The big macguffin on our Moon is hydrogen. There isn't much. It was thought that there's some ice in Shackleton. Hence, attempts to land over the 80° parallel South; so far India's got the prize at 69°. China is aiming to Shackleton itself in 2026.
UPDATE 1/31: Maybe China will build a base. Good luck with that! Supply from Earth is no picnic, to the poles. The deltaV would be better off hitting up an asteroid.
Something I missed this weekend was this thing about the New World's branches of syphiloid bacteria, the Treponematoses. I didn't know they had any. Apparently they had bejel.
This is not a V.D.; it has little relation to Old-World tropical yaws. Bejel is a skin condition of the dry parts of Africa and Spain.
Schünemann says: As we have not found any sexually transmitted syphilis in South America, the theory that Columbus brought syphilis to Europe seems to appear more improbable.
Personally I dunno. I've been aware since Larry Gonick's History funnybooks that bacteria trade genetics; certainly they could do that in the same family.
I first must ask about bejel in Brasil before Year Zero Common Era. I wonder if sailors from northwest Africa brought the bejel over. Those randy Phoenicians!
As to the virulent venerea - that could be latest-fifteenth-century recombination. Which I've pinned on the Portuguese.
BAAACKDATE 1/30 this time my fault.
Around what's now Poland, after the Tollense war, a people lived we're calling the Lusatians [not Lusitanians]. Their neighbours were the Hallstatt culture - commonly accepted as protoGauls. The Hallstatt were bronzesmiths from time-immemorial; well, okay, it's all immemorial to us (the Gauls being replaced several times over there since then, then wiped out).
Anyway back in 1200 BC not all Lusatians cared for metals. I assume most used bronze and later, iron for woodwork. Southern Lusatians thought highly of metallurgy, and assuredly passed on that "Smith And Devil" tale. But the Chełmno at the lake Papowo Biskupie didn't feel like this stuff was natural; it was not Their Culture. The Chełmno accordingly did not bury their dead with metals. Precious things for them were probably ambers, in that region, traded with the Baltic coast.
Saraceni, again, comes through [1/29]: the Chełmno lake did take metal sacrifice. It's just that these Lusatians did it later than others.
Is this where the Balts and Slavs split from each other? Balts maybe more conservative?
BACKDATE 1/30 again. Sigh.
Coming off of one of my worse weekends, let's talk China's worst export: millet. During the Bronze Age, Saraceni is [1/29] informing us broomcorn millet was used in pastes and puddings in what we're calling "China". There wasn't any such entity as "China" over there at the time, although Erlitou looks like a candidate for what preceded the Shang state.
Along the Silk Road, from Samarkand to the Indus, they were feeding millet to cows. I've got to assume similar for Tibet; I just know what the five preLhasa Tibetan peoples weren't eating namely wheat. The Silk Road started eating millets 2700-1500 BC.
This is borne out in the "Xinjiang" Taklamakan fringe 1700 BC to AD 700, eminently Silk Road at that time. The locals were eating millet in breads. They were not eating the sticky porridges. The Taklamakan couldn't! Shang broomcorn doesn't share genetics with points west.
So, I take it, older broomcorns got west before Erlitou then the Shang had bred something they'd eat. Everyone was feeding that stuff to their flocks, like so much alfalfa. It was later that the east got a version for humans. By then, the west had figured out the bread process - I suspect, at first for millet beers. Then the west moved to breads. No more millet imports were needed, so the great central-Asian cities didn't bother.
MASSIVE BACKDATE 1/30
John Ortiz has sniffed out methane. After, I am sure, quite a bit of gags (and jokes) from his team; they'd figured it came from the Curiosity rover.
This CH4 constitutes atmospheric pressure fluctuations that pull gases up from underground
. (Yeah, that's what I'll start having to call it too.) It fluctuates daily and seasonally, in this near-airless world's harsh temperature fluctuations. Boyle's Law, and such.
Here's a little sword from the Danes' Mark. Well, it's just a knife; hirila is what the runes say on it.
In Late Antiquity, the -ila suffix is well-known in Germannic: "Attila", "Totila". I think the suffix tended not to be accented; "Attila" was spelt that way to force Romans to accent the "Att-". See also "Etzel" in Germannic legend.
Thus, hir is a real sword and this affectionate nickname should be pointed "hírila". Although I don't know if the "i" be long (like Tot) or short (Att).
