"We are the dead", says John McCrae; arrogating to himself their stilled voice. It gets worse from there: Take up our quarrel with the foe: ... If ye break faith with us who die / We shall not sleep
.
So we're to fight forever, then? or to fight until ... when exactly? Assuredly once the Hun is gone from Flanders, but then what? What are your conditions for peace, dead man?
It was a 1915 poem, and it shows.
Since national-socialism is in the news again lately, thanks to Nick Fuentes and those who are taking him seriously for their own reasons, I've been alerted to Europa: The Last Battle. This is a NSDAP answer to Frank Capra. And it has pushback, from one "Consistent_Score_602" over on Reddit.
I'll lay out my cards that I sympathise more with CS602 than with her(?) target. I've been reading Liaquat Ahmed (2009); he's pointed out the bankers didn't want the First World War, including the Jewish bankers. There was in 1914 a transnational economy. Jews are supposed to thrive in that state of affairs.
On the flip side, I was unimpressed with CS602's comment on what started that War Of The World in the first place. Germany declared war on Russia, yes. Did she have to? Russia had already ordered a mobilisation. That might not hit Germany. But Russia was certainly going to hit Hungary, and that would have been a disaster. There were plenty of moves Germany could have made at least to keep the French off; I mentioned last year how bad von Moltke's plan was unfit for 1914. But the war was primed to happen anyway. Moderns are overall forgetting how far war mania was spreading around the Continent, even if THE JEWS didn't want it. Among the gentiles who did want it, it wasn't just the Germans.
On Bolshevik-cum-Soviet leadership not being Jewish, that might have been true in the 1910s but by 1920s, the promise of emancipation and the Russian civil war (White Terror, for us) drove many Jews off their lands in Poland and Ukraine into the Bolshevik-controlled cities. There, they were recruited. The Holodomor aside; we can talk of the Gulag. There we must ask after Genrikh Yagoda (opportunist, who should have known better). ctrl-F "Yagoda" ... nothing.
The counterreview claims Horace Greeley (no seriously) "Schact" (sic) was a NSDAP member. This is... sorry, it's just untrue. Even Wiki admits Schacht never formally joined. This one criticised Stresemann's policies but not, as far as I know, from the NSDAP side; Weimar Germany offerred plenty other political parties with pro-German semi-socialist ideas. Schacht'd come to enter the German government under the big guy in the 1930s but that's not relevant to what Schacht was doing when the big guy was a national joke in the 1920s. (Do watch Babylon Berlin please.)
The documentary further talks the vile state of Weimar-era Berlin. CS602 poopooes the Europa claim of hundreds of thousands of children trafficked in Berlin, on account that would sum to the entire child population of the city
. Would it, though? Such children don't stay children, nor always survive to escape childhood. We are talking about a decade for the process. And it might not be Berlin alone. Also if we are in a conversation about numbers, uhhh....
As to German prosperity, the counterreview correctly points out that NSDAP Germany was not as prosperous as was 1920s America - nor 1930s (the now-greatly-depressed Americans having already bought all those cars, and garages; and chickens, and chicken-pots). But, uh. Who was? I don't think you compare the Germans to the Americans at the time. You compare the Germans to the French, or to the British or to those luxuriating under the socialist paradise eastward.
CS602 claims 700000 rural Germans leaving the farm and swarming the city. Sigh, numbers again. Either way: that process was happening anyway with the introduction of the tractor. It was happening in the American rural South; Germany was if anything catching up. Certainly Russia was.
These are nits, because they don't much affect the thrust. In fact I may even have improved the argument, inasmuch as I am not seeing THE JEWS being for the 1914 war, nor for the 1917-18 phases of the Russian Revolution, nor for the collapse of the German lines on the Western front.
However. Liaquat Ahmed does lay out a case for transnational money doing better from the 1923 inflation in Germany; and I do see Jewish recruits into the early Soviet system causing a lot of damage. (Ekaterina Jung has implicated more the Latvians, but that's neither here nor there.)
As to the Nazi punks in the 1930s, they were genuinely crooked and leeches upon the German economy, such as it was. We agree on that much.
On this sad day of James Watson's death; we must discuss those who refuse his life's work. Which was biology - and genetics, which Watson helped invent as a field.
Scientody, if you don't like the word "science", concerns models of the physical world which models may be tested. You may or may not ever have liked Milgrom's modification of Newton, but it proposed to be testable. And it got tested, and proven wrong. It was still science.
This is not the case for "intelligent design" which is why ID got thrown out of a Dover court. It was always a philosophic stance, coming out of Near Eastern societies' need to enforce a common cultural frame of reference. Later the Greeks eavesdropped upon some of these conversations such that we got David Sedley's classic book on the their "Creationism"(s).
Grokipedia has failed to understand this. It's picked up whatever its AI has picked up. I suspect: from American Right sources. Like when Microsoft's Tay got fed inputs from 4chan.
This bodes ill for Grokipedia elsewhere.
Evan Myers is being strugglesessioned because he won't attend Shabbos (=Sabbath, for KJV).
First up, if a Jew is going to complain about a Gentile not attending a Jewish ritual; said Jew must then explain why they cannot sit in upon an Orthodox Sunday Mass. "Idolatry!", the Jew will respond. Which is fair enough! Jews as Jews do not, can not, recognise Jesus bar Miriam as Christ. In fact, some edgelords among them consider him a momzer boiling submerged in a nasty substance in Hell. And you know, they're right: per CS Lewis himself, if Jesus was wrong, that's the afterlife he deserves. I can accept that those who do not believe what we believe are not going to want to partake in the rituals in which we partake. (We at least agree upon the Saracens.)
How can a German participate in a ritual based in an ancestral exodus from a land they never knew? The German might not always have been German (geneticists are now saying the culture came from the Bottenviken) but such assuredly were never Canaani. And this assumes Evan is not an Ó Meidhir, nor a Cymraeg - they've never not been Irish or Welsh, respectively. The ritual is simply not theirs.
Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologica I-II, q.103, a.4 agreed; this entered the Canon Law too (1917) #1258. I recall the Letters of James of Edessa preaching against attendance as well; although not in our confessional tradition, Jacob's statements of praxis represent the Late Antique baseline of transconfessional relations.
I will here disclose that I could accept an invitation to a Sabbath. But... I am a good part Jewish. Saint Paul has granted dispensation to my kinfolk who are Christian. So I cannot speak for Myers.
Overall, Myers' decision lies within his own conscience. It should be assumed to be in good faith.
Return To Tradition points to Cardinal Victor Fernández, who no longer wants CoRedemptrix as one of the Marian titles. RTT considers this an insult to Our Lady. I consider that over-emotive. But we can look at the semantics around the title.
A paper can have one main author and several co-authors; usually this can be seen if the main author is out of alphabetic order. But it also can just have a gaggle of co-authors. OnePeterFive were earlier punting on the argument; now seem to be bringing past authorities.
In the Catholic (and, more so perhaps, the Orthodox) perception, we don't say that Jesus was a CoRedemptor. The focus remains upon Christ. As to why bring up Mary here: that's because she shared some of Christ's suffering.
... on the other hand, Judas wept too, in Matthew's Gospel. As did Peter, excepting in the Johannine tradition. Maybe the women who prepared his body for burial.
1 Peter argued, yes, for Christian grief and mourning to be taken on par with Christ's suffering. I have long promoted 1 Peter as essential for our canon (as opposed to, say, 2 Peter); I have prayed the Stations. But I do not see where any Apostolic text would extend that to Christ's death - and resurrection. Am I a co-redeemer for praying the Stations? subhânalmasîkh
And Saint Paul, that great apostle of the Resurrection, quoter of that hymn on the Incarnation for the Philippians, author of the "born of woman" creed - didn't bother with Mary's postpartum role.
Fernández sucks for several other reasons, some of which go to Mary's One Job as a woman. But once Mary had done that job, she became as any other female saint - or, really, as a male one, like Joseph.
Coredemptrix she is not. Fernández deserves credit for laying down the obvious.
Cyanobacteria, they say, contributed to the Oxidation - but didn't trigger it. The former spread before the latter. Dilan M. Ratnayake, Ryoji Tanaka, Eizo Nakamura proposed (August) a model as to why: urea and nickel.
Urea has nitrogen and dissolves in low-pressure water, which nitrogen doesn't (N2 dissolves in high pressure, hence the Bends). But urea seems to get too high a concentration with nickel about. Also not good for plants. I guess?
Anyway eventually the nickel dropped off and the urea got to a decent level, allowing the cyanobacteria to bloom. Oxygen ran riot, the temperature plummeted, on with Huronian.
Robin Lane Fox wrote a large book about The Iliad which wrote off the tenth chapter of that book, called "Doloneia". The rest of Fox' book dealt with the Iliad without it. Whatever conversations Fox was engaging with wider Homerian scholarship elsewhere, here we cannot blame Fox: Fox was delivering the consensus scholarship of AD~2020.
But maybe the Doloneia isn't a bust. Maybe it is merely corrupted. Christos Tsagalis is making that argument - and Andromache Karanika is agreeing. (Kind of a Dorian or Arcadian last name... shouldn't she be "Andromacha"?)
The deal is that this tenth chapter mirrors the ninth. As, we suppose, an insertion would - or a chapter composed after that one and before the next one. Tsagalis, apparently, is pointing out elements of this Doloneia as do not mirror the ninth, and are further absent from those afterchapters.
