Marginal Revolution used to be a mainstay at Instapundit's. I am unsure that site will be welcome postMAGA.
There's an influenza in the cattle population. It is H5N1 which is a bird flu and, yes, humans can get it. A vaccine exists... in England. Meanwhile the double digit IQ Right here is hrr hrr'ing about not gettin' fewled agin.
I have the dark suspicion that the outgoing Administration is of the opinion "fine, Great Barrington said let 'er rip; rip on, then".
Once again I am on a writing postfacto spree... for the end of the year that was. Anyway: we had a service "today". This involved the presentation / abandonment of Eli to the Temple at Shiloh. The Psalm was MT/Jerome #84. The Gospel was Luke when Jesus was twelve - which may be deliberate: Pharisaic bar-mitzvah happens at thirteen.
(Psalm 88 might have been better as a composition by Samuel's grandson, but - read on.)
It all reminded me of the nonDavidic Psalter. One way to tell might be the reference to the Lord as God of Jacob, not of the Jews. The Joseph story is certainly Ya'qubi subsequently Judaised; even the Samaritans couldn't restore the original. The Samaritans perhaps should have made more effort to preserve the nonZion Psalms.
Psalm 84 is however Zionist, and being linked with sura 65 (Elohist) perhaps always was. Inasmuch it invites the north (as Psalm 87 invites everybody), it invites to shift face to Zion. As part of Book 3 of the Psalter in the order 84-89: the arrangement may even be postZionist, for the exile.
In our service, our Psalm 84 extracts did not sing of Zion. In Jesus' times the presence of God was immanent in His person.
BACKDATE 12/31
Reinhard Kratz over at TheTorah breaks down the Jewish accounts of Antiochus IV in Jerusalem. Kratz holds that the Greek king of Syro-Palaestina did less than the Jews claim he did.
Kratz inherits David Ganz that Daniel 11 came first. Kratz diverges from Ganz on it being true prophecy; Daniel 11 fails accuracy after the initial "persecution". Also - argues Kratz - it "predicts" that the Greek king didn't order the wrongs done to Jerusalem. 1-2 Maccabees and Josephus, and Jewish lore generally, are in agreement that the king was a blasphemer himself.
Kratz sides with Daniel 11 that the king wasn't a "blasphemous tyrant". That much is a trope. It was already a trope: applied to - for example - Nabunaid of Tayman. In reality the local priests would sometimes halt the sacrifices in protest. If the priests' party won, as shah Cyrus won, they would restore the sacrifices and blame the old king.
All Antiochus did was quash a rebellion, sort-of. His troops, however, weren't even Greeks; mostly they were Syrians. These guys had to be kept on a leash or they'd take out their frustrations on historic enemies. This is the Near East we're talking about. Antiochus seems not to have kept his leash tight enough. So Daniel 11 doesn't even blame the king, it blames "they" - all the hosts with him - for disrupting the rituals.
One wonders - well, I wonder - if really what we're talking about here is the calendar. The Seleucid calendar was lunar with scheduled intercalated months (so was the Roman calendar back then). The Ptolemies, who'd had the place before the Antiochii, were Egyptian so solar. The Jubilees and the Dead Sea Scrolls are full of invective about the calendar.
Here is Trade And Antiquity (pdf): page 14 has been linked, here.
If you wanted "what happens when the whole of Anatolia sinks into the ocean", that's pretty much what we got. Late Antiquity, once more, applied to when Constantine's City is truly the Roman Empire, everything else revolving around it. After that, it's all islands in a hostile sea. Byzantium still exists, yes. But so does Spain. They're about as useful as each other. Somewhere below there are Sicily and Morocco, maybe Tunis and some sites in north Italy. Rome is, basically, nowhere.
What we get instead, in the time of the caliphs, is two rival island continents. One is the continent of Syria; the other is the continent of... Neustria-Austrasia a.k.a. northern France.
This still looks like a Dark Age to me. Unless you were lucky enough to be a Syrian, or attached to the Carolingian court.
As we're talking 'Abdisho', one commentary stands out: Abraham of Bet-Rabban, AG 9th century = AD 6th. On the son of Sira, "Ecclesiasticus".
We now have this in Greek. Ben Sira was done in Hebrew originally: some Dead Sea Scrolls, bare references in Talmud, and the Cairo Genizah. But the Jews went through their backlog, after which Ben Sira went the way of Tobit. I think even Jerome was stuck with the Greek.
Out East I'd thought that translation from Greek was done to Syriac later and by Paul of Tella the heretic. (The Melkites were doing their own thing into their own Aramaic.)
Of interest here, supposedly (Stadel credits Si'rt) Mar Aba the Great had beat Paul to the punch. But some of Aba's words on Genesis survive and nobody accuses him of taking from the Septuagint, like Ephrem was using Diatesseron. Might Bar Sira be taken from the Greek though?
Gorgias are promising a Bar Sira from the "Peshitta" or, at $90, perhaps "threatening" is the word.
BACKDATE 12/31
Lately the Qaeda offshoot having taken Syria has promised to "study" the phenomenon of the Damascene female judge, along with segregating Syrian universities. Here's a woman listing how we've seen this before. For those readers thinking "based natalism" - here's a woman arguing that point.
I somewhat wish that Rex Nebular game had been better. (There never was hope for Space Quest IV/X.)
I'm looking at "Whispers from the Sources". This is a list of exegetical work known, or related to, Assemani / "Ebedjesu" in our Middle Ages.
In those days the Mongols at Tabriz were allowing to these Christians perhaps their last era of protection. 'Abdisho' is the last we'll read of many of these commentaries.
I wonder if one reason the commentaries failed to survive is their very success; the gems are stored in the Diyarbakri commentary and by Isho'dad of Margiana/Merv.
BACKDATE 12/31
Among cosmic phenomena that actually don't exist: Dark Energy. That is because we can apply the time-dilating effects of gravity to the earliest galaxies.
This was predicted by David Wiltshire in 2007. If these results be further replicated, it will kill off dark-energy for good. Wiltshire may end up with a Nobel (not that prizes matter, as Perelman can tell you).
Poor timing on some people's part.
About a year ago Stover and (copypaste) Woudhuysen put out The Lost History of Sextus Aurelius Victor. What I didn't know is that as ebook it is free-o'-charge; also on academia.edu. I owe this to its recent Bryn Mawr review, in Italian.
I tend to agree with the review that most of their work looks legit.
We learn Victor was the historian of late Latin letters. He focused on the administration, presenting a Fürstenspiegel for the post-principes. He cast a somewhat dim view on "the Spartans", as Moldbug would have it. Latin was still the language of administration.
Latin was also the language of the army. Ammianus Marcellinus - the authors argue - was a reaction from the military faction; although more a Greek himself, he aimed his own history at Latin-speakers. Ammianus must exonerate the soldiers at Adrianople. Although even Ammianus had to admit that Victor was serious.
Less serious is that Malalas-like "Historia Augusta", which also used Victor. The authors explain this as a fraud by a nonhistorian, perpetrated upon a history-buying public. Sadly it mostly worked.
None of these histories survive in full. Ammianus is missing... a lot; later readers were interested in its later sections, discarding the rest. The "Historia Augusta" is missing Philip the Arab. Victor meanwhile survives - the authors say - in two parallel abridgements: the one drops sections of prose, leaving a mess that must be reconstructed from elsewhere; the other - they say, from one Paul, Deacon in eighth-century Italy - an opinioniated summary, to supplement where (especially) Paul was using Victor in other work.
The authors contend against that common statement, the more trustworthy sources on which the author of the HA could rely had halted somewhere in the course of the narration about Elagabalus’ reign
. Nah. HA had Victor and Victor was fine; also HA should have known, say, Dexippus.
Victor and Ammianus agreed against Christianity, although at least Victor was willing to pull from Lactantius, much as Lactantius was an idiot. From our Catholic side, Jerome, much as he was a grouch, had to admit of Victor's excellence as an historian.
Victor has suffered in posterity on account of the former abridgement, making him look like the peddler of nonsense (which nonsense the authors, frustrated comedians, send up) rather than his abridger taking that blame. On the other hand, Victor held an inferiority complex as wide as the northern African coast in which he grew up. He was constantly alluding to Tacitus and Sallust; we might call him a pioneer of the jeweled-style. Ammianus also presented his history as the next chapters of Tacitus but he doesn't abuse the Latin language as much.
Victor shares with Cassius Dio, that the Severans were a reflection of the Julio-Claudians, and a poor one. Not for Victor the Historia Augusta's laud for Severus Alexander.
For all our authors approve Victor (and Cassius Dio), they cast shade on Herodian. Dissin' Herodian is quite the team sport in academe. Was Herodian that bad?
I've been wondering how come Theodore Beale at the Vox Popoli blog has been on a tear lately on how everything is fake like Einstein is fake etc etc etc. I remembered that, last month, he claimed nuclear fission was fake - excuse me, "might be". But then Beale implied 30 November that Russia had access at least to radioactivity. If you're not Beale then radioactivity is a function of atomic number, meaning protons; governed by quantum effects and by... relativity.