Claim is that this language is already Old Norse. If so: not the ancestor to Gothic or Dutch.
Last week SciDaily flooded its zone with findings from our ancient and dry moon: early magmas, and more-earlier magmas. Also Japan's JAXA landed a lander, but (I hear) upsidedown so they're shutting it down to save power before daylight can hit it.
Inb4 jokes about Australia's upcoming effort.
The magma formed those basalts which we see in 3.5 Gya; from iron and magnesium. (Granites feature on the side we don't see.) 3.5 Gya's when the iron, which is more common on Earth, got swapped with the magnesium. Also a lot of those basalts are high in titanium now.
Before 4 Gya that crust had more water. One Tara Hayden has found apatite (another joke I could hardly miss); on a natural lunar sample, brought to us by meteorite. Formerly we hadn't seen apatite in ancient "anorthosite" crustal rocks; this meteorite was anorthosite. These weren't from the basalts which be more-recent; they're from the liquid-moon phase.
Meanwhile we are also pondering dusty rocks. These might tell us something about the Moon's magnetism. You'll recall magnetic powder from this blog as of use, in partic'lar, for telling the (relative) age of some rubble.
JAXA were going for a magmatic part of the moon too. Let's hope it works! NASA, this side of the world, are still planning to visit features by rover.
Incremental approaches are how "Fabian" politics work. There exists debate about where and how such approaches can work. Interestingly, this was the approach of the moderate slavery-abolitionists - including the Papacy culminating, perhaps-ironically, in Pius IX.
There is an anecdote in that best Gospel of which I know, in which Christ Jesus bar-Maryam heals a blind man. At first, the blind man only sees dimly, blurrily. Then, Jesus runs him through a second dose. Now the man can see fully. This anecdote, I think, did not quite get into Matthew or Luke, and I doubt "Peter" had it either if we accept that (I don't).
Stages of faith also appear to be common with us mortals. Leaving Fowler aside: Augustine accepted Christianity at an intellectual level first. He only came to love God, later: we often see a progression from intellectual acceptance to moral and spiritual metanoia.
All this assumes we are not born in sainthood. It somewhat breaks down with Mary. For the selfsame Pius IX, Mary was conceived Immaculately. No "character-arc".
Must she be so conceived?
Well... maybe. But Christians need better arguments than, "because an incompetent Pope said it".
Robert A Judge holds a Master of Arts degree. On 22 December he has used his knowledge to deliver, over at Catholic site One Peter Five, a brief for the theology of Mar Nestorios.
I doubt that was Judge's intent. His intent was to follow Cyril of Alexandria in condemning Saint Luke, on Mary mater dei's knowledge of Christ’s divine nature at some point in her life after his birth
. Judge says this knowledge was throughout her life; Luke implied it came to Mary in stages. Judge cites Ephesus against a rival assumption: that Christ had an overt human nature and a covert (maybe subvert) Divine one. This, Judge tars by association with Nestorius ex-patriarch of Constantinople.
I haven't wholly read Nestorius' own work - just the introduction by its translator. Judge has Nestorius claim that Christ...became God by degrees
. Nestorius' closest readers would, rather, that he had defined Christ as the union of Logos and of what Mary did conceive, which was flesh. Nestorius denounced adoptionisms such as that of Paul of Samosata. Admittedly Nestorius' union-in-Christ is not hypostatic. Nestorius could allow (did allow) that Mary was the Christipara bearer of Christ, already in union over the term of pregnancy. Nestorius simply could not allow Logotokos; therefore, not Deipara (Theotokos, Walidat al-Ilahi, etc).
Judge's sources are... not great, Pius IX and the "first" Ephesus council. I had to deal with Pius IX in other posts. As for Ephesus, this unhappy city, now for its sins ruled by Christian-hating Turks, hosted two councils. Both councils were robber-councils; there isn't one without the other. And we must remember that Chalcedon itself - to which Rome still holds, I'd argue best holds - restored a lot of what the Ephesian mobs destroyed. Especially in Rome, from Toledo before us, we correctly interpret Chalcedon that the Spirit proceeds from Father and Son.
Then there's Judge's rhetoric, which is snotty. Sorry, but that's the only way I can read this: Mary must have knowledge of her Son in order to triumph over Satan and be “eternally at enmity with the evil serpent.” In the Nestorian heresy this enmity is emptied.
