Lee's bill

Currently a bill is pending in the US Senate, driven by Mike Lee of Utah, to sell off a parcel of Federal land. Richard Hanania, a contrarian troll since he was Richard Hoste, is for it. Lyman Stone is generally for it as well, arguing Lee's sale would not even meet 1% of the Feds' vast holdings via "Land Management" or national-park. Most of X is agin' it; Lomez wants to see circles on the map. Contrarians are usually wrong but not always.

When the western Territories were made States, much of the land was lately spoils-of-war and/or wasteland, taken not by local colonials but by the US Army. Texas was the exception... until Texas too became a spoil-of-war when it foolishly joined the CSA, which lost its war. So land-ownership devolved to the new States (or to Reconstructed Texas) only weakly. Theodore Roosevelt then seized vast swathes of said land. This included most of the Black Hills (taken from the Lakota, who'd taken them not too long earlier) and pretty much all the Basin (taken from the desert).

Non-Native settlement tended to the mining, transRockies. Those mines, and the rails and roads to/from, came under the States. So South Dakota and Nevada as States have remained Federal-owned rurally and offroad. Some Native "reservations" exist. Feh.

I never liked the implicit "haha, backsies!" in Roosevelt's move. In my view, either a State is sovereign over land or a "First" Nation is sovereign. Much Federal territory may as well go to either. The main exception I'd allow would be watershed. Or nuclear-waste repo. Or I suppose if the nearest viable State be in arrears. The exception I would not allow would be fire control - counties and States should do this task, if in coördination with the Feds. The Feds simply aren't good stewards of forestry.

Back to the great wild wide West, I am not averse to opening some of that to development of this or that sort. Not all of it will be much seen by the casual city-based tourist. Parts of the West which have mining or recreational potential should be means-tested against other impacts. Maybe then some of it can then be sold to the State or to some First-Nation; or even given them, if the Feds are feeling generous.

But - isn't that already the system we got now?

Also, what guarantees exist the sale won't go to a Chinese Revolutionary Army standin? or to money launderers? human traffickers? (I don't mind solar-farms.)

Severus of Antioch, last evangelist of Thomas

Yonatan Moss, a Jew, has found a Christian he can support: Severus Antiochene. Severus, besides being one of Christendom's most successful schismatics, noticed that gender is what we make of it.

First a digression-cum-nitpick. One tidbit Moss brings I didn't know is that Severus accepted John Chrysostom as a Church Father, along with the obvious Cyril. But John and Cyril were rivals. A modern Severus - S. Voicu, Quoting John Chrysostom in the Sixth Century: Severus of Antioch - has that his namesake had cited John for his New Testament tafâsir. We should, then, read Severus' use of John as a late Nestorian like Elias bar Shenaye or Isho'dnah of Basra might nod to occasional readings from some Melkite or Miaphysite. Moss also noted that both John and Cyril were sexists which Severus wasn't. Moss should himself find little to admire in John overall, John being about the worst antisemite in Christian history. Jew to Jew, I suppose: if I were Moss in a Severan context, I'd have sidelined John and stuck with Cyril.

Moss argues that Severus thought of gender as a set of principles: weakness and strength. The strong gender prevailed among both Adam and Eve in the Garden. Then, upon the Fall, humanity fell to the weak gender. With the Incarnation, Christians return to the strong gender.

The divorcement of gender - as a grammatic convention - from biologic sex isn't entirely stupid. This held among the Hittites (animate/inanimate, for those wondering). Their Anatolian group, perhaps, yet survived in Isauria and some Carian coastlands. Still. Severus didn't preach in Isaurian.

Severus preached in Greek, and his followers mostly in Syriac. The notion of making Christian Greeks, Latins, Persians and Semites all use the masculine for their brethren but the feminine for everyone else is impractical as long as the Earth and Heavens survive. Our cosmos has survived since Severus' death some fifteen centuries ago.

Severus' main Christian antecedent, whether he admit it or no, is that last logion of the Gospel of ... Thomas: Mary Magdalene may join the strong gender by Christ's will.

The Denisovans of Manchuria

We now have a Denisovan skull. (Welcome to the Bagestan where we bring you HBDChick's tweets yesterday, TODAY.) NB: the Cro-Denisova proper was open for business, as it were, for a long time. By "Denisovan" they mean the seven fragments 2, 3, 4, 8, 19, 20, and 21; the others being Neanders, human, or simply unsequenced - or D. 11.

This paper concerns mitochondria - the mothers. That is why this paper includes Neander hybrid D. 3 but not the dramatic Vindija-mother hybrid D. 11, "Denny": D. 3's mother was Denisovan, where D. 11's mother was not. D. 11's currently-absent father, whom I shall name 11p and whose mtDNA we lack, clustered with the D. 3+4 cousins (pdf). D. 11p was, like D. 3, himself partly Neander. Both Neander influx came further back in their trees.

This newlysequenced skull isn't from Denisova - it is from Manchuria: the Dragon Man "longi", dateable 144kBC. The news here is that the DNA is now sequenced and shown to be Denisovan.

The full paper is on Cell. Specifically the Harbin skull aligns with the common ancestor of D. 2 and the other five. Those 3+4[+11p] cousins must have broken off before 185kBC, although their lineage lasted until the Asian dawn of homo sapiens sapiens; 3+4+11p are presumably the elder, truest Denisovans.

