Pleistocene lead exposure

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.

The first Australian tektites

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.

Sedeprivated Canterbury

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.

Collision detection just got fixed

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.

55 Cancri grows again

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

Martian ozone, past and future

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

Constraining Prox B

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

For hate's sake

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 Y

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.

Karnak

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.

The Global South in the premodern age

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.

Boron salts for rocketry

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

The other Mubtada'

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

Trajectory

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.

Christian Identity is not Christian Nationalism

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).

Primordial Earth

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?

Two roads, west or east

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.

An agnostic case for not summoning demons

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.

The Getting Started math subs

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).

John Brown's body of literature

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.

The Hilbert mapping

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

Baruch in Syriac

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

When science is put to the vote

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.

Cleon Skousen

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.

When Georgia was Iberia

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

The Pauline party in Ephesus

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.

So much for hyceans

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.

Theseus' Ice Cream

"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.

PseudoCarian

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.

Eskimo and (north) Tungusic

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

Le heckin' BASED Caffolick Cherch

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.

Two nations

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.

The Nazi-punchers don't go to college

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.

Why Korea doesn't always love us

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.

Moonscape in the front, Titan out back

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 is going away

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

Raptor redux

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

The day of vengeance

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

Water-rich terrestrial planets

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.

Kevin van Bladel saves his skin

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.

Venezuela is a narco-cartel

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.

Maduro has decided which.

The first bloodland

The genetics are in for what we call the AD 500s - when Christ and His Angels slept. The Slavs, or people with Slavic DNA anyway, pushed into Pomerania - and into Croatia. This transfer of population is politely termed "Demic".

At the back of the migration, these populations became 80% Slavic.

I don't know that the culprits in Pomerania were properly Slavic however. Isn't this seen in the Middle Ages as "Prussia"? No Slavs there; the language used to be considered instead "Baltic", but now I understand is termed a third branch of "BaltoSlavic".

As usual, talk of "ancestral" languages get rough before Late Antiquity. Most agree that the territory wasn't originally German, although the ?Slavs ?Prussians took it from Germans. Some call the ancestors here, "Temematic".

Inspiration for dungeons

I have offloaded one more project, a bit more adventurous than the last two. If nothing else, the logic is mine save the algo's (so I am playing the rôle of Mark Barnes).

Enjoy Cellular Automata, or "Cave" for short. If you do C# and don't mind the /unsafe tag.

Ringquest

In 1982, BYTE was running a competition for games. We've met the "winner" which nobody remembers. Enjoying a better reputation today is the number-five loser: Gordon Mills' Ringquest - at least, for the Redditors. This game is available in the MicroM8 emulator. All for the higher-end Apples, like 48k RAM.

This game is a fanfic / alternate of Lord of the Rings where/when the bulk of the Fellowship has failed in the depths of Moria. Now the Balrog owns Sauron's Ring. Your job is to get down there and pry the Ring off him/it, before everybody else is screwed. Treasure can be found. Mills switches-up the usual Nethack / Rogue conventions such that you can use the treasure to bribe encounters out of a fight; except for the Balrog itself of course. Your aim is progress toward the MacGuffin, not to gain loot.

The comp winner was in Forth. The fourth-with-a-u also-ran was in Basic... mostly. To input this thing into your machine required manual entry of many, many hexadecimal bytes: this is how most the data were separate from the program, which prog took up 6k RAM. I suppose the step after that would have been to compress the data which at least might have cut the manual entry (but could you do that in 8-bit?). The map, at least, was procedurally-generated.

I feel like the author should instead have saved it to cassette and sold it. This was wasted on BYTE. Maybe the use of the Tolkien Estate's property was the problem; Beyond Zork solved this with the "Coconut of Quendor".

The BACKDATE roundup

This August was among the worst months in this blog's history, beat out by last November. Dog Days indeed! Mostly I'm blaming the news because there wasn't much worth commenting. But also I found other things to do.

Here is what I did: porting fun games from ye olde Color Computer News over to C#. Incidentally I also learnt some basics on hooking Visual Studio up with Git. From July 1982 is Mark Barnes' GoldMine; from the ensuing September is Steve Sullivan's Venus Lander.