Now I find that Russia's government claims that Western nukes don't exist
.
Vox Popoli is in alignment with Kremlin propaganda. Even where said propaganda might be obscure to the West.
Well anyway, Russia's nukes might not be working well for much longer. Russia, Iran, and Brasil all seem to be tottering; meanwhile Argentina is taking-off and Thailand just joined Artemis. So much for the BRICS, then. What be left will be brutal tyrannies like Burma propped up by Xi. And their bootsniffing sycophants like Vox Day.
Yes, Orwell hated prose like "not uninterested"; but - bear with us. Trappist-1 is back in the science news. And not for its outer worlds: they're taking a new look at the innermost, "b".
The surface is dated to only a millennium, 1my, a thousand Earth years. That's... young, like Io young. That would imply a highly volcanic world such that its farside probably would have an atmosphere, if a highly toxic and hot one, constantly replenished.
Also possible is a hazeworld above a carbon-dioxide layer. They're thinking Eyeball-Titan, rather than Venus; hydrocarbon smog rather than acid.
Presidentelect Mondale I mean, Trump has sided with our mobbed-up and/or communist ports against America.
It has been also noted that longshoremen aren't the only bottleneck in the harbour-to-market chain. Also limited are warehouses. To be sure: warehouses are waste, the AGILEbros tell us. More to the point might be the rails and roads from the warehouses to the rest of us.
One question is if the bad ports are, also, a stealth-tariff against China's regime, which - as Perot observed, before it was cool - is a slave state. Garlic, for one, doesn't seem well-grown over there. To the extent this be a stealth tariff, the local state governments along these coasts should consider taxing the longshoremen.
We should seriously consider supply-chains as bypass even road and rail. Zeppelins aside, Elon Musk may well have one in the Heavy Booster and Starship-as-cargo. Probably why this talkative soul, which likes money, hasn't piped up.
The Roman Empire, after a brief interlude under Julian, made a decision about Jerusalem: it wasn't Jewish. Over in the "Chaldaean" Iraq, angry Jews put some choice touches on their Talmud there, which you may read in Peter Schäfer's Jesus in the Talmud. When the Sasanians took Jerusalem, the Jews got to act on their impulses.
It... wasn't pretty. We've long had Gideon Avni, "The Persian Conquest of Jerusalem (614 c.e.)—An Archaeological Assessment", Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 357 (February 2010), 35-48; from which, G Greatrex, "Khusro II and the Christians of the Roman Empire", Studia Patristica (Peeters Publishers, 2006), 14.51 exculpated the shah, if not quite exonerated him. A key document, probably an eyewitness document, was Strategios' homily which he composed on behalf of his abbot.
Sean Anthony and Stephen Shoemaker have now edited this homily, from its translations, and double-translated the result into English. And it's a LAMINE imprint! which means we get to read it for $0, although you might want to buy it in print anyway.
My main critique is that some of the footnotes are long; likewise the digressions to splat this or that argument by other scholars. Shoemaker is notorious for this latter habit. I can only repeat my earlier comments which is put them in appendices. I kind-of get why, oh, Patricia Crone might want to pad out the main text with a lengthy digression (Slaves on Horses, only 80 pages, spent many of those about the... Mongols). But in this case, the main text is the homily. All that introductory fluff doesn't need to be long.
If/when you get past all that, you will learn that, yeah, the invasion wasn't pretty. The churches weren't destroyed; but they suffered a lot of fire-fire-fire. The authors also blockquote Avni on the "mass burials". (All too common around there.)
Strategios reports that the Persians did the initial damage, and then took the survivors into the reservoir of Mamilla. They first plucked out those with skills, to be deported. (A common Persian practice.) Those left behind were offered to the Jews who, we can surmise, came in from elsewhere. Christians who renounced Christ could become the Jews' slaves. But the Christians refused. At which point the Jews bought them up anyway - to be slaughtered.
The Sasanians quickly moved to fix the damage - we're told Yazdîn dipped into his own funds - if only to keep the tourist drachmata and dinerii flowing. But the population sank; and many monasteries became easy prey for opportunistic "Saracens".
BACKDATE 12/17
Unlike at, oh, Saturnine moons like Rhea; on Earth, ammonia has to be manufactured.
Apparently we've been doing that by crashing hydrogen into nitrogen (or just bypassing it with urea, formic et al). Hydrogen is a bear to store and to work with. And the reaction is costly enough - and necessary enough - it's contributing to energy use, competing with us schmoes who live here.
The new, cheaper plan is a catalyst: mix of iron oxide and an acid polymer with fluorine and sulfur
. Humid air would pass through this mesh at room temperature
(or warmer) and sea level pressure. And if supply-chains are at issue, farms in Iowa can buy this mesh and just make the ammonia right there in springtime.
And shipping can also run on ammonia, so it will be cheaper for them too.
BACKDATE 12/17
Go away 4chan. That done: melanin under UV fire.
A. niger is a black mold. Melanin is just the result of proteins and a mold has DNA code to produce it just like humans do. The argument here is that, besides the purple bacteria which feed off of methanes, a black mold is king when the ultraviolets run too high. In amplitude; we'll get to frequencies...
UV can get that high when the sun flares... as happens a lot on Prox next door. But also UV is high when the UV is too... low. It seems counterintuitive (to nonregular visitors here) but if there be oxygen but the lightcurve is too low for "UV-C" to push ozones, the low-freq/high-wav UV-B breaks through. Life can't get out of the shallows. There's the K stars ruled out.
All this suggests dark lichens colonising the shores. Earthworms of course. Bugs under the shade. There might never be vascular plants or land vertebrates.
BACKDATE 12/31 h/t the wonderful one.
An "independent magazine of culture" is promoting a Bar Kochba revisionism. In AD 131, Jews in the Legions mutinied. They then attracted support in Judaea. Haggai Olshanetsky argues that Bar Kosiba, later calling himself Bar Kochba, manoevred his way as the movement's messiah.
That smells to me like modern revolutions: the rebellion suffers disorder, and when it's not quelled in time a strongman steps forward. Iran teaches us that the strongman might not agree with the ideals of the initial rebellion; he might even arguably be a heretic.
I suspect that Rabbi ʿAqiba (pronounced "Okeeva") was the hand behind Bar Kosiba's messianism. Mishnaic caliphate let's goooo!
I think fair that, when the rebellion finally failed, Jew and Christian agreed that someone should take the blame, and he may as well be the putz who lost the thing. The pagan Romans meanwhile kept better records, Cassius Dio being decent as their historians go. You will search in vain for a "Barcochbas" or "Cochbaïdes" or whatever in a saecular history.
BACKDATE 12/17
Christina Buttons has been many things over her life, as her not-a-manifesto today lays out in detail. Overall the theme is that mental illness exists, but not as a chemical imbalance. My late father was big on the chemical-imbalance theory... probably because his mother, during my infancy, contracted Alzheimer's which absolutely is a physical brain-tissue problem.
Abby-Normal's brain, like Buttons' Asperger brain, will instead induce bad decisions. Their consequences will give to Abby a sad. Fatalism - the belief that you don't have agency - encourages bad decisions over good ("I couldn't help it!"). Koreans call that feeling, han. Fortuna is a demoness; Sura 53, in our canon, is correct to ban her cult. (The CounterJihadTM can quibble over the move to make G-d "al-Mané" instead.)
I do need to point out, with David Cole\Stein, that the Trump side of the American Right... ain't much better. Let's look at Miranda Devine yesterday: The J6 riot was not an insurrection but a protest that escalated into an out-of-control riot because then-Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund was denied intelligence about potential threats that day
.
Devine here concedes that many involved in "J6" were violent. They weren't all FEDS!. Those who weren't FEDS!, should have owned the internal peace not to engage in riot. Devine is denying that they had that agency. Call it, the han-defence.
Trump won anyway. I suppose a nonfatalistic citizenry wouldn't even ask for politicians to save them. And to be fair Buttons herself used to trust in politicians, from the other side.
Just as Hebrew has dialects - Classical Hebrew in 1-4 Reigns, a Temple dialect around Nehemiah and Chronicles - so does the translation of Hebrew into Aramaic. I've been looking into a term for "the poor", meskinë in Syriac. The word recurs in the Aramaic Psalter for the Jews. Edward Cook found that this Psalter shares its not-Syriac with PseudoJonathan, Job, and Chronicles; more-recently Targum Sheni. Also found is that the Psalter depends on the Midrash... but not the reverse.
Hence the L in LJLA. This means that, where Christians often translated the Psalter into their vernaculars, Jews seemed less interested in Aramaic. Jews absolutely did translate their Psalter into Greek; I will not be shocked to hear if they also did Old Latin. But for Aramaic, Jews did not create a canon Psalter until mediaeval times; the Syriac Christians beat them to it, like the Copts beat them to it up the Nile.