Incidentally without the full genome for Dragon Man, we cannot say if it (can we know "he" or "she"?) had Neander influx as did D. 3 and 11p. But I suspect... it did not. The Neanders came later and Harbin is further east.

When the steppe spoke Arin

This came in yesterday but I had stuff to rant 'bout, so I'll post it now: the Huns were Yeniseyan. We always knew they were Asian, but they were suspected Turkic.

Also shown is that the Huns and the Xiōng-nú were the same, but I think we'd already figured that. Wasn't this assumed in Mulan? Anyway I suppose now the greater Turkic world can go watch that kino with a clear conscience. Manchus too what's left of 'em.

The specific branch of these Hunnic groups is Arin, of which I'd not heard.

This is made possible by the recent discovery of a Hunnic settlement in present Mongolia, suspected to be Lóng Chéng. Before it was Mongol, one supposes.

Plenty of evidence for Turkic, Mongolic, Tocharian, and above all Iranian runs all over the Silk Road... in the Tang, Tibetan, and Islamic centuries. Problem: Xiōng-nú, as the settlement shows, existed before Late Antiquity. During Late Antiquity, the famous Huns were in, uh, Europe. By when, Attila was speaking German: if Etzel had won then "lingua-franca" would have been something like "gothtongue".

Advice for Viennese Schiklgrubers

You are a struggling artist who needs $ and worries about AI. Your customers might be art appreciators but more likely, they are also artists - of the literary sort, looking to illustrate at least the cover of a book. You haven't yet earned your reputation selling to others, and the customers you want - again, literary - aren't going to deviantart. I may have some Don'ts and Dos.

Don't spam under a femme-coded name, first up. Near-literally, get off deez nutz.

Second: if you must ping the author, at least show some hint that you've read the story. Remember: FF.net has analytics, so we know when a story got clicked-on. The one I did isn't even a thousand words. I am also looking for evidence that you're a reader generally: did you review relevant work? Does the review show honest feedback? doesn't matter if "Formative" or positive.

I countersuggest social sites where, on occasion, a writer may hang out. Writers also read, if they are any good. Where do we read? At the bottom of the barrel, we read the boring and degrading places: 4chan, reddit, discord. So yeah: be a "draw fag". People will ask you for commissions.

Because I tell you now: if you have shown up at my door only because you want cash and public attention, I will not ask you for commissions.

Fanfiction.net has too many spammers

I am, like: old... and stuff. I was there in Lollapolooza moshing to the Beastie Boys. As such my leadin to the fanfiction universe was fanfiction.net. So when I started writing, that's where I went. It was a pretty decent place up to 2018ish. You could still get noticed. I didn't want ArchiveOfOurOwn on account it looked like it was being branched-out for housewife smut. I play it G to PG-13.

I am pondering a switch these days. And no, not because I'm horny.

When I posted my latest attempt woo-hoo, I got six emails. But that was weird, because I didn't actually get six hits on the story! On a read through these mails, they were all quick reads. Why? Because five of them were advertisements, all on the same theme. (The sixth had "questions". I responded to that one. I noted all the spam I got in case that's what this one is after. And today a seventh showed up also sniffing for commission.)

I noted that (now) seven out of seven presented as female, or female-coded. Hmmm. What are the - oh wait, I have a statistics degree and am a Dungeon Master. I know those odds! 1 among 2⁷ = 128. Sex sells. Or it might if I weren't old and still gave a toss.

I suspect ff.net's spam problem is why so many authors leave their fix unfinished and quietly avoid the place anymore. I am certain spam is why AO3, for their part, makes applicants wait so long before admitting them as users. (If I'm blocked thence, that'll be because of my social-credit. Because it's a smut site, and sinners don't want to hear from the saints - nor from those of us in Communion with them.)

I report spam to support@fanfiction.net with the [abuse] header, but I never hear back what action be taken. FF might consider commission-begging as part of the experience. FF might even take money to look the other way.

I reported them anyway. I don't much want to give the five (more like seven) spammers free exposure on this blog so, I'll not drop their names here. Some of those idjits were dumb enough to include their gmail and discord.

I'll go further: commission spammers, even if honest artists, are driving people like us off the human art and into the arms of AI. We simply don't want to deal with their ilk anymore. That the spammers are certainly on AI themselves doesn't matter.

Fantasy content

As to what I've been up to of late, 1d4chan failed to slava and - a few years back - was reborn in miraheze as "1d6chan". So: let's talk the Drow Series.

Nobody much liked how the D/Q series ended up. The decline starts within module D3, which ending isn't Eclavdra's manse with that cthulhoid elemental god - it's the Fane of Lolth. Lolth is, yes, a demon queen ruling over the multiverse's nastiest excuse for Eldar. But in the 1970s lore, she dindu nuffins. The villainy was being done by Eclavdra her apostate.

How to fix this? We've had over three decades, and in that time indeed several grognards have come out to fix this.

Dragonsfoot has D4: Encyclopaedia Subterranica, proposing encounters to affix upon the D series map. Joseph Bloch offered an alternate nonLolthian conclusion to that arc: D4: City of Spiders then Q2: Web of Souls; or perhaps "D3.5" and "Q1*". Back to Dragonsfoot, they'd prefer a "Q1.5" to the Demonweb Pits, DF16: Skein of the Death Mother.

Apropos-of-nil I have further wroten a short: "A salvage from the doomed planet". This is set in CS Lewis' Wood Between The Worlds.

