaître?

And we still have questions about mass itself. Does the χ field relate to the Higgs field? If not, where are the χ bosons? What to say of axions, neutrinos... gravitons?

Where Yamara has to live

Back when I was collecting Dragon magazines one highlight was the "Yamara" comic, serialised in that publication. Yamara was a halfling in a fantasy world, which world its author - in typical irony - named "Wyhtl". Its author went on to poast comments in various fora, under this name - revealing herself as a modern-wave feminist.

We gamers are familiar with the type. If any man, manboy perhaps given that we're gamers, puts a foot wrong then it is White Male Terrorism. Many game-authors, like Sean Reynolds, chose to whiteknight against those manboys. Reynolds was in the nobility; Reynolds' fans - and Yamara's fans - are the filthy peasants. HOW DARE THEY. (Now you understand #gamergate.)

Anyway sometime last decade, in some webcomic or other, some manboy (wasn't me that time) showed up at the comments, to blurt NAMALT basically. Yamara dropped by - hey, celebrity visit - to say, if you complain that we are painting with a broad brush, you are standing in the way of the brush. Don't start nuthin won't be nuthin. Say sunthin and it better agree with Yamara.

I'm reminded of that as I read the turtle's other blog: If you have more insight into why anyone is who isn't a horrible human being would support Donald Trump, I'd welcome it. The vast majority of his supporters that I've met (and sometimes have to do business with) are horrible human beings. I suspect this be the turtle's real blog . . .

I call absolute shens that the turtle would welcome any poast like, er, this one. The turtle has a prejudice; he can justify it, but it remains a prejudice. Arguing against that prejudice has a name now: sealion. I do hope that the turtle's "welcome" isn't channelling Kafka. I'll attempt a line around that invitation, instead.

How did we get to this point? How did we get to casual dreams about mass murder? Well... the turtle's got two blogs and that might imply he's online too much. Kurzgesagt considers this harmful. Some consider Kurzgesagt a Gates puppet; not everyone likes Gates, although Gates-haters mostly cluster on the Right these days.

I have a contrasting theory.

Say you already start out disliking, oh, Black people. You are not going to da klub. You are not going to upscale Black clubs; I used to live in Houston, these establishments exist. By various accidents I sometimes ended up in them, and experienced some fine interactions with the patrons and staff. Someone prejudiced - I won't call him a "racist", yet - wouldn't dare.

Here's the problem - in a South city, that melanophobiac will have interactions anyway. Those interactions by definition will not be solicited. They'll be with panhandlers, or with aggressive jerks on the sidewalk, even with criminals if he is unlucky. None of these interactions stand to cure his prejudice. They might even make a racist of him.

What sort of man does Yamara meet in internet comments, but defensive men who aren't good at talking with women in person. It is mostly feminine blogs as even talk about sealions. I assume Yamara talks to some men in real life, but they're men she's curated. I don't think she much tries spaces where men are men without caring what Yamara thinks. Any more than some n00b from an Ohio suburb is going to seek out a proper jazz club.

What sort of Trump voter does the turtle meet? - those he ha[s] to do business with, and those who force their business upon the turtle.

MOGging Milgrom

On topic of fancy theories being wrong, let's get back to Milgrom's Modified Newtonian Dynamic. This "MOND" was supposed to obviate the need for "dark matter" in explaining galaxies' overly-fast spin. Against my better judgement perhaps, I'd believed Triton Station. h/t the Turtle, last Tuesday John Moffat submitted Scalar-Tensor-Vector Gravity - which Moffat's calling MOG, just plain modified-gravity. I'll get into Moffat, later this week.

Milgrom makes predictions concerning wide-angle binaries. That radius is √[G_NM/a₀]; a₀ is an acceleration which is zero for pure Newton, 1.2 × 10^-10 m/s² for Milgrom. Moffat calculates 7000 AU for our Sun which runs beyond even a Planet Nine conjecture (although some comets might help us here). If the mass is that of the Centauri barycentre which is 1.988, 2.11 with Prox; we're looking at 10,168 AU. Even α/prox Centauri at their 2017 poorly-constrained maximum semimajor isn't more than 9400 AU. So - to the extent testable, a difficult test here.

But what if we had a wideangle binary of smaller stars. Next problem: those are hard to see in the first place, and we'd have to watch them for some time; which is time we often hadn't had, faint stars being only recently found. We hadn't the tech nor patience to do that from Earthside. Enter the Gaia 'scope, out on STL2.

Gaia has been watching a few of those binaries from our vantage. Following DR3, we've constrained a₀ to a maximum of 0.1032 × 10^-10 m/s² - and a negative minimum. Here's a 25 November update. Ol' Isaac, who never had a clue about any "a₀" so just left it zero, is vindicated. Milgrom, and followers like Triton, are hereby pantsed.

