Patrilocality in early Gaul

A week ago (drink!) I read Inequality: A Genetic History, a book from a couple years back. The author may want to add one more example.

Here is a reconstruction of a 70%-R1b1a1b1a1a grandfather. We have genomes for his purely Neolithic farmer spouse, who lived to her 60s and was buried in a grave in Champagne (the département), and their son and grandson.

The paper's opening summary would have animal traction... starting at the end of the fourth millennium BCE (sic), south and east. The Campagne area, northwest, remained more stayathome. The Globular Amphora culture (GAC) will kickstart the changes. The claim is, in three waves 3100-2450 BC: Yamnaya nomads, Corded Ware, finally them Bellbeakers. None of this would involve the horse which will come at the end of this third millennium.

These new Champagnards practiced patrilocality. If they had daughters, as statistics would suggest, they're buried elsewhere. The place was taken by the "BBC" not all that long before this 2500 BC burial. All the action had happened before all this. The men once they got there went scouting for farmers' daughters.

Difference de la densité

Geneva reports on a discrepancy between masses estimated by transit-timing and by good ol' radial spectra. I actually didn't know that transits even yielded mass rather than just relative radius (so volume).

They answered the question by noting that transit-timing tends toward resonant orbits. Because they're tightly packed. Because they're close to the star. The discrepancy is, then, with the resonant planets - which are indeed less dense.

Again here's something I'd not expect; I'd expect those to lose their atmo and become rocky. But if they're subNeptunes around red dwarfs then maybe not. They just heat up their atmo to be puffier. The paper would further suggest that in resonance, they are not bashing into each other, so can keep more volatiles than our own collison-happy inner planets kept.

Always at war with Eurasia - but which Eurasia?

This blog has over its lifespan noted how Bryant, Taylor, Suvorov, and lately McMeekin have argued for a grand-plan of Stalin's evil and Hitler's... lesser evil. Also-lately Michael Jabara Carley is arguing Stalin's case; has been for the past couple years.

Carley doesn't deal with the "Holodomor", concentrating on foreign-policy as he does; so defers to the second volume of Kotkin’s biography of Stalin (tag: ref=nosim?tag=postil17-20). Kotkin would have the famine as not focused on the Ukraine on account the Kazakhstan was hit harder. Personally I'd pondered if the Ukrainian side was Stalin's fault, or the fault of others in the Party; Snyder's Bloodlands recognised that Stalin was the man in charge by then, but seemed more to implicate (often Jewish) underlings.

On what Carley gets right as I can check: he notes that Stalin's foreign-office in 1933 wasn't Trotsky's in 1918. Trotsky's Comintern absolutely was an aggressive force making moves toward Hungary, and as far as possible Germany (Munich was Soviet, other states more homegrown). By the 1930s, I don't think Stalin was trying so hard. Spain did become a Thing but even here, Stalin was more interested in looting the place, purging antiStalinists, and testing armaments than in giving real support (not unlike Nappy-3 in 1864 Mexico...).

Taylor / Carley would seem to disagree mostly about the antisemitic fascist states between Russia and Germany, specifically Poland. For Taylor, Poland - especially Beck - hated the NSDAP and Germans, and (foolishly) calculated on Britain and France, to keep Danzig out of German hands and to "encourage" Germans (and Jews) to leave Poland. Carley by contrast would have Poland as "pro-German" although even he cannot call the two states "all[ies]".

Personally I think Taylor had more the right of it. Carley notes that the Soviets saw a war coming with Germany. That rather undercuts any case against Suvorov et al. Also I find hard to credit Carley that the West had any reason to trust Stalin as they observed he'd come up through Lenin's party, had overseen the famines, had meddled in Spain and murdered Trotsky himself. Even commies like "Orwell" Blair were warning everybody not to trust this man. Why should Carley trust him?

I Question-The-Timing of Vox Day bringing up Carley in 2024 when this interview came out December 2022. I wonder what happened between 2021 and 2024 which might cause a round of Russia-rehabilitation in Beale's side of the 'web...?

Dark matter still dark

University of Nottingham think that lithium near absolute-zero Kelvin can confirm or deny a gravitational scalar field. I mean - besides the Higgs, already well-confirmed and constrained (as opposed, say, to the neutrino).

I read some silliness in the press-release: a particle called a scalar field. Eerrrgh!! At least its title is good, reporting on the system rather than "in search of -" or, worse, "Is...??"

I remain unsure at what point the various funds will quit funding studies on dark-matter but, on the other hand, other establishments are still trying to constrain the similarly mass-bearing neutrino, which we know exists and is vital to explaining high-energy events like neutronstar-merger. Meanwhile modified gravity isn't going away (fair warning: they'd interviewed Gough for commentary, a Milgrombro until lately).

I do agree that a field might exist as isn't Higgs, which may account for "dark matter" and even for the neutrino itself. We may end up defining two forms of "mass"; maybe the neutrino has no Higgs mass but has relativistic mass? I have no clue. But then I'm a Byzantinist and applied-mathematician, not a cosmologist.

Solar minimum 360 BC

Radiocarbon watch: Cornell have redated a Hellenistic-era shipwreck. That much interests me little, as compared - say - to the Late-Bronze Canaanites/Ugaritics. More interesting is how the redate has forced Cornell to confront the radiocarbon curves of the era.

First up is that the wood had been treated by polyethylene glycol which is, of course, a hydrocarbon... made in our twentieth-century. Which carbon is the carbon of the time? Apparently glycol contamination is a problem with older museum-preserved woods. So, this team was able to remove that. (The press-release implies we shun hydrocarbons as preservatives anymore but hey, now we might be able to use glycol once again...)

It seems our Sun was weak before the wreck, when the trees felled to build the ship were still alive. At ~360 BC, our nitrogen took in more neutrons than it normally would, which decayed into carbon-14. Thus, it blew the carbon-curve. I don't think the spike was quite dramatic enough, or the planks wide enough, to leave a ring-by-ring record and anyway the ship could have been afloat for some years, hence why the date of the wreck itself remains a mere estimate (as I noted I don't really care).

I care more about 360 BC. Aurora?

The Crab Nebula, revisited

Three years ago this blog reported on the low mass of the AD 1054 Crab Nebula semisupernova. (Unadjusted for the speed of light.) James Webb's telescope has looked in on the nebula 970 years thence that is, last week.