We can allow some ad-hoc renditions were done, but nobody quoted them. This all reminds me painfully of the Psalter in Arabic.
I suspect the whole Late Jewish Literary Aramaic project be a reaction to Syriac. LJLA would be an artificial language. Unlike Syriac, Palaestinian was never a strong Christian language; so a Palaestinian basis would work well for Jews stuck around Galilee and Lebanon, and the Nile Delta. Why not; nobody was using it.
That might, further, explain how the Aramaic Proverbs looks like a clumsy and mechanical Peshitta.
BACKDATE 12/16
Black holes got mass (so volume), spin (so shape), and maybe charge. Here's an alternative, in the too-heavy and simple file: the gravastar.
Best I can tell, these are bubbles, not singularity-with-eventhorizon. You'll still get torn to pieces, but the pieces will (eventually) fall upon the bubble surface. Which will increase the size of the bubble. The size and mass we're looking at, would be Middlesex (or "London") and ten suns. So a bit denser than the neutron-star.
Since there is a shell, and not a simple cutoff of "in universe" and "not in universe", it doesn't emit Hawking. It is dark.
Because the outer shell is so rigid it is also cold. It doesn't move. Shining a light on it would just add energy, to make it larger. Some EV light would bounce back but with very long wavelengths: so, blackbody curve skews to the radio, leaving little for infrared.
So far this is a theoretic entity, so it can't be distinguished from that other really small, really nonemissive heavy thing. Unless it crashes into that other thing. Which is what instruments are now looking into.
BACKDATE 12/11
On topic of TTV, a habitable-zone planet was just found through its effects on Kepler 51d. The perturbator, which sounds dirtier than it is, would be "e". Year is 264 Earth days, so d:e is not-quite 2:1. e is also noneccentric, so would be Venuslike here; but for K-51-A which is a lighter star and new to the mainsequence (I'll get to this) e's Earthlike.
... but very heavy. e is a miniNeptune like the other three "cotton candies". I think TTV allows some constraint on true mass given that we do, in fact, know the masses of the b,c,d. Better now, in fact.
I didn't say superearth. Yes e doesn't transit; yes that means we don't know its volume. I can guess, though, that if the inner planets are puffy and hydrogen-rich then, so much more so this Sudarsky-II outer planet. Barring some crazy impact event but then, wouldn't its eccentricity match that?
The star is young; it spins eight days and (I learn) astrologists (heh) consider this a 500 My age. There is also noise from activity. Youth would assuredly explain why the inner worlds haven't lost their (opaque) clouds yet. Mind, this extreme youth further suggests a coming expansion of the HZ leaving e too hot. Well, e's moons, that is; although if it's got any I expect them to look like Ariel over around Uranus.
It took fourteen Earth years to spot d floating into transit so early. The virtues of patience. Maybe the improved maths we're promised will help find these things faster.
New readings of Venus' atmosphere are telling us that its volcanoes are not exjecting more water into it. Volcanic gas is at most 6% water.
Mars has ice under the surface (and sometimes on it). Earth has enough underground for a true Noachian Flood. Our volcanoes blast much water upward. Some of this is mediated through tectonics which push the ocean's water back underneath; Venus doesn't have tectonics (supercritical carbondioxide apparently not being much of a lubricant).
Venus is looking like, not only has it lost much atmospheric water, it never had much on the surface either.
Okay, last month I had VERY little to work with, but here we have bioarxiv for Indoeuropean populations. Big fez-tip to Razib Khan for 'splaining this to us genecels.
Italo-Celtic[-Lusitanian] is Corded Ware, aligned with Battle Axe in the German forests and, by male genes, R1b. This paper is saying Greek and Armenian came str8 outta da steppe. I assume that for Armenian, whose attestation is poor before their Grabar Bible, the paper has strained out all that Parthian and, before them, Cimmerian which meanwhile supplanted their whole ruling class. Greece, especially the islands, didn't have that little problem.
One surprise: the linguistic precursor of Armenian was introduced to the Caucasus by the end of the 5th millennium BP.
That's 2050 BC. That might agree with the earlier, less-documented collapse of the Ur III and Fifth Dynasty Egypt, known to be a difficult time. What 2050 BC is not is the collapse of the earliest twelfth century BC. So the Armenians were already living in the Caucasus, presumably around Trabzon and what's now the southern Georgia coast, where we now find the Mingrelians.
Quite a claim. Why isn't Armenian in the Hittite ritual-texts? Hurrians and Urartians in the way? (Same goes for Phrygian, still.)
Watching Paul Gilster go off to BlueSky "for obvious reasons" was a blow. It actually hurt. Not the move, but the "Kamala Obviously" attitude. Peter Woit, well... I never had much respect for that one, so his "post-truth" tantrum washed over me. And then there was Daniel Suarez calling Trump an authoritarian liar but, somehow, hoping we'd all come together after November to buy his book (by all accounts a decent book). But: enough of the negative.
Here's the positive: Casey Handmer on the d.o.g.e.
Handmer conducts a master class in gently advising the people in charge, whoever they might be in January, what benefits might accrue to this populace if the governmental-efficiency is NOT a sword to use against enemies. It could be used - generally - against pork, which trends actually highly Republican, as much as Democrat.
I admit I don't default to this attitude. I am not saying I always agree with Handmer - although, he's convinced me on battery storage and even on solar. Overall if you want people to take you seriously, this seems the best attitude to have. It may be too late for Gilster and Woit but Suarez could learn from this.
SciTechDaily links a heat-to-electricity medium: WSi2.
As thermodynamics go, once you use the electricity obviously it goes to heat again. And some will get lost en-route and have to be air-conditioned out. You can't win, you can't break even.
... but I daresay, if on an asteroid mine, the radiators form splendid bottlenecks to catch most the heat for reuse. Also mayyybe the WSi2 could power diodes for a visual diagnostic on those refractory panels (also largely tungsten). We are told that this material has a high melt point itself.
Today is a work day... sort of. I'm ducking out to follow up on a use for better spectrometry. And'also to assure my readers I'm not dead.
On Youtube one of the sciencey channels discussed how to sort out the noise in a transit. Sometimes, there's a pattern in the timing of the transits. This may be secular-drift from another body. That other body could be its moon. But usually a transit is seen in the first place because the planet is close to its star... too close for a moon. Alternat(iv)ely the other body may be an outer planet, not detected because it runs oblique relative to that planet and our 'scopes out here.
So here are a few papers to discuss some mathematic models: TrES-2b, from the TESS telescope; and this month Simultaneous Impact Parameter Variation Analysis mainly from the Kepler scope. Lately Daniel Yahalomi and David Kipping's publons on the exoplanet-edge and on the landscape.
It's Turkey Day. Here's Alex Jay Brady's stratified future. Without radiators LOL. That aside I'll review the rest of it.
Brady includes a fusion reactor. It is separated from the rest by distance, reservoirs of water, and the inverse-square law. I deem this SyFy and silly. He seems to be using this to orbit Saturn, low on light and metal. Why's he even at Saturn? If he's there why's he not colonising Titan and using methane waterfalls? Energy could be beamed from there. Leaving aside the titanic dynamo of Saturn himself.
THAT aside, a hangar shares that far end. I don't mind this as much. The ships at that hangar might be carrying some nukes, themselves - fission, mostly, but also fusion-afterburner and z-pinch (so with hot nozzles). The ships' very hulls, further, have been taking on plenty o' curies/ roentgen/ becquerels/ whathaveyou between missions, just from space. And the distance gives the Authorities space to turn inbound freight into tinylittle pieces should they be approaching the wrong velocity-vector. Might be overkill but if that's all I got, I'll defer to Brady.
Socially I dislike the highend / lowend / ultrahighend differentials. I feel like most interplanetary habs will be dug out of rubble. Everyone gets roughly the same under dirt: hollow chambers. We might get fully-fabricated O'Neills later. But would O'Neills ever get a tail of lowend? If someone's a bum, he gets exiled down to Mars. If someone's got a low tolerance for other people, he can work as a Belt miner or maintain a cycler on downtime.
Brady might work best for orbits as don't own much metal. That's my 13-10-8 Laplacian between Earth and Venus - actually Venus generally and all else below our 1 AU. Also Earth's L4 and L5. These get sufficient light none need a fusion reactor. Further out is enough rock and ice that the rubble-pile rules.
Also possible is the long-range colony vessel. Push the thing to biëlliptic = Oberth, aim at Uranus, spin around, decel until orbit-insertion at Ariel I guess. Mine those moons for whatever else will be nice for the journey. After a few years decide who gets to stay at the, er, arse-end of the Solar System; and who gets to go on to Prox.
Here is a drop in cervical-cancer; and there is a drop in chicken pox. Of course the drop in measles is well known. And in whooping-cough; as can be seen when unVAXXed kids get it.
RFK likes to claim he is not antiVAXX. Tell that to the Samoans, those who survived the measles he helped cause.