Homerists will know "wergon" as the common euphemism for bloody work of swords. This chapter plots a μέγα wἔργον of Greek assassins against Hector over there on the Troy side. - rather, it was supposed to plot so. Somehow, in the retelling, the "work" became nerfed to a ... spying mission. This retelling involved Rhesus of Thrace (whom the Greeks kill) and his horses. Consolation prize!
Or maybe all that Rhesus stuff didn't belong in The Iliad and was stuffed into this tenth chapter. So the book and its reviewer argue.
In 2022, Amin Ehteshámi got "The Four Books of Shiʿi Hadith: From Inception to Consolidation" published. Sort of the Shiʿ complement to Jonathan Brown's work on the canonisation of Bukhari and Muslim.
In the Middle Ages, the Shiʿa had three books. In the late 800s/1400s Ibn Abī Jumhūr found a copy of Kulayni's Kafi and promoted that as the fourth. Barqi had a Mahasin before Kulayni, but Ibn Abī Jumhūr didn't rate it; most likely, he couldn't find a full copy. We still can't.
It may be that the Kafi wasn't easy to find either. In fact: none of them were. Shiʿites didn't always have secure scriptoria over the centuries, like the Sunnis enjoyed. A lot of these scholars complain about that; other scholars give up and advise jurists, if you can find one of these three (later, four) then you can go ahead and use that book to run your court. We may suppose that's how the Buyids had muddled by in Iraq.
I take it that when the Safavids took Iran - which had Qom and Mashhad - the Shiʿa could copy those books again. That's more the 1000s/1600s I think.
I fully accept that gates exist as need keeping, and Jason Colavito is an effective keeper of the gates. Except when he isn't; and he has a bad habit of falling upon college-basement tropes ("homophobia!", being common on his blog). So here he is with a mean spirited review, of Manvir Singh. At least Colavito's being honest... this time.
The drive to find a common source of Western languages and mythologies, is a Western drive. Which is natural to Westerners - you'd think. But somehow it's a problematic when Westerners do it; and The New Yorker needs to mention it. Because Whiteness.
The fun part is that Singh doesn't engage in any of the pseudohistory that spawned from this drive... and isn't even Western. He's probably one of those Baltoslav offshoots given his name. Actually given Singh's name you'd think Colavito would be more interested in how he's bucking the Out Of India theories.
To continue Charles Coulombe's musings on how Catholics should recognise the Saxe-Coburgs:
Charles Coulombe lists some GermanEnglish monarchs who may have converted to Catholicism on their deathbed. Charles II springs to mind but he may always have been a closet case, like Sepharad-born minister Ben Disraeli the Marrano; anyway Coulomb is concerned with postStuarts. Coulomb claims Victoria wavered - but, truly wavered; she didn't take the leap, nor was she holding to the santa fé in private like the former Charles.
Her son Edward VII however might have taken that leap. Additional speculation swirls around George V.
The above stated, our Charles III - reports Coulombe - had his chrism blessed in Orthodoxy. That is not the same as Catholicism; but Orthodoxy is taken seriously in OnePeterFive, where we consider Anglicanism a LARP, which it is.
It may be that Charles and Prince William are tacking toward the Antiochene communion. They'll still not be Catholics, but they'll at least not be a joke.
With due respect to Curtis Yarvin over the late 2000s, the Stuart claim on the English throne is the Norman claim: conditional on its loyalty to the Altar and on some credible ability to assume the Throne. For us said Altar, since Charles II's (probable) cryptoCatholicism and of course James II's overt Catholicism, is Saint Peter's. OnePeterFive ain't the best Catholic site at present but on this much, Charles Coulombe seems to know what he's on about.
In 1766, Pope Clement XIII recognised, on the death of James III, George III as King.
There remained outside Britain a Jacobite Pretender; but, in 1807, that one up and died. The line can go through females among Stuarts same as for Saxe-Coburgs like Georgie over here. I mean, heck; Queen Anne was a Stuart, just an unlucky one (and Protestant). To this day, via various female Pretenders, the Stuarts may boast a male - in the House of Wittelsbach. Problem: this one is trying to marry another man. That blasphemes a Sacrament before the Altar therefore blasphemes the Altar itself.
Yorks also survive. Simon Michael Abney-Hastings Earl Loudoun is living an 'umble life downunder, and is a Catholic to boot. Coulombe isn't concerned with them.
The Fatima apparition spawned a heresy against the Dormition, unfortunately rife in the Western Church which - ironically - had earlier raised the Dormition to canon. (Its consecration of nonCatholic Russia is further an insult to the Orthodoxy of Russia, but I don't care about that, except inasmuch as it has erected yet another barrier to the reunification of the bishops.) Now Richard Hanania is explaining why it didn't happen.
What's lately happened is that Scott Alexander has been arguing for that apparition. Why? I dunno. Attention probably. It may take an attention-hound to fight an attention-hound.
Hanania is arguing similar to the "Big Data Fallacy", which he acknowledges, but says is different. What we skeptics notice in Biblical apologetics is how the apologists point to the fat stack of Byzantine bibles and cite it as proof of a Majority-Text. Well, no; it just points to the history of Christian takeovers of the scriptoria. To get to the text you have to go to the 100s and 200s AD, not the 600s. Fatima is actually different since the mass apparition is claimed to 70000 at the same time. So, more like the appearance of Christ noted by Paul, which "Saint" Luke perverted into the Spirit at Pentecost / Simchat-Torah.
Note how in "Pentecost" too we can see how an original mass apparition can be recast as something else and then canonised...
What Hanania is saying is that the peer pressure will be stronger in a crowd of 70000 from the same families, than in a small group of about a dozen. Also, the "Skeptics!!1" in the crowd told everyone they were skeptics BEFORE but now, after the fact: BELIEVE, BABY. They did not evince a paper trail of skepticism before the event.
Given the trajectory of the Papacy since the Fatima apparition, it may well be that it was at Fatima that the devil entered the congregation.
Two articles on the emergence of life before animals. Continent Nuna of the Boring Billion 1800-800 Mya is surveyed. The life on land, from 1400-900 Mya, spanning Nuna's breakup, would be fungi.
Earth had surface oxygen by then; thanks to the algae and cyano, but their home was water. The plants could make no foothold on land. Until fungi allowed for symbiosis with lichen.
Lichen isn't preserved well; but we have a few additional tools from genomics of fungi and plants today. They're talking about horizonal gene transfer, like when retroviri burrow into animal genomes. These events can be used as before/after date-markers. And then, I guess, related to what events we can know about, like the timeline of a supercontinent connecting all the shoreland.
Checking back in on Richard Carrier, we can sum up three theses. 1. Six of Saint Paul's letters are indeed Paul's. 1. Besides those six: 1 Clement and Hebrews also come from the first century. 3. Papias was kind of a moron.
Ignatius of Antioch by contrast was no moron. But, you know... neither was Paul. So why does Ignatius' Christology look so much like Antiochene Orthodoxy today, and so little like Paul?
That - says Carrier, rather said it in 2017 - is because Christianity suffered a terminal-Permian blow. Among the gentiles Pliny the Younger couldn't find many acting Christians in Bithynia, which is northern Anatolia not too far from whither Paul was sending these letters or even his successors, like whoever did Colossians on his behalf. With a collapse in Christian membership, became possible for men like Ignatius to promote an alternative Christianity based on the Gospels; or, at least, whatever Gospels that Ignatius could find. (I suspect he had the Gospel of Peter, rather than something good like Mark.)
BACKDATE 10/29
Daniel McClellan is critiquing the late Charlie Kirk - unfairly. I may as well take this space to explain how to do it fairly.
Charlie Kirk was one who thought on his feet - and then spoke from his hip, if I may. He does not always say everything properly. That said, I think I can explain what he's talking about in the video which McClellan is calling "lies".
Kirk brings the "Liberty Bell", which McClellan points out was not called that until 1830 when it had the crack, from its origins as a Leviticus 25:10 bell, which even then "proclaimed liberty throughout the land". For the Holiness Code, libertas was Sumerian amargi: relief from grain debts and freedom for the debt-bonded. In 1830, the people associated libertas with, well, freedom: from oppressive governments. Inasmuch as Philadelphia was founded by Quakers, they intended the same.
This was not an "Enlightenment" slogan but a Christian one. The Quakers who struck the clapper on that bell for the first time were ringing out their Christianity.
In that respect, Kirk is reading the same targum upon וַיִּקְרָא as the Quakers had done. As for "The Founders": although the Declaration might be Jeffersonian, Deist, Enlightened and generally Left; since the Constitution and the First Amendment, the Union Of States was decidedly more conservative in its stance. I do not believe it is an accident that this Government was then assembled in Philadelphia. (It had to move later because of the yellow fever but - let's not get too far in the bullrushes here.)
Kirk perhaps worded his argument poorly, and the Quaker reading was at base flawed. Neither of them are coming off as poorly, however, as McClellan; who is simply slandering the man.
BACKDATE 10/28
Geologically 70 Mya wasn't that long ago and ... we got an egg. NYPost thinks there may survive DNA.
That won't be the last egg we'll find. Elsewhere we're hearing that dinos were doing fine here in Parias until their asteroid-intercept system blinked out. This blog's readers will recall hadrosaurs were out-n'-about the whole time. To the extent fossils haven't been found, much of that is because our continent remains lush.