This has to do with the nickel:iron "Ni/Fe" ratio. The 2021 estimate pointed to Ni being high against Fe. It was concomitantly thought that the iron mass was too low for the classic "Type II" (=iron) core implosion. So they dug around for hypotheses as don't involve iron. They found a 1980 paper on "electron-capture". Q.E.D.!!

This ratio is now constrained better - in two regions anyway. Ni/Fe is indeed higher than, say, Sol. But not so high as to rule out Type II collapse.

John as the Tradition's gatekeeper

Among the clutter in my purview from last week, a Greek scrap of the "Childhood Gospel" ascribed to Thomas floated into some tabloid or other. On this I was... not going to poast. But today Davila, at long last, has found an article worthy of mention so floated that to his blog Paleojudaica. This is the farrago of legend whereby Jesus showed supernatural gnosis and power over life-and-death as a young boy.

As is usual, copies of this pile of pious balderdash are late, but we know it was composed much earlier. The article offers some reasons: first, the "Epistula Apostolorum" notes the event. The canon we know was barely in focus at the time. More intriguingly, by noting miracles of Jesus' childhood, the "Infancy Gospel" contradicts the gospel of John 1-20 which asserts that Jesus' first "Sign" was that of Cana. I am pretty sure that John would have considered as semeion, being able to turn clay birds into flying birds; as does this "Epistle of the Apostles".

Luke splits the difference: yes Jesus already knows everything, no it's not (quite) a Sign.

But maybe John was reacting exactly to such legends in his own time. Note that the scrap is a schoolkid's exercise rather than a lection or an amulet or something equally serious. Arguably Cana flirts with adoptionist Christology, contrary to John 1 and even the hymn in Philippians; but the legends were proliferating, and to such a magnitude of silly, that John (or his source) figured that he needed to impose a filter on them all (vide the ending of John 20). Cana remains silly, indeed Dionysian; but at least it requires an adult Christ. It brings in wine imagery as well, which John happens to enjoy - witness the "True Vine" discourse.

Where's the iridium?

In my absence last week I got wind of a new study on where the valuable asteroids be at. (I'd filled up last week higgelly-piggelly. Normally I'd have slotted this in, for later days; as these poasts stand, this one had to await today.)

The study aims at "refractory" metals. Such boiling-points be high; we're talking the famous tungsten, also niobium and others around the lower left of the 'Table. These should, then, condense first, as the solar-system cools. I gather the researchers expected to see more of these metals in S-type rocks down around here at ~1 AU. And we do have quite a bit of titanium on our Moon, which metal is near-enough-refractory we use it for roggets.

Yes yes our Moon is technically not S-type but it's been struck by a lot of S, so... regolith.

It turns out that iridium and other refractories (they're including platinum, I wouldn't) are more common far from down here. The thought is, then, that they formed down here - and moved. Then Jupiter moved inward and opened up the (Kirkwood) gaps, stranding the metal-rich S rocks on the far side.

Future miners should scout for S rocks out by Psyche and beyond. I wonder how much refractory ore remains in the rockier Hildas and Trojans . . .

As to the history of our system, we'd be more WSB 52 less HL Tauri (or βPictoris). Our nebula was a "Doughnut". Rings such as we see at HL Tauri come with Kirkwood, so with Jovians. All this incidentally suggests Jupiter and the others formed much further from our protoplanetary inner parts than is usually assumed. Either that or Jupiter simply wasn't much of a planet until later.

The griffin

Protoceratops wasn't the griffin. Glenn Reynolds suggests we should be looking into folklore. Luckily we OldEuropeanCulture readers can default thereto.

According to that blog, the vulture symbolises the start of "winter", in November - in the Khuzestan, which is the cooler wet season. Lions quit mating around the same time. Both are visible to herdsmen. Nobody's looking at "Protoceratops". Maybe during Silk Road times some yahoo could sell the fossil and pretend they still exist, but - as the PopSci report points out - nobody was collecting those particular fossils in any musea we've found (and we've found plenty). And if these fossils did ever attract attention, the calendar attracted attention first.

The error of Theodore

I was out for a week (in spirit if not in spacetime). [I may or may not retro-fill content for that past week.UPDATE 6/24 - done] In the meantime I've had the "flat earth" knocking around my noggin. Like: a few weeks ago I leafed through Death Ratio'd, a comic on "cancel culture" (which culture, Munro famously supported, against the Brave browser's founder). A sub-point is how the Internet facilitates shared-delusion. Flat-earth is one, lately floated by no less a light than Vox Day. Vox Day is in eminent company, it turns out; much as Christian apologists like Tim O'Neill dislike it.

I have in mind the Antiochene School. Apologists like to imply that Cosmas was a lone crank. He was not. He was preceded by Lactantius in the West and by John Chrysostom in Constantinople. John in turn could count on Theodore of Mopsuestia and on Diodore of Tarsus.

Which is not to say that the flat-earth became normative, at least among the orthodox. Theodore's tract/homily on Creation dropped out of the copyists' scriptoria. John the Philopon of Alexandria in the late AD 500s would attack the flat earth as the easily-debunked silliness it was and is. Here out West, Lactantius found few takers in Latin or Irish. This despite our bias toward Antioch against Alexandria, down to our choice of Gospels basically Chrysostom's.

Back to the 400s Nestorius, whom the Oriental Church would hoist as confessor and mascot for some critical centuries, is not recorded as promoting this doctrine; his views may or may not have extended to Creation. As far as I know Cyril of Alexandria never mooted it against Nestorius. Nestorius was in Christology keen for some formula as would not provoke a schism. I suspect both took an Augustinian tack, hoping to avoid the issue entirely. As for the Cyril/Hypatia controversy, overblown as it be: likewise I hear nothing about the curvature of the Earth.

The Oriental branch more followed Theodore himself. This leads me to the Alexander Neshana. This text is Syriac, not Palaestinian. That Alexander could traverse this world under Heaven in the sign of the Cross would, to me, assume a flat world. In the context of Heraclius' appeal to the Christian "fifth-column" across the Euphrates, this is suggestive for Oriental acceptance of Theodore here also, even into the seventh century.

Confronting Foucault

Michel Foucault - pronounced fu-ko, "the martialartist" to Michael Brown - is commonly relegated to the Derrida set of pomos. I find his harshest critics among the Marxists, whose ranks as of the 1980s may even have included Bernard Lewis (unnoted in Brown's bibliography). To Brown, Foucault is vital.