The hyperneutrino KM3-230213

Neutrinos are light-mass, fast-moving particles that don't interact with matter until they do, when the collision gives off so much energy that exotica like muons and pions appear. These decay at once, releasing photons which detectors detect.

So: here's KM3-230213, a "neutrino" detected in the Med. This released so much energy it overloaded a lot of the sensors. And it came from a direction whence nobody expects neutrinos, drilled through a lot of rock before hitting the ocean detectors, and no parallel neutrini were seen in the icy detectors of Antarctica.

Perhaps this was no neutrino. Perhaps it was a dark-matter particle. It's been getting harder to consider non-CDM solutions for wide-angle gravity.

Map generators

For those of us too lazy and/or uncreative to draw our own maps for the D&D modules we're writing, computers have come through to help us out. A few years ago I was designing a small barrow for a wight. Now I'm branching out.

Brave AI suggests Donjon. I point out here that the map size is part of the seed and that not all "egresses" are going to show up in this re-randomised map. Also they Stand With Ukraine like 1d4chan used to. Fine: I "stand with" Israel - from the comfort of this chair, same as Donjon does. How about standing with your users to fix your own crummy software, Donjie.

Let's move on to products with some clue what they're doing.

For basic crypts, we want something that looks like those tiny generic cavelets in D1: Descent into the Depths of the Earth. For that, 1KM1KT used to offer a "geomorph" but that seems not to exist on that site anymore. Dave's mapper by contrast still exists. It's dated - dated to 2011 it seems - but we're Old School Renaissance so we can still use it. I got results for David J Rust. Although it scales only to the barrow level.

For the D1 troll warren experience, Gozzy offers a "battlemap". Check out seed 1537774818. I suggest, for my part, to credit the source. Even if I weren't ethical; you should worry that in these AI days, some AI might catch you.

Also extant is watabou's cave generator, which is pretty good, but doesn't persist the seed number. Maybe you don't need it; watabou doesn't demand credit, although I'd merrily offer it.

BACKDATE 6/17

CO2 saturation

The CO2 Coalition is hosting Richard Lindzen and William Happer (pdf) since 2 June. Lindzen-Happer is more an editorial than a paper. It asserts that the exponential or hyperbolic heat Hockey Stick isn't the correct graph. The correct heat graph is logarithmic or even asymptotic: as carbon dioxide rises, heat rises slower, not faster.

We might still talk about water and soil acidification. We learn from Leadville's museum of mining that this leaches minerals off the topsoil dragging them out of roots' reach. Mind: not all minerals are wanted in the topsoil.

Anyway, these two individuals have been on this beat for some time. People choose what scientists to listen to. Even when they're not doing scientody, but policy at-best.

BACKDATE 6/19 from Issues & Insights.

Kaskaean and Kalashmaean

It's been a couple years since the Kalašma tablet 71.145, so - let's try again. Last year Learn Hittite did some talks about it; Rieken and Yakubovich had published the transcription, and commented on it in German.

It happens that the Anatolian tablets aren't all published. From the Cappadocia alone are some 25000 tablets only 5500 (old Assyrian) have seen print. We tend to publish first the easy ones and the interesting ones - the ones in Semitic, and the ones that look particularly unique. We get around to nonfamiliar fragments only when there's some way into them. Thus the Akkadian texts in Hattusas got published first and only then, once "Hittite" ("Arzawan" then, Knesian properly) got to a critical mass, did we start seeing the true Hittite archive.

Left over, it seems, has been the gibberish. Kalašma got published because it had some Knesian to introduce it. The youtube comments are claiming 174 tablets sharing the Kalašma language. That wouldn't surprise me; it's a local tongue, and there shouldn't just be one local to speak it. Although I expect that number to reduce as tablets get reassembled and conjoined.

Whilst we are at it, David Sasseville is claiming Kaska. Again: we should expect that Hattusa had some folk on hand to infiltrate the great northern enemy, and how else to do that than to learn something of their language and customs. I guess once they've ruled out Hurrian, Palaic, Semitic, Greek and all the other tongues - now including Kalashma too - that leaves few other options here. Hattic? old Svan-Georgian? Anyway per the abstract, since they won't let me read the whole thing, the vocabulary remains opaque. The structure is however known: agglutinative.

BACKDATE 6/16

The Mac Piasts

A couple months ago we were talking the Piast invention of a Polish empire. Now it's looking like they might be Scots. Picts anyway, since I'm unsure Gaelic had reached that part of Scotland as of the AD 500s which is when the closest relative shows up there.

This Y chromosome still exists in Britain. It may be that the (true) Scots who conquered the Pictland drove off their elites. Errybody was taking to the seas in those days. Will we know when the Piasts' ancestors got to Poland?

BACKDATE 6/13

Radiocarbon follies, Daniel edition

Nongbri a few days ago reported on 4Q114 redated: 230-160 BC. This holds Daniel 8-11 (Hebrew).

Now: "Daniel" as we have it is a mess. Daniel 4 differs wildly between MT/Brenton and Rahlfs-LXX, and then there's the Prayer of Nabunai likely behind both. Daniel 4 happens to reside within an Imperial Aramaic section chs. 2-7, rare in this otherwise-Hebrew Bible.

But we are talking about Daniel 8. This chapter predicts Antiochus Epiphanes. The pagan Porphyry in Against the Christians called this out as vaticinium-ex-eventu. Why skip over centuries when preaching to your own folk?