I don't know if either were classics. GoldMine did at least adapt a classic algorithm, a 1981 random maze generator. (I have it as pseudorandom.) Lander games were already old hat by late 1982: even on the CoCo, even allowing for the CoCo News' late spring publication hiccup. This one, I argue, had some art style.

I suppose I could ask if anyone else has already done these, as well. Google isn't coming up with anything.

ZFPM1 to GSDMC

We've had the horse since our Yamnaya days... attached to the wheel and chariot. Why didn't they just throw on some Comanche blankets and ride into battle directly?

Here's the study: the horse did indeed get friendly in 3000 BC, gene "ZFPM1". But they only got rideable (aside maybe for slender Scythian women) around 2200 BC. GSDMC, which apparently is less-great for us humies.

The Shroud of Turin is fake

Some old news that shouldn't surprise any triple-digit-IQ today... and didn't surprise them in mediaeval days, either.

The debunking in question comes from Nicole Oresme, before he became bishop of Lisieux AD 1377. Back then (before the Schism), thoughtful skeptics were allowed into the Church and, it seems, promoted. Especially during the Plague the Church couldn't have popular cults springing up and introducing chaos.

This blog wholly endorses the practice of taking the spiritual to evaluate the useful-physical. It happens that sometimes the "spiritual" is just fake.

Next, do the Mandylion.

The parasite does not befriend the host

Mikhail Черновић and other Internet Slavs are on the case of the Demons. NephCon aside, we have good data on parasites and how they act... like a demon might.

I am unsure how far prayer helps directly. What does help directly is expulsion of the parasites. Ivermectin does this. So does the old-fashioned way: fasting. It may be that prayer, by subordinating (what you think is) your will to an outside power, shows you where your will is becoming the wasps' will.

Yesterday one Joseph Noel Walker raised that Darwin's stomach problems came from some parasite or other. Usually here is cited the helicobacter, famously to be discovered by a mad lad who infected himself by design. Seriously: do not try this at home.

Back to the Christians I wonder how many other nasty Late Antique bugs were solved by going out into the desert and subsisting on sterilised foods, like dried unleavened bread left out to be nuked by the dry sun. Not all the Orthodox hermits are to be dismissed.

Darwin, overall, was a man ahead of his time. But an Orthodoxy behind his time might have saved him.

When the daimyos ruled England

Yesterday Anton Howes analysed England's century of authoritarian oligarchy. The Parliament was then held by landholding agricultural interests, "lords" and "nobles" - also bishops. They (mostly Norman) had been able to exploit a low-class (Saxon) peasantry. Then this miserable population got culled, by fleas. The survivors swiftly learnt the upside: they could bargain for higher wages.

The nobles reacted: by wage controls. In England (and Norway) the nobles further introduced the Letter Testimonial (in excellent Norman legalese). Howes equates the Letter to a Chinese hukou passport: the villein (serf) didn't get to move from his lord's manor to some better-paying lord's, or to repopulate those cities.

I don't know that Howes says this, but the fourteenth-century power-grab by the aristos made critical that aristos stay aristo. For awhile they could still gain lands and booty in France, thank you Henry V. But after the early 1400s that didn't last. I suspect the Wars Of The Roses resulted, as lords fought lords.

This all started under Edward III. "Ēadweard" is a Saxon name. One wonders if he were wiser to have held himself as the King of the English, as to revisit the nobles' privileges from the Great Charter.

Sargasso farming

I still can't say I got a lot going on, but I did come across this Youtube about the Sargasso. That's the sea which discouraged the Lishbunatis from further west, or southwest. Today I learnt that in 2020 it shifted south. I don't know if it has shifted as far south as Barbados, but it's dumping a lot of sargassum onto the northern isles. Where it dies, and rots. This smells bad for tourists and kills fish for everyone.

The good news is that rotting weeds can be contained to give off methane, a more-or-less clean source of energy on small scales... like what they want for small islands. It's not like it's any worse for "Global Warming" than letting the rubbish dump the methane right into the air before the locals can use it.

