The Goddess of Reqem

Davila has posted a 2017 report on the winged-lion temple at Reqem, called Petra. Which report we can now ignore - because Davila also links the finds. This is the smallest temple of four.

Of course the first chapter I scrolled-at was chapter 17 on the inscriptions. Here is presented a fine lapidary on how to do the temple sacrifice, assuredly the most important inscription for them and - had it survived in full - for us. This may well be the template for such inscriptions as featured once in the Jerusalem Temple, the "Temple Scroll" being a blueprint for what to incise on that Temple once the Essenes ever got back(?) in there. Unfortunately - for Nabatists - Reqem's marble is light on specifics to Reqem.

Nah. Here the best chapter is seventh chapter, R. Wenning's on Sculpture. This is where is pondered, which god(dess). But again: Manôt laughs at us mortals. We've had a lot of speculation on "al-'Uzza!!" but this is based on something called a "baetyl", which might be associated with Her elsewhere. An inscription refers to a "Goddess of Hayyân" - but Who? Those baetyls are early - and shared with a clear Isis from Egypt. So this temple hosts that sort of goddess, a royal rather than Fortuna. It turns out, in polytheism, a temple is supposed to be the home of one goddess in particular. A foreign deity can approach Her as a guest - a foreigner like Isis. We do not know Reqem's Hostess.

The shakiest platform in the solar-system

ToughSF links Erik van Helvoirt over Venus ~2013. Van Helvoirt now works at Guerrilla Games of Horizon fame. I don't think there's a game attached to this pic.

This is a balloon, dangling a station with ... panels. Probably not radiators, probably solar. For them to work consistently where the balloon itself isn't overhead this is likely a polar latitude. I wonder if that's the vortex.

ToughSF says the balloon is helium. Commenters ponder whether hydrogen could work. I suspect hydrogen would burn in sulfur-dioxide - but we might not have sufficient SO₂ way up here to spark it up. More serious is that hydrogen isn't that much more common than helium up here. Best I think would be superheated... CO₂, with a balloon reinforced against implosion. Leave the hydrogen for the colonists to sip.

With all those dangling panels, though, how are they protecting from that insane windspeed, especially polar?

The anarcho-syndicalist future

The Weinersmiths are still at it - talking communities in space. They're going with small-scale communes. If I were a Marxist (a good part of my economics is at least paraMarx) small communes would be how I'd scale it.

I suggest they trade amongst each other. Asteroid-to-asteroid, largescale cargo-transfer would work much like living on the asteroid itself. Hence why I keep harping on cyclers.

We might even have some work on microcargo over astronomical distances. Apparently no less than Paul Krugman (pdf) - back in 1978 - wrote a paper on trade over relativistic speeds. That would be microcargoes from Earth to some very distant colony; Krugman says "Trantor" but is clearly pondering Barnard's or αCen-C. One might ponder also a Kuiper colony, say on Eris. A central Federal Reserve Of Venus probably wouldn't be a thing - at least, we'd hope not.

Eccentricity timeseries

This blog has applied von Zeipel to two systems: GJ 229 and ToI 1408. I have a notion on how to apply this to others.

Say we have a two-body system of a star and a brown-dwarf maybe even red; the latter is visible to our 'scopes. These bodies define the inclination of the overall system. Introduce a[nother] planet around the main star. It is eccentric and inclined. Radial-velocity will catch its eccentricity. The inclination - relative to Earth - is unknown.

Von Zeipel suggests that we could run a time series on the eccentricity and also on the amplitude - apparent msini. As the eccentricity changes, given constant mass so should the amplitude. Constraints on the mass should be visible given better spectrometry.

It gets better: as inclination relative to us hits 90°, which I've admitted won't happen with GJ 229, we will start seeing transits. Yea even unto 1 AU from the host star. On the flipside some of our further-out transits, if they do have large outer planets, stand to shift away from transit over time. Luckily we've now had those snapshots.

Exciting as all this is for mostly-future researchers, I must warn that planets subject to ultraMilankovitch will not be habitable. They'll have ultraIceAges.

Can Tim Walz sue?

Theodore Beale promoted a tweet by the not-so-black "insurrectionist", Docnetyoutube. Cerno and Ace stayed away from the accusation.

Beale is an old hand at not committing to direct slander, instead bringing up tangential evidence and letting others do the slander for him. But if website owners aren't keen on having governments go after "misinformation", I suggest to those owners they engage in less of it.