I am not here to deny John's Revelation; however controverted in Nestorius' Orient, Nestorius' faction wasn't the resistance, so much as (say) Dionysius of Alexandria and Eusebius. (Judge would have better luck warning me off of Luke.) On the contrary, I read the Revelation at its word: Mary's victory over Satan happens in the next plane. This happens because Mary was assumed into Heaven and exists there now. By now, she is the consummate Théologienne, knowing Christ better than Judge, Nestorius, and myself combined.
We also get many paragraphs pulling from Aquinas and making reference to Mary's Perpetual Virginity, which we can take or leave, but with no bearing on the progression of Mary's knowledge of Christ. Best I can tell, it is all so much tribal signalling. Like the condemnation of Nestorius, which had so little engagement with Nestorius' own work. But it didn't have the same ring as, oh, "Theodore of Mopsuestia".
Robert Judge has, by the accident of his poor argumentation, has served more to make this reader sympathetic to Nestorius himself, let alone what is said about Mary.
I need a dedicate-post on Pius IX's correspondence with the American Confederacy (of slaveholding rebels).
This is because, for some reason, Catholics think wise to cite Pius IX. He was, in my (limited) research, the most unwise bishop Rome has seen, since at least the Council of Trent. The bill against him, in history, is long: from the self-sabotage of Maximilian's restoration of the Habsburg imperium in Mexico, to the Mortara case, to his ineffectual attempts in holding his estates and then whining about it as "prisoner of the Vatican". Papal Infallibility alone has driven a wedge between us and the Orthodox. Then there's the deeply-problematic doctrine of the Immaculate Conception.
As for the CSA: Pius' apologists would cast his intent to reach peace and to emancipate (in stages) the South's slaves, as was perhaps the hope in Union slavestates like Maryland. Judah Benjamin and general Longstreet may have used this in their own manumission plans. Rather than imposing penance, this Pope would accept repentance from within. He was not this guy.
If this was this Pope's intent - it didn't help. Why didn't it help? I think, any Christian recognition of the rebel states would require those states' politicians undergo metanoia: in this context, to repudiate their own statements of secession. That's what the Thirteenth Amendment would be. Was that going to happen by negotiation?
Last Thursday I got schooled over at the Turtle. The topic was f0(980). It is a boson, like the photon. But unlike the photon, f0(980) is also a meson. Whuuu?
Was this whole post a trap to call out the replyguy midwits? On the Right side, we see this with Cernovich and Vox Day. Well, such is life; I've been wrong on this mine own blog several times...
It turns out that mesons, although hadron, made up of quarks... are also bosonic. So: how does that even work?
Tune into the comments over there to find out. Much maths. It seems what he have in f0(980) is such a boson as is also, in part, made of bosons - the strongforce gluons, if nothing else.
These large particles, as we need high-energy colliders even to find, are large. Is the Higgs made up of quarks and gluons?
... as in, around Harran. Lyman Stone has a summary. I must first remind that I find difficult almost all the Abr[ah]am lore.
The Kaldu come into history in the Iron Age as lower-Euphrates Semites. Nabunaid/Nabonidus was of them. These were, interestingly, of northwest-Semitic origin; this king wrote in Aramaic and in Taymanitic. Later Aramaeophones came to aspirate the kap(h); the Greeks and Romans duly rendered the people as "Chaldaei". Later still, Iraqi Christians speaking their postAramaic language referred "Bet-Aramaye" to city "Perat de Mayshan" or (for Pliny) "Pratta" ("Euphrates" seems to be "river of the Furat"). So some have pondered Abraham as from some Ur of those Chaldaeans. It happens existed, once, a large city of Ur in Sumer. Christianity has assumed that's the one. Abram would then live in that Ur after several language shifts to Aramaic.
Problem: the Torah is going with a time before the Hyksos, in fact contemporaneous with this nonsense. That is the early Bronze Age. Aramaic did not then exist, independent of Canaanite. I am further unaware of any "Amorite" language trickling down to Ur, nor for that matter to Tayman, before all that Mitanni/Hittite guff in the 1500s BC. Semitic (as we know it) was spoken in Ugarit and maybe down to South Arabia, but not down the Euphrates. Why would it be there? The Euphrates hosted dense populations of cities, speaking their own paraSemitic languages, from Eblaite to Akkadian. So: no Kaldu down there, then.
Stone actually believes Torah - takes it seriously, anyway.
