Cosmotheism's compromises

In the spirit of reconciliation between Torah and AltRight, for which the Baghestan is so-noted... Greg Johnson offers a tribute to Dr Jan Assmann. Unlike Mix-A-Lot I don't think he was ever knighted.

The name aside (sorry), I ran across several of Assmann's books over the later 1990s. He promoted that form of Aegyptology which supported the priesthood against the pharaoh. Where late-Victorian Brits had lauded Akhenaten (Assmann's spelling), for his "beautiful monotheism" leading to Moses; Assmann damned his "counter-religion" for "normative inversion". Assmann planted his work in the "heretic pharaoh" subgenre alongside, in 1987, Donald Redford (and lately Foerster). Akhenaten was Egypt's Popol Vuh.

Mind you, given that temples and banks were the same thing back then: I place Akhenaten in the same reformist plane as Henry VIII and Basil I. The Alt-Left peopled by such as Michael Hudson should prefer the Victorian position, here.

Assmann studied more the Hellenistic-era Aegyptian theology, which he named "cosmotheism".

For Assmann (and Johnson), cosmotheism allowed for religious tolerance. If you wanted to build some other temple in Egypt - you could! you just shouldn't (say) be slaughtering lambs where Egyptians could hear it.

Assmann also studied the "axial age". Assmann didn't deny it existed; for him it was a "media event", wherein "truths" could be put to peer-review. A Greek could now read an Egyptian holy text, and critique it. In its wake a new world of exclusionary bigotry suppressed cosmotheism. (I gather it was Darius who spun-up Assmann's axis; if we're defining that age by textual- and calendrical-continuity through to the present.)

I won't review Assmann for what follows. I haven't ever read beyond his prefaces, and that was long ago. So I am trusting Johnson. What follows will go toward Johnson:

Down Egypt proper, I must ask how far the native Nile farmer (paganus, in Latin) was ever interested in this "cosmotheism", by Johnson's own lights more global-friendly than local cults would be. Ptolemy V was deep into the Hellenistic Age - and had inherited a brutal rebellion, against it. For Egypt, cosmotheism existed alongside the Axial Age, but ... how? The Rosetta Stone is all about the compromises which the Ptolemies had to make with the priests for their support, against their own commons.

Cosmotheism, then and now, smells to me like an élite phenomenon. It smells less like the old paganism and more like an artificial adaptation thereof, forcing pagans as much as Jews into a wider oecumene - and wider economy. Johnson's readers might ask (or be asked) how globalism compares with, say, New Guinean autarky (still neolithic at best). That subset willing to side with The Globe might ask how effectively cosmotheism can serve this Global community.

WD 0816–310

Among the polluted White Dwarf stars within 200 parsecs is WD 0816–310 alias SCR 0818−3110 or PM J08186−3110, at 19.4 parsecs. The new study doesn't cite Putirka / Siyi Xu on planetary mantles (tho' it cites an earlier Siyi Xu). I suspect this dwarf has no overlap with Putirka's set.

Its "cooling age" is 4.2 Gya; 2.5 masses before that, so between A0V and B9V for 600 My. And this one had more hydrogen than usual for a WD. This has been assumed pollution from hydrate ices like water, methane, and/or ammonia. I don't think Putirka had cited that paper.

Anyway the new study has this one as truly metal-polluted as well: Ca, Mg, Fe especially Mg. Usually when astronomers talk "metal" they mean anything higher than helium so would count oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen. This pollution is at least Vesta-mass.

More: the ratios look like chondrites. That's undifferentiated C-class rock like Pallas; Vesta proper is S (really P - for differentiated Marslike Planet). So this polluting mass is not counting what mass on its erstwhile Pallades wasn't metal. That may include silicon but assuredly includes carbon.

That, then, is why this paper does not overlap the others, on the planets' mantles. No differentiation means no mantles. Most worlds out in the soot zone perhaps even up to Mars' size stayed internally stiff. In the 600 My allotted them, they also did not mutually collide (as much). So they never differentiated; they stayed protoplanets to the end.

When the parent star went red, it expanded deep into what, here, would be the asteroid-belt. Gobbling... C-type asteroids, super-Pallades.

Anyon

In more excitin' quasiparticle news (well, from last week): Pixy Misa says hello to the new qubit. In a two-dimensional lattice, researchers can get a non-Abelian topological order. They are keen on the "anyons", as being neither bosonic nor fermionic.

Therefore certainly not mesonic which, as I've just been taught ("schooled", as I put it), can be both.

What we have here is an exciton, the moving gap in the lattice. Apparently it is more stable. Which is great, for those working with quantum computers (if not for encryption) because for all the hype and the cost, nothing here has really gone beyond "yayy we got a quantum computer (no it doesn't do anything your Acer can't do)".

The education of Jesus the Christ

Last weekend I was pondering a Talmudic teacher / student story where Jesu(s), str8 outta Egypt, schools his teacher by, um, worshipping a brick. Much as such tales might appeal to a Graves or even a Jenkins; the Gospels have shunned this one. If for no other reason, herein Iesous has, himself, a rabbi over him. Even where a Gospel touches upon Jesu's life pre-ministry, like... sigh, Luke or Infancy Thomas; such cannot have anyone in-position to teach the Rabbi (as opposed to testing him). And the timing between Gospel and Talmud diverges way divergent.

Most readers refuse that the accounts can be bridged. I am not most readers.

