The emergence of Nathaniel Miller's book

Nathaniel Miller wrote The Emergence of Arabic Poetry to counter Margoliouth 1925, to defend (some) "preIslamic" / "jâhil" poetry. The book follows Wansbrough in calling the genre unIslamic, on account "preIslamic" assumes (ironically) Margoliouth that all of it was composed in praeparatio for the coming Prophet. Even the Muslims should shun the term "preIslamic". (Some Muslims would in fact invent such work, most-notably - to Ibn Warraq anyway - as ascribed to Umayya. But not all the unIslamic poetry reads like ps-Umayya.)

For Miller, classical Arabic poetry starts in the northeastern Arabian highland called “Najd” – in Riyadh, for Saudis. The Arabs came to prefer the tripart qasîda genre. That genre is (mostly) absent from the Hijaz before Hassan (and Ka’b b. Zuhayr and Umayya) pp. 12, 84. Eventually p. 158 must note: Qasîda itself is artificial; so asks, why this form at all? Such couldn’t exist in the Hijaz without a patron, p. 86. Even in pro-Roman Jâbiya (tent city? p. 70) the qâsida arrived after the 584 dissolution of the monarchy p. 71, 302 n5: unless Nâbigha, pp. 83-4, is he who brought it there.

On this basis pp. 74-7 a qasîda to the eastern king al-Mundhir (d. AD 554) is raised as authentic. Also authentic will be extraMeccan references to hajj with details as do not appear in the Islamic hajj nor in the Islamic memory of the pagan Meccan hajj; and Hijazi references to a Meccan hajj where the poet swears by the sacrifice instead of by the God to Whom is sacrificed. With such poems permitted, likewise are permitted many more in that style. Thus, Wansbrough is vindicated.

I have so far read Miller up to chapter 6. Hijazi poetry exists; for Miller, the best western exemplar is the diwân of the Hudhayl tribe, which Miller sees as a reaction to the (greater, and in Islam better-regarded) Iraqi corpus. The poet Abû Jundab plays the same role for this book p. 135 as Umayya did for Spengler and Huart.

To get to that summary, one must wade through poor editing, such as repetitions - such as al-Sukkarî's complaint p. 86 then p. 201. Against p. 70 and unlike phantom Jâbiya, al-Hîra is just Kûfa which site does have archaeologic support, where possible to excavate. Nâbigha - Miller says - was a poet of Ghassân who did qasida; but we are also told that qasîda came to that region only after Ghassân's dissolution p. 71 vs. 83-4. The text introduces Ma‘add before we get support of whether it existed p. 47; consistently the text proffers terms like "Ghassânid" and "Lakhmid" before, hey, the neoGhassân of Late Antiquity was a mere poetic fiction p.73. Bipart qasîda is noted pp. 84-5; up to now p. 11 had led to qasîda as defined as tripart – so here is where we need to explain what a qasîda is, nasib and all; not at p. 75. Then I went to the index which lacks Jâbiya entirely, and p. 11 on qasîda. Abû Dhuayb is noted as Sâ'ida's râwî p. 197; this needs noting much earlier, like p. 88. Mecca in the 570s p. 52 is “urban”; but per p. 85, Mecca barely existed then. A glaring omission comes where discussing 'Awf's poem #35, where pp. 269-70 does a full commentary on ll. 6f. ... after the earlier text (p. 188) was somehow unaware of ll. 4-5 with its comment on the Qurashi hajj (read it instead in Peter Webb um, twice). One shudders to imagine the draught which beta-reader Philip Wood encountered.

On to philology, p.54 flips between Roman and Semitic terms for various cities. The linguistic evidence in Qurân brought p. 52 is incoherent: it claims mostly south Semitic only but it turns out overshadowed by NW Semitic (ie. mostly Aramaic). The page's claim of Iranian as "very rare" in the Qurân is amusing given p. 37 which records two Iranian lexemes; I suppose it depends where you look, like Q. 55-56. I feel like the substantive-adjective discussion at the “counterpoetics” pp. 152-3 could have been noted earlier where are the (“Najdi”) poetics; ditto such constructs as dhû-hashif p. 157.

As far as I can judge, most mistakes are clustered early. From ch. 3f the book translates text and argues therefrom; 'Awf excepted, both the translations and the extrapolations, to me, seem fair. I am left with nitpicks – for instance, kârim / karîm might not mean generous p. 123, nor honorable; although the poem is about a “widow’s mite” – so, giving honour to others is a good middle-ground. Also p. 145 I might delay the Arabic parenthesis to the end of the verse. We don't need "the Bechdel test" in the main text p. 239; this can go to a footnote. Ibn Qays al-Ruqayyât is 'Ubayd Allâh not "Ibn 'Ubayd Allâh" as indexed; and why is he "Ibn Qays" in the text and not "al-Ruqayyât" like al-Farazdaq?

Given all that, I would defer a decision on the Abû Jundab / sûrat al-Kafirûn synopsis p. 136; p. 137 rather than “proto-Qurânic” I prefer paraQurânic .

Where did the Safaitic migrants go?

Let's backdate this one; the idea came in the last hour or so. Al-Jallad has written at least two whole books about the Safaitic corpus, one on language and one on the The Religion and Rituals of the Nomads of Pre-Islamic Arabia. Among Nathaniel Miller's comments on the poetry, most of which he convinces me is authentic, concerns the nomadic Arab. The Safaitic graffitists - per al-Jallad - went to hajj-festival enough they had a verb for it, implying (to him) pilgrimage. And I understand that some Safaitic has ended up at Pompeii and maybe Delos. And at Palmyra of course.