The root of Christian vegetarianism

A few weeks back I had the dubious pleasure of sitting across a family with a strident female vegetarian. Her case was that Jesus was himself a vegetarian. As far as I knew that is untrue; Jewish Galileans ate fish and also herded flocks, and (especially) made use of animal parchment. Of all the misdeeds our Lord imputed upon Herod's Temple, the sacrifices were not among them. But.

There is a tradition in Christianity of red-meat-avoidance, especially during Lent, but also some ascetics did without meat all their lives. Some were in the Ebionite sect. These were - famously - in the tradition of saints James and Peter and not of Paul. These were Jewish Christians. Dr Yitzhaq Feder is now reporting that Judaism, also, had a ... mixed understanding of eating meat. The Second Temple take, which is the Sadducean and Essenian take I understand, is to eat only the meat as comes from the Levite Priests. Essenes weren't part of this Temple so didn't eat it.

So I am - retroactively - glad I did not pipe up; notwithstanding it'd be rude, and just tag myself as yet another annoying mansplainer.

Although, now equipped with TheTorah: to argue for Christ's vegetarianism would would be to read the Cross as the abolition of the Temple Sacrifice - which it is, in our tradition. Like the Essenes, we'd not have a substitute until the Messianic Banquet. So - if we in this Goyisch Israel be using leather and vellum, what do we do with the meat?

Spectrometry will be cheaper

One constraint on finding stuff like Barnard b out there is spectral noise. This affects radial-velocity shifting and planets themselves.

Smaller spectrometers can be put on space-telescopes like Webb, lowering the mass/science ratio (if that's a term). They're also pondering fluorescence detection on account, hey, small, doesn't have to take up a hospital's entire basement.

Gems set in pewter

I was listening to Garbage - the band - which brought to mind, the Late Antique style of art. Curtis Yarvin didn't think much of it, at least not in Latin; I suspect he'd not appreciate Syriac either. What we are seeing, in Symmachus and for that matter in Claudian, is the Jeweled Style.

Virgil had an intertext. This intertext was in Greek. His Latin readers would know the overall story. The likes of Ausonius by contrast lived later than Virgil, and were inhabiting a more Latin West. Such would lift passages from Latin poets; say, from Catullus. These are Member-Berries, as a mature satirist would call them.

The Late-Antique poets are barely known, even after Peter Brown's cheerleading of "Late Antiquity". I suspect Yarvin and Cahill wouldn't even mention them were it not for Michael Roberts' 1989 book on the topic. Late-Antique Latin literature doesn't always have the critical-editions we get from, oh, Tacitus. Even the Latin Josephus isn't up to par. So Roberts had to deal with bare manuscripts and, if fortunate, JP Migne.

Cillian O'Hogan has a good précis (pdf); also lately is a collection A late antique poetics?: The Jeweled Style revisited, which is reviewed in Spanish.

S2

From Harvard, in case anyone still cares: the 3.26 Gy carbonaceous impact.

This monster was 50-200 times Chicxulub. Luckily our life here 1.307 Gy on the mainsequence was still purple, not yet green.

It does bring up some interesting constraints on life elsewhere however. Lacking anything significant between the HZ out to the nearest gas giant: C bolides gonna bol'. S too. At the same time a reasonably-tectonic world might throw up some Siberian or Deccan flows.

We might get life but all the chaos will knock a lot of it down.

Karin, Koronis, Massalia

6% of our meteorites - on Earth - come from the famous Mars, Moon, Vesta trio. Those lack chondrules. We have now catalogued 70% others, of the noncarbonaceous chondrites: Karin, Koronis, Massalia.

Massalia makes up over half that 70%. This one spawned the L chondrites. Its breakup has been pinned to 466 Mya, that Ordovician mess, but also 40 Mya(?). Karin and Koronis sent H rocks down here, 5.7 and 7.6 Mya. Also see here.

Carbonaceous chondrites make up only 4.4% despite C asteroids being common up in actual Space - and delivering ruthenacious love to the dinosaurs. For this paucity, the papers blame... Earth: volatile-rich slushballs don't do well in our atmo. Also claimed: Ryugu and Bennu are basically the same, coming from the Polana breakup.