Yesterday I got to pondering (again) Papias' backhanded review of Mark's Gospel: "not in the correct order" (or timing!). Mark was writing a passion-play about the first-fruit of Qiyama. All agree that, before acting out Zechariah upon the stage of the Temple courts, Jesus learnt his troll-trade in Galilee and other northern regions. His prime fishery was the "Pharisaic" community. That means rabbis.

I speculate: these were Jesu's rabbis. Mark would, then, have collected stories about Jesu's apprenticeship to transplant them to his ministry.

Mark's source would be some vita of this annoying young twerp. This biography was itself unimpressed with the Peraḥya-to-Shammai school. At the same time I must concede: most rabbis were equally unimpressed with Zechariah LARP, in any faction. Accordingly Jesu's followers were at first a very minor minority. But... maybe that's the point. Major rabbis like Hillel and Gamaliel could take Jesu less seriously than they took Shammai. Such a reformist nonchristian Jew could appreciate some tweaking of the big Shammai schnoz, perhaps all the better if a joke of a failed messiah was doing it.

The brick story was perfect for Hillel. It was ineptus for Luke (and for Mark); but even Christians did not forget all the agrapha, most famously those which "Thomas" caught.

Christ the Troll

The only Patheos author worth the read is repondering (2) Zechariah 9-14. This pseudonymous prophet had floated an antimessiah: a redeeming figure who would behave opposite from how most Jews thought Christ should behave. Burton Mack would call this template a Cynical one.

Philip Jenkins was summarising Robert Graves; Jenkins has offered little to supplement that summary, almost four years on. Let's do it for him! Today I'd ponder "Jesus in the Talmud". Of course the rabbis returned Jesu's coin againt "pharisees", with interest. But there are rabbis and there are rabbis.

I propose that our Lord Incarnate's scandalous behaviour over there is of a piece with a Zechariahvic messiah. For instance: Sanhedrin 107b relates of two Jesu's, ben Peraḥya and his student. Ben Peraḥya, a Shammai before Shammai, used to teach (per Wiki) one who sins and causes the masses to sin is not given the opportunity to repent. The elder inevitably loses confidence with his pupil and gives him silent-treatment. Then in his own fit of pique, the student sets up a brick to pay it homage. Upon being confronted, this Jesu throws the words of his teacher back at him; nothing left to lose, you see.

The school of Hillel sides with the younger Jesu, "on points" if you will. The teacher was at fault for being so strict he caused, in reaction, an idolatrous schism (from the Jews' perspective).

Did the Talmudic event literally happen? The timing is off: this very narrative introduces Jesu ben Peraḥya has having fled Hyrcanus 93 BC, coming back maybe a decade later. All this, many years Before the Christ (of the canon Gospels).

But maybe, in some now-lost original, the aggressive rabbi was not Ben Peraḥya. Where's the story noted prior to Talmud? The timing allows our Jesu to have his sojourn in Egypt which Matthew discusses. And exonerates Herod, or at least chooses a different villain (although was Herod better or worse than Hyrcanus?).

Maybe the story had first been murmured about Jesu bar Maryam and some nameless Shammaist. The rabbis who took the story back up again used this as "proof" that Jesu - Christ - was an idolater. Which he wasn't.

I must however ask what Christian gospel or literature of any sort would include this story. That's another post for another evening.

Anti-Helliconia

From Yale: "The search for more temperate Tatooines". Actually a seasonal Tatooine; the anti-Helliconia. A planet orbits a primary star, and a secondary (smaller) star orbits the lot. This is from Malena Rice, Konstantin Gerbig, and Andrew Vanderburg: The Orbital Geometries and Stellar Obliquities of Exoplanet-hosting Multistar Systems. Which they didn’t paywall! yayaaaayy

The paper is all about dynamics, so forming the systems isn’t a problem – this is the paper which defines such systems! Habitability on the other hand . . .

My first proviso is that the paper concentrates on transits, a sample of 184 systems subsequently restricted to forty (reserving the right to boost the sample-set again). So: they’re close-in to the star. Leave aside habitable-zones for now…

The eight systems of interest to the paper have spin-orbit and orbit-orbit alignment. The binaries are: Qatar-6, CoRoT-2, DS Tuc, HAT-P-1, HAT-P-22, HD 189733, and TrES-4; and V1298 Tau, for ternary (spin-orbit). This led the authorial ternary to add binary TrES-2, as although too faint for the 40-system sample, it looks to share qualities with the other seven. Binary separations are like 200+ AU; that third member of V1298 Tau was a “proxima” at 10,515 AU. All this means the secondary star is not providing much light let alone heat. Might as well be Proxima v. AB – hardly proximal, from the perspective of that one’s planet(s).

So Yale’s take is clickbait as it stands.

But that is transit; just what we see. The paper's good news is that alignments cluster at stars under 6100 K. Our own Sun is 5780 K at its 4.567 Gy. So these stars are “cool”: we can talk reasonably-wide habitable-zones and long ages, types G and K. We won't see nontransits at 1 AU but we can't rule them out (anymore).

Consider a (hypothetic) M star orbiting in the Uranus range 20 AU from a G or high-K. For the first billion years the M is baking the planets inward of that; but then it cools off. How far does the M have to sail before it has no effect on warming those inner planets? How to deliver water and other “ices” to the HZ? Maybe through the eccentricity it will force upon its Kirkwoods. I worry lest the leftover ices be soots, such that the inner planets end up too carbonic.

And some major stars huddle closer. The obvious instance is the Alpha Centauri mainline, a high G with a K, the K orbiting outside the G’s inner planets. The K would have to run a bit further out than in the system αC got. Although … I hope it wouldn’t interfere with the inner planets even being created. And I expect little moisture on those planets as isn’t imported.