The Right might be more-inclined to Foucault presently. Here is why:

Foucault didn't just write about "gender studies" or whatever. He wrote Folie et Déraison and Surveiller et punir. These proposed an outsider-view of how we handle madness (in 1961 France) and how we handle crime (more timelessly). This all had to do with power/knowledge. The state imposes Commandments. Thinking otherwise is folie; doing otherwise is crime.

Foucault doesn't exactly take sides. He seems to consider all this inevitable. Such be the price of not living as the Nuer live. "Foucauldians", by contrast, by demystifying insanity and crime - as antonyms to docility - run close to raising up insanity and crime as manly virtues, against the Sheeple.

Foucault may end up remembered as more like Darwin even Ehrman, than like Nietszche. A cataloguer with an incomplete theory, picked on as representative of his sillier followers.

ASSMANN 7/11: besides cosmotheism, Jan Assmann also considered the alliance between power and memory: Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 53f.

Shrewsbury on the Nile

Among this week's projects was to read Peter Brown's memoir Journeys of the Mind.

Brown is known for studies in the Spätantike. His memoir pretty-much ends in the 1980s, with a postscript. (In that much, it reads like Goodbye To All That. I wonder if we be missing a first-edition.)

Brown approaches "Late Antiquity" as a sociologist. He relates demonology and the Ordeal to the animism of the Nuer in the upper Nile. He sees these rituals as spontaneously arising in the absence of a strong state, allowing for a communitarian approach to justice. Brown comes to Michel Foucault late in his career - I'll deal with that later in this blog.

I'll just point out here that Nuer justice is cancel-culture justice. The communitarian model means that the least-popular kid in the tribe gets blamed for evil. Now: I'll concede here that the least-popular kid is almost always guilty of ... a lot. He's disproportionately likely to be guilty of the crime of which he's accused; if not, he's a burden in other ways. And maybe the real criminal, seeing this kid's sorry fate, will tone down his crimes lest he suffer the same but doubled.

I wonder if instead of Foucault, Brown should have read Girard.

I wonder further whether Brown himself could have lived to the age of 87 in a Nuer society. Possibly. Brown learnt to "tweak", as Salopians called it then, in the best of madrassas.

What I don't wonder is where Brown prefers to live today. It's not South Sudan.

The Wallbuilders' Front

Here in northern Virginia I noticed an ad by the Metro, from the Wallbuilders. This is the Barton family gig of promoting the American Founding-Fathers as Antiochene Bible-believers like the Bartons. They tried publishing The Jefferson Lies under the Thomas Nelson imprint before that got discredited then discontinued.

The Bartons, although discredited even by the Christian academy, seem still to have adherents in Louisiana. How else to explain its governor's attempt to impose some version of the Ten Commandments - as commandments, not as decalogue - into the state's schools. Be interesting to see how "no graven images" will work among the (many) Catholics in that state, whose children not be in the parochial system.

Given that, I find telling that the ACLU went to bat for the Bartons on their right to plaster lies all over the DC Metro.

Believe X or y'aint 'Merken, is the Barton creed. The Bartons are best-compared to the Patriot Front. Except that the Patriot Front have actually read the material.

For those interested in, you know, facts Steven Green seems solid on the history of the church-state relationship here; interesting, anyway, for-example downplaying the Blaine Amendment[-to-be].

Red spots

Back on topic of historical observations, here's Cassini's permanent spot on Jupiter. Today we see a red spot, the successor to the red oval of 1879. We assume they're the same spot. Now we're told they are not.

Apparently astronomers since 1713 lost track of the thing - despite their instruments, mathematics, and understanding only improving upon Cassini. If it could be picked up only over a century later - 1831, they say - that must be a different "it".

UPDATE 6/25: Zimmerman and ESA talk structure.

Distributism and AI

Distributism is - historically - a Catholic alternative to Marx. Robert Stark over on Substack is proposing a "techno upgrade". He argues that Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan engaged in its secular version.

I am unsure how well Georgism fits into all this. I just know that Kek's Georgists grew up to be Stalin's men. "Third Way" secular parasocialisms do seem to end at Stalin, or at least Nehru. One fears that Catholic Distributism will end with Salazar, Peron, and the aptly-named Fianna-Fail.

Roko Mijic would propose "Trustless AI" - that is, ensuring that no one corporation corners AI as a "trust" monopoly. Stark also suggests a corporate tax, in progressive tranches like our personal income tax (the one Trump is pondering for abolition).

Space sickness on Earth

Sabine H expressed on youtube how much it hurts to be an academic in a SCIENCE institution. That was in Germany. We're hearing similar from Americans doing space SCIENCE.

I was miserable as an undergrad so, in fact, have the least academic credentials in the family. There's a lot of talk about "marginalization" in certain subsets. Which subsets have government protection (Constitution be-damned) I lack.

As the trend-line continues I foresee more protections forthcoming. I foresee further that those protections will harm more than help, including those individuals supposedly protected most.

The real Out Of Africa

Turtle brings up two archaic-ancestry papers. First: India. From last month: Neanders.

The papers come together in agreeing that, although modern humans did venture out of Ethiopia/Yemen 72kBC around Toba-time... said humans didn't do so in bulk. The main ancestry to Indian humanity broke out of Yemen 48kBC. But not, perhaps, immediately. Neanders were met 45kBC and intermingled during a span 6800 years.

This contradicts the Sundaland theory. It may be, instead, that Sundaland got settled that quickly by these new human/Neander hybrids, soon to be hybridised with Dennies as well.

Kepler's QHRC

Screw it, I had a nap this afternoon and I'm wired. Let's ring in Johann Kepler - I love this guy. We're now sniffing around AD 1625; his Rudolphine was published 1627. Our constellation be in part IV.

Lucida Coronae as 2-mag is α of course; Johnny K. notched this at longitude × latitude 6°37' × 44°23. Kepler thence marches northeast, with β. Moving back his quae sequitur lucidam will be Flamsteed's lucidam sequens which is γ. So ε corresponds to the one after the one after that, quae hanc rursus comitatur. This is 13°32' × 46°9'. Next one is north so ι.

Of interest: Kepler marks ι 13°02'. So, east of "QHRC". But as Flamsteed will tell us, ι is not east of ε. The nova is however southwest of ε. Did the nova interfere with ε?

Southwest of εCorBor

T Coronae-Ariadne would be very close indeed to the ε in that constellation. One Reverend John Flamsteed spent his life compiling a catalogue of boreal stars. Luckily (for us), Newton and Halley pirated his work in 1712. That's just six years after 1706.