It would be a supreme irony if the Americas were an outlier; with dinos doing more poorly in the Old World, whence the most successful placental mammals spread out. Because of course the Chicxulub target-site was right across Our Gulf.
GJ 251 is within the ten-parsec range (18.2 in ly), and is known for a close-in planet b. Today the news feeds are pointing me to c.
This planet orbits at a 51 day year and is, I suspect, tidally-locked. It is unfortunately four times Earth's mass. Whilst that does mean it likely still has its atmo; this also suggests a crushing supercritical atmo, such that "atmo" might not even be the word. So: no life.
At least we've seen c. The 51 day periodicity might be easy enough to spot in a high-mass planet against a M dwarf this close, but... GJ 251 is a flare star. That is why it has taken two decades to nail c down. And we only tweezed b in 2020.
Sabine left this open for comment: Palomar transient events.
If we don't believe in aliens, and today we should believe less in aliens than they did before Sputnik, the answer seems obvious - to me anyway. The early Soviets were covertly researching how to get Sputnik to work. At the time, the US was concentrating on aerodynamics (and nukes of course) and not on space so much. Even ICBMs were designed to land ballistically upon Russia, not to circle the planet back to the Americas. That is why Sputnik was a shock: it leapt frog all over DARPA.
If the Soviets launched a sat that was broken and not circling the planet many times, that didn't count and the Soviets basically hoped the US wouldn't see 'em.
The last Austro[I]-Hungarian[IV] emperor was a Karl, "Charles" to Anglo-Normans. I am unsure why he is first-of-that-name in Austria; several other deutschsprachig Habsburgs had ruled Austria before him, not least Charles V.
Anyway he's beatified. OnePeterFive just treated him with a tongue bath. Those who knew Karl I/IV best, said he was a thirty year old who looked twenty and had a ten year old mind. So who's right?
The Allies, which my ancestors were for, can appreciate that the man reached out to France to nope out of the war. Geopolitically: the correct move, given the Americans' imminent entry and the Russians' weakness. But he botched the handling of it. Austria stayed in there despite this move, and famously lost.
Karl got Religion in his final years, but then... so did John Plantagenet of England (and not of much France) 800 years ago, also first-of-that-name. When are we getting a second John? Probably not for another eight hundred years.
That OnePeterFive slobjob reminds me of those tiresome hagiographies littering the Church Of The East, like Thomas of Marga, as Victorianly translated by Wallis Budge. Catholic laity are cheap dates.
BACKDATE 10/22
Disease was just an unfortunate fact of life in the ancient world, and Egypt had some malae ariae on the Nile Delta. So when records reported diseases under Akhenaten, historians naturally connected these with the turbulent in-and-out of the new capital at Tel Amarna.
New reports would disconnect these plagues. They might have been ill down north, but not in the dry land - not much, anyway; tuberculosis did affect some, and others suffered from the effects of hard manual work. In fact that was likely good motive for the 18th Dynasty to stick with the lands of Amen away from the delta of Ra: it was just healthier up there.
Plagues would be a better suspect for the failings of Dynasty XIX which followed the Amarna Age.
BACKDATE 10/24
Tuthmosis I of the 18th Dynasty is considered, presently, to have ruled 1504-1492 BC. This was well after the Thera eruption and at a time the Hittites weren't doing great, also the Minoans seem to have been sharing Crete with the incoming Greeks. Whatever was going on in Libya or Nubia, the Pharaoh didn't care. His eyes were on Canaan. Problem: desert.
This Pharaoh figured rather than bypassing the desert, he should build a land route. Yesterday was announced a fortified waystation: Tell el-Kharouba. Latinbros will know it as the via maris; Egyptians called it ḫꜣt Ḥr. (The "King's Road" seems to be the road right through Sinai to Eilat.) It's dated to Tuthmoses 'coz pottery got his cartouche on it.
BACKDATE 10/24
We are all, I think, aware of arsenic exposure upon early Americans from Albuquerque to Chile. This led to the survival of the AS3MT mutation, expressed in the liver. It turns out that the Old World had toxic mineral exposure too. In our case: lead (plumbum; -208 mostly).
These early hominins had to have ingested the lead somehow, because it's right there in the remains. And we can't blame modern contamination. The bones are dead, dude; if there was ambient lead it should coat only the outside.
The claim is that lead salts had dissolved into cave water. I'd have thought that sedimentary caves like limestones and sandstones go more to calcium and silicon. But some caves are volcanic, or are simply ... downstream of the mountains. It gets worse: lead acetates hit the "sweet" tastebuds. So people - meaning, anthropithecenes - would actively seek out the lead-infused "mineral" water against pure tasteless water.
Eventually, back in Africa, our shared ancestors evolved brain defences against lead. Which, in Roman times, evolved brains as could tell that lead should not be ingested; and in modern times, that could tell the rich not to blow it into our environment.
About 780kBC something scattered tektites across the Sunda. Here, slotted for 15 November, is an earlier field: 11 Mya. h/t ScienceDaily.
They haven't found the crater for this. There should be one: tektites form when the meteor hits the ground. Australian ground tends pretty dry today; but the Pliocene was warmer for Australia (which is also a moving target) so might have been more erosive.
The see of Britain collapsed with the Roman province, so had to reëstablished: in AD 597 at Canterbury amongst a Saxon people. Thence Saint Paul's Cathedral was set up in London-wych AD 604. Canterbury weathered the Danes, the Normans, the murder of Becket, the Magna Carta, and even the Reformation. The last Archbishop in communion with the Romans was Reginald Pole under Queen Mary I. The present "Archbishop" of the Anglican schismatics is AWFUL, as the acronym goes.
Presently the leading Cardinal who speaks in communion with Rome in Britain is Nichols. That does not mean Cardinal Nichols is "Canterbury-in-exile", symbolic as that would be. It does mean that should Anglicanism be dissolved sooner rather than (inevitably) later, it would fall upon Nichols to choose his cathedra.
Unfortunately Nichols is not delivering results, either.
According to Dr Carroll of "Two Minute Papers", Ryoichi Ando has fixed A Cubic Barrier with Elasticity-Inclusive Dynamic Stiffness
(pdf).
Collision detection in games and movies had been done with a logarithmic barrier. If the object was too thin however, seems there might be a singularity (Carroll calls it "panic"). The collisions would not get detected and the thick object would break through the thin one.
If you are playing with late 1990s polygons then you just sucked it up. But movies - for one - are supposed to be photorealistic. So if Superman has a cape or, worse, you want realistic flesh and skin over a skull, "artifacts" of the thicker structure would seep through. So editors would waste weeks and millions of dollars fixing these bugs.
Various methods of "clamping" could be used to kludge the collisions before human editors came in. It all reminds me of the Ricci Flow With Surgery by which Grisha Perelman fixed the singularities in Hamilton's partial proof of Poincaré's Theorem - and beyond. Which made it a perfect proof. Some might grumble that was kludgey too; but if the kludge is mechanically applied and works by induction, it's a proof for any given finite or even countable solid. Unfortunately for artwork, the clamping didn't catch all the (literal) edge cases.
Ryoichi Ando would use cubic barriers. They don't have to post-process the artifacts. On the flip side: the new algo seems to be slower.
So it probably won't be used for games except in cutscenes. The speedrunners and plain ol' cheaters will be fine.
Anyway here is the github, refactored a fortnight ago. It's in CUDA 12.8 which looks like C. The paper was published last December, so as you see nobody took it seriously until some actual code was produced (which I totally understand). I don't get Received 20 February 2007; revised 12 March 2009; accepted 5 June 2009
in the paper's end though (since it relies on a lot of recent work); that looks like a stray from a template.
Tabari's history on occasion reaches back to one 'Ali, "Ibn al-Madini". That means his ancestry was of the Madinas: Ctesiphon and Seleucia. The Mada'in would lose its status to Kufa and then to Baghdad.
As of 2022 we now have a critical study. Our 'Ali is considered a coward and/or a crook in Salafi circles, starting from Ibn Hanbal's time. Everybody else has tried to give him a fair shake.
'Ali lived in the wrong time, AH 161–234/ AD 778–849; for the places he taught. He was no Umayyad fanboi and never visited Syria. He straddled instead pre-Hanbal Sunnism and Ja'farid Shi'ism. The consensus enforced by the Caliphs was that the Quran was created like any other Revelation including the Torah and Gospel, however flawed and incomplete the latter might be. Ibn Hanbal taught otherwise. Ibn Hanbal would have the legal profession in the Deuteronomy-to-Montesquieu stream. More the former inasmuch as the Quran was the new Torah except more so.
Since I do not believe the Quran coëxisted with the Lord, nor was revealed by Him in its present form: I am most on the side of the earlier Caliphs and, therefore, of this 'Ali. If we want Law as separate from Executive, which I do, then the Quran is not where I should start. Just to lay out mine own biases here.
So I feel for 'Ali, between tyranny... and bigotry. He could see that the ahl al-hadith was going toward the Hanbalite direction. It appears he redoubled his efforts on critiquing the Hadith as a corpus: 'Ilal, they call it, or jarh wa-ta'dil. Yahya bin Ma'in is his clear successor.