I further wonder if we could do this if the system had started out Helliconian: the K star and its cold planet are, together, orbiting an A. But then the A goes redgiant and dwarf. Now the barycentre has shifted (abruptly) to the K. The K has billions more years to live. Mind: in this case the dwarf isn’t delivering much radiation to the system anymore. That sounds dynamically difficult.

How Luke broke the Gospel

That title may seem a Strong Statement, but I've been pondering Marcion's favourite work, the protoBezae, for some time now - so, let's assemble what I got, in one place.

First up: we'll consider what Luke had to work with. For timing, everyone agrees Luke wrote after the Temple had fallen. Everyone agrees he built from Mark and from Tradition (oral or not). We Catholics and Mark Goodacre would add: Matthew. Another direct source was Paul's first volume, especially "Romans"; which was also important to Mark's implied genealogy which Matthew reified. In secondary volumes I deem safe to assume Luke knew 1 Thessalonians; Jesus' ascension being the firstfruits of Rapture. I can be convinced to include Philippians, also; and further-afield, "To the Hebrews" although perhaps under Barnabas' byline. Luke has the postdisciple John citing 1 John. And Luke was at least contemporary with such as Jude, the Patmian Revelation to John, the tract we know as "Barnabas", 1 Peter, and 1 Clement. Somewhere around here, I've argued, comes the Hegesippus > Africanus lore around James. I allow that Luke no longer even had the Lachrymose, 1 Clement feeding that need.

But Luke did not have equal respect for the library provided to him.

Luke's Acts, by ending the Spirit's journey at Rome, ended Paul's career. There was nothing left for the Apostle to do, but die. This led to a truncated copy of "Romans" which - conveniently - did not have Paul promising Spain. Also Luke offers an artificially rosey view of the early intraChristian disputes because hey, Holy Spirit. I suspect all these conflicts between Luke and the emergent canon, later, led to the Ecclesia's decision not to promote the Western text's inclusion of 1 Clement among the Catholic Epistles (which survived to the Alexandrinus).

Luke's gentilism, which surpassed Mark's and maybe even Paul's, led to Bezae's evangelion outside Luke, and to parallel adulterations in 1 Thessalonians.

Last fall I've started pondering Oxyrhynchus 4009 and 5575, and their - more likely its - parallels with "2 Clement". Since then I've pondered also if Justin Martyr and Ignatius might have assumed a more Petrine presentation of the Gospel. I'll just Go There: it's the Gospel of Peter, known to Serapion. Those accepting Luke - like Irenaeus - meant one of Luke's sources had to draw the short straw, which straw was "Peter" - perhaps because it was that obvious a pseudepigraph based, itself, on Mark. The Apocalypse of Peter followed it; although, for dumb reasons, 2 Peter stayed.

Alchemy update

We are doing better at bumping isotope-numbers. There's this list of heavier lanthanides: thulium-182 and -183, ytterbium-186 and -187, lutetium-190. Maybe not useful in of themselves; but they're giving us insight into what merging neutron-stars cough out.

Really these techniques look good for stabilising nuclear waste. Japan seem most-interested in this, as they're reintroducing fission reactors. Stable elements are still hot to handle, and would probably have to be stored longer; but they are less hot to handle, so can be more-safely carted off to storage.

Mathieu Tillier (2022) on epigraphy

Last weekend, having done on academia.edu what I did, I pondered doing another deed - this time, my usual doody over there which is translation. It's Mathieu Tillier's "Towards" article, Vers une nouvelle méthode de datation du hadith. This matches epigraphy (sometimes dated!) with the Hadith, which tends to be backdated.

Here's my effort, "Towards a new method of dating hadith".

I do hope de Gruyter and Academia between them let me keep that translation up there; although my translation is mostly Google (so is entirely Tillier's except for errors) and, also, I didn't do Annexe 1. (And I updated the font to what De Gruyter prefer in 2023-4, and I took an editorial liberty with the title.) I wish I'd known about that article years ago.

Because - wallâhi but the original article was a fine one. This delivers what Yehuda Nevo promised, some sense-making of protoIslamic graffiti. Nevo thought he could validate Wansbrough's theories of "prophetic logia". There was a lot of underpants-gnomery in that thesis, as Jeremy Johns and (more politely) Robert Hoyland pointed out. Tillier by focusing on the du'a Hadith is able to hit Islamic tradition where most-testable. The graffiti bears less speculative weight that way.

Contra Motzki and the Umlauts, Tillier seems to have caught at least Ma'mar and maybe even 'Abd al-Razzaq out in a lie. This is where the "hub" (nœud) has concocted a "relay" (échangeur) before him; he'd heard the prayer (which is now being carved in rock), and just figured - hey, Ayyub Sakhtiyana used to pray like this (whether or not he did) and then credited predecessors (who never prayed like that).

Why copper-zinc?

A copper-zinc alloy is found, and assumed orichalc. The metal of Atlantis!

... well, of Plato's Atlantis. Remember that Plato tells moral fables, not histories.

As to why we'd want 90-100% copper-zinc with trace bits of nickel... er. It's purdy? Holds shape better than gold? Not much resale value in stealing it like you'd steal gold? Apart from all that, both copper and zinc have antibiotic properties; although if anyone actually thought to make syrurgic instruments with this stuff, I am unaware.

SLAEI is coming back

Over the first decade of the 2000s I filled my shelf with Darwin Press' series on Late Antiquity and Early Islam - SLAEI. Indeed, when they were in print, they slaei'd it. From Andreas Goerke I find that Gerlach Press has been reissuing a lot of it - excepting Hoyland, whose tome Gorgias Press snapped up. And more: at least of what Gerlach hasn't posted already, are coming translations and second-editions.