Seeing it coming

Sasha Yates is/was a middle-aged British man. I believe I went to school with the pyrsyn; it was then an all-boys' school, mostly for boarders. The spelling "Yates" rather than, oh, "Yeats" is a tip-off. So clearly David did not "identify" as female then.

I am aiming for the side of caution when I speak of our past, but will note here - for now - that we were in the process of more-or-less becoming friends, at first. This was the "third form" which Americans call the eighth grade. Yates and I were in the lower-level classes, where the bulk of the student-body had Latin and French; I approached this school with no Latin and with one year of French. Kids gotta hang together or they hang separately.

At some point the Yates I knew approached me to become Friends. I could hear the Capital-F in his emphasis. I associated "Friends" with some harassing phone-calls I'd received, at my parents' home, in earlier years. My initial reaction was that here was coming more harassment my-a-way. I figured that, whatever was going on in Yates' head, I didn't need that head anywhere near my person. So I distanced myself from him. Later I heard about some older - like 17 years old - boy who had been Asked To Leave for being perverted, named "Clements", or so I spelled it in my own head. Other boys in our mutual acquaintance rumoured that Clements' victim, and I hold fair to assume that he was a victim, was Yates.

Anyway Yates was already a misfit, and unlike my head Yates' head wasn't getting any smarter, so he left whilst I stayed.

I've hinted above that, when I came to this school, I did not come without some baggage. I hold fair to assume that Yates had come with some baggage as well. How we handle this baggage, would seem key. Sometimes I made poor choices, sometimes I didn't have choices; later I worked to make better choices, but I cannot say that I have lived my best possible life. I suspect that I have made better choices, overall, than Yates has made.

Did Zap Energy design the Epstein Drive?

LOLheadline, no. But... Zap's 9 October zeta-pinch actually does squeeze fusion and eject it... somewhere: so far... 1,080 consecutive pulses. The next step is to do this consistently over 120 minutes. A two hour thrust-burn, if not yet a power-plant and not yet Epstein, will assuredly do for pushing tonnes into a Hohmann and out again. X user named, er, @planefag is writing a hard SF around such a drive.

You don't launch this monster from any inhabited spot on Earth; I'd not even recommend a graphite-infused atoll. The SuperHeavy takes you up to orbit. But once in orbit, preferably far from satellites: vroom.

SuperHeavy is a gamechanger for orbit; a z-pinch drive would change the game for inner-system travel. Only missing step is infrastructure in the mid orbits: propellant depot, metal-recycling space junk factories, stuff like that. The z-pinch drive will take some decades to catch up to, say, the fission-even-fusion NERVA solutions or that fusion afterburner. So we can get those space stations up meanwhile.

Gliese 229's ABCs

Gliese 229 at 5.7612 parsecs out was the first brown dwarf system discovered, in 1995. At minimum 70 jovian mass, the orbiter annoyed researchers as a Dog Not Barking. This close it should have been big enough against a star faint enough, to see. When the orbiter was seen, almost face-on to our eyes: it was seen in 2008 as 950 K, seen as too dim - a mere T on the scale.

The mystery is solved: it's two. And their age can be measured therefore certainly that of their main star A. It helps I suppose that they can now bootstrap what Luhman 16 has taught us about binary "brownz" (per Razib).

That main star has planets, also; planet Ac - the second found - floats in the habitable zone. As a Msini=7 "super earth" around an Archaean star, it is not tidally-locked and has assuredly kept its atmo. Which is not to say that planets this large be life-candidates; it's like to be a Sudarsky II with some supercritical fluid below its clouds. Hence why I didn't take it seriously when sketching potential colonies.

Both A planets are eccentric. As for the BC brownz, they're 70 joves of mass periapse 29 × (1 - 0.853) = 4.263 AU. So... yeah, they're going to perturb orbits. One might apply von Zeipel to their dynamics. That's good mainly for telling us that the planets' inclinations are hard to constrain and subject to change. Although, they'll probably never transit their star to our sight.

Powering smallish balloons

I figured that our floating Venus habitats - "aerostat" in the jargon - will be doing jes'faaahn for power, getting 1.911 flux as they get. Larger ones can supplement that by heat-differential, dipping 10s-km conductive cables through the clouds. How about smaller ones?