The Bible for Abram aligns better with some memory of north-Mesopotamians not from the Euphrates, but crossing Euphrates, to travel southwest not northwest-then-southwest. This at least shortens Abe's trip by an upriver prologue.
Now: I am unwilling to remove kasdim from the text entirely. The Chaldaeans had to come from somewhere, and north-Mesopotamia is a somewhere. Also I do not think anyone ever accused Abraham's mother of being hor(ite), nor for that matter Terah, which is what a "Hurrian" is, like "Amorite" is Amurru, or like "Hittite" refers to those northern cities claiming, in the Iron Age, the blood of old bronze Hatti.
Overall, though, Stone's thesis seems promising.
Boca Chica is getting serious [h/t Zim]: they're asking for a mall. A plan alongside this is to swap out some parkland, in exchange for much more land up north in Laguna Atascoca.
Between Port Isabel and Matamoros, we may have a serious metroplex where Rio Grande once rebelled from dictator Santa Ana. Hurricanes willing...
...and Soros willing. Can Schwab talk some sense at some of us?
The results are in from CalTech's solar-power transmitter.
To collect the power would require a kilometer-scale constellation
- which pieces fit in small(ish) cargo-holds. That's the "DOLCE" side of the mission; this was the hard part. Then there's "ALBA" to determine what sort of powercell works best in space. "MAPLE" is where we beam it since we don't know how George Smith's dead Martians did it.
This scales up power availability out in 1 AU, where we're not allowed to ship up mercury much less an "atomic pile" of your favourite fissile isotopes.
The plan is to power Earth with all this stuff. Not stations in 1-2 AU space, although I'm sure it'd help.
As the future holds: We might be able to pack more cells for future DOLCE.
BACKDATE 1/19
Last week, h/t ToughSF, we got steel electrolysis. Where iron is less expensive than titanium (unlike our moon), and we really need the hydrogen - this is your baby. Its deal is that it resists corrosion (hey now hey now now). The secret ingredient is manganese which, I think, can be had from brines.
Mingxin Huang is Hong Kong's man of steel. He and Elon really have to meet. Maybe to figure out how this even works; manganese shouldn't work. Some quantum thing I guess.
Apparently it works in/on acids as well, which is great for the Venereal clouds where, er, iron is less expensive than titanium. And it's all acid.
We had several articles last week over the cities in Ecuador's Upano, upstream of the Namangoza. I think this is the Oriente province; across the (two) Andes ranges. So: Amazon watershed, foothills.
Mann's book 1491 claimed - from several not-well-regarded colonial accounts - that the Amazon once had a Neolithic, not the jungle savages (like the "Fierce People", Yanomamö) whom the Portuguese explorers found there. Mann is holding up better and better as these cities keep getting found; the savagery was, basically, Mad Max. Postcivilisational people become savage. And why wouldn't they? They're living among reminders of what they once were. Look at the Merovings' Francia.
Upano's heyday was 500 BC - AD 500s. That is centuries before the crashes of other Amazonian societies. I wonder if some of these guys migrated elsewhere, sparking off successors - not Casarabe (as should be obvious) but something closer home, like Kuhikugu or the Tapajo.
The Turtle wonders further if 500s, more exactly, means the later 530s. If there were soil depletion and/or invasion, one imagines those signals would be visible in the record. Of course the same should hold for drought or cold - perhaps remembered as darkness. As to who might be invading, Muisca seem too late but who knows, the archaeology keeps expanding. The Moche are too coastal to be climbing Andes; the Tairona too northern. I'd worry most about Huari, also starting around this time.
With much work, Ecuador won't fail again.
Venus is an air planet upon which no man may land and live. It seems there's a race, if we can extract metals or nanofibre, faster; for our Landis balloon needs.
The issue Venus will have with the New York Yankees here is that, to the carbon-oxides, we must Just Add Water. Venereans don't have water; they have hydrogen, in the acids and (newly-found) sulfates, but not water. And the released hydrogen is not really a beneficial byproduct
, it is a premium gas they can't risk. Jeff Landis likes to bathe same as we do.
Honestly I don't much want to lose hydrogen from Earth either. Luckily most hydrogen lost here just burns with oxidisers on its way up.
I wonder if the carbox-to-nano technique could be adjusted to work against sulfates and acids, instead of water.