That's where Goerke is coming in: The Earliest Writings on the Life of Muḥammad (2008) now in English with four more chapters by Gregor Schoeler. (I used to call this dynamic-duo, "The Umlauts".)

Although, with the focus on ʿUrwa [bin al-Zubayr], do we... need this? Some of us have ʿUrwa already from Sean Anthony's Muḥammad and the Empires of Faith. We could argue that the documentary genre is looking better than the Muslims themselves have creditted it.

Are we getting second-editions from Lecker and Rubin? Maybe Lecker might have summat new to report on those treaties.

Do Gerlach have plans to resurrect the nonpublished material Darwin didn't get to? Will we be seeing more content in future?

Secret lore

William Morrow is pondering Leviticus, in the Torah. Every Jew is expected to know enough Hebrew to understand Torah, by the age of thirteen for boys. (A tradition perhaps mostly honoured in the breach.) Morrow finds interesting that Leviticus has descriptions of Priestly ordination... at all. This is what we Catholics would call canon-law. The average Schlomo or, for that matter, Mario wouldn't have any need of this stuff.

Morrow brings the namburbi genre, in Sumeria. Sumerians - and Assyrians who preserved this - believed in omens. The omens were public. Namburbi was how an Assyrian might overrule a bad omen (or a good omen, for his enemy). The Assyrian caliphs deemed namburbi too important to allow just anyone to read them.

Morrow thinks that Leviticus 6:1–7:21 was for specialists, 1:3–5:26 for the commons. So... some Dennis Prager of the era had approached the Temple and, by permission or no, published Levite and/or Aaronid lore for the masses, even in part "dumbing it down". Those opening chapters haven't changed since at least En Gedi.

It was a bold move, to open up the proceedings, allowing anyone outside Temple to see how Yahudi ordination was done. Some, oh, Hasmonaean could then ordain priests yea even unto the aforementioned En Gedi, and all the educated Jews over there would know what they were looking at. Oooor... a Samaritan could do it, in Shechem.

When was this Levitical dissemination? - is now the question. I could bring the history of errata in Torah text and the Seleucid spike in expense for copying literature. After Antiochus III it became more-expensive for the Madinat Yahud to fake a Torah scroll. Several Psalms care much more about legends shared in our Torah but which our Torah cares much less about.

Before all that, like under the Ptolemies, how many Jews even cared what Jerusalem was up to? Papyrus Amherst 63 and all that Elephantine / Yeb content look very very different from what our Bibles preserve. Hellenistic Jews had a different Exagogue than the Haggadah remembers: Moses, not G-d.

For the vulgate publication of Leviticus, I am pondering the roaming Tabernacle. As an Egyptian holdover (from the Ptolemies?) its priests would be Levites.

Also to be noted in-context may be the various Aramaic Levite documents; including Amran, Qahat and - sigh - Tobit. Of course Tobit was no secret. How about Levi?

Upload #209: February to February

It's been a year, and it's been a long weekend (sort of, there was a work day today but, not much actual work). So - sitekeeping! The big change here was Google's demand I upgrade the site again. Also I have repudiated "The Balance Restored" (on sura 83) and delinked it.

In happier news, I suppose, is (yet) another overhaul of "Blasting the Caliph"; G-d willing, the last update of that troubled project, at least for awhile. I also have fixes to "The Bankipur Dissent", "Walayat", "Moses to 'Ad", and "The Grant of Command" - which were the most-recent, so most-in-need-of-a-corrective. Also taking some tweaks are: "God’s Sultanate over the Upper Tigris", "The Last Word", "Building the Seven Heavens", "Islamic Alimony", "Remember the Reminder", and "Donning the Mantle".

I have some new content, to bolster Throne of Glass. But I didn't post it there (at present). I posted it on academia.edu: "Of Sirma and Sura". Actually I posted that last week, over two editions; the link should go to the 15 February edition. I figure enough time had passed I shouldn't need another edition for awhile. This is more than I can say for the essay's target. When you go after a dog's dinnerbowl (because Lindstedt's thesis contradicts mine) you're risking your fingers; and I gotta say, Lindstedt's essay was not one of his better-researched outings. But I gotta say also that that essay was, like mine, a draught. That is why we upload draughts, for others to review. So I aimed for politeness, although I don't know how far I succeeded.

Madrassa.

Washington Irving's brief against Lunacy

Philip Jenkins posts for the Anxious Bench, self-consecated to Saint Joseph. Lately he's been talking colonialism. He posts exactly the opposite of a Saint Joseph Christian. Should we reconsider Jenkins?

On 15 February he poasted on Washington Irving's take. Irving has his own issues. His biography of Muhammad was classic überprotestant bien-pensant tripe, which even in the early 1800s he should have known better than to attempt. I suspect that wretched book inspired much American amateurism - and adventurism, in the case of Joseph Smith Jr.

Then there's the question of whether imperialism is even all bad. We have Sinclair Jenkins, and Robert Tombs for us Brits. Bruce Gilley has made quite a name for himself (even supporting the Second Reich!). For the Americas in particular we have Carol Delaney; and Fynn-Paul, law kariha al-mujrimoona. For the U!S!A!'s inheritance of that White Man's Burden (but #woke?): Kaplan. At least Jenkins isn't chinstroking about asteroid-settlements.