This blog's opinion, which I believe is a consistent opinion, is that radiocarbon is a dumb way to nail down the time of your document. If Christians (or Jews like David Ganz) want to proclaim this as proof of some Calvinist Judaeo-Christianity... then they cannot complain if British Muslims point to the Birmingham Qur'aaan's likewise early date.

BACKDATE 6/12

Neander migrations

As we're doing theory on this blog, possible maps of Neander migrations. Marine-Isotope stratum 5e and/or MIS 3. MIS 5 is, I think, Eemian. MIS 3 is ~58kBC. I didn't know Eurasia was warm in MIS 3.

In either period, river valleys opened up for these our cousins. They could have got to the Altai in those two millennia when we find them.

If it took 2000 years then presumably they did not hike very fast. We should see their remains in those valleys, nu?

BACKDATE 6/11

Nanotime, second-hand

In nanotime news, here's more from the Austrians. That region of Europe has always been good at clocks.

The longstanding bane of improving over caesium atomic clocks is entropy (informational Shannon if nothing else). Telling time nudges the state of the clock. Rather: the "counter" of the clock.

The notion 2 June is to reduce the entropic waste of the counter.

They're going to test this on superconductive circuits.

BACKDATE 6/11

When Bronze Age Europe got poor

Something happened in Pannonia - "Hungary" now - 1500 BC. Something bad.

The diet suddenly got worse, and people started eating millet. Millet, as I've documented here, is an Asian cereal fed to livestock. People don't eat it until/unless they must.

The old Europe was one of fortified towns and meat-eating. The new culture, called the Tumulus culture, was one of more-vegetarian villages. And I take it they were fewer: earlier surveys even thought they'd gone pastoralist (the opposite is true). Overall it looks like a civilisational collapse.

We can't know what they spoke, except certainly IndoEuropean. It's likely some Illyrian protolanguage now entirely lost. Maybe distantly related to Greek and Phrygian.

I don't blame Thera; last I heard, it popped off in the early 1500s, and we're looking decades later.

BACKDATE 6/10

Time or space

Another shortpost since I haven't digested it, but tonight I watched a video [UPDATE 6/7 now private] on the memory/time tradeoff in computation. One important summary, which she linked, is Lance Fortnow's last February. There's also this last year on tree evaluation.

Overall if you can take up space to save time, you should. Space is fungible. Time, once used, is lost.

This affects those of us who were attempting to solve equations by means of power-series where the coëfficient of said series needed to be easily-accessible from some database. This could include RAM but, as noted, for quintics this nearly fried the computer I'd used.

Araminta Ross

Vox Day and Neon Revolt sure made a claim today - that Harriet Tubman did not exist. They base this on the existence of Earl Conrad's biography and on the fact that Conrad was a JEW (a Cohen, as it happens). He was also a "progressive" in the 1940s and you know what that means.

In "Conrad"'s own time the book got reviewed - by New England Quarterly, so it was taken seriously as a biographic work. I pick on the NEQ because it did not like the book. Even this critic must praise the book for its use of primary sources. Conrad went on to publish more primary sources. I do not find where others have attacked these sources for being forgeries. In the 1950s, opponents to the Progressive project still could publish.

Proving Cohen's perfidy would be a difficult task, inasmuch as some sources were by then already available in print to anyone who'd ask - in particular Sarah Bradford, Harriet: a Moses. But even before that as we may read (now) in Milton C. Sernett, Harriet Tubman: Myth, Memory, and History: apparently Franklin Sanborn, editing The Commonwealth in 1863, also noted Tubman's career and tried to make a folk heroine of her.

I am not Tubman's biographer and I am not here to judge whether Tubman deserves the praise heaped upon her, or not. (By most accounts, Tubman herself would not want this praise, contrast - oh - Sojourner Truth.) What is clear to judge, is that Conrad was no forger. The documents as I noted already existed.

Antisemitism makes men stupid. Or maybe it just attracts stupid and wicked men.

Mani as a Tatianist

A few articles came out over the past few years about early Manichaeism. One concerns how this sect approached the Old Testament - through "antitheses", between what the OT taught (selectively chosen) and what Christ taught. As for what they knew about Christ, that was had from the Diatesseron.

Through the aeons to our time, one text brought is the Kephalaia, "Chapters" in our Romance. The first of these, ll. 12.21–13.11, summarises Christ's life - which is harmonised. The argument is that the Gospel has been preharmonised, in parallel with witnesses to the Diatesseron, therefore that this summary is likewise Diatesseronic. (Notable here is the abrogation perhaps even ignorance of Mark.)

The other text is Augustine. This one is refuting an Adeimantos - "Fearless", likely equivalent to Adda a disciple of Mani; and Faustus.

Mani the Parthian seems not to have privileged the Jewish canon, having access - in early Sasanian Babylonia - to other Jewish work (famously the Enochian "Giants"), and to Buddhist work and others. It fell to successors to explain to Jews and to Christians, and indeed to pagans like Alexander of Lycopolis (a "White City", of Egypt I think), why on Earth Mani pretended to venerate a Christ whose Chrism makes sense only in relation to the ... Jewish canon. The Manichees were on their way to becoming a literally international laughing-stock.

Luckily for the Manichaeans, the same questions had been laid upon Marcion. So they delivered the same genre of answer. They could not follow Marcion's extremism for Luke, because if nothing else the Johannine theology appealed more to this gnostic sect. Also, living in an increasingly Christian Iraq and seeking recruits in the Rhomania, they wanted to appeal to as many Christians as possible. The Diatesseron at least in outline would do.