Meanwhile I'd missed this in 2022: Melih Gürcan Kutsal, on Bioshock Infinite's cloudcity architecture. I am no advocate of Levine's #wokery; I bought his first game but couldn't finish it, so refused his others. Levines as a rule are advised not to burn the flags as feed them. But as I have to admit where an antiSemite might, in passing, get things right; I'll admit where an antiAmerican who shares my DNA gets things right.
HD 63433 is a transit-of-interest, "TOI 1726", with two hot miniNeptunes dubbed b and c; this blog has looked in on c, almost two years back. The system is young; it belongs to the Ursa Major moving-group, formed around the same time - and we're generally moving toward that direction (solar-apex being Hercules), so it's only 73 ly away now. Now [h/t Zimmerman] NASA has brought a third transit, “d”. This returns the system to my attention, as a dynamicist.
Just do not call me a "citizen" in this context. Please.
The outer one, “c”, is a 2.67 R⊕ neptunelike… on the superearth track, losing atmosphere. No such atmospheric loss has been seen in the (now-)middle planet “b”.
“d” orbits close enough I expect it to raise tides on its sun and diiie (mister bond). Meanwhile it should push b to a higher orbit. The outer planet's year runs 17.8 times for every one of our years, so - consider that 17.8 speedup (or more, if c has also drifted) when plotting dynamics.
The known orbits d:b:c are 4.2, 7.1, 20.5 days. If b has drifted out, as I find likely, and if resonances be common in young systems, as others find likely: the outer two worlds b:c used to run more like 6.8:20.4 for a 3:1 resonance. If this resonance did exist, d's inward spiral has pushed out b to break that.
But they're not done. As d augurs in, it will lock into its own resonances. With b: first 7:4, then soon-enough Kirkwood’s 2:1. This could push d’s orbit elliptical as well.
Traversing the HD starcatalogue, Warwick Uni are onto #88986. Here's a wide-ish orbit planet as transits. This cycle's length is 146 days, which orbit would be subVenus here but still, catching transits at 146 days apart is quite a stroke of luck (and of patience).
Radial calculations hit up 17 Earth masses, and we know its inclination so... sini=1, 17 Earth masses indeed. Its disc is twice Earth radius, so the planet is deemed a "sub-Neptune". It is denser than Uranus our own miniNeptune. As I suppose it would be; they're estimating 460s K temperature, although I suspect that figure comes from stellar flux.
Also possible in this system is a... body, at 100 Jupiter masses. I do not think this body transits. That has to be a minimum mass. The body has to be a browndwarf at least. And we haven't seen its electromagnetic signals.
So it is not stellar. As a browndwarf it is not young. It hasn't blasted visible aurora. sini is close to 1, like HD 88986 b.
Science Daily offered a lot of JWST Tuesday. Today this blog checks in on the HAT-P-18 system. A Saturn transits this one, close-in. But also starspots transit this one's surface.
JWST can tease them apart, from 500 lightyears. This allows sharper definition on the planet's shape. They used to think the planet was hazy; now, deleting the noise from starspots, there's less of that haze. There's a better-defined cloud deck instead - much like Saturn over here.
That further means there's a tenth the water than they'd originally thought; and none of the methane. At nearly 500 K over 10 kPa boiling-point (which is 373 K) it's hard to see where a Saturnlike would hold water. As to what's in the clouds, that could still be the water; Venus has clouds and almost no water; those clouds' hydroxides are locked in acid and sulfates.
SciDaily links WSU on salty solvents. Not water.
We all need solvents to do our chemistry. Water dissolves all sorts of excellent material. But some planets run short on hydrogen; among those deficient worlds are sub-Earth asteroids and our own dear Moon.
Nice that WSU are working with us on solvents which don't need the hydrogen. Assuming we can even get a lander on. Assuming anyone will let Elon cook.
Multiple sclerosis is genetic. It's Yamnaya, specifically.
As an autoimmune disorder, I'd figured everyone knew that already. Immune disorders exist because their carriers needed to fight off anthraces and smallpoces; same as the Sickle Cell exists against malariae.
I suppose it's that this particular disease hit the nervous-system, was the sticking point here. Ashkenazim get it too.
Well: now we learn, in the Polania and in the Ukraine, we weren't just taxfarmers, pace TOO. Fiddler on the Roof was right all along: many of us farmed... crops; and - for our purposes here - we kept flocks by night. Even the Christians have sung of this, about us.
I must ask after whether something like MS existed among nonYamnaya herders in the Old World. Like along the Zagros; like in Africa. (China, perhaps, had the Tocharoi who were Yamnaya.)