Which is not to say I approve spreading religiosity to the fuzzie wuzzies, as a principle. India was hardly a savage and empty land; Dalrymple's Anarchy was excellent here, as is Matthews (and was Aurangzeb himself not a religious colonialist?). We apologists for Oriental Christendom must ponder the wreck which the Portuguese made in Malabar.

Washington Irving on his analogy with the Lunar war upon Earth isn't just hilarious satire, it even gets the science right, down to seeing the Earth rolling - fixed in place in their sky. The Lunatics can concentrate light. They can also use the sun itself as a lens (a looking-glass). Most concerningly their artillery can hurl moon rocks at us. As for Jenkins, his summary convinces me that this is the missing-link on the way to HG Wells' (and Orson Welles') dramatisation.

Vertical tectonics

Mars has tectonics without tectonic plates. Thing about plates is that they are horizontal. What if Mars had tectonic walls? - or at least pillars.

Such is what Joseph Michalsky et al. report from Hong Kong. Old Mars was like Archaean Earth (postHadean Splat): volcanoes stacked up and caved the crust down to the mantle. The volcanoes left there are high in silica, not basalts like Lunar maria or like our own ocean floor.

I am pretty sure an ocean existed here on Archaean Earth but it was just sitting atop, not lubricating plates.

As to Mars: the volcanoes look like a place to look for granites, nu?

Dwarf planet methane

Amazing that we can actually see the composition of Eris' (and Makemake's) crust: there's methane. Apparently new methane, without deuterium. Which means it is being burped out from the interior. Which means a warm interior.

"Warm" is a relative term from an orbit which never even crosses Neptune's (contrast: Mars). But how is Eris (the one I know more about) warm - at all? There's a moon. It is a tiny moon, not a set as might squeeze the interior with tides.

If these are radioactive elements then that process is not feeding neutrons into the surrounding hydrogen ice. So it is a slow decay, straight beta/alpha, not like that natural reactor in Gabon (or maybe Ceres).

Dynamical simulations considered harmful

Robert Zimmerman is casting much doubt on various simulations of our own Solar System.

We’re decent at proxies for past temperature and, say, how long our own day was, since the “boring billion” 1800-800 Mya. For two billion years our Earth hasn’t budged much from 1 AU. Mars is well-enough explored by now, we know that it hasn’t Velikovsky’d, either, since like 3500 Mya. I expect similar for Vesta. And for Jupiter and its moons. Dynamics work best for systems in deep resonance - they almost certainly formed like that.

Problem with deep resonance is that they are seen, from here, when they are very close to their star. Our system is not (much) in resonance. What happens past 6 AU? Saturn’s system is a problem and it’s exactly the outer planets as would be most-affected by a Gliese 710 in our past.

Edward Lorenz did his chaos-theory papers in the 1960s. Our computers have improved. Our ability to predict chaotic systems has also improved. But given all these unknowns...

Sturtian news

After the moon got free of us, 717 Mya sparked off the Sturtian. There was a hypothesis in 2020 about a "plunge" in sunlight but, I take it, we didn't find evidence that the sun was radiating us much less than usual at the time.

Now they have a different idea - volcanoes. Rather: lack thereof. Since we already had chloroplasts, the rest of the carbon/oxygen balance was volcanoes on the one side, and weathered rock on the other. Canada was doing most of the vulcanism 800-717 Mya (because the moon was squishing us more?). Anyway after that cooled off, the rock kept weathering and then the glaciers came, which added to the albedo.

The new Sturtian equilibrium was a bright shining Earth-sized Enceladus. The volcanoes were bottled up; there might not be weathering anymore but who cares.

That ended 660 Mya, thankfully.

Bennu's icy mother

A science-alert is saying that Bennu looks like what Enceladus is spraying out. Which cannot be so different from what's under Mimas.

So... did Bennu show up here from Saturn's part of the system? I mean, Ceres drifted in from outside, so...

What spawned Bennu, which is now mostly sooty rubble, would have been half Enceladus' size (a quarter Ceres') so: 250 km across. I would not call this midget an "ocean" world, out where it started. I'd call it a frozen iceball, like Mimas for most of its existence (honestly Enceladus' ocean is probably pretty young too).

Also they seem to think that, unlike Mimas, Bennu hasn't changed much since it got shot out, 4.5 Gya.

Future rock hoppers will appreciate the calcium and magnesium-rich phosphate in the crust. Perfect farm fodder.

7 Iris

The seventh asteroid found, Iris, was last seen with poor future prospects. Now it appears it has water. So does 20 Massalia.

Now: these two are S-type. The high densities ~3 and 3.5 means neither is a loose heap of rubble. Such probably formed about where Vesta is at, maybe even Mars. I was not expecting water out there. But I am glad to see it! I assume other C-types and comets delivered that water. Both are cold-enough that such might stay there.

Beach access

On topic of Constitutional concerns with beach rockets... Texas has a Constitution too. That Constitution, like all State Constitutions, is a mess. (Colorado's at least has TABOR, which mades up for a lot of Constitutional sins.) Among Texas' amendments is a "beach access" thing.

The very word "access" is a red-flag. In this case, what if the beach is being used for essential stuff. Like rockets; they are best launched west of big water.

One knock-on effect, if the Texas courts rule to the letter of this (rotten) law, is that someone might want access to the Ship Channel southeast of Houston. Or anyplace where is shipping around refineries.

I suspect that is the plan, to Californicate that state. UPDATE 2/13 Like how Colorado is about to shut down gas drilling and refining, For The Climate.