I suspect Bukhari was similar. They say he too didn't like the preëxistence theory. He carried Ibn Hanbal's ahadith (which Ibn al-Madini didn't), because Ibn Hanbal actually was very good at the Hadith; but not his theology / coranology. Bukhari wanted a hadith-focused Sunnism that didn't have to be Hanbalist.
BACKDATE 10/27
The 55 Cancri system technically has two stars, but most astros have neglected B. B is a M4.5V red dwarf at 1065 AU from the barycentre. If you consider how dim our own Sun shines at that beyond-Kuiper distance, you'll get a picture of how Cancrian colonists might even forget their companion exists.
This might be changing. B has planets. One of them is in its habitable-zone.
I'm pondering how stable this cluttered menagerie. It may be we need to keep watching this system to add, or rule out, more planets.
BACKDATE 10/19 ht Kyplanet
Tepe means "Tel" in Turkic. Zernaki is a Tepe around Lake Van. Yesterday, excavations found some inscriptions.
It seems to have been founded under Aramaean influence, given the new inscriptions, whose content we aren't provided. I don't know if that means Assyria - it seems, not, although the use of Aramaic couldn't hurt. Later I understand that Urartu extended its hegemony over that lake, which would explain why some of those inscriptions are defaced. Eventually the Assyrian Empire would crush Urartu.
I suspect the main contribution of this site to History will be insights into the preImperial state of the Aramaic language(s).
BACKDATE 10/24, yeah we're behind.
Islamic lore is heavy on the "Battle of the Camel" between 'Ali on the one side, and the rest of the Hijazi aristocracy on the other. 'Uthman al-Umawi had been killed. All the antiUmayyads then bickered amongst themselves, chasing 'Ali to the Iraq out east. 'Ali won and became the caliph of all the antiUmayyads. The battle is called of the Camel because ...
At the time, outsiders called this dustup the "Askaran" in Armenian. Scholars refer to 'Aisha's name for her camel, 'Askar. It always smelt of folk-etymology and of poetry to me.
I learn here that 'askar in the Iraqi dialects of Arabic means "camp". There's another link you have to pay for.
This makes more sense. Maybe the 'Askar (Syriac 'Askhara) was a nascent misr like al-Hira of old. Sites were fluid in those days, Tawwaj used to be an important misr in southern Fars and was later abandoned. Other amsar like Mosul near Nineveh and Tunis near Carthage have overtaken the ancient cities; heck, Najaf has overtaken al-Hira and indeed even al-Kufa.
BACKDATE 10/27
Mid last September, we learnt about Martian ozone. Venus and Earth have polar vortices. It turns out that Mars, with an Earthlike axis but much less atmo, also produces ozone.
Mars might not produce all that much ozone; but when it does, the O3 stays there. Because the Martian caps are - presently - 40 K below the temperature of the rest of the planet. Also although the perchlorates might (I think) help produce those infamous CFCs, said perchlorates are locked in the Martian soil. To the extent they're kicked up in the dust storms they're not getting to the vortices.
Now: I don't know how long this will last, because unlike Earth (and I suspect Venus) Mars' tilt is unstable. Earth has a heavy moon. Mars has a couple of drifting rocks. As a result the feedstock of Mars' volatiles is eroding.
BACKDATE 10/19
Just to fill in the gaps: RISTRETTO. This is the proposal to constrain Proxima b's vitals.
Since we do not yet own a manned lunar or asteroidal presence, and since LEO isn't for shadowed 'scopes, it is expensive to do SCIENCE from a space environment. So squeezing the most out of Earthbased 'scopes is the best choice. When I say "Prox" I mean that closest system in the Centauri constellation which is southern, so the South is the place to do all this. There, the best altiplano is Chile's (although I wonder about Antarctica); which already has a ESO 'scope.
I wish them well. They say that RISTRETTO can study our ice giants too.
BACKDATE 10/21
Jane Goodall was, in life, a brilliant primatologist whose insights led to a revolution on how we see primitive sociology. I don't think "chimpout" will ever leave our lexicon.
So it distresses me to hear that, with her final breath at 91 years, she wanted me off this planet. Two years ago she was talking about how a third of this planet was unnecessary; Elon Musk called her out for that. Goodall has (vindictively) added Musk to that list of people she didn't want to see anymore.
Goodall after a lifetime of studying amoral animals died an animal's death. Talk about taking the wrong lessons.
Planet Nine has taken on some brutal constraints up to last July. Then in August, Amir Siraj, Christopher F. Chyba, and Scott Tremaine instead proposed a planet with different parameters. The study has now trickled into NASA Space News.
The study is of the classical Kuiper Belt. Some KB-Objects have entered capture or at least resonance with that monster Neptune: Triton, the Pluto system, Orcus. These are excluded (unless/until someone can figure out whence they came). The paper looks instead at the reservoir as has avoided, thus far, this fate.
Our solar system has an "invariable plane", close to (but not quite) the ecliptic plane of the Earth's present revolution around Sol. The paper defines the invariable plane from the angular momentum vector of the whole system. The KBOs within 80 AU, where not Neptune-resonant, remain Invariable; but those past that, cluster at their own angle, which is not the Invariable.
Siraj-Chyba-Tremaine would resolve this by proposing a Mars-to-Venus-ish mass in the 100s AU inclined over 10°. At that distance I'd expect a lot of bright ice and lacking Pluto's dark tholins. They think the Vera Rubin should be able to see it, with its LSST survey.
University of Southampton has posted Ben Pennington's history of Karnak. We learn that in primordial Egypt, this was a sandbar which became dry land after the Nile Flood. At some point the Egyptians thought this a symbol of the emergence of land from the Ocean. So, 2200s BC, the Thebans built a temple on it.
Even then the pyramids downstream were a few centuries old. To give an idea how colossally ancient this civilisation is.
Thebes followed the Sun-god as Amun, as you'll see in the Pharaohs' names of the 18th Dynasty; the more-Delta-aligned 19th preferring Ra. We're starting at the Sixth Dynasty - or later; the rise in Thebes' profile might herald the intermediate period when Egypt fractured into "nomes". It seems suggestive there's already a ref to "Ra-Amun". The Amun-Ra syncretism is famed in the Pharaonic Dynasties, so it surprises me to see this so early.
The "Ra-Amun" ref comes in the 2000s BC from one of the three Intep petty-kings. It may be they were aiming to reünite the Two Lands. Not long after 2000 BC, Egypt would be one again.
A couple days back OnePeterFive ran a (qualified) defence of our Pope. That site caters to Catholics on the furthest Right, and as such became rebels against the previous Pope we had. That Pope was a north Italian raised in Argentina. Argentina, when Bergoglio was there, was a sort of decrepit Southwest-European colony. The present one is a Chicagoan whose main ministry was Peru. Argentina was not really a poor nation. Peru, on the other hand...
OnePeterFive is trying to get across the concept of "real poverty". The American South had this after Reconstruction and its failure, when the South lost its slave structure and evolved into a serf-to-peasant structure. We are now hearing the same held for India. Early seventeenth-century England was hardly a nice place to live, true; that's one reason they had a civil war, and so many fled west. India at the time was more like the fourteenth century.
I think it fair to call the Mughal administration a colonial empire on about the same level as the French in Saint-Domingue, or the Spaniards in Peru. Where is a throng of cheap labour who are not you, you don't better their lives. You pay them the least possible and invest in personal security.
As for the American South, from the youtube I linked the farmers were already (belatedly) replacing their sharecroppers with machines. The children of the liberated sharecroppers just remembered not seeing their parents over their childhoods, which they resented. Do we judge them for their resentments? The Pope would not judge them. OnePeterFive is not ready - yet - to judge the Pope.
I suspect however that 1p5 won't be long in following me.
On topic of efficient rocket fuels, here's something on the chemical end: Manganese dyBoride.
MnB2 is a halide salt which is a solid at the usual inner-system temperatures, like pure aluminum. It also seems about as safe as a table salt... until you add kerosene, or maybe methane if we're adventurous. It's not so much the weight that excites them although that's good too (20% more energetic than aluminum); it's the volume (150%!).
They conjectured that this salt should exist in the 1960s but couldn't actually make any back then. Now they have Arc Melting.
The scale of production cannot be high. I think they want it for low-earth satellites. Unlike metastable nitrogen we should be able to ship this stuff up there without it blowing up en-route.
BACKDATE 10/6
In 1989, Gordon Newby produced the Madinese/'Abbasid Old Testament, which he or his editors mistitled The Making of the Last Prophet. It's his translation of an assemblage of mediaeval quotes from Ibn Ishâq, mostly Tabarî. Newby presumed that Ibn Ishâq had composed a book which he, speaking Qurashi, would call the Mubtadâ. This summarised, for Madinans and for 'Iraqis alike, the foundation the Muslims were supposed to accept from the Christian Bible. The "Book", proper, was by then no longer fit for Islamic instruction.
Newby got some reviews (pdf); the most famous might be the one Ibn Warraq reprinted, back when the Internet was weaker. Personally I dislike Newby's output where he opines on current events. But I never call him a "pseudo scholar". Newby's book remains an excellent index to Ibn Ishâq, and a cogent argument that the Mubtada' did exist - if only in Ibn Ishâq's own notes.
I just found out that someone else wrote a Mubtadâ, and that this one survived in real manuscripts. These (three) MSS unfortunately are fragmentary. However some of it may, like Ibn Ishâq, be reconstituted, from later quotes. Ibn 'Asâkir seems to hold most of them. We owe this, once more, to the indispensible Tron Honto: Ishâq bin Bishr. As these authors were addressing Easter.