That darn vaxx again

Most Americans would rather just Let It Go, but a few remain who can't Let It Go - MAGA. So, for their benefit: Crémieux talks myocard.

Once more, "the VAXX!" is plural. Pfizer was low on active mRNA; Moderna was high. And this I can confirm: I wasn't affected by Pfizer really, at all; my brother near got isekai'd by Moderna. Overall the VAXeX myocarditis, if you got it, wasn't as bad as the Rona's would have been.

All this said, McArdle is off base. Pfizer in 2020 meddled in politics - never forget - which taints all it does with the suspicion of Seeking Rent. The bill of particulars, against all Pharma, is high. If you don't like "MAHA" or Kennedy or all his grifters, that's fine; this post has taken your side. We still have a pharmaceutical industry ripping off Americans because that's the easy path, like delaying the results of their vaccine to benefit the pharma-friendly Democrat elite was the easy path.

Like Health-Equity (read: transing kids) was the easy path.

McArdle talks of babies and bathwater, but all I see is a strong arm of Pharma lobbyists holding the baby in the bath and threatening to drown it.

Prognosis still uncertain

Shortpoast here: for those who learnt about the Milkomeda from Alastair Reynolds, this is not a certainty. nbody dynamics are hard especially if we don't have a handle on the true masses - and distribution of masses - of the bodies. We do not actually KNOW if our galaxy and their galaxy shall meet n' mingle.

And since most of our masses are dark matter, and we still have less than no clue what dark matter is (or if it is), how Galactic-scale interactions express themselves is another factor. I think.

Now, Reynolds works within fictional constraints which is to say, constraints he invents for intelligences higher than Reynolds'. So we'll allow it where we might not for, oh, Currents of Space. If you are a SF author and not as bold as Reynolds, I advise keeping this merger off your "hard SF" prophetic lore. If you feel as bold as Reynolds, feel free to say "screw this" and use some FtL Drive anyway.

Prospects for exomoons

Kyplanet really is a good Youtube, less excitable than even Anton Petrov whose 'tube is also good. Last weekend Kyplanet linked Zoltan Dencs, Vera Dobos, and Zsolt Regaly on exomoons. Which Petrov once thought we'd found which we hadn't; but it is generally believed we will find them. D.D.R. count a dozen candidates if no confirmations.

In advance of confirmations, D.D.R. make some up. They've run simulations on Jupiter-plus possibilities in the 1-5 AU range, looking for habitability. This range suggests stellar heat: a G star maybe late-F, where oxygenation might happen before red-giant-game-over. The G/F might be chosen because lighter stars, like K, don't tend to own Jovians, which, you know, we do. (K runs the table on Neptunians and Superearths.) This is a real study where, a couple years ago, this blog just eyeballed it.

I should further note in fairness that one example given is HD 114386 in Centaurus - which is K, 28% luminosity. Its Jovian b orbits cold: the 2017 Gaia dataset says 937.7 days, with a beyond-Martian 1.73 AU and eccentricity 0.23. (Wiki sux.) The paper claims msini 1.36 M_J although I read Gaia knocked that back to 1.14. The planet is brought because although any moons are assuredly frozen, they may own tides under the crust. The lower mass in the Gaia DR should shrink the space allowed for tidal-heating effect.

To be sure, few such wide-semimajor planets will transit us. Their moons might be difficult to spot as transits, likewise. I do not think they overlap with the present candidates; indeed D.D.R. rates all twelve too small or hot. Hence, the need for models.

For scope, nobody here is talking about captures in retrograde like Triton, just eccentricity. One might also consider the vanilla resonances like the three inner Galileans' also the less-known moons' around Saturn.

We prospective sattelitical colonials want volcanism running, allowing for atmo replenishment and an internal magnet. The magnet must be stronger than Ganymede's with respect to distance from the Jovian; we also, don't forget, need to protect against the star. So we're looking for moons much more massive than Ganymede, Titan, or the rest - heavier indeed than Mars if possible.

When they say "habitable" they mean by heat. Colonists must worry about moons whose heatsource is tidal/volcanic. Solar irradiance puts constraints upon chloroplasts - on photosynthesis. Abiotic oxygen, meanwhile, stands to poison everything else. Life, perhaps; but Not As We Know It (purple?) and we're not breathing its oxygen. "Luckily" moons as form out where HD 114386 b is at should be too small anyway - and not just for Ks. They're Europae. Not home for humans.

The D.D.R. model points to fewer but larger moons close to the star - so, 1 AU; further, the moons will be more plentiful but smaller, like what's around Jupiter. I guess Saturn's the outlier because it has Titan. (Neptune and Uranus have violent pasts.)

Their model is basically a two-body problem such as ignores migration. A migrate now in the HZ should be bringing its moons with it - small icy moons, according to the paper. Little damp marbles. But for our target of superJovians it may be fair to ignore migration in low-eccentricity unistellar systems without outer browndwarfs.

The masses of these "habitable" moons tend to about half Earth's and I don't know how metallic they can be. On the plus side, this post does not demand a "Cambrian" here; our bias is to younger systems, so if the dynamo dies after 3.5Gy that's fine (an F star might itself begone by then).