BACKDATE 2/15

Most M-star planets are airless

TRAPPIST-1's worlds b, c, and certainly d are airless; as, probably, are Prox b and d. There was hope for TRAPPIST-1 e through h. This hope is flittering away.

The problem is that when a M star joins the main-sequence, it takes too long. Meanwhile it is baking its inner planets - up to what passes for the habitable zone. Even something of Earth irradiance (ideally) is not Earth irradiance for a billion years or two.

It's not all cold water - or, rather, we want cold water here. It may happen that a largish Earthlike like TRAPPIST-1 f, all dry and airless and cold now, gets a cometary visit. The ammonia and water and carbon monoxide form the new ocean and react, so that eventually nitrogen envelops the place (and CO₂ maybe). Although this may not be common so, do not raise back up your hope.

BACKDATE 2/15 and now we're caught up. For now. JOULE HEATING 2/25: TRAPPIST 1 e is airless: here's the full paper. Now, for forewarning: TRAPPIST-1 is exceptionally dim. Warmer red-dwarfs might allow what this star doesn't, further from the star.

Runaway gap

The East Capital has posted on carbon-monoxide worlds. The research deals with K, G, and F stars - which firstly might have an Earth-warm planet outside tidal-lock, and secondly won't explode (or implode) during a reasonable time.

Carbon's monoxide happens when its dioxide is irradiated. The planets should fall into equilibrium states. This paper suggests that a "runaway" effect happens - like subNeptune planets becoming superEarths, or like various ozones, or like Venus becoming the dioxide-supreme hellhole it is. Only here, the dioxide becomes monoxide. We are all assuming no life on these worlds (F stars might not even allow the time for it).

When should the runaway happen? When there's a water ocean. This creates a carbon cycle. Hydroxyl ions, called "radicals" here, would normally clean monoxide out the air, at cool water-liquid temperatures (277 K). 0.2 bar (of partial-pressure carbon-dioxide) should suffice to stop that, thus leaving the sun to monoxidate the place. If warmer (perhaps because of, oh, a greenhouse effect), the partial-pressure needs higher for that runaway.

It follows that if/where we see CO ratio within this gap, some other process must be holding that equilibrium. I must ask how come Venus with no ocean and high-pressure and 1.911 irradiance, has not lost its atmo to monoxides. Is the atmo too recent? Is the acid cloud layer serving as the "ocean"? I suspect volcanoes.

For other planets, anomalous CO/CO₂ may or may not mean life. I don't know if CO can be used in place of O₂ for (animal) life.

Anyway CO-dominant worlds, although bearing no Life As We Know It, have potential. Any chloroplasts in shallow water would (obviously) knock all of this out.

BACKDATE 2/13 - I had Projects last weekend.

Mimas

The news here, if it be news, concerns Mimas the "Death Star moon", and its interactions with its enormous planet Saturn. Currently the best mathematic solution is that its ice contains an ocean, like Enceladus' ice.

That ocean would be 20–30 km deep. And it would have formed geologically recently, 5-15 Mya.

This admittedly comes from Cassini data. We have no more orbiters there, and I don't really want one there as yet, pending better (read: NERVA or fusion) engines and Starship to put them up there.

Still: that a frozen iceball can magically become a waterworld is intriguing. Is this because Saturn is doing tides on Mimas? Like - just now? I recall other indications that Saturn had more large moons than it now owns.

The Rivercity of Mayshan

A couple years ago I got into the ecclestiastic history of the Assyrians. These were mostly a Tigris (Arabic/Aramaic "Dijla") people, skating the edge of the Zagros; with a few touches on the Khuzestan southeast of that where they weren't clinging to Elamoid pidgin. For the Euphrates, west of the Jazira plains, I was a little more confused. Which is a problem for those wanting into the early Arab amirate. I need looking to the desert border...

Let's talk: Perât de Mayshân. Spellings vary - in Latin script. The Syriac speakers were a bit more clear. The nineteenth-century and Mingana studies led me to assume that this region was Basra. Lately I am digesting J. Hansman, "The Land of Meshan" ed. Iran 22 (1984), 161-6; doi:10.2307/4299744. Of course actual Iranians would prefer to call this region "Eraq" within the Aneran but we'll leave that aside.

Hansman links this Christian Perât with a Pratta known to Pliny before, and with al-Furât known to the Arabs. It is almost Basra. Perât is named after the Euphrates, but also was not the Euphrates itself. I keep having to revisit "Perât de Mayshân" so as not to consider it some "Mayshân" of the Euphrates so - let us not do that.

Pratta was probably just "Euphrates City". But maybe some other city claimed that name, so our focus is the Pratta of the Mayshan. Although it was not Basra, it was ten parasangs from where the Basrians planted their misr, so 48.3 km, which journey isn't too bad on a skiff. Since then the Gulf has retreated further, so even Basra isn't Basra anymore. Apparently the Iraqis are calling the site "Naysân" now.

Testing Sudarsky

One of the first essays on extrasolar speculation I recall reading was Sudarsky-Burrows' in 2000ish. Their papers proposed five classifications for gassy planets; here's the 2003 version. Unstated-assumption at least for II-III was that the planets collect volatiles out where's its cold and then migrate-in.

Our system's giants are all in the first set, ammoniac. If we had a giant drift toward Earth or Mars, ammonia would break down: thus type II is water-dominant and looks bright and cloudy, almost Earthlike. For Type III, inward of Venus, it's too hot for vapour: but since too big to lose their heavier compounds, such go cloudless - deep blue from Rayleigh, like I used to think for Neptune. Then over 900 K the clouds come back at Type IV because silicon-compounds and metals are melting. Let's don't visit a V.