Also - apparently - this weed can supplement brickmaking.

They are even making biodegradable shirts with it. That is nice overall given the planet has too many junk shirts, and Caribbean nations have to be tempted to dump their waste overall into that ocean. For whatever reason Shein is being blamed for textile-pollution. Shein is already unpopular given their record on, uh, slavery (ain't there a Commandment against that?). But back onto topic: good plan.

Chum

We coders have disdained Bill Gates since maybe the 1980s, when his BASIC insisted on keeping the GOTOs in the TSR-80. Then he created a foundation, which his divorcée Melinda took over to make #woke. What Gates has left to him, he still tends to misuse, often in the name of The Climate. (Oblig'ref to the late Mr Epst**n.) Gates isn't as evil as some of his WEF peers, but that's a very low bar. Harrumpf.

Having set that 'rumpf-stake: Gates is right on laboratory-grown meats. National Review as usual is wrong.

As Razib Khan keeps saying on X, it doesn't compete with your ribeye or wagyu. It competes with your cheeseburger, like the Impossible tried to do; and with "the TV dinner". The Impossible failed, sure. Grown meats shouldn't have the same nutrient deficiencies and chemical waste as the late Impossible. They should be more like bean burgers (which are great, if crumbly); or shiitake (also yummy).

I see the "beef it's what's for dinner" lobbyists have pushed to criminalise lab meat in Texas and Florida. And various AI slop peddlers on youtube keep raising Gates' mug because We All Know What That Means.

The agricultural cartel was last seen trying to get screwworm-infested herds into the US, and have generally been a bane to US immigration policy. That's a feature for NR these days; but never mind them. I suggest the Right not side with the cartel and the bought-off pseudoRight.

Lab Grown Meat: It's What's For The Microwave.

BACKDATE 8/27 in light of the Arabella news.

Cosmic Conquest

Going through old Color Computer News magazines, I found that some of them referred to other computer magazines - like those which might target a higher-end, "university" audience. One of these was BYTE. So then I got looping through BYTE.

Over 1982, concurrently with (arguably) the best year of CoCoNews, BYTE was posting the winners of a game-writing competition. Since at the time I was, uh, eight years old I hadn't actually read any BYTE.

Most of the games were for the Apple micro-computers. As hinted, my dialect was for the (Tandy/Microsoft) CoCo. If you, presumably not an eight year old boy, know CoCo MS Basic: you could probably grok most of the Apple's. I should have been able to handle that magazine's Apple games in the middle 1980s if not in 1982, although I don't know about Microsofting them (1989?).

What strikes me now is that, although everyone read BYTE back then, few seem to have remembered the actual winner of the comp. That would be Cosmic Conquest. Problem: it's not in Basic... at all. Alan Sartori-Angus did this in some Apple dialect of Forth nobody knows anymore. You'll remember (IBM-DOS) Forth from Starflight published 1986 - and its mod/sequel/cashin, which as far as I know was the last commercial run at a Forth game.

About four years ago some mad lads brought Conquest to a modern, hobbyist Forth. That's Rick Carlino; in 2022 Wargaming Scribe reviewed that. A year later some youtuber "I Shoot DVCAM" got the sprites working on an Apple II emulator.

Some oldschool type-em-up games have passed Chronus' test. People still enjoy lunar-lander, and Zork - even Rogue. Conquest left the awards with a blue ribbon and nothing else. It is in "the history of RTS" as a sideshow if that. For the reviewer, it squeaks into the RTS genre by dint of not being turnbased; although even here, under the hood, it is turnbased.

I have no dispute with the Conquest verdict of "totally obsolete". I do, however, dispute that this game belongs with Broderbund's The Ancient Art of War. Where Conquest really belongs is behind Master of Orion (which admittedly also has Civilization DNA) and, more-obscure, Reach For The Stars.

BACKDATE 8/30

Jemdet Nasr at Oman

As we're talking preUruk in the coastal Iraq: here's Magan - as Sumer and Akkad will call it. Only here the focus isn't Uruk.