I know, I know: a lot of Isaacs are running around over here. Maybe their oh-so-Israelite names inspired them to go on that hunt for Israiliyyat. They related some Christian lore as well; except, so Sean Reynolds argues, that this too was had from the Jews. Unlike the Jews these good Muslim felt that dear departed Yashô' was, nonetheless, still the Christ. I'll leave all that to the Honto.
I'm here to ask how come we haven't got a publication of this other Mubtada' yet. Get on it!
BACKDATE 10/6
Philip Lawler has a column over at Catholic Culture. Most Catholics were on the "cautious optimism" level a month ago. On 18 September, Lawler was still there. I had abandoned regular Mass attendance by then, after the 13/14th (Vigil); this pope was leaking support even before that. Mike Cernovich had called out Cardinal Prevost as a false shepherd years before; Prevost is now "Leo XIV".
Subsequently archbishop Cupich, also highly despised in the "trad" circuit, bestowed an award upon Senator Richard Durbin, an excommunicate for other bishops. But not for Cupich. And not for Prevost / "Leo".
Moving off of Lawler, bishops like Cupich are promoting a bad Bible. That's no problem for those who can read the languages and navigate their versions, who can take or leave this or that mistranslation - but how many of us do that? This problem is for the layfolk: what gets read in Mass is supposed to be The Word Of The Lord.
Catholic Culture hasn't even got into the blessing of a block of ice lately-performed. By The Old Gods And The New: water is "Living" when it runs through the font, and only then is it fit for washing. You do not bless the Others.
This may explain why churches are targets now. The Communion is weak. It doesn't stand for anything. Its congregation is legacy. The Scripture that bests suits it is the scripture of Solomon in sura 34.
I don't know that Mr Greenblatt will still have a job after all the hits he's taken, but one of his recent tweets does raise a good point. This concerns "Christian Identity".
This isn't Christianity. It is not, either, neither: "Christian Nationalism". Christian Nationalism is what Peter Hegseth believes in: a Crusader / Church-Militant mentality. This is, arguably, Latin-coded. It is not racialist. Pope Gelasius and Saint Augustine were African Latins; Columbus' whole mission was to recruit Americans. We can argue to what degree any of this did any good, or if these men were Good For The Jews - but we cannot say they were racist.
Where Christian Nationalism is a stance within Christianity; Christian Identity is not. You have to listen for "dog whistles" with the 'Nationalism; which tunes honest Christians cannot hear. Christian Identity is the howling pagan wolf. The Jerusalem Cross is not the "Celtic" Cross.
As dogs go, in that old fight between the ADL and the TPUSA: I had none. We did however note how the ADL considered TPUSA "Hate" which it did not for Antifa. The ADL has a defence for its definition of Christian Identity, and we should accept that defence. There was no defence for the slanders the ADL levied against TPUSA, and we've found the ADL deleting its glossary as a result.
As the ADL's future goes, honestly I wish it well. Jews need advocacy as any other nation does. Its commentary on the Celtic Cross remains useful. The ADL should build upon correct research, and should be more careful about its positions against neutral parties (like TPUSA) who do not intend harm to Jews nor to anyone (even if we disagree).
Add Kruttasch-Mezger to the growing pile of evidence that Earth formed inside the soot line. From Bern's presser, which admittedly is imprecise over carbon.
From the 53Mn-to-53Cr clock, Earth must have coalesced into a cooling ball within three million years. This has a serious knock-on effect: Earth (and Venus) formed where volatiles like nitrogen, ammonia, and methane could not exist. Nor could the big one: water. Carbon doesn't melt or vaporise at these temperatures but tends to mix with such volatiles to make hydrocarbons, which do.
Therefore the volatiles we got, down here beneath Mars, must have been transported hither. The study proposes Theia for us. It could hardly... not. The same must be true of Venus.
I am less sure of Mars. It has trouble keeping its volatiles to this day given its low gravity and room-temperature summer days. On the one hand, congratulations for providing something close to our null-hypothesis. On the other hand: how much of these molecules were delivered in the old days and when?
Earlier I was pondering the near-total wipeout of Central Europe and Balkan populations, courtesy the Slavs. Lately comes news from the east. How did they get to be (Russo-)Slavic?
The region is Volga-Oka, which means southeast of Moscow. Everyone here is R1a: specifically R1a-Z280 which gave rise
to -CTS1211 and -Z92. So, still the old Russian taiga-steppe after the Indo-Iranians left for Andronovo and Sintashta.
CTS1211 is first caught in Lithuania, so presumably Baltic; 1900s BC. But it's all over the place now. Z92 seems rarer and stayed in the west. The demic spread long precedes the cultural shift to Russian. (This is a good illustration of how pots are language, not people.)
As to what they spoke before converting to Russian: it's hard to say. I don't think we have loanwords. More likely, they were already speaking a dialect more Slavic than Baltic. They pulled Old Russian toward them away from, oh, Jugoslavic.
We must now talk Uralic, with its male N signature. This is well known to have intruded into the west probably in the Iron Age. Some of this Volga-Oka territory is now Mordvin / Mordovian (yo, Quest for Glory IV!). The paper takes pains to separate Erzya from Moksha. But their ancestry is R1a too. Contrast the Finns and the late Hungarian nobility.
So I am guessing to the extent some of the Mords speak Uralic, they did this (independently) to interface with the Uralic fur-trade, and were not conquered. They probably spoke this paraSlavic beforehand. Maybe the Old Hungaria, now Khanty, had demic conquest but not the Mordvins.
Let's assume for the sake of argument that I don't believe in G-d. (That much shouldn't be a difficult assumption for my longtime readers.) Let us further assume that the barrier between this our Universe and the Warp is impermeable. (This much, for sake of argument only.)
The Jezebel coven last month called into the Warp anyway, against Charles James Kirk. Said coven received what they requested. The Cernovich side of the Right, like Megyn Kelly, are crying foul.
We Catholics are told, constantly, that prayer works. If you are an agnostic, the case for prayer - even if you don't do it sincerely, or can't - is that the object of your prayer might feel that he's getting a powerful Patron on his side. Also it might inspire you, yourself, to do something concrete to help, because there's something tugging at you that "thoughts and prayers" are empty. Maybe even especially if you are bad at praying.
It happens that Catholics believe in a god of mercy and justice. It is not in us to pray for evil deeds, or it shouldn't be. Jezebel have appealed to different gods.
If prayer works for agnostic reasons, then prayer works no matter your motives and no matter your request - for those same reasons. A prayer to the Dark Powers hardens your own heart, and it makes unstable people ponder if the Dark Powers might give them aid. That aid would, of course, be towards doing fell deeds.
In short, Kelly is right. Jezebel engaged in a dehumanising discourse and raised the cause of evil against that of good. No good could come of it.
So we got a TRS-80 Color Computer and it came with manuals. At the age of nine I got interested in the Getting Started With Color Basic subroutines out back; in the 1982 edition anyway. These were for cosines and other functions not offered in the baseline 4-16K versions. We had a 32K Extended CoCo, so a lot of these were in fact offered in this manual's sequel. So why bother with the original?
My interest then was in how come there wasn't a SQR(-1). The "SWR" algo in the first manual seemed like it might allow it; when I duly typed this in I saw the numbers never coming to a stop. Later on of course Gleick would be mooting the Imaginary Number, which opened up plenty of other angles, but we certainly weren't taught those in the third grade.
It occurs to me that the BASIC square root function might retain some interest otherwise. There exists also a function for exponentation. Why not just... ^.5?
In the manual, what happens is iteration. It starts by setting up a value Y, which is just the input halved. Then comes the incrementor W: (x/y - y) * .5. Repeat until W=0. There is also a Z to remember the previous value of W.
This is, clearly, Newton's iterator. Why we need Z I dunno. I also get the feeling that initial Y doesn't need to be the input halved. Can we not bithack the input like q_rsqrt? That'd start with VARPTR in this tongue. Although maybe that would require we do all this in assembler.
On topic of assembler one Walter Zydhek in 1999 wrote Extended Basic Unravelled which - I trust - does what its cover promises. Behind the scenes, the CoCo was running Taylor (12) Series for the ATN function. Which looks much like what the manual's ATN was doing. The EXP also uses Taylor (8).
We find the SQR in assembler was not Newton. It just sets the exponent to .5 and then slips into the power (^) operator. Which then does the same LOG-then-EXP calc as the manual was doing. Why even offer the SQR in the first place?? /rant
One should point out further that Taylor means self-multiplication, and a lot of it. So x^2 is (much) more expensive than x*x. Honestly even Newton SQR should, generally, not be as bad as the ^.5 we're given. Hence why Q_rsqrt exists against ^-0.5.
UPDATE 9/28 for mantissa tricks, Kasper Nielsen's collection (pdf).
Since everyone's talking about some body in the grave, here's Mark Tapscott. Tapscott in the 1970s hoped to be an authority on the topic; both he and Brown are/were Republicans, after all. Tapscott says he'd done a few draughts before slipping out of college into partisan politics and whatever-it-is he's doing now.