Even more luckily, Flamsteed couldn't suppress all the copies. Here's one. Corona Borealis makes a small section of page 30. Flamsteed noted anything magnitudes down to 7 (lower=brighter). Flamsteed should have seen a mag-2 nova then. Further south he'd logged "34 Tauri" which we're now calling Uranus.

So let's hunt a nova. ε=Flamsteed's #14 is distance 62°12' from the north pole. This nova would be around 62°50' like γ and δ out east. Next up: west, of 236°11' R.A. I assume just east of ρ or ι, so at 237°.

Aaaand there we go. The catalog is sorted by RA. There is simply nothing there. I guess it would be "15 CB" if he'd notched it, displacing ι.

It may be that Flamsteed did see the thing but notched it in other notes, not in what Newton and Halley stole from him.

The jilt of Baghdad

... or so I'm translating Mathieu Tillier's désamour. This is Muhammad "Waki'" bin Khalaf, namesake of Ibn al-Jarrah: an Iraqi qadi best-known for providing a history of that office. It was almost the history, for Wael Hallaq (2005)'s chapter on the Umayyads.

Tillier, it seems, has noticed that modern historians have placed a lot of weight on this one manuscript - the only MS as survived to the print age. (This happens a lot.) So he's looking into why Waki' wrote this history. Tillier finds that this is a post-Mihna text, like Tabari's history; it pits against each other "Prophets-and-Kings". Independent - read, Sunni - judges would be our prophets, speaking the eternal Word Of God ghayr makhlûq. The Quran so interpreted, not the caliph, be God's shadow on Earth.

Waki' got himself swept-up in the raw politics as, perhaps, Tabari had not. And where Tabari got copied, Waki' basically didn't, except in this one case. It may be that, as now, it was noticed in mediaeval Iraq that too few historians had even recorded about the preBaghdadian qadi.

If Tillier is right, which he usually is, then whenever Waki' is talking about Umayyad Damascus, we have to suspect he's thinking about Mutazilite Baghdad. Waki' would agree with Crone and Hinds - taking it personally.

Local Bubble

Two of Monday's articles involved regions of stellar gas. From Vienna was noted three star cluster-families. The regions formed 155 clusters starting around 40 million years back. They were formed by local explosions, not ingestions of other galaxies.

(I'd have got to this earlier but boy-howdy did we have a lot to discuss last week.)

The three regions are hereby named after the clusters the Austrians deem interesting: Collinder 135 (Cr135), the sixth Messier fuzzy (M6), and Alpha Persei (αPer). It seems one knock-on effect blew out (what's now) our Local Bubble which walls might have overpowered the heliosphere and dumped Iron-60 all over this place.

T Corona Borealis in history

On topic of stars up and leaving our field, with the h/t to Breitbart: T Corona-Borealis (mediaevally -Ariadnae) is set to blow... soon. This was first published in May 1866 then, watched by better instruments, February 1946. Thence in 1977 one R[onald?] Webbink tracked a previous observation in Rev. Francis Wollaston's 1789 catalog, confusing it with HD 143707 = Herschel V 75; Bradley Schaefer confirms 1787 December 28 (hey: good job with organising the year first, we programmers salute you).

If this interpretation of Wollaston's (mis)note holds, we might have a pattern. Schaefer additionally sees a radiant star noted by a monk Burchard for AD 1217 as being, actually, T Co-Bo; noting that observers well into modern times routinely saw trails spouted off of supernovae like that famous Crab blowup AD 1054 and Kepler's own 1604.

For that nova in 1217, Schaefer assumes this recurrence: 7×81.4, 78.5, 79.7 years. Much weight is placed on that ×; he must expect additional eruptions within a year or two of 1706, 1625, 1544, 1462, 1381, 1299... AD.

So let's look to the system. Their semimajor is 0.54 AU. 1 AU = 214 solar radii; so the red giant here is orbiting at 116 M_☉. I assume the two formed together so are the same age, the 1.37 M_☉ white dwarf exploding first. The red giant's own radius is 75 M_☉. Its mass is still 1.12 M_☉; which means their barycentre is closer to the dwarf, with the giant seeming to orbiting the dwarf. That giant should have expanded out beyond 1 whole AU, like they say of our own Sun. I assume that it was during its redgianting when most of that hydrogen was sucked-up by the companion. Both stars then slowed in the mire toward their present proximity.

And there's my problem. As a star continues to gobble matter, flareups should gradually peter out as available matter decreases. So if they happen, like, ~80 years apart in modern times they might have happened more-frequently in the Middle Ages. The white dwarf has already cleared most of the mass. And the overall Keplerian ratio has been depleted as so much of what's left is going nova and escaping at lightspeed, literally so with much of the mass.

Schaefer continues prior to that monk: 1137, 1055, 974, 892, 811, 730, 648, 567, 485, 404, 323, 241, 160, and 78 AD. Of these AD 648 and 730 would fall in my purview. The Syrians, at least, saw no new-stars worthy of Hoyland's mention in Seeing Islam. 740s? maybe. 670s? sure! And the 620s-30s be rife with portents, which we can take or leave.

Looking afield to Ralph and Dagmar Neuhaeuser, we get (no aurorae in any catalog found from AD 719 to 733); then a portent in the sky seen in Constantinople, and seen and heard(!) among the Tang. Although ... the Neuhaeusers say aurora, not nova. Their notices for the early 800s don't look much better for the nova hypothesis.

For the Tang comets we go to Williams. These accounts for Borealis all have the hairy star moving around the field, never just staying in "Kwan Soo". A nova can't do that.

The Julian Romance

Marianna Mazzola has a vital edition of the Syriac Julian Romance. Effectively this is the first edition of its full text, as intended by the author.

In this form Mazzola reveals it as an edifying (so, fictional) anti-hagiography of the era from Constantius II to Jovian. The Armenians will be seeing similar from Movses of Chorene, that Malalas of the Kavkaz.

Mazzola finds Julian Romance's historical lore from one "ad AD 640". That is a Syriac MS, extracts thence Palmer had translated as Text #2; Mazzola disputes Palmer's eight sections. What mattered to our topic was that Monophysitic rant Palmer's Rubric 5, here #6: another continuation of Eusebius, starting again in 325, as did the Continuatio [Eusebii Antiochiensis], until year 30 of Heraclius (639/640). Palmer translated the end of "Rubric 5" only as a preface to the maddening "Rubric 6" Mazzola's #7. Rubrics 5 and 6 will note that Shahvaraz was met in July... AG 940, which in our calendar be 629. Rubric 5's text carries on to Heraclius' thirtieth year which is indeed AD ~640.