The moons should expect to be tidally-locked, although one does - where eccentric without extralunar resonances - ponder the 3:2 Mercurylike spin:orbit. The tidal locking would affect, most, interactions with the Jovian's magnetic-field, which should start extreme. But this post (if not DDR's) does allow for billions of years. Maybe the magnets retract before the atmo and ocean be lost.

קולורדו

TheTorah.com posted a piece about how the Jews shifted from their own alphabet into Imperial Aramaic. A few months ago I saw קולוראדו on a T-shirt - in, again, Imperial Aramaic. In light of recent events, how should that be naturally transcribed?

First up, this is from Alfonso's Castilian Spanish - and it's masculine. The Portuguese would call it Colorido. The word may be archaic now, outside our Rio Grande. It could easily have been named rather "Pintado". I'd even ask if modern Spanish might go for "Teñido" (dyed). At least the Castilian derives from Late Antique Iberian Latin Coloratus; Classical allowed also for Colorius. We might consider modern Jewish transcriptions as Sephardic. We might drop the aleph to make it קולורדו.

I am not Sephardic. (I remain unsure how Jewish I am, but leave-aside.)

Semitic would prefer צבעוני / مصبوغ, keeping the masculine. Its feminine would I think be "Zébeghûnît" in Classical Hebrew thus Tzev'onith in Israeli Hebrew. But I'll pretend this State was named by the SPQR and latterly visited by the Sepharad, on their Arizonian camels. Let's lean into that loanword-to-Aramaic path. I can play with the קלר root. We get some fun results if treated as feminine, topped with emphatic-state.

I'd start with קלור. Feminine-plus-emphatic makes this Q'lorata. If Canaani-shifted, as late Syriac does it: Clortho. Who ya gonna call?!

Well, probably not the Boulder police.

A short relief of boredom

During the boring-billion of our Proterozoic Earth, we're told one reason it was boring was a dearth of tectonics. We had a supercontinent... which would be desert. The tides might not have been strong either because our Moon was stuck there for that span, day after nineteen hour day. Where was erosion, wasn't eroding any nutrients.

That might an oversimplification.

The supercontinent - usually called Nuna, but such of my readers as identify as "anti#woke" may prefer Columbia - erupted into a dike, from below. Igneous rocks store magnetic polarity, and have datable uranium/lead percentages (the constants haven't changed since before this solar-system's nebula). This dike formed in the "north China" craton 1235.6 ± 2.0 Mya (now that is precision). That allows constraint of Laurentia-Baltica-Siberia / Australia-China 1.38 Gya, with Australia making its own way 1.32 Gy. Contemporary with this great dike of China, that rest of Nuna was cracking 1.26-1.22 Gya.

So now Earth had continents again. GEO Girl - who alerted me to the paper - has a few other comments for context. Like, the Archaean might have had supercontinents too... but no tectonics? which make the Archaean a mystery, or perhaps just a Venereal era. Nuna is, then, the first supercontinent as makes sense to tectonic-informed research - as a Gaeology, if you will, rather than as a planetology.

The two-continent era spans 1.342 Gya which is, I think, our chloroplasts. So: why not nitrates then, rather than 800 Mya? GEO Girl doesn't talk about after this paper's scope, but does show a slide 50 seconds in: Earth suffered another Single Lid Episode, after the postNuna continents slammed back into another supercontinent, this one Rodinia (which is better known).

Venus' co-orbitals

Last week we got this scaremonger from Universe Today: undiscovered Venereal coorbitals. Sounds like something you need a urologist for. But seriously - Carruba et al., arxiv.

The paper is talking 1:1 down in the Solar well, so something like Cruithne up here; also, L4 and L5 rocks, like 2013 ND₁₅. They call the former, "horseshoe"; the latter, "tadpole" - both, low-eccentricity, so they offer some high-e 1:1 as well. In fact most observed co-orbitals are high-e; they cannot account for this by dynamics, so blame observational bias.

If low-e, you'd think - why should Earthlings even care. Carruba points to an earlier study he'd done: they switch orbits. What we don't know can hit us. If nothing else, this blog should ponder von Zeipel: a high inclination, low eccentricity orbit can switch to a 3.4° inclination, high-eccentricity orbit. Overall they bring a Hamiltonian equation on how these orbits can flip type. This raises Lyapunov exponent, which 10 Hygeia knows all about. The paper flips that exponent for 150 years, before these rocks can't be predicted.

The mathematic indulged here is the (e,i) plane.

The paper suggests putting a sort of JWST-Venus at SVL2 to block out the sun and Venus both, to do a search for these co-orbitals. (Or STL2, but we're kinda using it. Either planet's L1 might also work: we might not care that the planet is reflecting light at its back.)

The Chibcha move south

Last year I noted a people called the "Muisca", where they touched Ecuador. A paper now exists how they got there.

"Muisca" is an approximation for "Mysca", using a special upsilon for a vowel not used en Español. Mysca and Duit were common languages in the Colombian highlands - altiplano - until the Century Of Our Lord 1700s, and then in AD 1770 the most Catholic king Charles III banned all the things. Which didn't stop the independence movement that was coming; I suspect it just united everyone against the Crown under this same foreign language. Luckily for Mysca (and to an extent Duit) they got transcribed into a (mostly) Latin alphabet, revealing their membership in the Chibcha languages. These languages were everywhere, are well-studied, and many survive today. Wiki presently thinks Uwa is the closest tongue to the Mysc-cubun.