The "Great Barrington" guys like to claim they were just antiLOCKDOWN. Jay Bhattacharya can now claim to be vindicated - by popular opinion. Well: I was there. These doctors were not just antiLOCKDOWN. They supported "herd immunity" - letting it rip. (This blog supported masking-with-distancing until THE VAXX came out.)
On topic of THE VAXX, these were several vaxxes. AstroZeneca, yes, seems to have had side-effects. I took Pfizer and didn't suffer any. We could also talk about the vaccine scheduling for childhood; if we were talking to people who were themselves talking in good faith. Autism isn't something I care to discuss given its high hereditability.
Overall I am not yet seeing that Kennedy or Bhattacharya, in their own ways, have a record of arguing in good faith. And from the now-ascendant Right, which Trump has belatedly joined (hey, remember Operation Warp Speed?): I just hear people screeching that the concept of public health is "evil".
In that interest of good-faith, I should make a disclosure / confession. I was prepared to post a Toldjaso after the election, which I'd suspected might be a Blue romp... although I didn't vote Blue myself. I'd thought that the "Kovid Karyn" vote might stick with Biden. It may be that my constituency, which is here the Hanania constituency, didn't move the needle. Because we had other concerns informing our vote. So: the preceding post has been one on the public-health merits, not on whether such convinces voters, because evidently it doesn't.
Meh. Let's hope nothing worse gets loose in the populace.
BACKDATE 11/29
SciTechDaily has an artilce about DNA in Europe from 5000 BC to now-ish. This is, I think, the ceramic Neolithic. It'll span the rise and fall of Cucuteni, and then the steppe invasion.
They're saying that immune-system genetics got selected-for. And then... un-selected. Gene mix from nonimmune populations.
That is rather telling me that immunity had side-effects. Once the disease was defeated, the genes lingered... as allergens. Allergens, like STC're also saying gives us Alzheimer's.
BACKDATE 11/29
Although I am left somewhat at a loss for power-supplies past Jupiter, here's one planet which won't have any problem generating power: Neptune. Besides the storms, which Event Horizon immortalised: satellites here also get free energy from its retrograde moon. That would be the Kuiper's greatest export to the Great Eight: Triton.
Triton is a low-gravity, mostly cloudless, low-atmo moon. Because it runs retrograde, its underground is getting squeezed. The heat is pumping volatiles up to its surface where they spew geysers. And where they don't, colonists will suffer little effort in drilling a few KM to get at the reservoirs.
The energy can be pumped to its L2 tower and, thence, beamed to outer space-stations. Which will just be the usual bundled piles of rubble fitting arbitary millions of us.
Hard to believe I hadn't thought of this already.
BACKDATE 11/29 inspired-by.
Impulse Space is flaunting Helios / Deneb: 66,720 N thrust. I don't know about ISP; the focus on thrust and its use of methane implies something like the Raptor. Although they are not competing with the Starship. They're going to turn the thing on once in space.
Nuclear is better of course but we frown on that in LEO. So, Impulse are aiming for space-tugging: LEO up to mid-Allen up to GEO and beyond. The press-release calls it "kick stage" and "transfer". Which is fine! We need that too.
It is not just a test; Impulse are to use the engine for real cargo, if small cargo. This is all that fits on a Falcon 9, assumed still the game-in-town in mid 2026. The payload is called "Mira" and it's for our Space Force.
On topic of SLS, and Mars Sample Return, and the upcoming new space telescope: here is NASA on a roadmap to asteroid-mining. The paper, naïvely perhaps, sees a spiral of costs, which it amusingly illustrates, and hopes to invert it to a spiral of savings, as one advance on the way allows for infrastructure creating opportunities for the next advance.
The paper bears a strong musk of PowerPoint, October 2017. However: now we have a reusable SuperHeavy and, maybe next week, reusable Starship.
The tech-aim here is the "Honey Bee", extraction of water and other volatiles from a NEO, preferably polanoid. Also to capture a large rock, or at least to pull ice-blocks from one; and run the material into Lunar Distant Retrograde Orbit. We don't do the Lunar Gateway in this scenario, but last I heard Elon is likely to kill it anyway.
BACKDATE 11/17
Now that Elon Musk has bought himself a government on Earth, although some may see some downsides, one upside is the end of the SLS. That's a problem for the dilberts, d-fens's, and code-gibbons hired to work on the boondoggle.
Believe me, I em-/sym-pathise with working a job for a company doing The Wrong Stuff. More than you know.
The incoming administration shifting the pain to Blue States like Colorado is a crude solution but, you know, eff em if they didn't vote for us, as Baker put it to the elder Bush. Same with Equity positions, now exiting Boeing although still infesting NASA.
We do have more space jerbs coming on-line - privatesector. The dilberts have real skills and GenX oldsters in particular tended to MAGA this year. Should USG legislate that the dilberts get affirmative action?
BACKDATE 11/17
I mean, I'd always assumed that Mars' atmosphere is ridiculously thin for altering trajectories or orbital capture; but it's nice to have the maths.
Aerobraking is mostly an Earthling thing. Gary Johnson notes that ablative tiles - tiles wot falls off - are the best way to do it; but once something is down here on Earth we just, like, slap new tiles on (11/14 an active field of study). I think aerobraking is what Elon's planning for the Starship which, remember, is what does the work in LEO before coming back 1819 November.
Venus is also good for aerobraking and assuredly quiet Titan. But the Martian atmo is too unpredictable.
Anyway this blog has been consistent that we normies don't colonise Mars directly. We colonise asteroids, and (so Nyrath has convinced me) Deimos. From Deimos just dangle a tether bro.
BACKDATE 11/17
ToughSF will link (pdf) to Alex Ellery 2021: "Generating and storing power on the moon
using in situ resources". ToughSf summarises: solar concentrators paired with vacuum tube-based thermionic converters reaching ~15% efficiency
.
These are not solar panels ("photovoltaics"). Panels are for LEO, shipped up from Earth. Ellery is working from a paradigm where we don't ship panels further to the Moon; Loonies go assemble their own power-sources. Once set up on the Moon, Casey Handmer can go beam to them additional power from some high mountain on Earth.
I imagine similar should be good for near-Earth asteroids like Atíra.
BACKDATE 11/17
Today we got more on the Polana CI-chrondrites, here Ryugu. We should be able to replicate the results with Bennu.
Before Polana birthed the rubble of Ryugu - they say - it was under a magnetic field. This was 15 microtesla (μT); Earth to contrast is 50 μT. That would have worked on the iron and nickel in these icy mudballs - and on the gas and ice giants out there.
"Out There" would be from 7 AU on. Closer home, the solar system - then - was pulling more like our 50 μT even up to 200. Jupiter, remember, had a Grand Tack at some point, so - implicitly - formed Out There.
This is evidence Ceres and Hygeia and those other iceballs formed even further Out There.
The origins of writing are here matched to cylinder-seals. In effect: typing preceded writing. At least in Sumer and Akkad.
It all starts with accountancy, those little statuettes all over the Cyclades. These are tokens for trade - including trade in humans (not necessarily slaves; round-trip ferrying might do). The question moves to how they became the two-dimensional representations in pictographs. Most researchers don't deem the pictographs to look like the tokens. The seals are that middle path, the "Seals and signs" paper now argues.
We read backward, as we dig backward. Uruk IV is ~3400 BC. The word "language" doesn't come up until the bibliography, but the authors use Sumerograms for most pictographs. Which they can now decipher with help from the seals. Uruk III / Jemdet Nasr is around the turn of that fourth/third BC millennium; seems more-solidly Sumer. Although, as in the case of netted-vessel representation ZATU190: we cannot necessarily read it as the later pictograph would read it. Here the picto will be GAN / [i]kannu[/i], but ZATU190 holds not just the "stand" but also the netting.
BACKDATE 11/7 like hell I was doing anything on Guy Fawkes' Day. Anyhoo h/t Archaeology org which used to be Saraceni, now might be AI.
For Americans the upcoming few days will be difficult such that I deem unwise (say) to drink them out. So I am taking this time to revisit the two Darius "pesach" pages. Because the Jews in Darius' fifth year, although noting Pesach, did not relate this to The Unleaven. Darius had a different holiday for that, in Nisan: the new-year holiday.
Pesach was a Psalm 91 thing, a ritual to ward off the divs (as a Persian would name them). 11Q11 will collect quite a bit of these.
Another interesting substitution - before the Ebionites and saint John would think of it - is the replacement of animal sacrifice with this bread. I read here that this was done first in Iran before the Jews, and not necessarily their Christian subsects, thought of it.
h/t to ZR's Carnival: Gathercole presents Jesus as Herald. That is: not as Christ.
Gathercole uses an Armenian translation of a misattributed homily. Which is all manner of problematic but too-often As Good As We Get. I'm not here to dispute Gathercole's support for its antiquity. I am come to dispute its relevance.