Julian Romance's milieu would, then, precede such antiJewish tracts as Hoyland documented in Seeing Islam. The genre continued to Anastasius in Greek, except that Julian Romance is Syriac...and earlier. As to Rubric 5, it looks independent of the rest of this MS; composed, I think, in a part of Syria not as of AD 640 / AG 951 yet fallen to the Arabs.

Zamakhshari: the gunpowder-empire tafsir

If you read Arthur Jeffery's introduction to Materials, you will have seen him cite several classical works of Quranic commentary, philology, and variant-text-collection. Indeed Materials itself exists as the introduction to one of the latter, by Ibn Abi Dawud - son of that Abu Dawud. I spent rather too much of the middle 2000s tracking these texts in various libraries. (And we are all still awaiting the publication of Escorial 1337.) Today, let us consider commentary.

I noticed, checking up the tafsir side, that many interpretations seemed... similar. Walid Saleh a couple years back gave us the service of tracking how that happened.

Basically: Zamakhshari happened. Everything in Islamic commentary after him was a summary or a reaction. That is: until Salafism and the Sauds forced Ibn Kathir on everyone; but Jeffery was writing when the Sauds weren't his problem, when the Spanish Civil War was keeping him out of Madrid. Jeffery doesn't even cite Ibn Kathir!

Before Zamakhshari, Sunnis used Tha'labi (unknown to Jeffery), and then Tha'labi's abridgement by Baghawi (which Jeffery used instead). These were holdovers from the Tabari / Ibn Abi Hatim al-Razi era, where tafsir built upon older tafasir which in turn relied heavily upon the Hadith.

According to Saleh, Zamakhshari was a Mutazilite... in a time when the Mutazila was dead. Zamakhshari might even count as something of an "autistic LARPer". But he was so wise in his art that his tafsir got hailed as the best tafsir, eclipsing his predecessors. Indeed it became increasingly difficult for the Sunni to find copies of, say, Ibn Abi Hatim, Ibn Marduwayh, or even Tabari. Another Razi, and Abu Hayyan, used Zamakhshari extensively. Note also: "Razi" means from Rhages - from Tehran. A Shi'ite, also, could appreciate Zamakhshari.

Which may explain the jurist Baydawi, working in somewhat-nearby Tabriz. He did a Zamakhshari abridgement editing out that annoying Mutazilism. This made the project more Sunni-friendly.

It seems Biqaʿi (again, not used by Jeffery) was he who touted Baydawi as the best mufassir. Jalal al-Din Suyuti liked Baydawi too but credits, rather, his own teachers; Biqaʿi was... ideosyncratic, in his approach. Biqaʿi is mostly famous for taking the Bible seriously. Suyuti did two tafasir of his own: the Durr citing sources before him, like Tabari of yore; another, more "orthodox", completed the commentary begun by Mahalli.

I get the impression that rulers like the Mongols at Tabriz and, later, the Ottomans rather preferred a Mutazilite approach to Islam, over the juristic mob of the Sunnis. Zamakhshari's work got copied from On High. It was the commons who'd kept Baghawi in print; it would be the jurists who did the same for Baydawi under the Mongols' short noses.

Well... time went on, and the Arab Street got tired of losing, or at least of watching the Ottomans and Moghuls lose on their behalf. Thus: Salafism / Deobandism. Thus: Ibn Kathir.

The Christians' Torah, as Arabs read it

I found this Monday but I figured a little more time was needed: ʿAlāʾ al-Dīni 'l-Bājī on "the Torah". Camilla Adang is the author of the article.

Bâjî was (probably) of a town Beja from out west; maybe Portugal, maybe Morocco. He did a lot of writing but few read him. One polemicist had this one work of Bâjî's copied with other antiChristian tracts. This one goes after Christian translations of the Torah into Arabic. He seems aware of Jewish translations, albeit not Samaritan excepting via Origen's "Samaritikon"; but those aren't his problem. This man is not a Biqaʿi.

Bâjî claims that he found his Torah specifically among the Melkites. Adang finds of the Arabic Biblical parallels: Arab^Copt for Genesis and seemingly for Exodus; Arab^Syr2 for Leviticus; and Arab^Syr_Hex1b for Numbers and Deuteronomy. Arab^Syr2 would be a Peshitta; nowhere is Palaestinian Aramaic. Some Melkites did survive in the old Greek cities Alexandria and Antioch. These would seem the best match.

It seems strange that Melkites should grab a translation from Copts who should be Miaphysites. Some Copts, like Ibn al-Qunbar, were known to cross the Aegean, as it were. Anyway Egyptians were all Septuagintals over the base text. Syrians were divided: Philoxenus of Manbij/Mabbug and Paul of Tella are implicated in west-Syrian LXX, if I recall. Arab^Syr2 as Peshitta is not that; Arab^Syr_Hex1b might be that. However even this had got corrected toward the Peshitta even beyond what the MT would allow.

The textual state of the Christian Bible in Araby was... not great. Bâjî's complaint was valid. I do think the Bible is in better shape now, but again Muslims can still make hay with it. I wonder if Arab Christians back then could retort, yeah, the text isn't great, but where the best reconstruction coincides with the Qurân, it's not supporting the Qurân. The Qurân assumes a rogue text, itself. A mistake upon a mistake is rarely a correction.

Venus' big sister

Gliese 3470 on the other side of the Cancri's, 96 light years away, has a planet. This is transiting its star - perpendicularly. The planet is now measured: ten Earth masses, gassy, marked at 325 C. That could be a direct measurement from the Webb.

This puts the planet's temperature between Venus and Earth, so Sudarsky II. Among the gasses is sulfur-dioxide. Apparently that's rare in other planets. Also here is water. Interesting that they don't just say "sulfurous acid". Has anyone checked back on HD 88986? - or maybe these vapours have disassociated from the clouds and that is how we see them . . .

There's methane too; seems that oxygen isn't being liberated from the other elements as it is on Venus. At least not anymore. It likely formed further away and got brought to its sideways-Venus orbit, later. It would have been a heavier Uranuslike out there.

Stealth mode

No stealth in space... they say. Heck even NovaGirl93 had to admit to it. But here's someone saying otherwise. Namely: if you're not doing something dumb like firing thrusters, your vessel can direct outgoing infrared to some unobserved direction; thus keeping your vessel (apparently) cooler than it is.