It's a question I hadn't thought to ask, but the first Venereal habs will be small, aiming to scale-up; also, not everyone wants to live in a large city. For the floating suburbs, power can be beamed point-to-point. ToughSf is more considering tethering a balloon to the ground and running a current. There's no need on Venus' surface (wind power will do better) but I can easily this being nice for, say, highland Mars over those pesky dust storms.

The paper's source of the laser-beaming would be GEO. That orbit exists for Mars (Deimos is almost there already) and of course for Earth. Not so much Venus, absent an orbital ring; but as I noted, not much need. Another fine use will be in reducing solar-panel area in lower orbits.

For Mars they'll want a larger balloon painted gold - which as a side-effect means more surface-area.

Theodotus of Âmid

Why not wade back into the early-Islamic Jazira - here's a book on Theodotus of Amida. Unfortunately by Gorgias so you'll be paying through the large hooked nose; but this work seems better than, say, Michael Jackson Bonner's work over there. Because it's Hoyland and Palmer.

Palmer is an expert in west-Syrian text but didn't include this in The Seventh Century - on account it's not a chronicle, and might not be entirely west-Syrian (I'll get to this). Hoyland meanwhile gave this one a ringing endorsement in his own, some-years-later, Seeing Islam. That's my source for what follows, since I don't own their latest take.

Theodotus was a seminomadic saint of the region which had endured so much violence in the AG 950s / AD 640s. By his time the violence was over, and the victorious Arabs dealt with the region largely through Christian subordinates. These were a diverse set of Christian: the Vita comes through Joseph presbyter himself ordained by Jacobites. Their pope Julian had in fact ordained Theodotus as bishop of hometown Âmid around 1000 / 690, but Theodotus (like James of Edessa AD 684-8) didn't much appreciate so worldly an honour, so retired to Qenneshre to be a monk.

I am somewhat-interested in Theodotus' career before Julian (999/687); the 990s/680s had descended into war again this time between the Umayyads and... well, everybody. Part of Theodotus' ambit was Nisibin. Nisibin belonged to those whom Joseph will call The Heretics. In Joseph's time, also Julian's time: Jacobites applied the term mainly to the Nestorians (who returned the favour of course). But Theodotus went to the house of the heretics... just as freely as with the orthodox. Theodotus even got arrested for Melkite ("Roman") sympathies. Pseudo-Methodius was similarly culturally Monophysite and uninterested in picking sectarian fights with fellow Christians.

Joseph reports that Theodotus wrote many letters in "the land"; going as far as to "Beth-Hesne" which "house of fortresses" is marked as Roman territory. The disciples of James of Edessa owned such a collection of James' letters; I assume Joseph owned a similar collection from Theodotus, using them to compile his Vita. But, like the Ninevene Christians, the latter letter-collection hasn't survived the Turks and the Daesh.

The reasons the Jacobite hierarchy wanted to claim Theodotus are because he was known as holy by everyone, and because he, um, mostly lived there. I wonder if Theodotus' relative tolerance spurred bishop George's anathema against itinerants like him.

The priests of Shu

From the land of the undomesticated kittycats, Archaeology is summarising the Shu, at now Sanxingdui. I blame allergies.

Anyway, these were postdiluvian contemporaries with the Shang state. The Shang spoke and wrote Chinese. I always say "pots ain't people - they're language". The Shu, in a valley somewhat separate from the Shang with the tech at the time, did not use the same pots. They liked anthropomorphic designs if stylised, rather like the Maya; the Shang didn't go for that. Also the Shang used bone to cast oracles - luckily for us readers - of which, we've no evidence for the Shu. The two cultures differed, in short, probably not even speaking the same language. But it seems they may have agreed upon similar notions on the State.

When I talk about "Shang" I use the state's own name for itself - because they told us that name, in their inscriptions. Later Chinese recalled the state as "Yin", from their family name (the Zhou let them keep a duchy at Song). We have "Shu" from a "Chronicles of Huayang" of which I hadn't heard. Anyway it too is a later source. So, I use "Shu" for want of any better.

In Mesoamerica, Tlaxcala had a republic and the Aztecs had an amir. The Aztec amir was in-process of making a caliph of himself when the Spaniard showed up. What we're now calling "China", in Shang times, seems more like the Bronze Age over in Mesopotamia. Mitanni and Hatti were not the same, but their mutual treaties could agree upon what a "king" was and what a "temple" was. Likewise, it seems, the Shang and the Shu agreed upon the correct duties of a king and of a priesthood.