See what I did there? I just announced my intention to deliver a message. I didn't even claim to be an angel. You don't have to be an angel to announce the start of a message. You don't even have to be a herald.
Jesus does not have to be an angel sent from Heaven; although admittedly saint Mark - by starting his mission at the Jordan - rather implies this. But still, "I am come" presupposes that Jesus is not himself the King. Or at least has not yet revealed that He is; a skeptic would argue the Messianic Secret has not been revealed to Jesus yet.
Another skeptic may wonder if the ghost of John the Baptiser be lurking behind these accounts. The Infancy Gospel ascribed to Thomas is lately mused to be about John, but redacted to refer to Jesus.
BACKDATE 11/5
We're big on airships over here, not least for Venus colonisation, but the tech-tree has been languishing out here on Earth. Casey Handmer's run up a few posts on that tech. Not hearing anything from Brin, I checked in on all that this... month, and up came "Cargo airships are happening" from one Eli Dourado.
Why is this important? Because I'm sick of American ports being as bad as they are, no thanks (as usual) to the Biden Administration and its Transportation Secretary. It was known two decades ago that the west coast longshoremen were literal CPUSA. East coast was hardly better; they were mobbed up. I understand that the west is more efficient, so - hooray Stalinist efficiency. I guess?
Last month it came out that our ports aren't automated. As Reason noted - they should be.
I am unsure why all this is tolerated. I suspect it would "help" that we make stuff within our borders. To that end, bad ports serve as hidden tariffs. Be nice if our IRS got to see those revenues, though; not the hard Left or the @#$%in' Mob.
Dourado sees airships outcompeting aeroplanes for ocean-to-inland cargo. They could well compete with those seaports.
BACKDATE 11/17 and this time I'm actually sorry about it.
Solestial has a solar panel as will self-heal at 65° C, on up. That is good for inner-system operations where hooked to a radiator; just turn down the radiator and the panel should just ... get there. Or at least the other operations, when losing heat, can shift to using the panel as a radiator for a bit.
Flexibility will help too.
HATTIP: ToughSf 11/5.
Davila has posted a 2017 report on the winged-lion temple at Reqem, called Petra. Which report we can now ignore - because Davila also links the finds. This is the smallest temple of four.
Of course the first chapter I scrolled-at was chapter 17 on the inscriptions. Here is presented a fine lapidary on how to do the temple sacrifice, assuredly the most important inscription for them and - had it survived in full - for us. This may well be the template for such inscriptions as featured once in the Jerusalem Temple, the "Temple Scroll" being a blueprint for what to incise on that Temple once the Essenes ever got back(?) in there. Unfortunately - for Nabatists - Reqem's marble is light on specifics to Reqem.
Nah. Here the best chapter is seventh chapter, R. Wenning's on Sculpture. This is where is pondered, which god(dess). But again: Manôt laughs at us mortals. We've had a lot of speculation on "al-'Uzza!!" but this is based on something called a "baetyl", which might be associated with Her elsewhere. An inscription refers to a "Goddess of Hayyân" - but Who? Those baetyls are early - and shared with a clear Isis from Egypt. So this temple hosts that sort of goddess, a royal rather than Fortuna. It turns out, in polytheism, a temple is supposed to be the home of one goddess in particular. A foreign deity can approach Her as a guest - a foreigner like Isis. We do not know Reqem's Hostess.
ToughSF links Erik van Helvoirt over Venus ~2013. Van Helvoirt now works at Guerrilla Games of Horizon fame. I don't think there's a game attached to this pic.
This is a balloon, dangling a station with ... panels. Probably not radiators, probably solar. For them to work consistently where the balloon itself isn't overhead this is likely a polar latitude. I wonder if that's the vortex.
ToughSF says the balloon is helium. Commenters ponder whether hydrogen could work. I suspect hydrogen would burn in sulfur-dioxide - but we might not have sufficient SO2 way up here to spark it up. More serious is that hydrogen isn't that much more common than helium up here. Best I think would be superheated... CO2, with a balloon reinforced against implosion. Leave the hydrogen for the colonists to sip.
With all those dangling panels, though, how are they protecting from that insane windspeed, especially polar?
The Weinersmiths are still at it - talking communities in space. They're going with small-scale communes. If I were a Marxist (a good part of my economics is at least paraMarx) small communes would be how I'd scale it.
I suggest they trade amongst each other. Asteroid-to-asteroid, largescale cargo-transfer would work much like living on the asteroid itself. Hence why I keep harping on cyclers.
We might even have some work on microcargo over astronomical distances. Apparently no less than Paul Krugman (pdf) - back in 1978 - wrote a paper on trade over relativistic speeds. That would be microcargoes from Earth to some very distant colony; Krugman says "Trantor" but is clearly pondering Barnard's or αCen-C. One might ponder also a Kuiper colony, say on Eris. A central Federal Reserve Of Venus probably wouldn't be a thing - at least, we'd hope not.
This blog has applied von Zeipel to two systems: GJ 229 and ToI 1408. I have a notion on how to apply this to others.
Say we have a two-body system of a star and a brown-dwarf maybe even red; the latter is visible to our 'scopes. These bodies define the inclination of the overall system. Introduce a[nother] planet around the main star. It is eccentric and inclined. Radial-velocity will catch its eccentricity. The inclination - relative to Earth - is unknown.
Von Zeipel suggests that we could run a time series on the eccentricity and also on the amplitude - apparent msini. As the eccentricity changes, given constant mass so should the amplitude. Constraints on the mass should be visible given better spectrometry.
It gets better: as inclination relative to us hits 90°, which I've admitted won't happen with GJ 229, we will start seeing transits. Yea even unto 1 AU from the host star. On the flipside some of our further-out transits, if they do have large outer planets, stand to shift away from transit over time. Luckily we've now had those snapshots.
Exciting as all this is for mostly-future researchers, I must warn that planets subject to ultraMilankovitch will not be habitable. They'll have ultraIceAges.
Theodore Beale promoted a tweet by the not-so-black "insurrectionist", Docnetyoutube. Cerno and Ace stayed away from the accusation.
Beale is an old hand at not committing to direct slander, instead bringing up tangential evidence and letting others do the slander for him. But if website owners aren't keen on having governments go after "misinformation", I suggest to those owners they engage in less of it.
A few weeks back I had the dubious pleasure of sitting across a family with a strident female vegetarian. Her case was that Jesus was himself a vegetarian. As far as I knew that is untrue; Jewish Galileans ate fish and also herded flocks, and (especially) made use of animal parchment. Of all the misdeeds our Lord imputed upon Herod's Temple, the sacrifices were not among them. But.
There is a tradition in Christianity of red-meat-avoidance, especially during Lent, but also some ascetics did without meat all their lives. Some were in the Ebionite sect. These were - famously - in the tradition of saints James and Peter and not of Paul. These were Jewish Christians. Dr Yitzhaq Feder is now reporting that Judaism, also, had a ... mixed understanding of eating meat. The Second Temple take, which is the Sadducean and Essenian take I understand, is to eat only the meat as comes from the Levite Priests. Essenes weren't part of this Temple so didn't eat it.
So I am - retroactively - glad I did not pipe up; notwithstanding it'd be rude, and just tag myself as yet another annoying mansplainer.
Although, now equipped with TheTorah: to argue for Christ's vegetarianism would would be to read the Cross as the abolition of the Temple Sacrifice - which it is, in our tradition. Like the Essenes, we'd not have a substitute until the Messianic Banquet. So - if we in this Goyisch Israel be using leather and vellum, what do we do with the meat?
One constraint on finding stuff like Barnard b out there is spectral noise. This affects radial-velocity shifting and planets themselves.
Smaller spectrometers can be put on space-telescopes like Webb, lowering the mass/science ratio (if that's a term). They're also pondering fluorescence detection on account, hey, small, doesn't have to take up a hospital's entire basement.
I was listening to Garbage - the band - which brought to mind, the Late Antique style of art. Curtis Yarvin didn't think much of it, at least not in Latin; I suspect he'd not appreciate Syriac either. What we are seeing, in Symmachus and for that matter in Claudian, is the Jeweled Style.
Virgil had an intertext. This intertext was in Greek. His Latin readers would know the overall story. The likes of Ausonius by contrast lived later than Virgil, and were inhabiting a more Latin West. Such would lift passages from Latin poets; say, from Catullus. These are Member-Berries, as a mature satirist would call them.
The Late-Antique poets are barely known, even after Peter Brown's cheerleading of "Late Antiquity". I suspect Yarvin and Cahill wouldn't even mention them were it not for Michael Roberts' 1989 book on the topic. Late-Antique Latin literature doesn't always have the critical-editions we get from, oh, Tacitus. Even the Latin Josephus isn't up to par. So Roberts had to deal with bare manuscripts and, if fortunate, JP Migne.
Cillian O'Hogan has a good précis (pdf); also lately is a collection A late antique poetics?: The Jeweled Style revisited, which is reviewed in Spanish.