On to Religion and Rituals: I was looking up keywords like "season". The graffiti notes a season of "late rain". That's what we'd call "spring". Miller would relate that to Rabi' or to ṣyf. The graffiti don't mention Rabi' but I don't much care; Hudhayl don't mention it either (Miller, 191). ṣyf is followed by qyẓ, when there's still pasturage and springwater, but less rain. Then comes summer.

Question I got: the poetry, and even the Qurân (sura 106), mention winter. Sura 106's whole reason to exist, despite barely being a sura (it doesn't rhyme!) is to give a Divine deed to the Quraysh of a House, as a sanctuary.

The graffiti at the Safa do not mention winter. And assuredly bare rock Jordan is no place to wait out the chill. One graffito even complains that his herd got caught out by a cold-snap in what should have been the ṣyf. These herders must have wintered elsewhere.

So where did they go?

The Saites' view to heaven

Archaeology.org leads to a report on an Egyptian observatory. Buto Temple, 26th Dynasty called the "Saite". This was the long sixth century 664-525 BC.

I assumed that the Egyptians - as farmers and geometers - came to care about the heavens; the Pyramids are said to match the constellation Orion. But I hadn't seen much evidence. I suppose with the Assyrians knocking around, the Egyptians had to keep up with the latest out of Babylonia.

Any observatory should have seen whatever caused the great spike of the late 660s BC. I wonder actually if this portent hailed the Saite takeover.

The long farewell of the Palaeocene

Today we learn that the Palaeocene ended in two heat spikes. PETM was 56 Mya... and then 2 My later came an Eocene Thermal Maximum 2. The warming had started 58 Mya.

They are correlating oceanic heat with atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Here, unfortunately, I scent marketing. They are touting (not to say pimping) its relation to modern anthropogenic climate change. This might include Atlantic cooling but the authors know which side their bread is buttered on.

In Palaeocene times no native life could build coal-fired factories on Earth. The article is looking to "tectonics". That would have to mean volcanoes given that orogeny - mountain-building - should expose easily-reactive ores as to pull carbon from the air as carbonates. Probably "Eriador".

The underground seas of Proxima Centauri

This blog has been (very) down on M stars having useful planets. Last month I'd concluded that Alfvén had delivered the last nail pon Prox' coffin. What I'd failed to remember, is that our Earth holds enough hydro in her mantle and core to roust out Brian Keene's Earthworm Gods.

Deep-crust water has lately been found for Mars 11.5-20 km down. A decade ago, Hop David calculated 15 km for this planet's dig limit. Deep underground water is meanwhile surmised also for extrasolar Super-Earths, where low-density and considered surface-watery. This deconstrains the composition of LHC 1140 b.

So, if these worlds are Pitch Black-y, desert on the surface but with vast aquifers below: we cannot rule out life down there, either. M stars' planets should have ice in the rear which should keep aquifers closer the surface than (say) Mars allows.

As to Life As We Know It, consider taproots. Anything vascular bringing transpiration to the perma'rradiated surface will do a Garamantia from its wells. The vapour blows to the icewall, condenses, flows back into the aquifer.

Fast delivery of a square-kilometer rhenium radiator

Antimatter exists in small doses as in, nanogram doses. Those doses are good for reducing critical-mass in nuclear reactions. In space such could get us past the various bans on enriched-metal nuclear work in space (nobody wants Little Boy in equatorial space). How about... antimatter-on-hydrogen?

Last week Casey Handmer roused himself to post - and yesterday, Gerrit Bruhaug. I may as well get in on it.

Antimatter, mostly antihydrogen but also antihelium and even more exotic stuff, comes out of particle accelerators one nanogram at a time. In theory we could also get it from space. Directly, antihelium at least is so rare it's not worth the bother. Nah: orbital spacemen could get much more antihydrogen from our Van Allens.

Handmer's maths aim more for the ISP, than for thrust. rlelder noted in the comments that for thrust, we should be looking at a pulse method, like ol' Boom Boom or that fusion afterburner. For getting off of Earth we can't use either: we'll still need the (chemical) Super Heavy Booster. I'll add that the SHB's use of methane seems better than hydrogen just for storage, although a small-scale nuclear reactor at a hurricane-/tsunami safe distance up Rio might offer JIT hydrogen to Boca and, whilst we're at it, to Tamaulipan steelworks.

Once already in a midrange Earth orbit, Handmer and Bruhaug are saying we don't need to be goosing fissile matter, which would require too much paperwork up there anyway. We could just spike the antiprotons against regular protons, also farmable by the nanogram from the solar wind. The economics and the safety-requirements of collecting fuel in high Earth orbit make nanogram-farming more attractive than (somehow) hurling stuff up from Earth, and perhaps more-so bringing kilotonnes of radioactive-whatever from some space rock toward Earth.

I expect antimatter-driven cargos could be larger than cargos sent by solar-sail. They would really come into their own, past our solar-system's snow line, the "solar" part delivering diminishing-returns by inverse-square AU.

So now let's get to thermodynamics (boo!). Bruhaug notes that the heat from these monsters exceeds what even those refractory metals can withstand; you know... the rare metals like iridium we are hoping to mine from those outer asteroids (titanium can be had from our moon). Interstellar ships will need ten megameters of radiator space: compare Earth equatorial radius 6.38 megameters.

We're just going from planet-to-asteroid presently. But it seems that our refactory-metal imports may need, in fact, to be functioning radiators, themselves. Not stored in a "cargo bay".