I've already ranted about how much Kelvin sucks if we suspect I or II. But let's play along.

Venus gets 1.91 times the insolation we get so should be equilibrium at, what, 515 K. That is easily in the II range - for insolation. Venus is very cloudy but has no hydrogen over the clouds. The acids are simply heavier than the gasses it got (including water), so ride lower (given airpressure). Clouds annoy researchers because they reflect light and light is how we even into these things. I imagine clouds would also reflect light back up into the higher atmosphere; one more reason Venus' atmo over those clouds is as dry as it is.

So: we're testing the II/III/IV range now. I got this from SciDaily last weekend but the paper linked Gliese 9827, which I wanted into first. The papers are asking if the clouds form over or under the water. We can see water in Gliese 9827 - if it is vapour. If bundled into clouds, we won't.

GJ 9827 d despite getting Venus' insolation ... has water. I assume that planet has clouds too. But the clouds must be heavier, like Venus'. I wonder if the clouds are, likewise, acid.

Before al-Kindi, Porphyry

TheTorah [h/t Davila] has an excellent summary of the Ezra legend in Late Antique Judaism. By tradition, the Jews on return from Babylon didn't have proper and/or legible Torah. Ezra either restored this by Divine Inspiration, or translated it to Aramaic by same. There exist some parallels with the Septuagint legend over in Egypt.

Porphyry's work against the Christians, we are informed, grabbed hold of this legend to prove that Moses had not composed Torah. More: that under the Monarchy was no Torah. These days this standpoint is considered extreme; for instance we may have Deuteronomy from Josiah, and the four Reigns books plus Judges always looked ancient.

But Porphyry had his lore from legitimate Judaeo-Christian tradition. I am reminded of nothing so much as the earliest Christian hits against the jam' al-Qurâni. Here too, AbdalMasih Kindi and even Emperor Leo were able to confront the "furqân" by means of Islamic tradition, at least as it existed under the last Umayyads.

Gliese 9827 d, and e

Gliese 9827 at about 30 parsecs had its planetary system found in 2017ish, in that K2 extension of the then-ailing Kepler. It is K6V, cooler and lower-mass than our Sun. The outer one is "d".

Their periods are 1.2, 3.6, 6.20186; so, yeah, the inner b:c are nigh a 3:1 resonance. c:d is, what, 31:18? 16:9? - maybe even 3:2. The authors did not want to call it all a resonance. Still: the star is over five Gy old, so cannot be exerting all that much saecular drift anymore. (The authors use an older estimate, to approximate six Gy; for our purpose, that's unimportant.) Laplacians seem to form early, like HD 110067. If GJ 9827 isn't a 9:3:2 Laplacian how else could it survive? - "read on", I suppose.

The system is close to us and, of course, a transit. The outermost GJ 9827 d is a 3.42 M_⊕ superVenus, or subNeptune. It might still have an atmosphere, so was marked as a candidate for spectrography. Now Pierre-Alexis Roy and Björn Benneke (et-al.) reveal: there's hydrogen on it.

Now: the constraints aren't great after only eleven passes (besides assuming tidal-lock). No reflected infrared has been measured, at all. The temperature estimate assumes black planet, which is laughable - 680 ±25 K, for all we care. The paper instead finds transit depth variability. Eleven of d's years is, what, seventy Earth days; enough to observe a ∼30 day fluctuation in the starlight. This may reflect another planet but they're not willing to say that yet. They ponder, rather, starspots. The fact of a 1.2 day "b" planet, to my view, has to be doing stuff to this star's innards. A starspot map would help.

In advance of fine-tuning d's atmosphere even temperature, two theories are possible, hydrogen or water. After 5-6 Gy no Venus-zone planetary mass should have held its primordial hydrogen. It might have tacked into this tight orbit recently but, why now? Otherwise: water vapour, above whatever clouds it has. Benneke tells the media of both scenarios, but his coauthors in the paper agree upon free hydrogen as unlikely.

Although at that mass it could keep what volatile gases it formed with: the water is hard to square with a rock-layer formation. So either way, they think, this thing formed further out - 2 AU should probably do it, for ices in this system - and tacked in. Also might explain its nonLaplacian orbit.

Tacking-in suggests that d passed its orbital momentum to something else. I suspect the system sports at least one larger planet out there, but not 30 days: instead sailing further than 2 AU from the inner three.

The Soros boost to red-state economies

Say you have a state where criminals go to jail whether or not its municipalities like it. Posit another state too weak to overrule a Soros-funded district-attorney. And then posit that there's no Federal bureau investigating cross-state criminal movements.

Effectively, the Soros family has allowed DeSantis and allies to impose a tax upon New York City and DC. You can carjack all day long in DC, even do some murderin'; and then go to Florida to spend yer gainz. Florida cops might nab you and extradite you but - why bother, it's a lot of paperwork and it's not like DC will do anything. Just keep your nose clean in Florida, and enjoy your vay-cay, because Floridians won't let you do crimes down there.

Do you see this ending well? Because I don't.

A good Sierra fangame!

A pleasant surprise here: I downloaded Son Of Xenon last Sunday. I didn't have a car so I needed to do something... anyway. This Saturday afternoon, snowed in here, I finished this game.

The main critique I have involves the pixel-hunting "puzzles", especially toward the end. Also we must consider continuity. But if we get past all that, this was a fair game on an approximate level of difficulty and humour as the first game, to which SQ:SoX serves as prequel. And canon SQ had the exact problems I've noted here, including continuity as the games progress.