This introduces the wonderful world of non-Hermitian Hamiltonians in photonics. Photonics - the quantum science of how light interacts with atoms - would also, incidentally, explain why we cannot use X-rays to push sails.

Now: I much doubt that the stealth can scale. Your Romulan Warbird have to stay put and drain off as much heat as possible, likely meaning no internal energy even for life-support. Torpedos can't adjust velocity until the last minute. Tungsten rounds from railguns leave the cannon... slowly?

Here is a military use, though: An enemy could drop limpets around a field of rubble. They quietly stick to the target. On a critical mass, boom.

Maybe it will be good mainly for dampening infrared in orbit so that nearby telescopes (like on land) aren't distracted.

Spaceships first, then travel

We had... a lot of space news yesterday. Some of which we'll get to. But I'll jump to what I see today which is longterm health in space. We've poasted a few poasts on microgravity mitigation.

The focus today is on kidney damage. Not just stones; damage. It seems that weightlessness causes the kidneys to lose the ability to process calcium.

I vaguely recall that stones can form due to germs damaging the kidney and, well... space does a number on the immune system as well. Something called "quercetin" can help with germs, for short shuttle hops (like the Starliner).

Overall if we get hibernation, which I agree we'll need to reduce food-/oxygen-/water-demand for a long voyage; hibernation too will need to be within spingrav.

EYES 6/19: More fluid-shift. OHIO 6/25: Carnival. MITOCHONDRIA 7/1: Looking at organ-by-organ.

Carbon carnival, Earth edition

I'll follow up the earlier carbon poast with a poast as is useful here right now. Mostly, only for here; although Titanoids might appreciate what to do with their literal lakes of natural-gas.

Sometimes hydrogen is the point. Can we store it?

Overall, why even sweat CO₂ where we have CH₄. Jet companies can take methane directly from the well - and from landfills. (And no, I am not willing to vaccinate cows. Wolves gotta eat too you know.)

We can also talk efficiencies on combustions wot we got already. Lately also diesel... bane of Planet of the Humans and of old-growth generally.

We already know that coal mines are a fine place to look for rare-earths. I was wondering if West Virginia might be able to hit up the tailings. But the American West seems an even cheaper and better place. Maybe WV should aim at being the national laboratory for wringing efficiencies out marginal mines.

This winter we heard much hype about ammonia for shipping (why not nuclear, bro). Ammonia looks ... risky.

Carbon carnival

ScienceDaily have an ongoing roundup of organic-chemistry engineering under the "Fossil Fuels" heading. I'll mix up some mint tea as to approach all this with a sober and calm mind. The Baghestan's standpoint is that we don't care about "climate"; and we care about "carbon" inasmuch as we'd rather use it before we let the trees have it. We are also keen to do this chemistry on other planets.

For carbon-dioxide we already got, electrochemical reduction "CO2R" sometimes blows out unwanted byproducts. Among these: if we reduce with a hydrate - like water - said reduction gives off hydrogen. That hydrogen will probably escape - taking with it, the useful chemicals we want, like methanol. Acid and a metal catalyst makes CO2R efficient. The catalyst being gold or zinc.

Meanwhile catalysts could stand, themselves, to use less power. Magnets might help.

Among what we can convert CO₂ into is formic acid. Which we've looked at. Also acetates, also looked-at; but now they're saying they can do it by the kilo.

As to the chemicals from CO2R proper, carbon-monoxide seems most-obvious. One of many uses Robert Zubrin had for CO, was for methanol. Enjoy. I prefer tea.

Jesus' epiphany to the Samaritans

Paleojudaica led me to Harry Maier's review of some antiTrump boomer. The two dispute the Samaritan woman account in John 4.

There exists (now) a feminist reading of the anecdote inasmuch as many commentaries assume that the woman was a sinner, which John himself... didn't. Further vide Davidson (pdf). I'll disclose that I concede the point to the feminists. I'll further defend my sex and raise Chaucer as a fellow man who also didn't read this character as a sinner; the Widow Of Bath had run through her own five husbands. With the admission that too-few male exegetes in my language have brought Chaucer to the story. Either-way my post here is not focused on that hermeneutic. Nor on the boomer's general political stance.

Maier suggests that the account is a post-resurrection account in origin. That intrigues me, for this post's focus.

It is Mark, not John, who has taken the hit in classical Tradition for misplacing events in the Gospel narrative. In our context, the Transfiguration is usually considered a Christophany misplaced. Recall that Mark doesn't do postResurrection in what we have (the Catholics' "Longer Ending" probably comes from some harmony or homily elsewhere). But if one evangelist could shuffle events, why not others, since we have at least four of these books, plus an apostolic tradition. Indeed Matthew and Luke don't dispute Mark's placement of the Transfiguration.

John doesn't have the Transfiguration. John's got straight-up postResurrection accounts. Also I cannot find where Meier argues for John 4 as a reshuffle. So I must speculate. What would lead Meier to think it is?

Jesus, here at Sychar by Gerizim, is doing his usual Johannine thing of babbling streams of theology, as the other canon Gospels (and Tradition) wouldn't. That's more the habit of "gnostic" books like the Apocryphon of James. The preachings are done and now is time for the teachings; the SCIENCE, we'd say. Said gnosis is secret, divulged to apostles like Paul in visions. John's revolution was to backdate his own lore into Jesus' mouth before the Cross - at least implicitly.

Now: John isn't all backdated gnosticism. The Cross itself came in real time, that of Pilate. And John offers miracles in parallel with the Synoptics also difficult to claim as postResurrection.

Against that: in John 4's case Christ's miracle isn't upon this physical world. For instance Jesus isn't bringing any of this woman's husbands back; surely she must have retained affection for at least one of them, like the Bath widow did. As to Sychar's landscape its well isn't dry as (say) Luke 4:25 was noting of the days of Elijah. John 4 offers a story like Emmaus where someone shows up and eventually the audience realises they're talking to Christ. Christ's presence is the miracle. It is just that then immanu-mashiach, as it were; which means at Sychar unlike Emmaus it's not so miraculous.

StackExchange, basically nerd Reddit, brings Matthew 10:5-7. Matthew's Christ had told his disciples to avoid the Samaria. In John 4, Jerusalem is about to lose its primacy even for Jews (v. 21). The Cross would be a drastic marker of Jerusalem's abandoned status. Perhaps John's pool of tradition postdates Matthew's. That might suggest a Samaritan composer bringing the Gospel, at last, to her own people; Christ has lifted the embargo, and by this story He has done it in person. All this, John will chuck into his Tardis. I guess?