The specific preUruk culture which Magan imported was جمدة نصر. That's the culture just upriver to those Uruk marshes 3100-2900 BC. So the Iraq's navigators knew of Oman centuries before they stuck the "Magan" label upon it, usually dated 2300 BC.

Some of what they traded was shells, which seems more Uruk than Jemdet-Nasr. I take it that Jemdet-Nasr could farm crops simply impossible in the briny marshes. If the middlemen were Sumerian, this can explain how Uruk/Sumer was able to supplant the up-river.

BACKDATE 8/29 h/t Archaeology.org.

Aliens in the Smithsonian

Jason Colavito argues that the NephCon is taking the Smithsonian. At least, I think he's arguing that.

It blasts a barrage of facts, at least I think they're facts, about Smithsonian controversies of yore. The Smithsonian is in historic Dixieland between (as of, oh, AD 1785) a moderate Catholic state (Maryland) and a moderate Episcopalian one (Virginia). These aren't really the founding states of the US, nor do their elites represent prole Americans. As a result, when Administrations have taken over since then, the victors want the Smithsonian as a spoil.

One might write an article about that. But that article would have to mention Whiteness. It would have to mention how both central MD and north VA have become colonies of Cambridge, MA; alienating (per the polls) over half the country outside the region.

One might even write the irony of Pat Buchanan loudly supporting the bombing of Nagasaki in the 1980s, against his progeny in the Catholic Right which boo-hoo-hoo's about poor Nagasaki's great Cathedral and how the whole war wasn't worth the US' bother. (If pressed most'll say they're just asking questions.)

I don't think Alberino quite counts, Cernovich aside. Colavito was doing better, earlier.

The New Republic is trying to be the next Wall Street Journal, I guess. Just another partisan broadsheet, canting slogans.

BACKDATE 8/29

Cairo MS 247

On the 19th, Shaker and el-Khatib released some real scholarship, may it serve as an example to other Arabs. This attaches Cairo MS 247 "Maṣāḥif" to another muṣḥaf, Berlin 4313. The latter was known to Bergsträsser (as "Qāf 47") and photographed, although only its photos have survived the wars and Ideologies.

Cairo ends at Q. 4:137, where Berlin picks up v. 138. Corpus Coranicum makes use of Berlin.

The paper takes the opportunity to run some textual analysis. The reading of both is more-or-less Ibn ʿĀmir (d. 118/736), often opposed to the Warsh or the "Cairo" each of which north Africans use today. The reading which interests the authors most is Dūād (sic; ḥamza) for Dāwūd, which they argue is ancestral, with "Dāwūd" being "ʿajamī" (Iran?). I take further that the sura order of the two reünited MSS is 3-4-5-6 against Ibn Masʿud 4-3-etc; and that the variants are nondramatic. So, generally Umayyad; as befits a MS of Umayyad Egypt.

The parent MS is dated even to ʿUthmān himself. I am unsure of that much; the text runs 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 14, 15, and 21 and I don't think sura 21 nor even 14 be this early. But: it lacks the sura headers and dividers of (say) the Birmingham MS. It could well be copied from a Sufyānid basis with others brought in under ʿAbd al-Malik.

BACKDATE 8/28

The tidal civilisation

Sumer is considered a river civilisation like Egypt. Phys.org has Liviu Giosan and Reed Goodman, on Uruk which they date 4000-3200 BC (Wiki would say, overlapping Ubeyd down to 3700 BC). They argue that this Uruk civilisation - yes, Sumerian - started not along the Tigris (much less Euphrates) but through the Marsh.

The paper points out that the flood/farm cycles don't match in Iraq like they do (rather, pre-Nasser - did) in Egypt. I assume the Nile Delta could have supported a low-level culture too, but didn't need to scale up to a river civilisation. Well-fed Upper Egypt could just conquer the villages down there, mostly to establish trade-ports.

Back to Sumer, this has two deltas at first: Euphrates and "Khuzestan". The locals weathered the 6200 BC freeze and the various droughts. But the deltas merged over the next millennium. 5500 BC commences the "Ubeid" ceramic style. The tides had declined so by the late Uruk era 3500 BC, there's no direct record left in Sumerian - save myths, about separating the sweet water from the brine, tropes alien to the Semites and Egyptians.