Darien

Rocket Factory, almost antipodal to Rocket Lab, messed it all up in the Shetlands. Scotland since (by law) 1707 is not independent of England so shares its Civil Aviation Authority. Which Authority, being British, is astonishingly nasty as this planet's bureaucracies go, much worse than our FAA. So: why can't Scotland speed up their spacery?

The Rosinante reviews actually mention this, those books being musings about South Sea Bubble schemes. The Scots were deeply implicated in such, John Law having messed up the French monarchy, terminally. Less known (to me) is how the Scots had messed up their own Glasgow-Edinburgh band of Britain. This was the Darien scheme.

Back in the 1600s, pretty much all the European nations (excepting Portugal) were planting colonies and settlements all over "The West Indies", so-called. This region expanded from La Florida (as defined in the Madrid peace 1670) all the way to Panama. Spain could not control all these coasts. The French gobbled western Saint-Domingue and Louisiana; the Dutch had substantial islands as well, and even the Swedes and Latvians got into the game.

So: Panama. The famous captain Morgan - a Welshman - had done a famous raid upon a Spanish fort over there. As of the last decade of the 1600s, a good patch of Panama had gone uninhabited by The White Man. At the time the Scots were feeling some economic pain and figured, hey, why not us?

Scotland and England were united under a common royal family, the Stuarts, of Breton descent but with a long history as Scottish kings and a shorter one over England. William of Orange had taken over both lands, being William II of Scotland (III of England - its second conqueror, mayhap). When the Scots wanted a colony, William - neither Scottish nor English himself - didn't much want to do it, but agreed to it.

If the Scots had paid any attention, they might have asked, why, two centuries after Columbus, nobody else had hit up this coast yet. We now know this region as The Darien Gap. It is arguably the second worst span between the oceans, vying only with the Drake Passage. We wouldn't see a Panama Canal until the nineteenth century I think. Even today the Darien Gap has no highways, because a highway simply cannot be built in this mountainous insect-infested diseased jungle. South Americans get killed there on the regular.

Long story short - I haven't read a history beyond la wik - 80% of these settlers died and everyone else noped out back to Scotland. Scotland now had NO MONEY NO MONEY NO MONEY. We're no longer talking Caribbean Age Of Exploration; we're now onto This Time Is Different. The Act of Union in AD 1707 would be written on English terms, by the London Parliament under a foreign king.

Gilliland, whose name is French, may not have known about the Darien debacle, but assuredly was familiar with John Law at least. Space exploration could mean space speculation, and the latter is a grave of nationstates.

Ruthenium on-the-go

I've been here and there interested in Chicxulub. Avi Loeb in 2021 floated the idea that it was a comet, which idea got shut down like most Loeb's ideas. Current thought is that iridium-laced rocks are C, like Chicxulub; forming close to home, then pulled further out, rarely returned to near-Earth. Now in addition to iridium they're talking ruthenium. Chicxulub has this, as do impactors of 3.5Gya so 1 Gy after our whole system formed. So let's talk about where it exists, and how to get at it.

Element 44 was discovered by an ethnic German scientist deep in "Ruthenia"... that is, in 1844 Россия. It was extracted from a platinum ore. As you can surmise, ruthenium is most uncommon down here. The impact record would indeed point to ruthenium being much more locally-common at mainsequence-plus-one-Gy, than today, or even 65 Mya. We just got unlucky this one scrap hadn't got far enough away. (Well... the dinos got so unlucky, and I suspect the marsupials. Platypodes could burrow out of it.)

I was pondering ruthenium as an asteroid-mining opportunity. But from 1 AU, C-types like Egeria tend to be a delta-V pest.

Looking it up, it seems that we can, instead, alchemate ruthenium at home; like we make antimatter at home. Physics does it for us - in practice, has already done this for us, in the form of beta-decay of Element 43, none of which isotopes are stable so none of it primordial anymore. We've made quite a bit more Technetium-99 as a waste product of nuclear reactions, 211 ky halflife, making this one of those more-annoying isotopes: too hot to use, too cold to store short-term. The beta-decay leads to stable ruthenium-99. One atom at a time. Ugggh.

... unless we were to paint Tc-99 (with its trace Ru-99) on the inner side of the reactor as a neutron sponge. Technetium-100 does the same beta, but faster. Ruthenium-100 is also stable.

I'd request some strong magnets to move those new electrons away from the computers and, also, maintenance personnel collecting the new ruthenium.

Violet dawn

A good way to drive replayability to your game is to open up its game engine. Jedi Knight attracted much attention for the mods it permitted. Microsoft's Dungeon Siege, a so-so WinXP effort that doesn't even work from Windows 7 on, acquired a Warriors of Destiny mod which revived the original game's sales singlehandedly. So! let's talk the fantasy world of print.

Last year on RoyalRoad, I read a few "guilty pleasures", some perhaps more guilty than pleasant; one to which I've alluded was by BlueFishCake / JL Williams. The series is... sigh... "SexySpaceBabes". Here's GoodReads on all that.

In this world, branching from about AD 2020 here, Earth has been conquered - mostly - by seven-to-eight-foot purple space orks called Shil'vati. The soldiers are female. Shil'vati males exist, and some have even come along for the ride; but these are small, slight, and outnumbered. The title, in short, is an irony: the SSBs are us. How does BlueFishCake work out the sociology? ... he really doesn't. The reader doesn't suspend disbelief so much as hang it.

I'd have tiptoed away from all that, nice Catholic boy as I am, excepting that I've lately stumbled into Reddit (sigh again), and ... uhhh... wtf. There's more fanfic here than I've found in major published authors. Not all the SSB authors are even XY men, witness "HollowShel".