John 4:31 "meanwhile" - that is, as a sidenote - has the disciples note that the Master isn't eating. The concern with whether the Lord eats is that of the Docetism controversy, such as Ignatius confronts - which trends postResurrection. However vv. 31-8 doesn't need to belong to this particular anecdote, which concerns water and not food (nor wine!). If we're shuffling one story, we can hardly resist shuffles of pericopae within the story. It remains suggestive that John, at least, associated these two anecdotes.

I suppose my readers will just have to ask Maier.

Boozeworld

As we were deciding on carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen (CHON) in space and on Earth (respectively): here's ISO-Chamaeleonis-I 147. Lots of the former two elements. Less of the latter two.

It seems that the ultracool stars, like GJ 12 and TRAPPIST-1, don't come with oxygen. So what's had are the organic classics: acetylene (first seen, from Earth), ethylene, benzene, even that classic of Titan ethane. These are seen in a 300 K cloud. So pretty much the weather here this past week but without the ozone.

Such planets might not be enriched in these compounds if the reason for all these hydrocarbon gasses is that the star has blazed them off the rocks. But, presumably, the gas'll form comets (at low distances from such cold stars) which might end up crashing back into the planets.

The research doesn't speculate what this sort of oxygen-depleted planet might look like except that it is certainly not Earthly. Soot planet again? Gasoline and ethanol seas?

Don't bring your scuba to Mars

I know this was satire, but it just got funnier. The satire has come to be at Zubrin's expense more than at Musk's. I too am getting laughed-at by proxy, because back in fateful 2020 I believed these reports of liquid lakes on Mars - rather, in it, under the southern caps. Seems like... nah. Big nah.

In all fairness to Zubrin, if not to me, we keep finding water ice. Zubrin's suggestion was for the crater Korolev which was never tagged for subglacial lake.

The real takeaway (despite keeping watch for gullibility) is to remember that humans... aren't there. We're not even in orbit. So the data we get must be interpreted, against models. The models are improving. But incomplete models will yield "AI hallucinations".

SEISMIC 6/25: Maybe the lakes are further down? Seems like all so much crossing-T and dotting-I but then, science sometimes has to work like that.

The latest crash

The Gaia telescope is sketching the process of our galactic Creation. This blog has discussed our galaxy's consumption of clusters like Omega Centauri, and the mergers which made our core. Now from Rensselaer Poly: the Virgo Radial Merger, in the inner halo.

Here are a set of stars we know aren't native to this place. These were earlier thought to belong to the much-earlier Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus merger. The VR merger was 3-1 Gya, although the presser and the study prefer 2-1 for most the magic. I take it that both mergers were already defined, but that the VR was more-questionable. The VR must have been mooted recently since I'd thought the Sagittarius was the latest. Now the VR is solidly defined.

The VR should have sparked some star-formation, lighting up some nice supernovae over our Boring Billion skies. I don't think anything with a brain was yet swimming in our scummy ponds and shoals.

The cart before the horse

Horses were domesticated around 3000 BC; the Yamnaya invaded Europe around the same time. Today we are relearning the limits of circumstantial evidence; this blog recorded hints of the present study, three years ago.

To repeat: the first domesticate horses were of the Botai. These were not the horses which the Yamnaya and, then, R1a-'ryans would use out East. This means that the Yamnaya migrations didn't use horses, as Botai might. Horses came to the post-Yamnaya Europe, later: the 2200s BC. And to Anatolia later.

The pedestrian Yamnaya invasion still must be explained. A culture able to traverse the distance beyond local clan, I think. Even without horses and chariots, the humble cart - handdrawn - could scale up commerce and migration. Also: how about donkeys and oxen?

Anyway as B. Breathed noted of "having your cake and eating it", "cart before the horse" needs to be retired as a dead cliché.

JOSTLE 9/23: Yamnaya had cart-bruises. But - they point out as I'd pointed out - you can cart with cattle, donkeys and even wild asses.

Adobe addio

I'd been using a free Acrobat solution to edit documents. I don't trust its company Adobe to keep their hands off my stuff. I'm trying PDF24.

The first blizzards

Curtin's title is unnecessarily clickbaity, so try mine: Nonoceanic water cycle at 4Gya. This merits promotion to the Timeline.

They have water underground reacting with rocks. They say that would be delivered from water on the surface, not from some deeper vent. So I guess they couldn't find any oceanic salts in the vein. That means: freshwater on the surface.

They mention life... several times. But Earth had no life then. Stromatolites are datable a few hundred million years later. I'd have left "life" off the title and maybe mentioned it only once in the main body. Better speculations would go toward other planets at ~550 My of age and, especially, the 70% insolation range.

Also missing on Earth at the time: a magnetic field. Before the 550 My mark, gradual release of water from internal sources should have boiled off. Why not after?

Did a big post-Theia comet or Cereslike deliver this water all at once? or volcanoes? A sudden steamcloud might deluge the whole planet before salts got into the basins. I get the impression that space rocks tend salty already when they get within 1.6 AU. I bring to witness Mars' perchlorates - and for that matter Europa's ocean; given its own heat-sources, radiation, and low-G. The salts don't however make it back into atmo to rain down on the plateaux. Or for that matter to snow down.

Chris Combs can ...

[...insert humiliating ritual here] This morning the SuperHeavy launched the Starship into a successful orbit and landed again (on the water). The Starship followed.

Zim has a rundown, which must be supplemented with Stephen Green. An engine was lost on the SuperHeavy but that didn't hurt; then another one failed on the way down. Also hard stresses affected the Starship itself, especially an orientation-flap. The stresses resulted in more stresses, like a cracked lens. Still: both vessels might have been reusable, if SpaceX wanted to keep that generation of either (which it doesn't).

So far I doubt the FAA can call Miss Happ. Frankly they shouldn't have rung her up for the third test either, but at least some saner heads over there rated it insufficient to block this test.

Starliner had taken off yesterday; this time, trying to get to the ISS. And... it did! - having spouted hydrogen leaks. It barely made it. Thus putting them on parity with (checks) the Raptor and Dragon except that these don't leak. It's like Starliner put humans in a test vehicle. As for the Atlas 5 that put the Starliner up there, that worked as well as the SuperHeavy did; excepting that they don't even try to retrieve the Atlas 5.