From Harvard, in case anyone still cares: the 3.26 Gy carbonaceous impact.
This monster was 50-200 times Chicxulub. Luckily our life here 1.307 Gy on the mainsequence was still purple, not yet green.
It does bring up some interesting constraints on life elsewhere however. Lacking anything significant between the HZ out to the nearest gas giant: C bolides gonna bol'. S too. At the same time a reasonably-tectonic world might throw up some Siberian or Deccan flows.
We might get life but all the chaos will knock a lot of it down.
6% of our meteorites - on Earth - come from the famous Mars, Moon, Vesta trio. Those lack chondrules. We have now catalogued 70% others, of the noncarbonaceous chondrites: Karin, Koronis, Massalia.
Massalia makes up over half that 70%. This one spawned the L chondrites. Its breakup has been pinned to 466 Mya, that Ordovician mess, but also 40 Mya(?). Karin and Koronis sent H rocks down here, 5.7 and 7.6 Mya. Also see here.
Carbonaceous chondrites make up only 4.4% despite C asteroids being common up in actual Space - and delivering ruthenacious love to the dinosaurs. For this paucity, the papers blame... Earth: volatile-rich slushballs don't do well in our atmo. Also claimed: Ryugu and Bennu are basically the same, coming from the Polana breakup.
Sasha Yates is/was a middle-aged British man. I believe I went to school with the pyrsyn; it was then an all-boys' school, mostly for boarders. The spelling "Yates" rather than, oh, "Yeats" is a tip-off. So clearly David did not "identify" as female then.
I am aiming for the side of caution when I speak of our past, but will note here - for now - that we were in the process of more-or-less becoming friends, at first. This was the "third form" which Americans call the eighth grade. Yates and I were in the lower-level classes, where the bulk of the student-body had Latin and French; I approached this school with no Latin and with one year of French. Kids gotta hang together or they hang separately.
At some point the Yates I knew approached me to become Friends. I could hear the Capital-F in his emphasis. I associated "Friends" with some harassing phone-calls I'd received, at my parents' home, in earlier years. My initial reaction was that here was coming more harassment my-a-way. I figured that, whatever was going on in Yates' head, I didn't need that head anywhere near my person. So I distanced myself from him. Later I heard about some older - like 17 years old - boy who had been Asked To Leave for being perverted, named "Clements", or so I spelled it in my own head. Other boys in our mutual acquaintance rumoured that Clements' victim, and I hold fair to assume that he was a victim, was Yates.
Anyway Yates was already a misfit, and unlike my head Yates' head wasn't getting any smarter, so he left whilst I stayed.
I've hinted above that, when I came to this school, I did not come without some baggage. I hold fair to assume that Yates had come with some baggage as well. How we handle this baggage, would seem key. Sometimes I made poor choices, sometimes I didn't have choices; later I worked to make better choices, but I cannot say that I have lived my best possible life. I suspect that I have made better choices, overall, than Yates has made.
LOLheadline, no. But... Zap's 9 October zeta-pinch actually does squeeze fusion and eject it... somewhere: so far... 1,080 consecutive pulses
. The next step
is to do this consistently over 120 minutes. A two hour thrust-burn, if not yet a power-plant and not yet Epstein, will assuredly do for pushing tonnes into a Hohmann and out again. X user named, er, @planefag is writing a hard SF around such a drive.
You don't launch this monster from any inhabited spot on Earth; I'd not even recommend a graphite-infused atoll. The SuperHeavy takes you up to orbit. But once in orbit, preferably far from satellites: vroom.
SuperHeavy is a gamechanger for orbit; a z-pinch drive would change the game for inner-system travel. Only missing step is infrastructure in the mid orbits: propellant depot, metal-recycling space junk factories, stuff like that. The z-pinch drive will take some decades to catch up to, say, the fission-even-fusion NERVA solutions or that fusion afterburner. So we can get those space stations up meanwhile.
Gliese 229 at 5.7612 parsecs out was the first brown dwarf system discovered, in 1995. At minimum 70 jovian mass, the orbiter annoyed researchers as a Dog Not Barking. This close it should have been big enough against a star faint enough, to see. When the orbiter was seen, almost face-on to our eyes: it was seen in 2008 as 950 K, seen as too dim - a mere T on the scale.
The mystery is solved: it's two. And their age can be measured therefore certainly that of their main star A. It helps I suppose that they can now bootstrap what Luhman 16 has taught us about binary "brownz" (per Razib).
That main star has planets, also; planet Ac - the second found - floats in the habitable zone. As a Msini=7 "super earth" around an Archaean star, it is not tidally-locked and has assuredly kept its atmo. Which is not to say that planets this large be life-candidates; it's like to be a Sudarsky II with some supercritical fluid below its clouds. Hence why I didn't take it seriously when sketching potential colonies.
Both A planets are eccentric. As for the BC brownz, they're 70 joves of mass periapse 29 × (1 - 0.853) = 4.263 AU. So... yeah, they're going to perturb orbits. One might apply von Zeipel to their dynamics. That's good mainly for telling us that the planets' inclinations are hard to constrain and subject to change. Although, they'll probably never transit their star to our sight.
I figured that our floating Venus habitats - "aerostat" in the jargon - will be doing jes'faaahn for power, getting 1.911 flux as they get. Larger ones can supplement that by heat-differential, dipping 10s-km conductive cables through the clouds. How about smaller ones?
It's a question I hadn't thought to ask, but the first Venereal habs will be small, aiming to scale-up; also, not everyone wants to live in a large city. For the floating suburbs, power can be beamed point-to-point. ToughSf is more considering tethering a balloon to the ground and running a current. There's no need on Venus' surface (wind power will do better) but I can easily this being nice for, say, highland Mars over those pesky dust storms.
The paper's source of the laser-beaming would be GEO. That orbit exists for Mars (Deimos is almost there already) and of course for Earth. Not so much Venus, absent an orbital ring; but as I noted, not much need. Another fine use will be in reducing solar-panel area in lower orbits.
For Mars they'll want a larger balloon painted gold - which as a side-effect means more surface-area.
Why not wade back into the early-Islamic Jazira - here's a book on Theodotus of Amida. Unfortunately by Gorgias so you'll be paying through the large hooked nose; but this work seems better than, say, Michael Jackson Bonner's work over there. Because it's Hoyland and Palmer.
Palmer is an expert in west-Syrian text but didn't include this in The Seventh Century - on account it's not a chronicle, and might not be entirely west-Syrian (I'll get to this). Hoyland meanwhile gave this one a ringing endorsement in his own, some-years-later, Seeing Islam. That's my source for what follows, since I don't own their latest take.
Theodotus was a seminomadic saint of the region which had endured so much violence in the AG 950s / AD 640s. By his time the violence was over, and the victorious Arabs dealt with the region largely through Christian subordinates. These were a diverse set of Christian: the Vita comes through Joseph presbyter himself ordained by Jacobites. Their pope Julian had in fact ordained Theodotus as bishop of hometown Âmid around 1000 / 690, but Theodotus (like James of Edessa AD 684-8) didn't much appreciate so worldly an honour, so retired to Qenneshre to be a monk.
I am somewhat-interested in Theodotus' career before Julian (999/687); the 990s/680s had descended into war again this time between the Umayyads and... well, everybody. Part of Theodotus' ambit was Nisibin. Nisibin belonged to those whom Joseph will call The Heretics. In Joseph's time, also Julian's time: Jacobites applied the term mainly to the Nestorians (who returned the favour of course). But Theodotus went to the house of the heretics... just as freely as with the orthodox
. Theodotus even got arrested for Melkite ("Roman") sympathies. Pseudo-Methodius was similarly culturally Monophysite and uninterested in picking sectarian fights with fellow Christians.
Joseph reports that Theodotus wrote many letters in "the land"; going as far as to "Beth-Hesne" which "house of fortresses" is marked as Roman territory. The disciples of James of Edessa owned such a collection of James' letters; I assume Joseph owned a similar collection from Theodotus, using them to compile his Vita. But, like the Ninevene Christians, the latter letter-collection hasn't survived the Turks and the Daesh.
The reasons the Jacobite hierarchy wanted to claim Theodotus are because he was known as holy by everyone, and because he, um, mostly lived there. I wonder if Theodotus' relative tolerance spurred bishop George's anathema against itinerants like him.
From the land of the undomesticated kittycats, Archaeology is summarising the Shu, at now Sanxingdui. I blame allergies.
Anyway, these were postdiluvian contemporaries with the Shang state. The Shang spoke and wrote Chinese. I always say "pots ain't people - they're language". The Shu, in a valley somewhat separate from the Shang with the tech at the time, did not use the same pots. They liked anthropomorphic designs if stylised, rather like the Maya; the Shang didn't go for that. Also the Shang used bone to cast oracles - luckily for us readers - of which, we've no evidence for the Shu. The two cultures differed, in short, probably not even speaking the same language. But it seems they may have agreed upon similar notions on the State.