All this makes SQ:SoX better than several 1990s-era published Sierra outings, frankly. SQ6, KQ5, KQ7-8... lookin' at you.

The game is on GameJolt. I do not know much about them, be warned. Although the download was safe as far as I know; they only make you log in, if you want to make a comment / join the community (I wanted the former not the latter).

I am pondering the SQ3 fan remake next. Admittedly fan remakes' record is slightly chequered. "Tierra" (not called that anymore) did well with KQ1, yes. I do not approve the KQ2 remake. Also the SQ3 exe is on Dropbox; I don't know we want an account with them.

Climate, and classical disease

Kyle Harper got famous by The Fate of Rome, his disease-theory of that decline. This had attracted some critiques but his theory has been buttressed, by others. Kyle is back (, back again) and he's letting us read him for free. His new study is about dinoflagellates in Italy's southern seas, like the gulf of Taras. Stopping just short of Constans II and all that.

It returns to my attention as I am reminded, from last March, how warming also helped the Epigravettian, before all this. Global warming is pro-European.

This paper claims "Cyprian's Plague" as being well-documented. It was indeed documented... but only by the Christian saint Cyprian; hence the name, since actually this plague is a bit controversial, on account hardly anyone else noticed of whom Harper knew. Cyprian worked during AD 251-266. This span overlaps the hapless emperors Valerian and Gallienus. Rome almost died then; after Valerian's capture, co-ruler Gallienus inherited sole rule of not-much. He was I think murdered and his successors, all short-lived, had to reconquer the East from an Arab dynasty, to reannex the West from a Roman upstart, and to kick various northern barbarians back out. Anyway as a result of this political clusterfun, no Romans were much paying attention to what their own (increased) poor were dying of, except for the saints running hospice.

One sidecomment is that although filoviri and (more so) bacilli swarm in moist cool conditions; southern Italy was drier. No swamps or standing-pools, no mosquitoes - no malaria (among other blood ailments). So, bright side, if you had anything to eat down there, that was one slate of disease you didn't get anymore.

The Gravettian nations

First came the Aurignacians in Europe, until the 31s-kBC. From then to 24kBC is a new culture, which we call "Gravettian"; followed by "Magdalenian". We're about to discuss what that means.

On Cinco de Mayo 2022 someone posted a long thread in Twitter about the western Frost Age. For over a year we could have this on ThreadReaderApp. Since then, Twitter has imposed one of its hare-ier-brained rules such that ThreadReaderApp no longer works on deleted "X" content, even good content from a now-disgraced [by whom?] author. Yeah by "X" I'm blaming Elon, the putz.

Another paper from last March is (still) blessedly online and inshallah shall so remain. Relevant here: the Gravettians in the west and southwest were Aurignacian-descendates. The Aurignacian demos was never replaced in the west; we just had gaps in our knowledge of the region. (Maybe the Twitter guy had figured his old posts as superceded.) They just became Gravettian by culture.

Meanwhile we now got new content, for 32kBC-22kBC - so, I guess, including the last bimillennial Gravetti holdouts in the east. The Gravettians of any race were not total nomads. (Few tribes are.) They settled their patches of land to make their own jewelry. Seashells of course, they're nonmetallic and nonceramic. Maybe some amber.

Dutiful reminder that pots aren't people, pots are language. In these lands before pots: jewelry is language. But languages do resist gene flow.

That March 2023 paper will, however, see demic turnover later - 12700 BC, the Bølling–Allerød warming before the Dryas. This gave good health to the western Epigravettian, and by now I assume to their dogs also; but less so to central Europe. The Epigravettian then, finally, replaced the Magdalenes bodily. (Pity the eastern-Magdalenes, those nonadaptables...) Thus, Epigravettian westerners formed the WHG whom, much later 6000s BC, various Baltic and East-European peoples [EHG] will meet, for trade.

Kharaf

To hat-tip Reynolds, from the elderly-dominated forum he administers: questions are raised if the Classical era knew dementia. The Greeksnromans were aware of Losing The Fastball (last weekend, I admit, I was pondering this for myself). But Oldtimer's Disease... they did not really mention. Mental decline of that severity was not worth the great doctors' efforts.

All this, despite infamous levels of heavy-metals in the water and in cinnabar-cosmetics. Which the Romanzngreks also knew was/were Bad For You.

It may be that, for those Romans and Chinese who did reach old-age (and many did; "life-expectancy" is a statistical fluke of childhood mortality): madness struck before memory.

As usual, this research is Classical, for Greeks and Romans. That's where our highschoolers learn the languages. It all got me thinking about the Semitic world, which isn't as widely taught. Where, for a start, is Syriac? Well... here, I don't really know. But the Arab-speakers in the mediaeval period did find kharaf among the Islamicate societies.

Before the 'Abbasi dawla, one might look to the Quran and, yes, it's there: in sura 16. To me, this looks like a tack-on, to general Qâric musings about the aging-process and the need to be kind to one's elders. I suspect sura 16 as a Marwânid-era forgery. But why did the Arabs choose the end of the first Islamic century, to make a nod in that direction?

If sura 16 didn't have this lore from the Arabs, then - yeah - it must have had it from the Syrians. Are we missing some Masarjawayh? maybe Egyptian pandects?

RHEUMATISM 2/2: A reminder that just because a culture doesn't mention a condition, doesn't mean they didn't grow up to suffer from it. Here: Egypt (wherein Ahrun would do those Pandects). It may be that geriatrics were simply not of interest; these were cultures which concentrated on the good health of 15-45 year olds, as being (1) able to spawn children and (2) able to do manual work including, for men, war.