Meanwhile Axiom is reporting that on the assumption of a working Starship into orbit, which SpaceX have, yesterday's Artemis III Integrated Test looked good too.

Given all that, I decree that Starliner is now a test shuttle, such that on its return to Earth nothing valuable and nothing human be stored on it. To get the astronauts home I am afraid that NASA will need to get a Dragon up there.

Justin/Luke

Over the past few weeks Michael Kok has been confronting some of Brant Pitre's grand(ios)er claims on New Testament authorship. The dispute has entered the Carnival, thence PaleoJudaica. Kok seems to be expounding on his 2022 paper (pdf) which concerns Justin's use of "Luke".

We all agree Justin cited lore which we now find in the Lucan corpus. Kok has been treating Pitre with respect. Kok holds Mark and Matthew to be very early, even a memoir of apostolic times; I agree with that assessment of Mark, by the way. But Kok cannot find where Justin, if aware of the Lucan volumes, was aware of their authorship as by Luke. Marcion was similarly unaware.

If I may interject... said corpus had sources too. Those now claiming that Luke and Matthew used a Quelle, rather than that Luke just used Matthew; might also suspect that Justin used "L" and not Luke. Perhaps Kok follows Goodacre (and Pitre) that Luke used Matthew...? If so, Kok would have a bias against speculations on lost sources. I tend to agree with Pitre on this much as well.

But I question whether Luke's sources be as lost as some think.

The failed crusade

I was hoping to catch the Eucharistic Pilgrimage at Steamboat Springs - which festivities be scheduled for after work hours. "T.I.L." that the (Ivanti) VPN doesn't work with our servers from the Steamboat or Kremmling libraries. It will work from Empire and perhaps the whole Summit County; but I didn't want to drive on Wednesday, I wanted to be in Steamboat on Wednesday.

"Luckily" I didn't need the servers for my highest-priority which was administrative haggling. Which was also an exercise in inconclusive frustration.

Let's hope tomorrow is a better day, even though I will be stuck here in 90°-F weather.

Tamid

Davila points to Bavli Tamid. This is a tractate in that Talmud which is classically considered to be off the standard eastern Aramaic.

It seems one Noam Eisenstein has found, with an algorithm, that Tamid actually is typically Talmudic... except where it talks about Alexander. Yes, that Alexander. Alexander cast a long shadow in the Aramaic Orient.

What I can't find in this press release is whether we're dealing with a special dialect for storytelling (like in Callisthenes' Romance), or plain Syriac or Hatrene, or even the hoary Palaestinian dialects used in certain Targums. The paper of DOI 10.3828/jjs.2024.75.1.1 is paywalled.

Leaving Eros

Let's talk exports from the permamaglev in vacuum and micrograv. On Earth, the fastest train is the Shanghai which has been tested up to 23 m/s. Normally it doesn't go that fast. I assume it could if the Chinese didn't sweat the air-resistance.

That means the calculator again. If I want 9.8 m/s², and I have 200m radius: the train must run 44.3 m/s. A 1km radius will run 99 m/s!

If some of those numbers look familiar, that's because I used a similar calculation for a momentum capacitor elsewhere. Which leads to ponder if we could so use the maglev as a momentum-capacitor. Escape-velocity of Deimos is 5.556 m/s. Even given my terminal case of sloth where it comes to, say, v_inf I am fairly confident our maglev can eject pods from any rock up to Eros' size, such that Eros won't see them again.

It may even be among Eros' jobs to make those pods. It's not like anyone needs Eros in that orbit. Deimos, yeah, the Martian merchants probably want to keep.

On the other hand: crashes are that much worse at higher speeds and avoiding such requires that much more lead-in time to screech to a halt. As my readers be witness I was considering safety first (well, repairability first). So I think we'll have only as many cars on the track in the wider ring as on the shorter ring, and space them out more.

Repair-protocol in Eros

As an aside on Thursday's sketch, let's discuss its safety-features. Rubblepiles seem resilient: where a breach opens up, it should only be localised. A breach in a large solid rock - like Deimos, or Eros or Apophis - might not be.

I don't actually think that the rocks be all that solid, even on Eros. I expect colossal boulders with gravel in-between. The spingrav tubes are each, potentially, subject to blockages. Something might shift or even crack a boulder above or below. In natural milligravity, which at the centre is more like microgravity, a crack should be visible before the rocks lazily intrude upon the passages. Or just an accumulation of regolith and gravel.

Higher-risk would be sabotage, or some asteroid-shaking impact like an experiment or docking-manoeuvre gone wrong elsewhere on the rock. More likely is that somebody wants to move the thing. Apophis has a dangerous orbit (for Earth); most asteroids have useless orbits. Maybe someone wants Apophis to be our regular Venus-to-Earth shuttle; maybe someone wants Eros in STL4. That's going to shake things up. Do we evacuate?

The obvious worst-case scenario, if a local one, is decompression. Some cars will have EVA suits; all cars have means to patch leaks (GenX may remember Mission Critical; younger Millennials, The Expanse). Most cars, in event they can't be patched, should light up red warnings commanding to GTFO that car and onto some place safer. EVA suitups simply take too long to do the job from there. A professional in EVA will, in EVA's good time, get over there to patch the leak.

A general bad-case scenario is loss of power to the superconductor. The maglev then shuts down. This means the trains slow down, grinding against the outside floor... which floor is set to become the microgravitic ceiling. We'll want auxiliary power-supply but I'm assuming we'll have that; life-support takes a higher priority to spingrav. I'll hope some softlanding strips line the outside "floor", to reduce damage to chassis. The people in the trains have time to secure their belongings before freefall.

Another bad-case is a boulder-blockage. If unscheduled that's a worse-case: the superconductor must activate backwards. This is to grind the cars to a faster halt. There's less warning. In the worst case where the crash cannot be avoided, affected cars must depressurise too, to avoid internal shockwaves and human implosion (so we learn from "Privateer").

As to cleaning up the mess: I've designed for redundancy, so evacuees in need of gravity should switch to the parallel train or maybe even a nearby rubblepile. That'll be the wounded first, like whoever got himself exploded and/or lost eardrums. I suggest also filling the whole track with nonreactive nontoxic gas as long as trains are not running; this probably means nitrogen with a ratio of carbondioxide. Why? So that human mechanics don't need EVA suits - and also, don't worry about fire. Said mechs will of course need goggles (because zero-G dust) and an oxygen-supply.

When it's all fixed, which includes replacing the brakepads: start it up again, and allow the inhabitants back into their appropriate cabins.