Tapscott's contribution is that he uncovers that John Brown actually had a political programme of his own beyond 1856 Frémont north-state freesoilism. It's little known, but the North abolitionists under William Garrison considered the US Constitution a "pact with Hell". From the abolitionist faction, against Frémont (who'd lost, so'd slithered away), Brown in 1858 cooked up a "Chatham Convention". Brown would be a Commander In Chief, a stronger Executive. The Confederate Constitution, on the funhouse side, had more states' rights, excepting slavery which was close to a Honduran forever-clause.
Brown also had an immanent blood-atonement theology, around Hebrews 9:22, to read same as a Mormon or Gazurtoid should read it. We who appreciate René Girard read this passage rather differently.
Brown hoped for a Mutazilite Caliphate against the South's Hanbalite Caliphate, we might say. I think Brown at least kept the judiciary apart like the Deuteronomist proposed, so wasn't quite abolishing ol' Montesquieu. Tapscott would argue this judiciary would be toothless.
That said: AI is holding Tapscott up to task. Brown presented his document as provisional, and may have meant it; a true Garrison might not do so. We would call it a wartime-constitution. If Brown was going to rule Southern States, would he expect to rule them long? I doubt Brown expected to live that long. He assuredly thought he could submit his crown to the Union having won the Civil War for them, after wringing some concessions, like the 13th Amendment we actually got. I mean, Lord-Protector Brown was going to be dealing with a majority-Republican North. We can compare the 1830s negotiations between the Texian Republic and the earlier Union.
Brown was, nonetheless, living a delusion. This is certainly a take Tapscott could have taken. He's turned into a lazy thinker and it's quite possible he had constructed a lazily-founded thesis. Probably why the college didn't let it through the door.
In the 1980s, computers got good enough to display fractal patterns to the home audience. James Gleick put out Chaos at about the right time, for the PC-Jr. In mid 1990 I figured out how to render some of these for the school Nimbus (remember that?). We're here to talk the Hilbert tasselation.
Hilbert rendered your 1D array into a 2D spacefilling curve. It is, or maybe was, considered superior to the usual x + y*maxx mapping since proximity in the array would approximate proximity in the mapped plane, also. Hilbert himself used the square grid; Gosper's flowsnake does it for the hexagonal beehive.
In 1984 Antonin Guttman invented the R-tree, which indexes multidimensional objects: "find bookstores within two miles". Hilbert gained a real lease on life here. To be noted, I think technically Gosper is better out of doors, as a wilderness map.
Hilbert's classic square, rather, has use in human-visualising the nature of 1D data. It also compresses images and/or dithers them.
BACKDATE 9.26
I got into one of those Biblical rabbitholes and pondered, hey: what's up with Baruch?
In the Masoretic / Protestant tradition, Baruch is an apocryphal book that doesn't belong in the Bible. In the Greek tradition, it's part of Jeremiah. Jeremiah, by the way, is itself different in both; the Greek tradition ends in Egypt and allows that Baruch is about equal to Jeremiah, thus making that whole text a Jeremiah-Baruch cowriting exercise. Presently scholarship agrees that the Greek Jeremiah accurately translates a text, from which the Masoretic has reassembled. Perhaps, exactly to exclude the Baruch parts.
In the Dead Sea is no Baruch, excepting the "Epistle of Jeremiah"... in Greek (7Q). On the other hand, the Hebrew behind Greek Jeremiah famously survives. So maybe they did have Baruch like they had Nehemiah, except not preserving the copies. Ehh. Qumran quotes Nehemiah where it doesn't seem to quote Baruch.
Anyway, off these merry texts went outside the Hellenistic world. Jerome didn't translate Baruch to Latin, since he didn't have the Hebrew; but somebody did, since its in the Vulgate now. Meanwhile it also went to the Syrians.
In modern scholarship, all those Baruch/periJeremiah "apocrypha" went fairly ignored in Syriac studies - until the late 2010s, at the latest. That's when (Atlanta, I think) a total amateur like myself stumbled into a session on "2 Baruch". 2 Baruch seems to have been very popular as an apocalyptic text out East, on par with the Revelation in North Africa. You'd think the other Baruch books, being lost in Hebrew and preserved in Greek, would be simply ignored in the East, like Jerome was hoping to ignore them West. Ah but then there's Paul of Tella (re)translating all the Greek stuff for his colinguists.
You can read about Liv Ingeborg Lied 2022 free of charge, thankfully. The Baruch corpus seems complex to me, like the "Nehemiah" book and Ezra corpus. The "Second Epistle" of Baruch in the East, is what Catholics refer as just "Baruch" and, before us, the Greeks had appended to Jeremiah and treated as part of that book. And yes: iggerta not kitaba (Arabic may well be "risala").
Seems that the "2 Baruch" apocalypse did indeed come to Syria first. In Syriac the letter is to Babylon, where the Greek after en had the dative forcing "in". Dr Lied, engaged with paratext, sees that as evidence that indeed the "second epistle" came after 2 Baruch which was for Babylon, thus forcing this translation. I don't think Lied takes seriously that the mistranslation inspired 2 Baruch's authorship; I wouldn't either.
BACKDATE 9/25
In 2009, some geologists met to decide upon the consensus for the disputed Silverpit Crater in the North Sea. Impact was a popular second choice.
So much for that. Now we know it is an impact. Not one of the impacts anyone should care about, it having little, uh, impact beyond making waves.
The real takeaway is on why they held the vote in the first place. This is some Jesus-Seminar nonsense. Something is probably right, or wrong, or "don't know yet". If you have to hold the vote then you don't know.
Dr Benjamin Carson, an antiestablishment figure who lost to Trump in the 2015 primary, is still touting [W.] Cleon Skousen. Skousen in the 1950s was a LDS thinker. He is best known for The Naked Communist. Today Communists like David Corn don't like it.
But when Mitt Romney was mounting his own run, in 2007: Hemingway over in National Review noted that Mitt Romney was citing Skousen too (disclosure: I never voted for him). So also Glenn Beck (disco 2 boogaloo: he's nuts).
Skousen's ideas were terrible. Hemingway notes that Skousen's exegesis of LDS scripture is in the modern LDS mainstream (probably why Skousen didn't want blacks in there); also his analysis of Constitutional Law tends to be well regarded. But Carson wasn't citing those parts. He was citing the anti-Communist parts.
Luckily I don't think Kirk cited Skousen, himself, anywhere.
I'll inject a couple of articles on Iberia before it was Georgia (or Gruziya SSR). First is an attempt to link the languages to genetics. Then, uh, came a bioarxiv of the genetics. The Kartvel before the Horse, maybe.
Svan split off in Time Immemorial, like "7641 BP" which, in myyy daaay, coïncides with the Black Sea Flood. Roughly. The paper seems legit excepting its claim that IndoEuropean started in the Zagros or Alborz. I feel like that's the exact wrong side of the isthmus.
I'm more interested in Late Antiquity naturally. We are told of an influx of Huns, with their skull deformations. The locals had some deformation too. But they deformed their skulls differently. Also: is there Hunnic (Yeneseyan) or Avar (Mongol) influence in the languages? Not seeing it. Alan (Ossetic) is assuredly here, and Turkish of course (it's blown out a lot of old Laz, now preserved in Mingrel), but not Hun nor Avar.
The genetics are noting less Greek than we'd expect of Lazica, famously tied with Trebizond and Crimean-Greek trade. What does turn up, after Christianity AD 400s, is Near Eastern and Anatolian influx. These were by then calling themselves "Romans", not Greeks. Trabzon/Pontic ByzanGreek survives to this day.
One event of some import was in the AD 600s-700s, when the Iberians migrated down the river and split the Laz from the Mingrels. Iberian "Old Georgian" then became the language of literacy. I guess Roman-era Lazica never was literate on her own. Their elites - even when Christian - simply communicated in Greek or, later, Armenian.
BACKDATE 9/23
Jacob A Lollar has submitted to Academia, "The Meaning of Ephesians: Competing Christianities in Second Century Ephesus". We all know "Ephesians" had nothing to do with Ephesus. Lollar has taken upon himself to explain what "Ephesians" was trying to do; and, why it got associated with Asia's capital city later.
Lollar notes that Ephesian Christendom was better associated with John. For some values of "John" that is even true. The Revelation came from a nearby island, and Ephesus was first in the Apocalypse's recipients. There exists also that answer to Luke's Acts, John's Acts. (The various versions of Luke/Acts floating about, don't matter.)
Given the above, I do wonder how come Ignatius hasn't been noted. To Ignatius is ascribed another letter to Ephesus. Unlike the Pauline "Ephesians", nobody serious contests Ignatius' content and recipient.
Ignatius parallels some Pauline phrases. Clearly he meant to evoke 1 Corinthians. Colossians and even "Ephesians" 5:2 also get parallels. To dovetail Lollar I do not read where Ignatius says "as Paul wrote to you". Compare how the Romans under Saint Clement levied Paul's Corinthian correspondence, also against the Corinthians. (At least 1 Cor, also I think the Lachrymose Letter which we don't got no more.) Rather, Ignatius is accepting "Ephesians'" consensus of Asia Minor Pauliana. To the extent "Ephesians" possibly exists to smooth over dispute over Colossians, that dispute was no longer a problem in Ephesus, anyway.
Ignatius faced a different problem in Ephesus, shared with those who accepted that collection like Ephesus' bishop, Onesimus. The problem too was shared, as Ignatius writes to bolster the bishop. The dispute was getting to the point of violence. Ignatius argues that as they are cruel, do not become cruel in return. (Ignatius pretends the cruelty is all done by the baddies, as usual in disputes. We may ignore this.)