And some of these stories deserve respect. I'll single out CokeSamurai's "In For a Penny". This one delivers reasonable characters, reasonable interactions, and deep psychology. It is so notable that "Sol" took time to review this one, despite that it is a fanfic. Sol does point out its flaws, such as the character Valran isn't needed; but there's nothing here an editor couldn't cure, and it seems criminal CokeSamurai hasn't found a publisher for whatever else he's doing.

So although I've cast some shade on Mr Williams' oeuvre, I have to grant to the man some credit for worldbuilding and inspiration. And more credit for his generosity and humility. Take note Anne McCaffery.

Nanoplastic, shmicroplastic

With all the hype about micron-length plastic pieces, which as far as I know have been in all our water since the Second World War, it would be good to know - first - what actual harm they do; then get around to reducing them. So, in order:

@salonium reports on a prelim from "Research Square" under review at Nature Portfolio. That is - it is not peer-reviewed yet, check the link to see for yourself. Apparently that hasn't stopped the Grauniad from plastering this all over the Internet as if it were Settled F&in' <3CIENCE.

All this said, I tend to agree... but it is precisely because we are predisposed to agree, that we should check their work. We've endured a lot of "retraction watches" lately.

For those interested in removing these things without undue cost, here's the University of Missou(ri). They think they can hit 98%.

Wentabury

A couple years ago Francis M. Morris and Martin Biddle wrote about Venta Belgarum, which may be their home town. They call it "Winchester" now. Craig Davis has a review out.

I have never set foot in that place; I'm probably not going to anytime soon, unless this blog and/or my books get me extradited. We do, here, hold some interest in the previous time Britain (and other nations) fell out of Christianity into a dark age. Also I've long been interested in shared suffixes in placenames, here how a -castr suffix became -chester.

The site entered the Roman world as an "oppidum", a hill fort. The Celts called such briga or maybe dunum, the Germans burg. But the Romans did not name this site like that. They called it "The Belgic Mart". They didn't install a colonia at the site; people just worked there.

...until the late AD 300s. After Jovian's grovelling capitulation to the Sasanians, the barbarians out West figured that Rome for a joke anymore. The Irish, the Picts, and the Saxons between them figured, what would the Philistines do. In AD 367 they all hit the Romans' Britannia at once. Emperor Valentinian sent over one Flavius Theodosius, who restored the best part of Britain to the Romans, renaming the province "Valentia". Such a loyalist could never survive his patron's death; luckily, Flavius' son survived the purge, to become Theodosius the Great.

According to Davis, the book claims that the market town grew in population, but not in prosperity. Once more it was a fortress. Presumably the region was by then Romance-speaking, hence *Venta-Castrum rather than, say, "Wentabury". When the Wessex state took it over, it became Wintanceastre thus Win(t)chester.

Tomorrow War 2

The Tomorrow War was a pleasure... if a dumb pleasure. The flick probably wanted to be Looper or Edge Of Tomorrow; it ended up more Independence Day (itself ripping off Alien). I'd continue pretending I hadn't seen the movie at all, but I just now read a sequel is coming.

The biggest loose-end is the time paradox. The aliens are here; they are only destroyed thanks to information brought back from the bad timeline, which is no longer happening. Also known is that the time loop is possible... and so, therefore, is FtL.

Meanwhile aliens are carrying monsters as can wipe all macrofauna larger than a rabbit off a planet. The monsters are an evil; the aliens are evil by choice.

So are we going to get horrors from a deleted multiverse-possibility, like Langoliers? Are we going to ignore the whole timeloop theme?

I don't hold high hopes, either way. Independence Day had a sequel - remember that? and Stargate was going to have sequels; the books floating that idea were so awful they started over for "SG-1".

Von Zeipel meets Hilda

As we're looking into orbits subject to von Zeipel, let's check the Sol-Venus innermost sector of our System. I'd start with Mercury but relativistic effects scotch such research; so we'll scale up to SV-Hilda 3:2 resonance, where - if we don't have asteroids or stations - we should.

Here we've already calculated that Jacobi, but we'll normalise that to 1. SV-Hilda's constant at flat inclination is Math.Sqrt(1-0.112*0.112) = 0.99371. Luckily we've already forced eccentricity to maximum at zero inclination so any switches to higher inclination should just make it all more circular. Semimajor 0.55175 AU, perihelion at Mercury-L2 0.49 AU. So where inclination is zero: 0.49 = 0.55175(1-ε), meaning maximum eccentricity be 0.1119 for aphelion 0.6135 AU.

As to inclination at a circular orbit, cos i = 0.99371 so maximum inclination 0.1122355 radians for 6.43°, not all that large. We also need timescales. Relative to Venus: 1.5 (1-e²)^1.5 here with Venereal e=0.00677323. That eccentricity won't undercut the 1.5 Venereal year baseline noticeably. So, it's just 337 days. That's short enough we'll disregard when Venus starts shifting its own eccentricity.

It is all somewhat "ideal" given that Venus runs its own resonance with Earth (13:8), which may allow a 3:2 with that former, but not on von Zeipel's terms.

Above the plane

With respect to a two-system plane, a particle third body's orbital dynamics are stable when dominated by the Lagrange points. This blog has also handled Laplace wherein several resonant orbits cancel out "saecular" long-term effects. Let's handle the three-body problem, off Lagrangian and neglecting other bodies. Entering... THE THIRD DIMENSION

The von Zeipel effect, due to various Cold War politics called a "Kozai Mechanism", means that √[1 - ε²] cos i is a constant - like the Jacobi potential-energy is a constant, usually around 3. I would venture to relate the two: the von Zeipel formula is constant for a given energy-state. We're dealing with a natural change in an orbit of a given Jacobi even if we don't eject cargo as propellant or raise a sail.