James Webb Telescope has a pressrelease, on freefloating browndwarrow W1935 and W2220. W2220 is staid; its methane absorbs light as usual. W1935's methane is glowing. Technically was, 47 years ago; but there's no reason to assume it's not still doing that.
Possibly why Dan Caselden, called here "Citizen Scientist", could spot it at all - at that distance. I do hope Caselden rejects the term, as a good antinationalist.
They figure W1935 has aurora. It has no star as should induce this. So - planetary-mass orbiter? It's hard to know even what to call such a satellite; they're going with "moon".
Take this for what it is worth, since even the White Right wants nothing to do with "Eric Striker" anymore; but Joseph Jordan has things to say about the Maccabean saga. He is citing Sylvie Honigman so, best I can tell, his post has summarised Tales of High Priests and Taxes. Said book is still expensive so I'll let Bryn Mawr do it. Overall 1-2 Maccabees are works of political propaganda; to which end - Honigman and Jordan say - were lying about religious persecution.
This blog has cited "Striker" twice. Both times over three years ago, but both times favourably. On this third time, I could pipe in that the Jason of Cyrene stuff narrowly pertains to 2 Maccabees, so is irrelevant to 1 Maccabees (which is better-regarded). "Against Alpion"... oy. His name was Apion, fool.
As for the accusations of plagiary: I hadn't ever seen that. On this time Jordan did cite the scholar. He also contradicts that scholar's chapter on "Olympiodoros" (sic), as do her academic reviewers. He downplays whether the revolt started as a tax revolt, although he does note that Classical tax-systems fell harder on noncitizens, which made Hellenism more attractive (the last gasp of this two-tier tax-code is, of course, the jizya). I find odd, given that Honigman depicted the Temple as a bank, that such a "countersemite" as Jordan would miss what (say) Guyénot did not. So if Jordan plagiarises, I don't find where he has done it to Honigman. Frankly he'd have to read her book, first. (At least I've not claimed to have read it.)
All this said, Striker/Jordan may have a point that Antiochus IV was unaware what he was up against in Judaea. The larger point is that Antiochus hadn't taken this tiff - still a tiff internal to Jews - seriously, fretting about the Arsacids in Iran at Coelesyria's east. Which also seems to contradict Honigman inasumuch as she posits a 168 BC revolt (over taxes or no) over all southern Syria, beyond the Jews.
The local Jews produced a (vast) literature of internal polemic. We have the Maccabean books themselves, if only in-and-from Greek (ironically). Against them, we have counters, mostly apocalyptic. I am aware, so far, of Daniel, and Jubilees, maybe Dream Visions; besides such Dead Sea Scrolls as the War Scroll. Many Jews didn't think that the Hasmonaeans were rightful priests and they sure didn't like them as kings.
Probably why the Maccabee books didn't enter the rabbinic canon and, also, weren't brought to Qumran.
One reason for considering that this tiff really wasn't all that important (at the time, and besides literary "flamewars") is that the place still kept paying taxes to the Syrian Greeks. It was only under Alexander Balas that the Hasmoneans were recognised as kings.
I suppose this post marks that third time, of three, I'm more-or-less agreeing with Striker-Jordan.
In Ezekiel 20, 23, 29-32 are oracles against Egypt and her allies in Judah. Safwat Marzouk argues they were delivered against king Jehoiakim and his successors from 597 BC on.
First up: this should be contemporary with Jeremiah. Second, I'd always figured Ezekiel for an exile-prophet (with little tolerance for the natives).
Marzouk claims the Pentateuch never accuses Israel of worshiping Egyptian gods
. This has some kernel of truth inasmuch as the Torah must deal with the tabernacle among other Egyptology which Sigmund Freud detected. For one, er... circumcision is Egyptian. There's some nostalgia for Egypt. Calum Carmichael might quibble that some Priestly and/or Holiness passages subvert Egyptian religious practices.
Although admittedly the Torah narrative more-directly hits the Canaanites. This is possibly inherited from the basal text of Judges-Reigns.
Under some of the Persians and all the Seleucids, a border separated Egypt from Aram-plus-Canaan. When Egypt was stronger, as under Psamtik and Hophra/Apries and the Ptolemies, a different border separated Jerusalem from the Syrians. So it could go either way.