The good news for Sumer: lessons learnt from that elder hydrology could scale to the impressive irrigation of Uruk and beyond.

A pack of marsh Karankawa suddenly ratcheting up to agriculture explains why Sumerian is an isolate, unrelated to Hurrian / Semitic / Elamite. Everybody ignored those swampy yokels, excepting the odd trader. Until suddenly they couldn't be ignored. If the culture had come from the Euphates we'd expect it to be Akkadian-only; likewise, if across the Tigris, Elamite-only.

I would however like to know more of Ubeid upriver. They weren't as good as irrigation, but they did do some, and herded cattle as well. Their villages weren't as hierarchical as was Gilgamesh's city; Ubeid was more like Cucuteni in this. City-names like Arbela-Erbil and Babil (Babylon) are still not comprehensible as Semitic or Sumerian. So who were they?

Pons-Brooks again

Pons-Brooks, or "12P", is a shortish-period comet which Daniel Kirkwood calculated had got diverted - by Neptune - AD 991ish. Carl Sagan made it famous by not reading Kirkwood and claiming it had something to do with Chinese history - which it did not. It got to aphelion again last year although I wasn't paying attention.

Nature Astronomy was paying attention. So now 12P is famous again: its water is Earthlike. Of course it didn't contribute any water to us; the comet is still out there. But it formed with other comets as reached the inner solar system.

Trappist 1-d

I've been on other projects which I am hoping to post on other fora, so have neglected this blog. I do wish to discuss Trappist 1's inner planets meanwhile. JWST has a report on -d.

The present consensus runs that -c is airless. This was thought for innermost -b too; now, JWST claims -b has thick supercritical carbon-dioxide atmosphere "with a hydrocarbon smog". The present study looks at -d. This like -c has turned up nothing.

"Turns up nothing" doesn't mean nothing; Mars has something, but Elon doesn't care, since we cannot breathe on it. More of interest for -d is the counterclaim: that a thick cloudlayer shrouds the dark side. We'd be able to see the edges of that at the edges of either transit. Climate models - they say - allow this for such an insolation around such a red-shifted star.

My counter to the counter: planetary-formation models. Trappist-1's planets are in mutual resonance. They formed where they are without interference. Then the star did its T-Tauri thing. The T-Tauri phase enforced a coal line, which starts far away from -d. These planets, then, did not form with water. Nor with ammonia, methane what-have-you.

Whaddabout Venus, I hear my readers. To whom I am sympathetic. I did think T1-c, closer to the star, would be a Venuslike! but... it's not. As for T1-d, Venus is more massive. When our Sun was T-Tauri, Venus was further away than T1 b,c,d to T1... by a lot.

I'd hold the counterclaim for some other inner-HZ planet in a nonresonant M system.

Paul of Tella

Sean Anthony considers whether the Qâric umma was in fact a politeia. The whole thing is as-yet unavailable; so I'll tackle the first bit, which engages in a spot of trolling about Paul of Tella.

Thus far, this here blog has known Paul for his upgrade of the "Septuagint" Bible in its Syriac form. I did not know that he had created a subculture to use it. As such, Paul would sit after such fifth-century extremist Syrian Ephesians as Rabbula. Rabbula, technically, was still in communion with the Purple; Anastasius was in his party. Justinian... maybe not as much. Anyway Paul didn't see him as such. Paul would end his days in the plague year our AD 538.

Over in Egypt Peter IV and Damian will be following Paul's example. The whole of Coptic Egypt, in effect, will become Anastasius' church in exile, a sort of river-long hermitage.

BACKDATE 8/30

Let the dildoes hit the floor

In theme with the Why Do They Hate Us commenting this weekend, let's speculate on why it's raining men (ay-men) on the WNBA courts. To the point there's now a dong dome.

I must throat-clear that this blog opposes the schlong. The author has one of his own which causes him more trouble than, perhaps, he deems worth keeping. I don't care to see more. Harrumph! ... but.