I don't think anyone involved knew the Lukan corpus; Ignatius' appeals to the life of Christ are famously paracanonical. Luke's absence means Acts of John weren't there either. Ignatius further parallels some events now found in our Gospel of John, like the anointing as integral to the Passion. But Jesus' very title was "the anointed". Some anointing scene should be reified in any useful narrative. In fact such a scene is not restricted to John 12. The parallel to John 12:32 is bereft of Johannine tropes so likely precedes both.
As to what the schismatics actually taught, Ignatius brings the Physician Creed, which has become famous: There is one Physician who is possessed both of flesh and spirit; both made and not made; God existing in flesh; true life in death; both of Mary and of God; first passible and then impassible — even Jesus Christ our Lord.
Ignatius implies that the other team by not accepting this cannot be cured. One might read this creed to bar the doors of episcopal hospitals. I do not read such: instead, Onesimus and Ignatius were dealing with Christians who refuse medical treatment on grounds flesh be nothing compared to spirit. Christian Scientists, one might say.
The Physician Creed is at the core of Ignatius' thought generally. Ignatius must elsewhere end-run around Mark 15 as he cites Peter against Christ being an asomatic spirit. Some skeptics even wonder, as a result of Ignatius sidestepping Mark, if Mark's Gospel yet existed. I think this Gospel did exist by then, but Ignatius can't use it. (Mark elsewhere is facing headwinds, as was the Gospel in the Egerton papyrus. We are lucky to retain Mark.)
I suspect that Onesimus' problem was the spiritual tradition, beyond even Mark. This tradition can be identified with that around the Acts of John, which - again - wasn't yet written, but a lot of similar lore had been written. The tradition may already have been associated with John. Ignatius won't dignify it with John's name, but that doesn't mean his enemies hadn't. Ignatius' angle was instead to bang the codices of Paul.
The "hycean" world, theorised a few years ago, has been hard to pin down in practice. It might not even be possible in theory, say the Swiss.
The subNeptunes forming out past the snowline start out with an ocean... of lava. The hydrogen and oxygen react with that. By the time it's cooled enough for a water ocean, that water is an also-ran. The atmosphere left over is itself binding hydrogen into methane and ammonia, oxygen into carbon dioxide. What water be left is illiquid. I think the model would be L 231-32.
Which makes me ponder "water rich" planets found here. Although they're smaller.
"Ben and Jerry" just lost Jerry. Unilever, who now own the majority share, had to decide if they were to continue Jerry's vision of political campaigning through the supermarket fridge door, or to sell... ice cream.
Unilever has chosen ice cream. Jerry has flounced.
I expect John Muir will be buying his ice cream elsewhere. Perhaps imports from some Lebanese or Syrian "resistance" outfit; maybe he can whip up a sermon against corporatism. He's certainly not one for fasting.
As to the brand: If it becomes "Bengieri" or some other corporate mush I'll laugh, and buy lots of it.
The Carian language is ancient but its dictionary is very recent, like about two decades old. You'd think its inscriptions would have been deciphered earlier, given its obvious-to-us derivation from Luwian. One stumblingblock appears to be false etymologies dumped upon us by Late Antique grammarians.
Usually the grammarians have been more helpful than this. I understand that Phrygian, for instance, was fairly accurately brought to us. Also Lycian and some other Carian words; but the mix of good and bad in Carian just made people suspicious of the good too.
Which inspires the question - where the "Carian" words aren't Carian, then whence? A couple years ago Orçun Ünal pondered the classical Scythia. For Greeks (and Assyrians) that means the wider steppe. Ünal picks up three words: κόον "sheep", γίσσα "stone", and ἄλα "horse". Words that sound like this can be found in the odd IndoEuropean language, but are not protoIndoEuropean for which all three have famous derivates. None of them are Anatolian.
Ünal thinks they're Altaic. In some cases, other languages had borrowed them from Altaic: kwn appears in old Mongolic, the Mongols not being much for raising sheep so presumably trading for their pelts.
As a Turk himself he has an interest, to stretch the Turkic connexion to southwest Anatolia into Classical times. But if we nonTurks force him to acknowledge that, we must acknowledge our own interests. We are left to view the paper itself. Which actually looks good, at least to my amateurish eyes.
I would point out that the γίσσα soundalikes in Altaic trend not to stone in the general, but to stony badland in the specific. That is the stone which poses a barrier to the wandering shepherd.
Ünal raises the three words might be real loans into Carian, but cannot find them in the graffiti. He concludes the later Greeks simply erred. Like I said: Ünal is not to be dismissed as a nationalist. As to why they erred, we can only speculate.
This is a blog; let us speculate. Perhaps some barbarians brought along some Turkish shepherds: Slavs would be a good Late Antique suspect. These shepherds would, perhaps, identify themselves as never-Slavic; on settlement, they interfaced with the local Carian shepherds directly. Those latter shepherds had quit speaking Carian, themselves. So these three words because Carian-by-geography. When the Byzantines found these shepherds, they immediately recognised these three words as not Greek nor anything they'd seen in the region. "Carian" it was, then.
The Eskimo family, our exonym for Inuit, came from northeast Asia. A few correlations were noted between its Asiatic branch and Tungusic. In 2015 Alexander Vovin showed that the synopsis exists only in north Tungusic, never trickling to (say) Manchu.
I am no Manchulogist. I didn't even know this split in Tungus until "now". Apparently it goes back around to Christian Year Zero, about when Octavian became the august prince and when the Han empire hiccoughed. The Tungus homeland is the Amur.
Should Vovin's finding be true, means the Eskimo lived much further into Asia than hitherto understood. Sirenikskii would be a sub-branch there. Perhaps the north Tungus pushed them east.
Another blindside, more of interest to this blog: Uwe Seefloth "Die Entstehung polypersonaler Paradigmen im Uralo-Sibirischen" (2001), that Eskimo // Uralic.
BACKDATE 9/17
Today was the feast of the Exaltation of the True Cross. This is the AD ~630 event by which Heraclius made a deal with the crumbling Sasanian authority to retrieve what the last effective shah, Khusro II Aparwez, had taken. That shah by the way had been Christian-curious himself; but on his death, the West could hardly trust that his mutually-fighting successors could keep this relic safe.
From what I have seen today, I wonder if Heraclius should have bothered.
What we parishioners got in our homily, almost fourteen centuries later, was general pablum about self-sacrifice and the Cross of Christ which Charlie Kirk himself might have delivered. We did not get any note about the risks Kirk had himself taken for this faith. We did however, after the service during the announcements, get rather a lot about... Gaza.
Sure: Kirk did not die in this Church. I understand that he came into Christendom from the Protestant or even Waldensian direction. A hardcore might argue that if a pagan (jack-Mormon, possibly, I didn't look it up) hits a heretic, that Problem be Somebody Else's. Maybe.
That would, I counter, go double for Jew-versus-Muslim. When I think of Catholicism, I typically do not see Gaza. Christians in the Holy Land at this point are willing hostages to one side or the other. Presently in Gaza that side is Islamic.
I suspect what is going on, among our Bishops, is a distraxion. They see that the terminally-online youth are increasingly in the Third World Ideology, which is anti-Jewish. They are pandering.
The statements "I disagree with X when he says Y but I don't think X should be executed for it" and "people shouldn't be executed for saying Y but X said Y" sound alike. But they are not alike. Allow us a thought experiment, here.
Okay: for me it is not much of an experiment. I never approved Turning Point, that "Coffee Party" of the Right. They got themselves involved beyond just those "prove me wrong" tables; where they interfered with Biblical-scholarship classes, they stepped in my turf. I don't know that TPUSA kids similarly interfered in biology; but I know Prof. Mike Adams did, and you'll find rare in TPUSA circles to say of Adams what I am here saying of TPUSA.
I respected that TPUSA were pushing back against the Left, but that says more about the bankruptcy of our Left than about TPUSA. I mean, QAnon might - might - have ginned up voters in critical moments. Longer-term such voters gin up meanwhile the antiRight vote, and distract the Right itself. TPUSA wasn't this bad, as noted they weren't even as bad (in-public) as was Adams. They were still, at best, checquered.
To steelman further, advocating for the government to exert force is the woman's way around exerting force one's-self. Politics is war, says Clausewitz; Heinlein says the vote is sublimated violence. Curtis Yarvin knows this. Andrew Anglin is saying this.
All this might sound like I'm talking myself into the position that this was a righteous hit like what took out Suleimani. Indeed some people on the Left are blaming exactly a Rightist for this crime. Or they're blaming Israel / Mossad, assuredly what passes for the Right in Jewry.
This blog must take the brave stance that it disagrees with Charlie Kirk but that it would be wrong to kill him for that. (Dumbass.)
If TPUSA was wrong, they should be told that they are wrong. Then people don't attend their events because they know such events are a waste of their time. Administrations don't ring up Charlie Kirk because they know his word is about as useful as that of a TypePad blog. For whatever Charlie Kirk believed, with the warning it is impossible today to ask him, I understand he would not have recommended that we do unto a Marxian history-professor (say) what has been done unto him. He would have had an agent float that professor's nonsense into public scrutiny, which might be adjudged accordingly.