Von Zeipel has a stable inclination of Acos √[3/5] = 39.2°, remembering that this angle is against the two-body plane, which will likely not be Sol-Earth. For the system to oscillate, the constant's floor is 0.7746.

I've... not actually known about this effect, despite the Planet Nine shenanigans making reference to it. More of effect upon us here on Earth are the Milankovitch Cycles, imposed upon us by Jupiter. We're inclined and eccentric, both. So there's room for more eccentricity bringing about shorter (if hotter) summers, especially down South but bad enough North that ice ages happen.

Also of note will be Mars and all those little rocks further out the Belt. At least one S-type asteroid got to be Earth-crossing in both perihelion and inclination; so, maybe where Chicxulub formed, it was circular and inclined. In happier news Mars is less inclined, but 0.1-eccentric already, so could well go to a circular orbit later. Plenty of comets are inclined and eccentric both, suggesting a trans-Kuiper origin, so - well done Dr Oort. Closer home, our own Moon pulls circular polar satellites into elliptic (solar-)planar molniyas, probably not back again.

13 Egeria

In Gilliland's universe, G-type 13 Egeria seems not to exist, its 2.5769 AU = 4.14 year orbit being taken by similarly-carbonaceous "Rosinante". Carbonaceous asteroids generally are clayballs as come from afar. All C types presently this close to the sun should expect a baseline of high eccentricity - as Gilliland indeed sketches for "Rosinante". In our universe however Egeria e=0.083, compare Mars 0.0934. Why so circular?

It happens 13 Egeria is also inclined, 16.539°. Really we should say for "also", "instead": Egeria is suffering the "Kozai" mechanism (actually von Zeipel), trading eccentricity for inclination.

Fictional Rosinante is, I expect, just non-inclined enough to keep its inclination free of Mars. With that plus its 1.32 AU perihelion, it presents a delta-V Hohmann target for Earth not inferior to Mars', given porkchops.

Gilliland has done quite the engineering marvel at Rosinante, and has additional "munditos" at Pallas and Ceres and at Mars' moons, so alt-AD-2039 sports quite the advanced technologic society.

Gilliland's rafters

Yesterday I went up to Nederland where I bought (used) Alexis Gilliland, The Revolution from Rosinante - with S. It's the first in a trilogy. It's in George O Smith's genre of an asteroid colony dealing with Earth bureaucracy and lawyers - also, unions. Since I haven't finished even the first book, I shall defer the review to Nicoll, in times past a smarmy Leftist but perhaps by 2024 a little wiser. For our post here I am getting my head around the station architecture - because, I have to, in order even to understand what is going on over here.

This architecture is so alien to me, and the content uses such alien terms like "purlin", that we need diagrams. These are supplied in the first few pages. But they aren't helpful either, so - 3D illustrations are needed too. Luckily, we have the cover art. Humans reside in a cylindrical bulb inside a lampshade. Actually a pair of "lamps" together.

Rosinante is a Quixote reference, being the Don's horse. We'll see it reused in The Expanse with C. Nyrath Chung was big on Gilliland's book, probably why Abraham and Franck reused the word. Nyrath's recommendation was why I kept my eye out for it. I can't just download it on account Gilliland, already almost fifty years old in 1981, is still alive(!).

"Purlin" meanwhile is a sort of ceiling-rafter. In fact "rafter" refers to the load-bearing struts running from the wall to the top; a "purlin" is more like a buttress, connecting the rafters at the perpendicular. Assuming you're not just doming it all.

The rock is, best I can tell, fictional. It is a C-type which has got itself into a Mars-crossing eccentric orbit semimajor 2.58 AU - middle belt, past 3:1 resonance. It pretty much shares a band with also-C (subset, "G") 13 Egeria, with a 4.14 year period; although at 1.32 AU perihelion the fictional 'stroid is a sight more eccentric. To the extent a hard-SF feels the urge to invent some fictional rock: not!Egeria with low-inclination and near-perihelion seems an excellent choice, with plenty of water and other "ices".

As for Gilliland's habitat design, I do wonder how stable it be. They might get away with affixing it all to the rock. The rock's own rotation may pose a problem; 13 Egeria is oblate on account of spinning a 7 hour day and being 10% water.

The usual science-molesters

Issues-ampersand-Insights has a screed against the Gerbil Worming. Tonally, it's off; Google doesn't want Adsense on it. Mark Tapscott, who would like us to see Darwin as a "sexist" and who also deems Catholicism as (false) "religion" unworthy of Christ and Calvin, is crying "censorship" as a result.

Which is not to say I deem that purveyor of Russian disinformation Peter Woit any better than Tapscott. He's not willing to host dissent either. Where Sabine Hossenfelder goes after SCIENCE! from the Left... I'd take that more seriously. Except.

I get the scent of tribal signalling. The Gerbil Worming is a truth quite-convenient to the Insulated. They aren't giving up their vehicles.

PS, yo Pete. What's a woman?

Kangaroo girls in space

Familial-responsibility for raising infants to functional adulthood would appear to be in the news. I may have a take hotter than Vance's and Weinstein's: the placenta was a degeneration, on our way to sentience. We humans, especially, lay eggs without the shell.