The Chimila and Wiwa Chibcha (genetically unrelated!) retain a presence in the Ariguaní valley by Cartagena northeast of the isthmus; northwest other Chibcha extruded up to Belize. The paper touches upon Kogi-Arhuaco, therefore Tayrona which would include Wiwa. I hinted earlier that Chibcha perhaps pushed other Amerinds before them south as well. This paper proves it, for the central Colombian altiplano anyway: a hunter-gatherer group lived there as of "6000 BP" (4000ish BC) until they... didn't. That demic switch probably happened in the 1800s BC when maize was brought - by the Chibchans. There, the settlers developed the "Herrera" culture, which sounds like they were ironworkers which they were not. What they were, were potters. Herrera pottery becomes Muisca pottery in the middle AD 700s, without replacing the local genetics. This is simply an advance in social organisation which we might call "civilisation".

The Muisca were / are technically north-hemisphere still. They were too far north to meet the Huari; I recall from Covey that there was another sort-of Darian blocking easy passage south.

Whom the Tocharoi met along the way

Another fine openaccess book from Brill on the great steppe: Like Dust on the Silk Road. This, Shams Benoît Bernard's PhD, concerns the Tocharians' preBuddhist origins. They'd already left Yamnaya before entering Junggar, over a couple centuries starting 3000 BC. Centuries later, 2100 BC - the Aryans came.

Specifically this book claims that first the Tocharians met the BMAC - rather, something like them (see below). After that (and after the end of BMAC), the Tocharians met the Iranians - specific Iranians, not basal IndoIranians nor protoIndians like the Mitanni. That makes the book a sequel to the great split from Baltic. This is all long before the Tocharians occupied the Tarim.

We only get Tocharian after their split to Tocharians A and B, their embrace of the Buddha, and their settlement into the Tarim - and beyond. (There is as yet no "C".) Tocharian B - 10000 documents strong - was first spoken in Kucha (probably) as "Kuśi"; it enjoyed some historical spread and development into a classical language, then a later dying language. Tocharian A for "Agnean", interestingly the more-innovative of the two (and a borrower from Classical Kuchean), only exists as a classical language specifically a holy language. With 2000 documents.

To be sure, as languages for Buddhists, much actual-Indic did enter Tocharian. But such words are clear Sanskrit and/or Prakrit, not basal Indic like Mitannian. And they trend high jargon against native kombuistaal. This book ignores Indic as it sequesters, oh, Bactrian or Khotanese (like for iron): to debunk claimed Iranian loans as came too late.

The book ponders Tocharian's relationship to Iranian as an oriental parallel to Armenian's, except less extreme.

The data-chapters here concern Iranian for chapter 2 then BMAC, in shorter chapter 3. Iranian is of course still with us in many descendents, including ancient ones like Avestan and (in writing!) Old Persian. So the Iranian loans can be rated, even including calques: words that Tocharian inherited from IndoEuropean but then repurposed, to translate terms from Iranian.

INTERJECT 6/21 In the process is deconstructed "paraću", as had been done from protoGreek elsewhere. Benoît Bernard removes "paraθu" from Old Persian. The Persians and Elamites had instead something like dabar; in fact Persians still have it. This renders paraśú an Iron Age silk-road loan. It may be Old Steppe Iranian even Saka; spreading thence to India south, and to Choresmia north. The great Iranian steppe is where the Tocharians got their own parat.

The book finds that the Iranian language was met during the Steppe Bronze Age. The Tocharians would get their word for iron from the Khotanese, rather from their ancestors, later. The book even proposes which Iranian subbranch: Kushan (only lately deciphered!), with much commonality with Ossetic and other "Scythian". That said, I do wonder why old Azeri is not noted in the dataset of Middle Iranian.

Also claimed is that the "BMAC" whom the Tocharoi met were not those of Balkh-Merw. The Tocharoi met an eastern people, around Junggar - a more primitive people, as we'd expect of a people met so early. The BMAC proper (famously) was a high civilisation, and we hope a literate one.

Jupiter goes to the gym

Jupiter as a planet does not easily lose mass. What can happen, is volume contraxion - which to our boy Batygin looks like happened. This paper came last week but it keeps bubbling into sites and Youtubes I visit so, let's get it over with...

This size is "measured" from Jupiter's oft-overlooked "fifth moon" Amáltheia, a jagged rock orbiting closer to the royal planet than Io. Also, then, Jupiter had fifty times the magnetic field. I don't know how they measure Jupiter's radius retroactively, nor honestly its insolation (yo, Grand Tack). Jupiter's composition won't be subject to nuclear alchemy, but some chemistry should have happened since then. At least the Amalthean magnetism can be measured, given all the probes we've sent to Planet Five.

I wonder if this lore has been bootstrapped to/from extrasolar large-but-fluffly newlymade transiting planets.

Flight 9 postmortem

I have other poasts slated, but I figure this one can drop-into the sequence. Read Stephen Green.

Starship's last two 'splosions were FAA mishaps. Two years ago the mishap happened on launch: I'd even suggested someone else do the launchpads. Flight 9 might not be a mishap. The pieces did not fall upon inhabited areas. The stage-separation worked, getting to "SECO" (a milestone I first heard of, yesterday). The booster was reused, until more experiments were done - which experiments were planned.

If not a FAA-worthy mishap, this was still a RUD. The Starship's leaks and breakup were premature for the stuff they wanted to test (excepting the cargo door, which test at least failed earlier).

Let's get Flight 10 up there soon.