When I talk about "Shang" I use the state's own name for itself - because they told us that name, in their inscriptions. Later Chinese recalled the state as "Yin", from their family name (the Zhou let them keep a duchy at Song). We have "Shu" from a "Chronicles of Huayang" of which I hadn't heard. Anyway it too is a later source. So, I use "Shu" for want of any better.
In Mesoamerica, Tlaxcala had a republic and the Aztecs had an amir. The Aztec amir was in-process of making a caliph of himself when the Spaniard showed up. What we're now calling "China", in Shang times, seems more like the Bronze Age over in Mesopotamia. Mitanni and Hatti were not the same, but their mutual treaties could agree upon what a "king" was and what a "temple" was. Likewise, it seems, the Shang and the Shu agreed upon the correct duties of a king and of a priesthood.
The Shang's holy kingship failed its test in 1046 BC, when the Zhou mounted a revolution. Anyang - last city of the Shang - was abandoned, left to modern Chinese to dig back out. The Zhou would rule with more thought to local concerns, and left to others the glory of the gods. Likewise it seems that the Shu faced a contemporary test: priests and nobles alike vanished from Sanxingdui, after which the nobles reappear at Jinsha - without the priests. Before the nobles left Sanxingdui they buried a lot of bronzes - not recast them, just buried them. There never was much of an "iron age" in China, so the archaeologists judge this burial as a simple waste of money. It must have been done for ideology.
I am somewhat reminded of how the priesthood of the Incas gathered wealth unto itself; or maybe the nobles of the Maya.
Unfortunately the Shu didn't leave any writing - like the early Shang and Erlitou didn't leave writing. More likely is that they did have writing but we're not lucky enough to own (say) oracle-bones... because the Shu didn't use bone for oracles. If I had to guess I'd pin the Shu for a Tanggut/Tibetan lot.
The Judio-Theory always smelled wrong to me on account of how apocalyptically tradcath the Admiral ended up. For those still paying attention, last weekend we got a flurry of silly on muh genetics. What we have here is failure to replicate... again.
Off to the next shiny thing I suppose.
Just a short note that, although I woke up too late to see the launch and stage-separation - both boring at this point - I did catch (heh) the retrieval of the SuperHeavy. I was not expecting it all to be so precise.
Of course Musk and Shotwell (heh heh) have had a lot of time to plot out contingencies by now. Musk in particular has had nothing better to do than to appoint himself as Troll Lord on X. That's our runaway government's fault more than it is, Musk's.
Interesting fire at the end of the booster-catch; there shouldn't really be all that much fuel for a fire, when the booster done boosted and done ... done. But that's why we test. Nobody should be expecting a big bang; the fear was a crash and broken equipment. Since they have everything else intact they'll know what to reinforce for next-time.
Zim is calling 100%. I can't argue with that. Shame on FAA and on all the other clowns for trying to stop this.
Last month I missed a speculation on K2-18's planet: that it might be hydrothermal. That is: it indeed has a water layer below the clouds (sulfur/carbon dominant); in a supercritical state. Like the carbon-dioxide defining Venus' "sea level".
Tom Mueller's been busy since losing his job with the Raptors (although he's kept that on his resume). ToughSf points to Helios.
This is a nonnuclear solution for tugging cargo from LEO (halfway-to-anywhere) to Beyond. They're going with five tons - I assume nonmetric - for LEO>GEO in 24 hours. Metricbros can point to the 67 kN spec. For the SF auteurs amongst us: here's our baseline.
One assumption is that multitonne widgets will be had in LEO for pushing off past the Van Allens. This is the SuperHeavy future; Mueller seems to be aiming at Starship-without-Raptor. Hey why not; Starship's job is to get back to Earth, not to muck around in orbit.
The "head tax" is a Persian concept, applied upon the various Aramaeans whom the Sasanians ruled. On the word they used for it: Mustafa Akyol, whose Mutazilite Islamic Moses book I've just read, really needs to quit citing Ziauddin Ahmad on some Persian etymology for "Kizyat" or whatever.
Several circumstantial problems attracted my suspicions.
For one, where both later Semitic and Iranian languages have an -ah suffix, Semitic tends to reveal that theirs came from -at. Mediaeval Iranian feminines go more to the -ag, -aj, -ak, and -aq. So I'd not expect a "kizyat" in Middle-Persian, only in mediaeval postIslamic Farsi... or in later Arabic anachronisms like in Tabari then Bal'ami.
Also, where we catch late-Antique Aramaeans mentioning the Iranian-imposed head tax, as Goldblatt cites the local Talmud: it is krg'. Take off the emphatic suffix, do some aspiration and out comes the kharaj about which we (also) hear so much under the later Umayyads. (Jews were the suckers who had to pay the thing.) Note meanwhile that -j.
Add to all this that I don't see jizya or gzitho applied to tribute (westSyriac mdatto) until, what, the Maronite Chronicle and then Theodotus of Âmid(a).
Akyol is correct on the concept but is clearly a better philosophical-historian than he is a philologist, so should be more careful when dabbling into the latter.
Living in one of North America's xeric provinces - we shouldn't dignify this one-party votefarm with the title of "state" - we are subject to fires. One cause of fires is the electric vehicle, especially large ones like cars. Apparently burned-down pine forests are greener.
Which is not to knock the technology - when it gets there. This safety leap counts as getting there. Like nonmeat food is getting there.
In last-week news I didn't quite get to, Ceres is muddy and Ryugu is CI chrondritic. I'd thought Ryugu was Cg and baked closer - so, no real retractions needed here. Seems like that middle-road between "Cereslike" and "Pallaslike".
Bennu at least can be mined for food. Ceres may well earn her name as the Demeter of our system. Pace the Expanse, she won't run out.
Technology exists for altering hurricane strength. The tech has been touted all my life for Cloud Seeding - which precipitates out moisture, lessening the water damage (if not wind). Apparently there exist more options, found by patent. After all, Einstein was a patent clerk, in 1910s Suisse; government employees in America ought to be twice as wise and thrice as diligent. Especially those versed in American corporate law.
Or mayyybe the US suffers a known "patent troll" problem permitted by... overbroad, vague, and frivolous patents.
As to the usual "global warming" culprit: greenery in the Antar'tic outskirts is happening, and perhaps those Sahara monsoons. Those shouldn't concern us. But the cost may be more-severe warming at the Gulf of Mexico as the same time as the eastern Atlantic. As more people move to affected coasts, like the Florida coasts, they should prepare accordingly. DeSantis as governor has been preparing accordingly, at least for Helene last week.
As to Milton: its track looks like the 1848 track. That is not a common track - note the year - but it has happened, and when it happens it is Bad. Please stay safe out there. And stay sane.
UPDATE 10/26: Viganò, h/t Vox Day. Richard Hanania would say that Trump is a sight better than "MAGA".
ToughSf points to Robert Hoyt et al., "WRANGLER: Capture and De-Spin of Asteroids & Space Debris" (pdf). Up to a megaton of spinning material can be tethered and despun.
The "N" in WRANGLER stands for "net", so those rubble-piles should be despinnable too. Or, for colonists: made to spin faster. Newton is Newton.
Chesterton, followed by Bloom, pointed out that Mark presents Jesus not as a mere man, but as a god walking among us. Contrast, say, Last Temptation. What other gods be like that?
Vridar a while back noted that where the Jews had "El" this just means "God". ("Baal" isn't so different.) The actual god would be Hadad the sky god. When in Genesis "God calls fire from God in Heaven", this means a god on Earth was calling for Hadad.
Gods walking on Earth in human implies something more like a demigod. That wouldn't be Hadad.
Jesus would be more like Dionysius - oft-cited in the scholarship. Another possibility is Heracles. The Gauls had Ogmios; although the Celts envisioned him as an older man, Greek visitors worked to harmonise Ogmios' legendarium with the Twelve Labours. The Greeks figured that Ogmios is how Heracles behaved later in life.
Uttar Pradesh has yielded some impressive news: Late Bronze chariots. Contemporaneous with the Mitanni.
I'd thought Mitanni-like Aryans - "sintashta" if you don't like that word - didn't get across the Indus until the civilisation over there (who near-certainly did not speak Indic) had collapsed.
As to what the culture had, besides Ochre Pottery and QuicKarts - they also had symbolic burials, of animals. Like dogs and birds. Not horses? Among the human ("primary") burials is one decorated with double-horned helmets and sacred fig leaves
. (LOLvikings.) Apparently that fig remains important in Hindu culture today.
'Tis possible that the chariot was such a killer-app that paraMitanni took over northern India without changing the language... yet. With the fall of the already-weak IVC, the locals may have been so impoverished they had no choice but to accept now-Vedic overlords. See also Hungary.
Barnard's Star! - I can hear the groans from here. No seriously, Barnard's; or Presently-Proxima Ophiuchi which Gliese catalogued 699. The ESPRESSO "VLT" 'scope found this one.