If we consider mammals before the Chicxulub hit, I understand we had a good deal of biodiversity, at least as much as them dinos. Placentals existed, but in South America so did marsupials. Chicxulub selected for tiny critters which could hide out and didn't require a lot of breathable air. It didn't select for intelligence - nor, I'll posit, for intelligence potential.

How dumb are marsupials, exactly? The koala is famously smooth brained but it has One Job, eating eucalyptus. How's Tasmania's Devil? How was the thylacine; how were the South American beasties? Absent a, you know, Hyperion-sized asteroid are we sure that tiny nocturnal lemurs would end up ahead of, say, a bipedal kangaroo-analogue?

The vertebrate sentients we meet from other planets could end up being marsupial.

Jurassic mammals

Science Advances has published on the lifecycles of Jurassic-era Dryolestes and Haldanodon. Late maturation was the hallmark.

If I may just-so this story, I think early maturation features in egg-born animals and among placentals. Eggs and placental-infants leave the mother at birth. The mother then not only must nurture the child, somehow; she must keep watch. With the help of grandmothers mayhap.

The mammal who always knows where her child is would be the marsupial. This blog's understanding is that mammals-as-such emerged earlier, early Jurassic.

We placentals start competing during the Cretaceous by which time South America was its own continent. (Unsure about Australia preChicxulub; the famous marsupials down there now had rafted over from South America, but echidnas and platypodes remain a thing.)

Watch for a retraction, if you care

Vox Day and the "died suddenly" cult seem keen on some paper about the VAXX being a nanomachine. Sounds serious; sounds too hot for lizard-people journals like The Lancet much less Science. So: who published it? International Journal of Vaccine Theory Practice and Research. Sounds specialist.

It turns out to be a journal featured on, er, Retraction Watch. This is usually a site for that Replication / Reproducibility Crisis, usually a prime source for us "deniers".

I can make two predictions: first, the nanobot paper will be retracted; second, the VAXX folks are going to ignore the retraction, move onto the next shiny thing, and keep being ghouls when some middle-aged wine aunt dies. (Not that I'll miss her much, either.)

This blog stands by its position that Long Covid and vaccine side-effects both exist, but that the former is worse. It follows that the strictures imposed for social-distancing (and masking) slowed the spread enough for mandatory vaccinations to, basically, kill the bug by summer 2021. For every one Wojcicki down, hundreds of thousands of Millennial / Gen-X single white women are still up. They are not going to die in time for this November's election. They all agree with me that being a "Karen" saved their lives and saved the lives for those they love.

Luckily for Trump, it was his vaccine all along. Maybe Trump should run on it? and maybe Pfizer should advertise accordingly.

Texas defends Mars from our colonists

I napped off so am awake a little later. The big news is ... The News. Drudge Report notes this News, then Richard M.: a pollution-problem just north of the Rio Bravo delta.

This is a Texas State agency, their Commission on Environmental Quality; not the EPA. I would take it more seriously. Also out: Shotwell's rebuttal. We don't have Robert Zimmerman's rebuttal yet except that he dislikes CNBC's reportage, for which he has a point.

What TxCEQ mainly has noted is mercury in the water. The agency blames the deluge system which was forced upon SpaceX after that notable launchpad blast last year. It sprays a lot of water against jets of high-temperature exhaust. The exhaust should just be more water (as steam) with carbon-dioxide and maybe trace monoxides and nitrogen oxides. But the temperatures also might cause engine damage "ablation", which adds metals to the water.

The behindtheblack commentariat is skeptical that the engines should own any mercury, and certainly the cargo won't. Wouldn't mercury be bad for other metals? But there may exist mercury in the fuel as was sent down to Boca Chica. The volume of fuel all ejected at one time may eject a dose of mercury.

When Leo disavowed his own Tome

Dioscorus and Chaeremon to the Roman Legates, AD 497, claimed that Leo's letter, which since it needeth no introduction must be XXVIII the Tomus ad Flavianum, was translated by Nestorius' party before Chalcedon accepted it.

Our good Catholic Encyclopedia doesn't mention this kerfuffle, and I was inclined to ignore it. But: we do find in letter CXXIV to Palaestina that Leo disliked the first Greek translation. In CXXXI Leo asks Julian of Cos for a new translation; in CXXX he endorses this(?) new translation - although these two letters do not exist in English.

BACKDATE 8/15

Libellus

"Libel" is an accusation. In English law, this has the connotation of a false one. It derives from the old Christian libelli: a message of ritualised anathema against the wrong Christians. Once successfully libelled, the target Christians entered infamy as haeretics and lost their places in the Diptych canons. The time machine reveals that Roger Pearse is going to alert us to some old libels.

Translated here in 2022 is much of the correspondence of the Roman bishops from AD 496-520. On the Roman side, Anastasius II and Hormisdas; on the Constantinopolitan side, emperors Anastasios and Justin, and patriarch Epiphanios (this post shall stick with -us).

We get here several libelli, starting from Dioscorus Alexandrene of Ephesian (in)fame. Hormisdas is going to lump Dioscorus with Eutyches in a libellus of his own. John II of Cappadocia delivers his own libellius to the Romans agreeing with their bishop.

The translator ubipetrus2019 finds most-interesting Epistle 80 - rather, "LXXX", coming from Rome as it did. Hormisdas in his own time couldn't get many bishops to sign his bill, which Americans will note as both post-facto and of attainder. The bishop of old Roma - whom I have not been hailing "Pope" - grovels to Epiphanius and by-proxy to Justin and prince Justinian, advising the New Rome they not even raise the name of Peter. The blog, "Ubi Petrus Ibi Ecclesia", intends to muse upon that term rather than to prove it.