I used to appreciate the Girl Boss in adolescence. Relevant to WNBA, our family would go out to see the Comets in Houston. It was a passable and inexpensive way to pass the time - and a safe space to watch girls in motion, which most boys rather enjoy. If the fans in the stands were also girls with less reciprocal interest in boys, if they weren't being hostile to boys I could take it.

What has happened lately is the hostility to boys. Articles came out whispering of a lavender mafia in the cloakrooms. Lately the WNBA put out a po-faced conference where they were talking about the dildoes being yet another manifestation of "sexualizing women". They could take gaslighting lessons from Lord Roberts.

The WNBA has other issues. Garner got busted in Russia and her comments about men trickled out, also. (For whom, we traded the subject of Lord of War.) The WNBA blathered about paying them what we owe them, as if the free-market wasn't doing that already. Somewhere around here was the racism against Caitlin Clark, although that's less an issue for me I'll admit. We might also discuss all the PRIDE flags waving around, and good-luck if you're wearing a MAGA hat because that's "political" which the PRIDE isn't we're told.

As noted, I don't support throwing stuff on the court. I agree, it's dangerous. If you don't like the way the WNBA treats men or even normal women, then don't go.

Pay the WNBA what we owe them. Which - to me, right now: is nothing.

Power to Truth in the House of Lords

I had access to a printed Wall Street Journal this morn. In it was a "Review" piece by some Lord Andrew Roberts, about Churchill's legacy and those who oppose it. The Lord couched the piece as an explainer: why do certain people, clearly not the Lord's sort of people, drag down this hero.

In it was a side-swipe at David Irving as a "neo-nazi historian". Which you can just... say, in the Yookay; because Lipstadt won her libel case. The nuances don't matter, you can say things and dare anyone to come to this man's defence.

With that in mind, Roberts goes on to say the reason people "hate" Churchill on the "far" right is because they like authoritarianism. Theodor Adorno lives!

If you actually listen to the antiChurchill / altRight intersection, they aren't shy on telling everyone the real reason. It is because they feel like they've been cheated. Moldbug Yarvin used to talk about feeling "jobbed"; hoe_math is lately talking about how we tried MORE than you. hoe_math for one feels bitter about this; that his kinfolk have given over their cities to those who say you are sad, worthless individuals destined for the hellfire; unless you embrace Islam.

People like that, like William Golding's avatar in Free Fall, stuck on the outs, will ask how they lost their freedom. One answer offered to them is - Churchill took it from them. Or maybe the Jews did; whatever. That isn't the focus of this post.

The focus of this post is what should have been Roberts' focus, why Rightists out on the fringe reject Churchill to the point they feel hatred. Roberts did not answer that question. And his non-answer went to its own extreme, as a refusal. Lord Andrew Roberts is the mirror image to a Holocaust denier. Roberts is even more far gone than an Occidental Observer editor.

The question one might pose is, why does Andrew Roberts hate the Right so much. Although I suspect the real emotion he holds is fear.

BACKDATE 8/10

The American lemur

Vox Day linked University of Reading on primate origins. Ideologues like Beale never link "scientody" for its own sake; it's always about casting new discoveries as "epicycles" against "Darwin".

If you read the article for its own sake, we learn how animals evolve - through where, and when. The geography wasn't the same in the Eocene as it is now. Neither was the climate. In the elder days of the early Caenozoic, Europe was more like an island-chain, with a Pannonian Sea in what's now Hungary. It was also warmer: a common ancestor to the falcon and the parrot flitted about Denmark. There was much rejoicing among Monty Python fans.

For basis: the mammalian life that emerged after Chicxulub was dispersed and very different between South America, Africa, North America, and Europe. North America had dogs, horses, camels. South America of course was marsupial - spreading across a then-temperate Antarctica to Australia. Africa had the elephant, and hyaena/cats I think.

The paper-proper argues that primates should be listed with North America and not with Europe. North America does not benefit from the currents which keep Europe from being East Labrador. The paper argues that North America wasn't always temperate back then, either. It might even have been worse than Antarctica at the time.

The ur-primate would have been like a dwarf lemur, with hibernation properties. The primate could also migrate better than other animals at the time. I am reminded of Dinosaur (2000) with lemurs and dinosaurs witnessing the asteroid together.