As a radial nontransit this reading has a minimum mass: 0.37 M⊕ sin i. If it were a transit it would sit three times Mars' mass and half Venus'.
The orbit is 3.1533 ±0.0006 days so 0.023 AU. Zero eccentricity and no moon at this distance, so we should all safely assume no rotation. This late in the system's age we can disregard tectonics.
They are talking other signals: 3.15, 4.12, 2.34, and 6.74 days. The furthest would be 0.17 AU, the closest - which skates very close to the confirmed planet - 0.019 AU. The outer one would get incident-flux 2.4 S⊕ and the inner, 10.1, all more than Venus gets. I'd rather they'd calculated the irradiance of the planet they tell us they'd confirmed, before asserting a "temperature". Overall flux looks upward of Mercury's 6.674.
Add all this up: Barnard b has no air. They're guessing a sunfacing albedo of rock, 0.3; for 400 K. Back of the place should retain some ice tho'.
... in Mars, h/t Reynolds. That'd be pretty awesome for colonists if they had oxygen, which will still need breaking down from concentrated CO2 and water.
Still: nice that it doesn't need to be drained from oxygen and water - and hydrocarbons - which colonists will jealously need. Just dig it out!
Unlike Hollister David's permashuttles, the 13:10:8 station doesn't skim a major planet. How do we build it?
A station needs: protection from radiation, air to breathe, and water to drink. This being nowhere at first, we import metallic canisters full of volatiles, and keep the canisters. The canisters should possibly be designed to be easily split lengthwise.
Just to fire the engines and let them cool down, will require radiators; and the station itself needs to reflect and otherwise-handle 1.35 flux. The station can import radiators too.
One bit of good news is that also had here, is hydrogen. It'll be rushing past with much energy. This could be used to reduce oxygen off of imported rocks, and of rusts as happen inside the station. This industry should happen on the sun-facing shield protecting the livable parts of the station; the water drains toward the station which catches the water.
The solar-wind will push us outside this orbital position. To mitigate that, we chose this position for its resonance. Maybe (somehow) we can shift angles, not to get pushed out, when Venus sails into place to pull us back in. And as a rule we should prefer to radiate heat away from the Sun and not toward it.
How do we slow an incoming craft? I don't know that we want to be losing volatiles - or even tungsten. Consider: an Orion as doesn't eject a tungsten plate, but ejects ceramic plates. They handle the heat better than any metal; besides, metals are heat-conductors which we'll want for the radiators.
"Vox Day" Beale thinks that the Lebanese parastate Hizb-Allâhi, which has as many Latin spellings as the Devil has names, can outlast the present festivities. He argues leadership doesn't matter when the people are united. Richard Hanania points out meanwhile that expertise and interpersonal connexions are difficult to replace; especially if your paymasters don't natively speak a Semitic language.
The glory of being a parastate is that you are Resistance. You can claim to be fighting the zionist occupation even if you are not yourself being occupied, as Gaza was not occupied until last October. Hezb were rather the gaolers of Lebanon, and the bullies of Syria and Iraq.
One issue with the presence of a parastate is that they cow the legal state to keep a lighter hand - as in Mexico today. Not entirely unwelcome.
Overall, though; Levantine Sunnis seem not entirely unhappy with the present lack of Shi'a leadership.
A few months back Redmayne-Titley splurted "Hizbullah is Lebanon!". I believe this thesis can be tested. It's more likely that Hezb was just Iran as seen by the fireworks last night.
Beale was more fact-based yesterday on what Israel's next step is. It makes sense that Israel might set up a buffer in the south to push the Hezb remnant back, leaving the more-intact Lebanese army to reassert its lost sovereignty. But today Beale got stupid again.
The annual American Library Association's lovefest is on, to celebrate the new Seleucid year of 2336 I guess.
The public library is run by the same postmenopausal Presbyterians as run the public school. The neglectful and/or Munchausen parents who dump their failed abortions on the school don't care enough to keep them from the (similarly-run) library. "Banned" from the school means endorsed for the library. It is a shell game.
If "public" means anything it means "alternative to corporate".
Therefore any public library has a conflict-of-interest when it comes to books that are banned from schools.
If the public library was honest, it should showcase books banned from Amazon. Books like Jared Taylor's White Identity. Books like Ibn Warraq's The Islam in Islamic Terrorism.
Michael Jackson Bonner, who last decade had posted some good stuff about Sasanian ideological output, in 2020 published a full book: The Last Empire of Iran. I didn't buy it because, frankly, it cost too bloody much: it's a Gorgias joint. Van Bladel has reviewed it and is highlighting another problem with Gorgias - that it is a Syriac imprint, publishing proChristian product.
According to van Bladel, Bonner has treated the Sasanians - and the Muslims - like an East Syrian archbishop might. The former follows the cow faith of "Zoroastrianism" and the latter are camel jockeys - so the review claims of the book. Van Bladel proposes that both religions deserve better, at least from 21st-century scholarship if we cannot check our biases. (G-d knows Van Bladel is no slavish Noeldekist, himself.)
Also missing - which Van Bladel concedes are deliberate omissions - society, economy, material culture, and archaeology
. Yes, archaeology is a dry topic; yes, we can handle material-culture in footnotes. But how the F$^* can you talk about an empire without discussing its society? For the Sasanians in particular we really must say something of its economy, especially given Mazdakism.
An actual Parsi or Muslim, at this point, has cause to consider Gorgias as Bombadier priced as Brill. Except that this would insult Bombadier; Gorgias here is rooting around Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited territory.
On topic of Islamic origins (while we're here): available since last July is an essay by Stephen Shoemaker attached to some others, courtesy Cascade (and Amazon, if you own Kindle and want the $10 epub). Unfortunately my introduction to this work is a commentary on footnote 181; which footnote is annoying al-Jallad, van Putten, and even MacDonald. Also lately available is Robert Spencer.
Last week I bought and read Lenore Newman and Evan DG Fraser, Dinner On Mars. Kelly and Zach Weinersmith, A City on Mars now has competition in the leftwing authoritarian space. And how!
I'll start by slapping the authors silly(-er) for omitting the index. When you don't have an index you are telling your readers to go pirate the PDF. (Disclosure: I was honest. I hold a Barnes and Noble membership and bought this book there.) In a (slightly) happier note I see a partial-bibliography, of the "Further Reading" genre. Here we learn that the authors have read Zubrin's Case for Mars and Robinson's Red Mars; in the main text Fraser cops to The Martian (the movie not the book, but that's fine, and he's surely read that too).
Newman admits to a female "partner", which means she has taken herself out of the running for future humanity. Her causa, instead, is Earth: she wants not directly fewer people, oh no, but poorer people (who will then decide economically not to increase their families). The book admits that Malthus and lately Ehrlich were wrong, but this is to well-detectable chagrin.
You could run a full drinking-game on "we must" comments at this book's conclusion, pp. 202-6. The book here p. 203 touts how wonderful Canadian "policy" worked for getting everyone vaccinated against Covid. "Policy" means force. Yes: Newman - excuse me, "the book" - intends to tax carbon p. 206. Newman should say force. Newman should tell her readers outright that she is a Fury - but for everybody! Fraser, that soyboy - or oatboy as pp. 110-14 would prefer - is not the man to stop her.
Getting past Newman's noxious misanthropy was a chore, for this blogger - also of a misanthropic and authoritarian bent. Hey; I just prefer that people say what they are. Come out come out little girl!
On the other hand: Newman has restrained at least her misandry, enough to work with Fraser, to the extent his Y chromosome works. And the book is pro-labour, or at least purports to be (a directly anti-immigration stance would have been key here, for a book which claims pp. 156-7 to know economics). So maybe there's something in Newman that can be reached.
For another thing Newman is a vegan. On this much I'm more amenable; Mike Cernovich and I think Robert Kennedy have made trenchant comments on how we grow meat in the West - actually on our diets generally, which both this book's authors agree on. The book makes a semidecent case for e/acc legume-and-fruit veganism, although branching to seeds like Oatly (which we won't see @cernovich). The book further recommends fake crab and fake salmon, and fake egg, even the Impossible Burger (which I still doubt is quite ready).
On the other side of the semi is almost-certainly Fraser: the book recommends - and outlines! - artificial trout-runs pp. 183-9. For my part I think Martians will rather enjoy watching koi and catfish swim about in 3.73 ms-2, and snails and tilapia might help keep the ponds clean. If Fraser had read more Zubrin - How To Live On Mars, say - he's too polite to note that this book recommended bringing chickens and goats too, which Newman would refuse. One does however wonder about guinea-pigs and rabbits.
Overall Newman and Fraser boost ahead of the Weinersmiths if only because Dinner on Mars does argue that we should be getting out there. I remain a Gillilandist, more-inclined to spinning habs, than to Mars proper. Newman (particularly) is so authoritarian and misanthropic that I shouldn't want in on a colony she's queen of. Same as she probably wouldn't want citizenship in the Baghistan.