Marzouk's argument works better for Ezekiel 17's parable about the two eagles. And now I wonder what 2 Isaiah's pro-Cyrus brief chs 40-55 owed to Ezekiel.
The Navaho, or Navajo in Spanish, are Athabaskans from Alaska who got to the American Southwest after the Uto-Aztecans did. Once there they occupied the territory, daring to rename the indigenous communities "enemies (anasazi)". Their Apache warriors thence embarked upon an imperial rampage until the Comanche struck back in their inimitable style.
Now these settler-colonials squat on ancestral Hopi / Pueblo lands. And claim to own the... Moon.
The Athabaskans did not discover these sub-40° more-ecliptic latitudes of the Americas; let alone the Moon.
I reckon the Navahists' reward for tying up our courts and culture with their nonsense should be to head back northwest, such that we who belong here can continue our launches from closer Equator. Maybe the Navahists can consider claims more orthogonal to the ecliptic.
For some time I'd been pondering how a cloudcity over Venus might gain anything, like, hard. Lately I've been wondering if the rest of the solar-system should pitch in to build a ring to shade the planet to dry-ice temperatures, so eventually to land at least (pressure-rated) robots onto the surface. L Neil Smith's megastructure was just to nuke the whole planet into literal pieces.
Well - now we got further readings as to what's in those acid clouds. They're adding: iron sulfates. Rhomboclase has the added bonus there's hydrogen in there. We like water (and nitrates).
I have to wonder now about other metals in the clouds. Iron is visible just because it is common, as well as rustable. How're the usual low-melty suspects: lead, zinc, and tin? How's copper?
ScienceDaily did Gath yesterday. I was reminded of another brick-dating scheme, from Haaretz - also noting Gath but more in-passing. Joab "Yoav" Vaknin did both papers.
Gath was very important up to the late ninth century BC. Fifteen months ago Vaknin mooted Gath's destruction in green as "Aramaean", "ca 830". Now they say definitively Hazael. I mean, they can at least prove the burning was premeditated . . .
Or was that just a thing in those days that these southwest Palestinian towns could expect to be sacked a lot? I mean as opposed to nowadays.
Saraceni points to Paolo Molaro / Federico Bernardini, from Trieste last November. They're discussing an ancient stone on which the dots coincide with upper-Orion and bits of Scorpius. It would be a starmap except that one of these stars... isn't there today.
The story isn't going away. It keeps getting revived, first last December in Newsweek and yesterday again Saraceni.
Orion and Scorpius are star-generating regions of space, or were 10 million years ago. Those stars which shine so visibly today are young stars; Betelgeuse (in Orion) is on its way out. Maybe another one as bright as Rigel went nova, earlier?
Which brings us to: why the interest, in that particular part of the sky, at the northern tip of Adriatic. Usually the Old European Culture hits this up, on account constellations tend to look like animals, on account animal mating-seasons use the same calendar as farmers use. Animals don't do astronomy - but farmers do, farmers have to. Scorpio-Orion rising seems a late-autumn mark.
Where the starfield changes, some might worry the climate will change.
As to which century this starfield was seen - well, stone inscriptions are difficult to date. The fort was inhabited from the Middle Bronze down to the Gaulish invasions of ~400 BC. Probably always Raetic but I can't but feel that the Greeks might have paid the place a visit.
Davila points to The Biblical Review, on Nathan Mastnjak's Before the Scrolls: A Material Approach to Israel’s Prophetic Library. The book looks good. Beyond that...
Mastnjak argues for an understanding of sefer as a multivolume work. Before parchment, seferim were scribbled ad-hoc in papyrus. Why not, given that Egypt was right next to Madinat-Yahud (as Persians called it) and - after Cambyses II - incorporated into the same Persian Empire. I'm thinking of Jeremiah here. These smallish scrolls could enjoy their own independent life; they were not yet "anthologies". (More on that, anon.) Prophets and their followers could move around in tabernacles; Jerusalem held no monopoly, then.
This post so far has discussed Persians and papyrus - not (animalhide) parchment. Mastnjak says the move to parchment happened under Hellenism. A good target I think is the Seleucids, which detached the Greek Judaia from the Nile.
For Mastnjak, parchment occasioned the formal anthology. Once such is that of the Lesser Prophets, including (for instance) Jonah which is an antiprophetic satire if anything. We could add: the Psalter(s). "Isaiah" is clearly arranged likewise: an Isaiah-themed collection including anonymous prophets, not a book by the historical Isaiah. Be aware the volumes in Late Antiquity don't always follow the divisions which modern scholarship would reconstruct - see once more, Isaiah. Be further aware that the Lesser Prophets don't all exist in the order which we have today.