The Shang's holy kingship failed its test in 1046 BC, when the Zhou mounted a revolution. Anyang - last city of the Shang - was abandoned, left to modern Chinese to dig back out. The Zhou would rule with more thought to local concerns, and left to others the glory of the gods. Likewise it seems that the Shu faced a contemporary test: priests and nobles alike vanished from Sanxingdui, after which the nobles reappear at Jinsha - without the priests. Before the nobles left Sanxingdui they buried a lot of bronzes - not recast them, just buried them. There never was much of an "iron age" in China, so the archaeologists judge this burial as a simple waste of money. It must have been done for ideology.

I am somewhat reminded of how the priesthood of the Incas gathered wealth unto itself; or maybe the nobles of the Maya.

Unfortunately the Shu didn't leave any writing - like the early Shang and Erlitou didn't leave writing. More likely is that they did have writing but we're not lucky enough to own (say) oracle-bones... because the Shu didn't use bone for oracles. If I had to guess I'd pin the Shu for a Tanggut/Tibetan lot.

The Columbus Day hangover

The Judio-Theory always smelled wrong to me on account of how apocalyptically tradcath the Admiral ended up. For those still paying attention, last weekend we got a flurry of silly on muh genetics. What we have here is failure to replicate... again.

Off to the next shiny thing I suppose.

Hats off to SpaceX

Just a short note that, although I woke up too late to see the launch and stage-separation - both boring at this point - I did catch (heh) the retrieval of the SuperHeavy. I was not expecting it all to be so precise.

Of course Musk and Shotwell (heh heh) have had a lot of time to plot out contingencies by now. Musk in particular has had nothing better to do than to appoint himself as Troll Lord on X. That's our runaway government's fault more than it is, Musk's.

Interesting fire at the end of the booster-catch; there shouldn't really be all that much fuel for a fire, when the booster done boosted and done ... done. But that's why we test. Nobody should be expecting a big bang; the fear was a crash and broken equipment. Since they have everything else intact they'll know what to reinforce for next-time.

Zim is calling 100%. I can't argue with that. Shame on FAA and on all the other clowns for trying to stop this.

Hydrothermal

Last month I missed a speculation on K2-18's planet: that it might be hydrothermal. That is: it indeed has a water layer below the clouds (sulfur/carbon dominant); in a supercritical state. Like the carbon-dioxide defining Venus' "sea level".

LEO to GEO

Tom Mueller's been busy since losing his job with the Raptors (although he's kept that on his resume). ToughSf points to Helios.

This is a nonnuclear solution for tugging cargo from LEO (halfway-to-anywhere) to Beyond. They're going with five tons - I assume nonmetric - for LEO>GEO in 24 hours. Metricbros can point to the 67 kN spec. For the SF auteurs amongst us: here's our baseline.

One assumption is that multitonne widgets will be had in LEO for pushing off past the Van Allens. This is the SuperHeavy future; Mueller seems to be aiming at Starship-without-Raptor. Hey why not; Starship's job is to get back to Earth, not to muck around in orbit.

Jizya is not a Persian term

The "head tax" is a Persian concept, applied upon the various Aramaeans whom the Sasanians ruled. On the word they used for it: Mustafa Akyol, whose Mutazilite Islamic Moses book I've just read, really needs to quit citing Ziauddin Ahmad on some Persian etymology for "Kizyat" or whatever.

Several circumstantial problems attracted my suspicions.

For one, where both later Semitic and Iranian languages have an -ah suffix, Semitic tends to reveal that theirs came from -at. Mediaeval Iranian feminines go more to the -ag, -aj, -ak, and -aq. So I'd not expect a "kizyat" in Middle-Persian, only in mediaeval postIslamic Farsi... or in later Arabic anachronisms like in Tabari then Bal'ami.

Also, where we catch late-Antique Aramaeans mentioning the Iranian-imposed head tax, as Goldblatt cites the local Talmud: it is krg'. Take off the emphatic suffix, do some aspiration and out comes the kharaj about which we (also) hear so much under the later Umayyads. (Jews were the suckers who had to pay the thing.) Note meanwhile that -j.

Add to all this that I don't see jizya or gzitho applied to tribute (westSyriac mdatto) until, what, the Maronite Chronicle and then Theodotus of Âmid(a).