To sixth-century Rome, Chalcedon is what matters - and not the "Papacy". Keep this in mind when Saint Martin Confessor convenes the bishops to the Lateran in the 640s. Also of interest Nestorius' spectre floats around mostly as a haeretic boogaboo - with one exception.

Looking around, Volker Menze (2008) doi 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199534876.003.0003 suggests that the libelli where they condemn nonChalcedonians ... put the latters' back up. Menze argues that it gave motive to, say, Egypt to create their own church. This couldn't happen under Justinian but it broke out hard under the younger Justin.

BACKDATE 8/15

Ancient East Eurasia

As sequel to Out-Of-Iran we have Jacob Harringer. As noted some populations went through the tiger-infested surroundings of the Plateau. Some also struck out southeast, to Sahul; and that's whence the bulk of Asian ancestry.

This is the ancestry of the first modern-humans as encountered native "Mousterian" Neanders in Europe, preserved Bacho-Kiro and Oase. Problem: these FAILED. Europe gets its hunter-gatherers later. Harringer isn't discussing them except inasmuch as GoyetQ116–1 preserves their descendents in a quarter of their own genome.

After Bacho-Kiro / Oase split off northwest, next to exit the south-central-Asian hills was a "ghost", not presently found in archaeology. This genome is found instead deep in New Guinean and Australian genomes - like paraDenisovans. I don't know when they met any Denisovans, if it was when they were alone or if their New Guinean descendents did. I do know they didn't touch Timor.

BACKDATE 8/13

Beware the Internet

It's amusing to watch free-speech advocates get burned by the fake-news they permit, as happened to Musk yesterday - and to HBDChick, and to other twits on X.

Mind, if "Two Tier" Starmer hasn't considered reviving the Transportation before, he's assuredly pondering it now. So don't lose track of those windproof earmuffs just yet.

All this came yesterday. This morn a rogue website hijacked my (Brave) browser mimicking a Windows Defender alert, complete with computerised female voice. It expanded over the whole screen, and was not closable like a Brave window. It probably could have been dropped by Task Manager but I just rebooted to be sure. What website was I on, you ask? Yahoo.com, that's what. Luckily despite my worry about what was happening to this machine I did not call the phone number proffered. I'm getting fairly wise to red flags.

So when I hear of a Tim Walz horse story from 1995 West Point just before the man moved out... again, I'd not waste time on that. There are plenty of serious stories like, oh, the pro-MAP legislation and that whole lying-about-the-service-record thing.

Out of... Iran

Eurasian human diversity has a Planet Nine issue. Eurasia was first of the Novae-Terrae, our people branching from East Africa in the earlier(?) 60skBC. But our common ancestor isn't that old; excepting "Basal Eurasian" it's more like 45kBC. That implies a bottleneck where a tight population could survive on Stone Age, preSolutrean tech - which implies, besides time, space.

The Iranian plateau is now recommended.

They wouldn't have called it "Iran" at the time - you'd have to pick between those old isolates like Burushaski, Sumerian, and Elamite; arguably also Dravidian, and Northeast Caucasian, and maybe whatever-it-was they spoke in the IVC. Mind: any cluster of absolutely unrelated languages in the same (approximate) place points to a refugium. See also: Mesoamerica, Iberia, and that Caucasus.

We don't have the fossils; this study exists so someone can look for the fossils. Should the Iranians' god allow it.

BACKDATE 8/12

Starliner be boned

VodkaPundit notes how Boeing is reporting a $125m loss and musing about total failure, with NASA publicly showing less than full trust in Starliner to work.

Meanwhile Starliner needed a big software update.

Andrew McCarthy demonstrates how, when someone asks for a source, he's almost never on the level. I wonder if Bayes might ponder if the existence of replyguys suggests that the OP is right.

A disputed succession

The regnal deeds of Cyrus, Cambyses, Darius, and Xerxes are all well documented: the Greeks, the Aramaic correspondence in Yeb "Elephantine", the Elamite tablets, the last Jewish prophets, and of course Darius' own propaganda which also informed the Greeks (Herodotus didn't care to fact-check Behistun). But, er... then what?

Artaxerxes Longhand was a significant "what" over the middle fifth century, ruling until 424 BC. He'd planned a succession... but here, the oh-so-literate Greeks don't help much. They were too busy in one of those Pelopponesian Wars. The Jews are basically running out of Scripture by then too. Per hbdchick, Matthew Stolper wrote an entire book collating a subBabylonian witness, from old Nippur. And the book can be d/l'ed for free! Per Stolper, 424 BC occasionned a local Mortgage Crisis. Problem: the book is from 1985 in our own era. How does it hold up?

Checking around, DT Potts offers a hundred-page chapter on the Achaemenids from start to finish. Wherever Stolper comes up, Potts endorses him.

The issue here is that we actually do have a Greek narrative account. Rather: we did. He was Ctesias, physician to Artaxerxes II. Ctesias talks about Artaxerxes' successors, Xerxes II and Sogdianus, prior to Darius the Bastard born prince Ochus. Another problem: Ctesias is the only source for Xerxes II or Sogdianus. Potts generally trusts Ctesias... but Stolper didn't.

That may be why Potts trusts Stolper, come to think of it. By keeping the Greeks to the side, Stolper could run the data from the Nippur archive. This is what flags the mortgage-crisis of 424 BC. Something had screwed the economy. (Not that anybody dares make analogies, here.)

One issue might be that the big Persian names in the Nippur archive are simply not the Persian names in Ctesias. Prince Arsames shows up but he's an absentee, the 'Abd al-'Aziz over in Egypt keeping that place sweet. Arsames isn't touching the mess in the 'Iraq. Well maybe not directly.