Now: if the dwarf lemur originated in America, I am keen to understand how it got to Europe and then Africa (thence Malagasy) before rafting back to South America / Mesoamerica. Because the Americas nowhere have lemurs. I admit, this won't be the last time North America spawns a species as dies out at home: cf the camel.

BACKDATE 8/10

The plague of Jerash

For whatever reason I didn't discuss Adapa et al. so let's this "today": At Gerash in what's now the kingdom of Jordan, was found a mass grave.

Gerash as a good Hellenistic-Roman city owned a hippodrome. Over Late Antiquity, lookin' like post-Zenobia, the locals lost interest in that sport. But its architecture was still excellent, boasting many delightfully cool basements. So the local potters took up the space for their industry and storage. Then came the Year Without A Sun; and Justinian's Flea. It seems it got re-repurposed as a mass morgue, where the bodies were left literally to rot.

As a cool space in a near-desert, these bodies stayed preserved until the recent study. Which is proving that, yes, the plague of Gerash was indeed the Flea - the Yersinia. I am pretty sure we already knew that, but from remains preserved far from the Jordan, so this evidence is better.

BACKDATE 8/28

A failure at the gate

Dr "Tron Honto" Anthony goes back to his reviewer roots and has at Ibrahim Mohamed Zein and Ahmed El-Wakil. The latter of whom we've met.

A major university of Qatar approved this thing - which we must sigh and accept, as a product of Qatari geopolitik. More troubling, for the rest of us, is that Routledge published it. Thus, with Craig Considine, laundering Islamic-"revert" John Andrew Morrow.

Honest scholars would have taken Considine to task by way of taking Morrow's selfpub seriously. But Zein and el-Wakil are no more honest than is Considine. An honest publisher would have refused their book, as transparently taking current-year kumbaya over Veritas. Routledge seems no longer an honest publisher. I am reminded how the Slavic Orthodoxy still clings to the Constitutio ascribed to Constantine, infamous for the donatio. Anyway, now Dr Anthony can't ignore el-Wakil (or Zein), although I bet the duo are now wishing he had.

Anthony devotes footnote #4 for better scholarship. Some of it has been used at this my blog; others may supplement it. Here I discuss the late-'Abbasi redo of the "Pact of 'Umar"; here I discuss Lecker on the correspondence which Mirza may supplement.

BACKDATE 8/28

Justinian's adventure

In 2018, Peter Heather published Rome Resurgent, a military evaluation of Justinian's foreign wars mostly in the west (alt-title Making Rome Great Again). Academia.edu has raised Parnell's review of it.

The Greek and Slavic Orient has long hailed Justinian as "the Great" or even as a Saint, like Louis IX for the French. Secular Westerners have also tended to see Justinian positively; more so as his legal code was rediscovered in the High Middle Ages. The primary exception has been the Church, still sore about the kidnapping of Vigilius. Lately, Western scholars have asked if Justinian was right to carry on to a large war over here, rather than concentrating on the Persian front, which - as Procopius already observed at the time - was existential.

Heather splits the difference.

The Vandal kingdom, from its first African beachhead throughout the various Roman and Byzantine efforts to dislodge it, had been lucky. Its army was optimised for fending off Berber raids; its navy was a pirate flotilla. Justinian, more competent than Leo and better supplied than Majorian, tore through it handily. And then Justinian was able to hold it against those Berbers. Heather argues that the expedition paid for itself. (We might, in hindsight, ask if the East Roman Empire needed another potential base for rival Emperors.)

The problem of course was Italy (Heather adds Baetica, the province in Spain). Nobody can argue that the Italian wars were anything but a headache - well, nobody excepting star-struck mediaeval romantics.

I don't know that Heather has added much to our understanding; in 2018, a cursory flip didn't uncover any, and I didn't buy the book. Parnell's main questions concern common army life, which featured in 2010s-decade monographs Heather didn't read; and the plague. That peste is a burning question in scholarship which - I agree - requires an accounting in any study of the post-536 years.

BACKDATE 8/10