Akyol is correct on the concept but is clearly a better philosophical-historian than he is a philologist, so should be more careful when dabbling into the latter.

The nonfiery car battery

Living in one of North America's xeric provinces - we shouldn't dignify this one-party votefarm with the title of "state" - we are subject to fires. One cause of fires is the electric vehicle, especially large ones like cars. Apparently burned-down pine forests are greener.

Which is not to knock the technology - when it gets there. This safety leap counts as getting there. Like nonmeat food is getting there.

Carbon-chondrite roundup

In last-week news I didn't quite get to, Ceres is muddy and Ryugu is CI chrondritic. I'd thought Ryugu was Cg and baked closer - so, no real retractions needed here. Seems like that middle-road between "Cereslike" and "Pallaslike".

Bennu at least can be mined for food. Ceres may well earn her name as the Demeter of our system. Pace the Expanse, she won't run out.

Weather control and mitigation

Technology exists for altering hurricane strength. The tech has been touted all my life for Cloud Seeding - which precipitates out moisture, lessening the water damage (if not wind). Apparently there exist more options, found by patent. After all, Einstein was a patent clerk, in 1910s Suisse; government employees in America ought to be twice as wise and thrice as diligent. Especially those versed in American corporate law.

Or mayyybe the US suffers a known "patent troll" problem permitted by... overbroad, vague, and frivolous patents.

As to the usual "global warming" culprit: greenery in the Antar'tic outskirts is happening, and perhaps those Sahara monsoons. Those shouldn't concern us. But the cost may be more-severe warming at the Gulf of Mexico as the same time as the eastern Atlantic. As more people move to affected coasts, like the Florida coasts, they should prepare accordingly. DeSantis as governor has been preparing accordingly, at least for Helene last week.

As to Milton: its track looks like the 1848 track. That is not a common track - note the year - but it has happened, and when it happens it is Bad. Please stay safe out there. And stay sane.

UPDATE 10/26: Viganò, h/t Vox Day. Richard Hanania would say that Trump is a sight better than "MAGA".

Altering asteroid spin

ToughSf points to Robert Hoyt et al., "WRANGLER: Capture and De-Spin of Asteroids & Space Debris" (pdf). Up to a megaton of spinning material can be tethered and despun.

The "N" in WRANGLER stands for "net", so those rubble-piles should be despinnable too. Or, for colonists: made to spin faster. Newton is Newton.

The god walking among us

Chesterton, followed by Bloom, pointed out that Mark presents Jesus not as a mere man, but as a god walking among us. Contrast, say, Last Temptation. What other gods be like that?

Vridar a while back noted that where the Jews had "El" this just means "God". ("Baal" isn't so different.) The actual god would be Hadad the sky god. When in Genesis "God calls fire from God in Heaven", this means a god on Earth was calling for Hadad.

Gods walking on Earth in human implies something more like a demigod. That wouldn't be Hadad.

Jesus would be more like Dionysius - oft-cited in the scholarship. Another possibility is Heracles. The Gauls had Ogmios; although the Celts envisioned him as an older man, Greek visitors worked to harmonise Ogmios' legendarium with the Twelve Labours. The Greeks figured that Ogmios is how Heracles behaved later in life.

Ochre Pottery on wheels

Uttar Pradesh has yielded some impressive news: Late Bronze chariots. Contemporaneous with the Mitanni.

I'd thought Mitanni-like Aryans - "sintashta" if you don't like that word - didn't get across the Indus until the civilisation over there (who near-certainly did not speak Indic) had collapsed.

As to what the culture had, besides Ochre Pottery and QuicKarts - they also had symbolic burials, of animals. Like dogs and birds. Not horses? Among the human ("primary") burials is one decorated with double-horned helmets and sacred fig leaves. (LOLvikings.) Apparently that fig remains important in Hindu culture today.

'Tis possible that the chariot was such a killer-app that paraMitanni took over northern India without changing the language... yet. With the fall of the already-weak IVC, the locals may have been so impoverished they had no choice but to accept now-Vedic overlords. See also Hungary.

Third time lucky

Barnard's Star! - I can hear the groans from here. No seriously, Barnard's; or Presently-Proxima Ophiuchi which Gliese catalogued 699. The ESPRESSO "VLT" 'scope found this one.

As a radial nontransit this reading has a minimum mass: 0.37 M_⊕ sin i. If it were a transit it would sit three times Mars' mass and half Venus'.