Stolper overall ponders if Ctesias has been mistreated by his tradents, such that what everyone says is "Ctesias" be extracted from his work, and massaged by various interested parties like, oh, Plutarch. It's Stolper's thought that Ctesias is best used for Artaxerxes II, a man he knew personally. Mind: Artaxerxes II had suffered a disputed succession of his own... as "fellow" Greek Xenophon told us from the other side of that dispute, which was the side of the bastard's queen Paurushatis / Parysatis and their son Cyrus. Anyway Artaxerxes won so Xenophon had to march his gitz off north, leaving Ctesias to tell the rest of the tale.

Back to Potts, a chapter this large could be a book if expanded even slightly. He seems to know his stuff. I reckon people would've bought the book.

Looks like WSJ was right

In an exquisite exercise in timing, Samafor put on blast the Journal along with maybe half the Times for accepting the Israeli line that UNRWA had some Hamas in it.

Nine employees just got fired for helping along with 7 October. Ten months later. I doubt this would have happened if the WSJ hadn't run its piece.

Worst hit: Ron Unz.

Far Europa

Still on the Alfvén constraint, let's try some speculation. We are here to revisit Trefils-Sommers, Imagined Life.

Propose a world in the upper-HZ of a M star, like LHS 1140 b. Eyeball planet; but here terran in mass, so not LHS 1140 b. Also unlike that world, I'm going subAlfvén (as most are), so: no atmo.

This planet will like LHS 1140 b remain cold enough for ice; not as much ice, to be sure, but ice on the darkside. Liquid water needs an atmo, but solid water doesn't. And on the darkside nobody cares about stellar flareups.

Basically what we need from Imagined Life is to promote that tidally-locked world as, in part, a dead end. Instead it leads to its under-ice ocean world - here, perhaps several under-ice seas each shallower than Europa's, which turns out better for life than Europa; or its ice world, where are cracks.

Please stay away from Gliese 1132

With the Alfvén constraint blasting havoc in water-poor planets, "Andrei" is bringing Gliese 1132 b. Suspected is vulcanism.

I'd actually already looked at this when Wiki cared, in 2021. The one post-Wiki dedicate paper which Google Scholar coughs up is this 2023 paper. This covered two transits via Webb, one with vapour and N₂O, as we'd thought in 2021... and one with, nothing. Stellar contamination is cited.

This points to starspots on GJ 1132. Where are starspots, we must fear flare. The planet is occasionally irradiate - like poor blasted Proxima. And at 19 times Earth flux... okay, let's consider how the darkside looks.

GJ 1132 b and c are not particularly resonant; 11:2, feh. They are however eccentric and c weighs in over 2.64 M_🜨. b should be volcanic, as sometimes perhaps detected. These gasses could be temporary spurts from volcano on the starside. I'm not even sure something this eccentric must be 1:1 locked, it could be 2:3 or 3:2 like Mercury.

Eitherwise, b looks horrible. Atmo may well be as sporadic as the radiation it gets, blasted out by flare, just to replenish it.

Then there's c at 1.9 flux... like Venus. As a superterrene there's no good core (Venus isn't even superterrene, and has no good core). This also looks horrible, whether its atmo is blasted out or no.

I'm not taking my starship near this place. Sorry, Andrei.

When Mark was an epitome of Matthew

The "Gospel of the Ebionites" is associated with Jewish-Christian sects and - by Epiphanius - with Cerinth the haersiarch. Wilhelm Schneemelcher (d. 1928) thought it was a stripped-down Matthew, and that's the last word at Wikipedia. Here, I would muse upon Epiphanius and his Panarion.

It happens the Panarion has suffered by interpolation. It enjoyed great popularity: it was adapted by many, not least John Damascene. Its standalone text itself got glossed on its way to mediaeval times. A few days ago Richard Carrier raised flags about how this text handled the Library of Alexandria.

I know of one gospel as of the late second century dismissed as the truncation of Matthew - our gospel of Mark, as in fact Augustine and his Church would remember it. During this Marcan darkage, Hippolytus of Rome preceded Epiphanius as a refuter of all haeresies. As Mark struggled back into canon, those haeretics still using Mark might not be accepted as using Mark, instead using something spurious (like "Peter" is spurious). Maybe Clement of Alexandria could get wind of a "secret Mark" as was not Matthew; but he was writing later than Hippolytus, and was more intelligent than was Epiphanius.

So these Mark-using haeretics were first blamed for using truncated-Matthew, in second-century haeresiologies; subsequently parroted in Epiphanius and various glossers, who knew Mark but didn't remember Mark's time on the outs.

Red star Lagranges

Anton the Wonderful raises Edward Brobruno and James Green: that 3.81 light years toward Sagittarius, sits a halopoint. Around this point, could be captured a rogue planet. In theory, we could take even a brown dwarf or a supercool here.

Petrov admits: these have not been found here. As youtube commenter @patrickunderwood5662 notes, if lowly Sol has a halopoint then so does... every other star. Do we know where these other stars might have Lagrange capture halo?

I suspect that we're ignoring the gravities of passant stars as might interfere. From Sol, lots of stars barrel within 3.81 ly and then barrel out, so as to disturb this.

I submit that the systems most-likely to own Lagrange are the lower-gravity systems, which will hug those points closer, so less at risk of Gliese-710s. Not Proxima Centauri of course, I am thinking unbounds.

Coincidentally I hear that commentary is now possible on arXiv papers so - go to it, if you like.