The Shift

I saw the latest Angel Studios flick, The Shift, around noon. This retells the Iyyub story, as interpreted through evangelical Protestantism. I notice the soundtrack ripped its Leitmotiv, even subject, off Depeche Mode's best song . . .

The main character Kevin has made a series of choices throughout his life. Most of his choices were good ones... until the end. Yes it's another multiverse story, although without Butterfly Effect's time-travel - think more, Rick and Morty. At the end of this timeline, the best-Kevin-so-far meets him whom Tolkien named "Annatar". The Benefactor, as is his wont, offers to Kevin what he offers. Kevin refuses the gifts; the first time any Kevin has done so. In spite, the Benefactor exiles this Kevin, by "Shift", into a world wherein the Benefactor is - well, wherein he's the Prince. Although Kevin's act of refusal, it turns out, has exiled the Benefactor from that world too, for a time.

Several Protestant (and paraCatholic) themes show up. Is the Shift a form of Rapture? Is Kevin the Landwaster? - and, as in The Book of Eli or for that matter of Mormon, Scripture bears the Divine doxa more than does our Risen Lord. In Annatar's world, the Scriptures are banned (as are personal firearms, of course) and you only get to do shopping if you bear a special implant. Hey I caught that reference!

We have a "Heavenly Father" prayer early on. By this, my first thought was LDS [UPDATE 8 PM MST: Angel are LDS]. Then I considered the Synoptics - especially Matthew. A pendant of the empty tomb, aside its shifted outer rock, features; we don't get this in (say) John [and I daresay it's unimportant in LDS].

On the other hand this movie is not nearly as annoyingly fundamentalist (or Mormon) as I'd feared. Kevin spends his exile's downtime transcribing the Bible from memory - and his Bible-fu is not the best. One cannot help but consider how our own Bible came to the Maccabean-era Jews.

I feel like the story could have been made (back) into a Jewish story with small effort. In the Greek (or Islamic) version, Job is edited toward the virtue of patience. Kevin is hailed for that Ayyubi patience in this movie too ... but he's really not all that patient, just one trying to do the best he can. Annatar is the villain, as he must be; but he doesn't have to be evil. Contrast Hurley's portrayal in the more-Jewish Bedazzled. I feel like modern Judaism could use a story as showcases the Light To Nations, as opposed to the usual alternatives. Some might argue that lack of vision is a failing in Judaism itself. I shouldn't judge; I'm a converso.

Either way the script needed work. Kevin's illness doesn't affect the plot. He just coughs now and again to let us know he's Job on a producer's budget.

Iron nitrite

Last summer this blog figured out that the limit on visiting an airless rock isn't oxygen, and maybe not even water so much; but inerts. Where this visitation is a settlement, nitrogen matters most. We've even attempted some equations. I didn't find much nitrogen in the Hebe class of stonies.

I was very aware that our asteroid-belt has a lot of ice - out by Pallas - coming to include ammonia, out by Saturnish 9 AU. I was skeptical that ammonia can survive ≤6 AU. Ammonia mixes with water and, together, lower the melting point so should steam out (maybe leaving the water behind). This, because we're always told of ammonia-water in Enceladus but not, say, Callisto. I want nearer-Earth asteroids first, and Deimos. I have little hope of ices particularly nitrogeniferous down here. Instead I mostly looked to cosmic charcoal.

Ryugu's samples are now suggesting that the meteorites we have on Earth from the C-class, like from Phaethon, might not be restricted to coal. Phaethon runs close to the Sun and other C here on Earth have blazed through our own atmosphere. These processes change the outside of the rock. At Ryugu, which remains cold, the processes have been enough to reduce iron compounds to pure iron. Iron compounds at Ryugu mostly mean magnetite rust. Ammonia will react with iron, releasing the ammoniac hydrogen. So the regolith - which we'll never see in a meteorite down here - contains a mix of leftover magnetite coated in Fe₄N.

The bad news is that Fe₄N is a layer around magnetite - and a thin one. To the extent the regolith adds to the total of nitrogen we figure upon stonies like, say, 6 Hebe - it doesn't add a very lot. Rather: this finding would show prospectors where to look first, to gather their nitrogen. Of course prospectors also get to keep that pure iron.

LHS 3154

This came in yesterday but a lot was going on over here then, so: LHS 3154. This is about a ninth Solar mass... and it has a planet. A big planet, as M×sini = 13.2 Earths; or, 3.5 × 10^-4 its own stellar mass. Pending inclination, it could well be as big as Uranus (or as Neptune; but "Uranus" is funnier).

It orbits 3.7 days so, from 51 lightyears away, we might never get to see the planet. The system is making waves on account the research is finding difficult to explain how two bodies like this got so close together. At that distance I assume it's making literal waves on its star.

The mass-ratio isn't inexplicable of itself. Not too far from us, Luhman 16 is a binary of browns. But. These swing around each other at a 3.557 AU semimajor from their barycentre. Clearly LHS 3154 doesn't; Kepler says 0.023 AU.