The orbit is 3.1533 ±0.0006 days so 0.023 AU. Zero eccentricity and no moon at this distance, so we should all safely assume no rotation. This late in the system's age we can disregard tectonics.

They are talking other signals: 3.15, 4.12, 2.34, and 6.74 days. The furthest would be 0.17 AU, the closest - which skates very close to the confirmed planet - 0.019 AU. The outer one would get incident-flux 2.4 S_⊕ and the inner, 10.1, all more than Venus gets. I'd rather they'd calculated the irradiance of the planet they tell us they'd confirmed, before asserting a "temperature". Overall flux looks upward of Mercury's 6.674.

Add all this up: Barnard b has no air. They're guessing a sunfacing albedo of rock, 0.3; for 400 K. Back of the place should retain some ice tho'.

Abiotic natural gas!

... in Mars, h/t Reynolds. That'd be pretty awesome for colonists if they had oxygen, which will still need breaking down from concentrated CO₂ and water.

Still: nice that it doesn't need to be drained from oxygen and water - and hydrocarbons - which colonists will jealously need. Just dig it out!

Assembling planet 2.5

Unlike Hollister David's permashuttles, the 13:10:8 station doesn't skim a major planet. How do we build it?

A station needs: protection from radiation, air to breathe, and water to drink. This being nowhere at first, we import metallic canisters full of volatiles, and keep the canisters. The canisters should possibly be designed to be easily split lengthwise.

Just to fire the engines and let them cool down, will require radiators; and the station itself needs to reflect and otherwise-handle 1.35 flux. The station can import radiators too.

One bit of good news is that also had here, is hydrogen. It'll be rushing past with much energy. This could be used to reduce oxygen off of imported rocks, and of rusts as happen inside the station. This industry should happen on the sun-facing shield protecting the livable parts of the station; the water drains toward the station which catches the water.

The solar-wind will push us outside this orbital position. To mitigate that, we chose this position for its resonance. Maybe (somehow) we can shift angles, not to get pushed out, when Venus sails into place to pull us back in. And as a rule we should prefer to radiate heat away from the Sun and not toward it.

How do we slow an incoming craft? I don't know that we want to be losing volatiles - or even tungsten. Consider: an Orion as doesn't eject a tungsten plate, but ejects ceramic plates. They handle the heat better than any metal; besides, metals are heat-conductors which we'll want for the radiators.

The postHezb Levant

"Vox Day" Beale thinks that the Lebanese parastate Hizb-Allâhi, which has as many Latin spellings as the Devil has names, can outlast the present festivities. He argues leadership doesn't matter when the people are united. Richard Hanania points out meanwhile that expertise and interpersonal connexions are difficult to replace; especially if your paymasters don't natively speak a Semitic language.

The glory of being a parastate is that you are Resistance. You can claim to be fighting the zionist occupation even if you are not yourself being occupied, as Gaza was not occupied until last October. Hezb were rather the gaolers of Lebanon, and the bullies of Syria and Iraq.

One issue with the presence of a parastate is that they cow the legal state to keep a lighter hand - as in Mexico today. Not entirely unwelcome.

Overall, though; Levantine Sunnis seem not entirely unhappy with the present lack of Shi'a leadership.

A few months back Redmayne-Titley splurted "Hizbullah is Lebanon!". I believe this thesis can be tested. It's more likely that Hezb was just Iran as seen by the fireworks last night.

Beale was more fact-based yesterday on what Israel's next step is. It makes sense that Israel might set up a buffer in the south to push the Hezb remnant back, leaving the more-intact Lebanese army to reassert its lost sovereignty. But today Beale got stupid again.

Banned books week

The annual American Library Association's lovefest is on, to celebrate the new Seleucid year of 2336 I guess.

The public library is run by the same postmenopausal Presbyterians as run the public school. The neglectful and/or Munchausen parents who dump their failed abortions on the school don't care enough to keep them from the (similarly-run) library. "Banned" from the school means endorsed for the library. It is a shell game.

If "public" means anything it means "alternative to corporate".

Therefore any public library has a conflict-of-interest when it comes to books that are banned from schools.

If the public library was honest, it should showcase books banned from Amazon. Books like Jared Taylor's White Identity. Books like Ibn Warraq's The Islam in Islamic Terrorism.