The loss of papyrus, forcing books onto parchment, would have weighted the production of books into a richer class. As it happens Jerusalem had a sacrificial cult such that the Temple's cost to produce books was cheaper than elsewhere. On Pesach, they butchered lambs. Lambskin makes for excellent writing.
The era of Antiochus III onward, is coincidentally about when Yonatan Adler posits the start of Judaism as a widely-accepted religion; Kugel The Great Shift before him. Adler mostly fingers the Maccabees but the Maccabees couldn't have gotten started absent a pool of supporters to which they could appeal. That pool of support looks like ~200 BC; before Daniel, the Animal Apocalypse, and Jubilees (as we know them), maybe around the Aramaic-Levi era.
BACKDATE 1/4, now I've read Davila.
ScienceDaily delivers - that is, delivers ACS Food Science & Technology's food, to space.
We're looking for longterm foodstuffs as can be grown in a sweetspot between least-resources required, and not having the crew mutiny and become cannibals instead. ACS came up with soybeans, poppy seeds, barley, kale, peanuts, sweet potato ... sunflower seeds
. Lots of seeds and nuts, as you see.
I wouldn't limit this menu. The 'nauts might want yeast for protein, a softer barley-bread - or just marmite. Maybe Mission-Control don't want their 'nauts to be brewing hooch. Also: do the other seeds need work? I hear that we generally need to treat (for a start) almonds and olives. Don't peanuts get roasted? But then, ACS chose these seeds precisely for being low-maintenance.
The mention of peanuts trigger an autoimmune response in me (not the peanuts themselves, I love those). Some might handwave this as "we'll just screen for it on the launchpad". I am unsure I like this. Luckily, we may be able to mitigate.
As for where ACS serve this repast, that (I think) would be on our own sweet moon. Asteroid stations, next.
Water-usage was a pain-point. Some might think: the 'naut eating (say) a banana will enjoy the water locked in that; this water is no longer needed for drink. Against that, the station needs water (and hydrogen ions) for other purposes.
It's a new year; I could have posted over the weekend, but I had stuff to do. Before I post that stuff let us look at Argentina, now headed to libertarian utopia. Presently the leader of the anticom resistance. Also apparently against trade-unions.
Vox Day holds that the world is in an ideological struggle. On one side is Clown World, led by the Blue Tribe along the Potomac. On the other side: the BRICS. That's Brasil, Russia, India, China, and whatever-else. Usually horribly-run places like Iran, South Africa, Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela. Also the ansârallâhi of Yemen sometimes called "Houthi" - in fact, they're enforcing a R/C embargo against the rest of us.
The Baghestan is hardly a Clown blog. Communism aside, which is a disaster almost as bad as Islam, I don't know that I take the Clown side over national-interest. National-interest if nothing else protects the "legacy" generation, for all some dislike it.
On the other hand - economies do better when in good Clown standing. Argentina has, after taking a 54% haircut in national savings (mostly of the upper-middle classes) and promising a clamp on "piquets" (think: pickets, but on your way to work), had a resurgence in income. Against VD, Argentina has abandoned the BRICS. Argentina might be looking for a way out of Mercosur too - much could depend upon Lula, who seems less doctrinaire this time 'round (after the Bolsonaro scare, and an inherited Congress). America might do better decentralising our police, itself - for a start, taking Vivek seriously re the FBI, pace Hanania and Trump.
As to the libertarian/statist argument much, I think, depends on simple geography. The whole west-Eurasia and north-Africa region enjoys productive lands and a central position; one might say similar for India, Indonesia, and North America. A little statism goes a long (often good) way here. If you're scraping the Southern Hemisphere, I think matters be a bit different: howling winds, poor soil, middle of nowhere. (Immigration is also a geographic issue; the Algerian who can afford the Americas is superior to the Algerian who simply slips over to France. If I do say so myself.)
Argentine (and south-Chilean) policy, in that event, should focus more on trade-routes. And I don't mean extortion like the ansârallâhi; I mean proving to the world that you can dock ships at Buenos Aires and not have your goods stolen. Leaving aside Perú, in Argentina the IMF are the good guys. Vox Day, by contrast, is openly saluting the pirates against all that is good.