The one exception that should be made is when they endorse violence outside of the legal structure. The Nation of Islam should be allowed to preach. We can argue the point about, oh, Yakoob. The Zebra used to do murders. There's no arguing with that.
Back to the first paragraph here: how you arrange these statements matters. By "well yeah you shouldn't be deleted for saying Y but he said Yyyyy" you are laying out your marker that Y matters more than the shooting.
Hollow Earth TERF: He dropped out of university after a semester and then got radicalized on discord. If anything, college would have kept him on a normal path
. In fact Tyler Robinson was going through vocational-tech, which is what the Right suggests more people should do for a Normal Path. But whatevs. I am here to suggest that the college path isn't as Normal as she'd like to think.
College is for the nurses, teachers, administrators and laptop-people... cheering the thugs. And perhaps for the Црна рука arranging the sale of horses
.
Thugs, or thugs-to-be like Tyler Robinson, meet the college grads on Discord (or on IRC if they are full-on autists rather than basic ass-burgers). Robinson has the temptation to look up to these people. These grads sure know their "facts". Grads like Representative Seth Moulton; a real hand for statistics, on that right arm. 76%! Wow.
One hopes that Pam Bondi and Kash Patel came out of college with some numeral skills, themselves. They sure started out in the Administration with a lot of support, that we citizens'd not be suffering this level of terrorism.
Maybe they should be rolling up these networks.
AFP, which is the French press I think, is reporting on the camp towns. Every now and again some foreign nation sets up a base in Korea. The Koreans, not exactly Earth's most xenophilic race, segregates this base as far as possible. But Koreans are as human as are the rest of us, so occasionally a slut or a criminal crops up. Disgraced from fellow Koreans, and not wishing to starve, such a one will look for nonKoreans.
The Korean government could kick out the scoundrel, or scound-rette; or just quietly disappear the problem. In fact these solutions have been resorted-to over the decades. But sometimes they just... let things happen. Things get really spicy when orphaned or abandoned children were involved.
The Mad Corean is attempting nuance, although it could certainly be argued - commenters are arguing right there - that the nuance is kinda stupid and clickbaitey. I am not a Korean nor any kind of East Asian (I am literally more South Asian). So I'll let you judge.
It would be smashing if all armies everywhere were staffed with gentlemen who always doffed their top-hats to the native ladyfolk, wot. But sadly America has a few scumbags of its own, and its Army has been known at times to make Allowances. That is why a "UCMJ" exists, to catch such men after, perhaps, it be too late.
The usual pattern is that somebody brings up a crime from back in the 1960s - now 1970s - and a deal is struck. Once such deal in Korea was struck 2014. Well, the Korean courts floated it up again in 2022 and found it was still illegal. Whenever there's a pro-America government in Korea, politicians on the outs can score easy points by dredging this stuff up. So can edgy entertainers like the wretched Psy. Like how American opportunists bring up the USS Liberty whenever Israel gets off the leash.
Some news today, so I'll go with the good news: TRAPPIST 1-e. This blog has been dismissive of b-c-d as likely-nonatmospheric (or Venereal; -c turned out nonatmospheric). We were saving our hopes for -e.
Some constraints are in. Might be nitrogen and... methane. Wonderful Anton Petrov is pondering a Titanlike.
It's a little warm for a Titan-proper, you'd think but... this planet is tidally-locked. The starfacing side could be barren and rockey, yes. (None of these planets are as dense as is Mercury.) But the other side could hold those "ices". Like water, in ice form. Methane can exist as liquid under colder temperatures with a thick-enough envelope of some inert gas. Over Titan that's nitrogen.
Typepad ain't the strongest blog platform - Wordpress still exists, and these days Substack is probably best. What's left of it is going away; to which I am only now alerted. So I gotta look through this blog.
I've dug up two links, both last year, to Ancient Hebrew Poetry and Harvard Press.
The latter link was from 2012 and is just an excerpt from The Anointed. The HUP haven't updated their blog since 2023. John Hobbins last posted to Ancient Hebrew Poetry in 2017.
Won't be a problem to update those links I think.
BACKDATE 9/11
Gary Jennings back in the middle 1990s wrote a book Raptor, set in the decades of the Latin/Gothic Late Antiquity. Jennings argued (by illustration) that these decades weren't a Dark Age... quite yet. The age was however a fragile one, with the darkness pressing inward.
In AD 476 Odoacer was king of Italy by the legal-fiction of being the Christian Empire's agent, which sole ruler reigned from Constantinople. By this fiction, Odoacer kept the legitimate Western emperor Julius Nepos from doing his emperoring from actual Rome. Four years later, Nepos was dead. Odoacer then let his flag fly as a German king. He held no respect for Latin or generally-Roman norms (losers!). The surviving Roman Emperor, Leo in Constantinople, took this as the insult it was. It happened that Leo was a Thracian ruling over lands which not all the Goths had yet vacated for the west. After much mutual conflict, Leo sent those Goths west - under Theoderic.
When I read Raptor I'd figured this whole span as an historic detail at best (pardonnez-moi pour le Lepenisme). Apparently people still care about it. Hans Kerrinckx has uploaded a review he'd done in 2016 of a book in 2015, Jonathan J. Arnold's Theoderic and the Roman Imperial Restoration. This he did, I suppose, before Peter Heather could write such a book first, as Heather was hitting up Justinian instead.
I'd like to report that Kerrinckx had read enough about these years to critique Arnold. Kerrinckx at the time was a MA or at least candidate. Sadly he does not, delivering only a book-report. He even whines about Arnold's prose being difficult. I would red-mark this if this were a BA-candidate essay; it does not deserve MA status. Further: does Academia.edu need book-reports? As they say on 4chan: get a blog.
BACKDATE 9/14
Christians promise the Day Of Judgement. The Islamic term is, as all my readers assuredly know already: the Yawm al-Dîni. I was having trouble finding a Yôm had-Dyn in Hebrew. In 2009, Drew Longacre may have found something like it.
The proof-text is in Deuteronomy 32:35-37. This is the famous quote that vengeance is Mine
, lî. But maybe it wasn't lî. Maybe it was li-yôm.
Although the latter is not in MT, neither is it noncontextual (excuse the 2x-neg, plz). After the Lord discusses nqm; He goes on to talk of time, even unto The Day. Also the Greek here translates en hemerai ekdikesios.
The MT lî enjoys support from the Targums. It gets formidable support in the Christian translations. These latter, anyway, may depend on Saint Paul: who - exPharisee - notoriously quoted from a protoMT against the LXX. The Epistle of Hebrews however did not... excepting right here, which also has "vengeance is Mine".
Longacre notes here Qumran and the Samaritans. The Samaritan Torah proves that the Greek didn't just cook this up. A real Hebrew text was here in the centuries BC.
I'll also note that the Hebrew is nqm and not dyn. Our "Day of Judgement" looks like something brought from the MT, that Graeco-Samaritan variant being forgotten. It was assembled from other text.
BACKDATE 9/13
Trappist-1's planets are in mean-motion resonance. Since we're still looking at this system, most of its planets remain unconstrained - except that they are not very dense. Alejandra Ross et al. have a study on similar MMR systems, not Trappist-1 itself.
The dataset numbers 24 systems. Kepler-36 and Kepler-105, specifically -36b and -105c, are standouts. Not only are these less dense than the others; they cannot even be made of stone. The Ross team implies that most MMR systems had formed in-situ.
Two other outliers: WASP-47 e, and good ol' 55 Cancri e. These, the study proposes, formed where they are like the other twenty. They were once Neptunians; but, in the heat and the tides, have boiled off most their atmo.
Those two Kepler planets - therefore their systems - must be migrates from out in the coal and ice regions, with (relatively) less stone and iron. Now they have supercritical "oceans". The paper wants to label the two, Icy Core Worlds. Various models are possible; suffice this blog that K-36 b is 1-5% water and K 105 c is a whopping 11-25%.
On the other side of density, Kepler-107 c is marked a superMercury. It happens this is the only one in the 'set. Elsewhere Trappist-1 - say - doesn't have any.
BACKDATE 9/13 Kyplanet.
Dr. Kevin van Bladel wants to retire the Biblical term "Semitic". His argument is that there is no such thing as race. If Jews and Muslims agree to apply "Banu Sham" to themselves, they shouldn't.
In fact several genetic markers do cluster with those ethnoi, or gens if you like, who call themselves Semites; terms like "Natufian" and the "J Y-chromosome" are rife in the literature. The linguistic affinities have been known since antiquity, as van Bladel must admit. If "race" be political, that is because politics evolve among clans to advance the clans' interests. "There is no such thing as race" is an ideal, not a fact. It is "ought to be" against "is".
Van Bladel cannot be unaware of this. To be blunter: he is lying.
Which leads us to query his motive for the lie. It must be difficult for a "van Bladel" to survive in modern academia. I must add that the Plattdütschman in question is hitherto best-famed for pointing out sura 18's dependence on Heracleian propaganda, and maybe even postHeracleian.
This man, to use the chromosomal definition, will likely come out a decade from now like Gladwell admitting that he said things in order to keep his position.
A day or so ago, the US sank a boat carrying deadly drugs and armed Venezuelans. Said boat was in international waters and, legally, should not have been granted port access anywhere. Once they entered those waters they became pirates. Or, a Venezuelan offencive forse. (Sorry, I sometimes like switching up those c's.) It was up to Venezuela's President to decide which.