Aryo-Baltic

The Indo-Iranian language family comes from Andronovo and Sintashta; we may even know what their elites called themselves, which - well, it got coöpted by people who don't belong to it. These people (and admittedly the people who got them wrong) all belong to a greater family with various isoglosses with other members of that family.

Axel Palmér has now constrained the basal isoglosses. The IndoIranian branch is sister to BaltoSlavic. That was already intuited in the nineteenth century but it coincided with the centum/satem split, which shift observably keeps happening - if you thought "centum" is pronounced "sentum" or "tschentum", you've just done it yourself. Besides Romance, another example is Armenian: satem, by the time anyone records it, but by then so heavily Parthianised that in the nineteenth century most scholarship thought it was full Iranian. (It is not.) So clearly satem wasn't enough. You have to mark when it happened. And you need other isoglosses.

INTERJECT 6/21/2025 Further knocked out of the running are coincidences. One example which this book doesn't note is πέλεκυς "axe" which sounds like a Sanskrit word paraśú. The Greek probably comes from Semitic. Sanskrit before the Achaemenids had little Semitic contact.

Kudos by the way to Brill, who've allowed this beautiful book into open-access. And h/t Razib Khan who considers this about the last word.

It is not that big a beautiful book. Casuals may skip most of the third chapter where the data, which in research-papers is usually the Supplement.

The Urheimat of BaltoSlavoIndoIranian was Fatyanovo-Balanovo. That'd be Russia, north of Yamnaya-now-Ukraine. They got up there around 2600 BC before any Finns or Hungarians showed up, then 2100 BC the Aryans moved east to Sintashta. The latter, wainriders now, seem to have conquered the Bactria-Margiana ArchaeoCulture in north Afghanistan which collapsed in 1700 BC. There, picking up words which the Balts never got, and the Slavs could pick up only millennia later from Scythians on their way back.

I still don't know what to make of the eclipses however.

Africans in exile

Latin-world followers of Apocalypse include Victorinus and Ticonius, and Beatus of postIslamic Liébana.

Ticonius was a Donatist-1, so not as far gone as Parmenian or Donatus-2. Inasmuch as Ticonius refused to read the Apocalypse as a chronicle of the future brought back through wormhole, Augustine cited him. Ticonius' commentary would fall out of mainstream Catholic thought so must be reconstructed. Besides Augustine, we get the reconstruction from Beatus. Which is where Lucy Pick comes in, calling the elder author "Tyconius". Pick is more looking at Beatus; she argues that Beatus reads Ticonius in part through Augustine but also restoring Ticonius' intent.

Beatus shares a peninsula, if not the time, of the "Mozarabic" chronicle ad AD 754. That chronicle, since Hoyland 1998 anyway, piques the interest of Islamic historians: because it is early, isn't (on its face) anti Umayyad, and... doesn't mention Islam much. Nor even Muhammad, which has piqued the notice also of such as Robert Spencer. This means, to tease out what this chronicle doesn't say, requires to understand what it flat didn't know or what it chooses to omit. That demands an understanding of this Latin chronicle's motive, which we can only get through understanding its Christianity. We need, in short, to know the mind of contemporary Spanish Catholics. Beatus, later, shows us his mind through his Chronicle.

One feature in Beatus is mention of Africa. This was the home of Donatus, Ticonius, and Augustine; at least the former two felt they were persecuted by the saecular authorities, ostensibly religious or just Roman. Naturally all three of Beatus' forebears preached about the province they inhabited. Augustine wasn't quite in Donatus' boat himself, but Augustine's followers would face the Vandals and then the Greeks - shotgun-married, if you will, to the Donatists.

I've said before that Maximus having fled to Carthage shared some of these beliefs; I'd not be shocked if he adopted them. Looking around, in the middle ninth century, Maximus' Ambigua on Gregory the Theologian and on John were known to Scotus Eriugena, who translated at least the latter. I don't know if Beatus had a copy however. Cerban will translate Maximus' On Charity in the 1100s.

Pick argues that the Chronicle and Beatus are African at heart. In the face of the ever-westward march of Islam, it would be African Latin elites who swarmed into the later Visigothic kingdom. I've suspected they even gestated the Spanish-Portuguese languages.

The Chronicle represents Augustine. Whether or not the end of the world be nigh, the Arab conquests aren't (much) in the schema. What matters in the schema is human sin. If it weren't Muslims, any Berber adventurer could have done what they did - like Munnuza, who'd set up his own Tirmidh north of the Pyrenees. Muhammad happened to die in year 666 (after 38 BC) - which is a Revelation trope - but that interpretation's left to the reader. If Islam doesn't matter, that - for Pick - explains why the Chronicle doesn't talk it up.

I deem fair to consider Beatus a Neo-Donatist. Beatus revives Ticonius' view of a split within the city of God which is the Church. The Arab advance had stalled in his day, leaving Liébana Christian. Occupied Toledo owned an Adoptionist bishop. That's not exactly compatible with sura 3, which presents Christ as an Adam-like new Creation. But it assuredly agrees with the bulk of the Islamic book.

This general neutrality over the Church hierarchy of the time reminds of John bar Penkaye, more than of Pseudo-Methodius.

Algebraic effects

Pixy Misa yesterday raised an event: "effect handlers". Apparently various software engineers have defined whole languages just for this, like Effekt and Ante.

If, like me, you work with C# or freakin' BASIC, you are working with an imperative language. The program starts, does stuff, ends. Your job - programmer - is to set the commands which run in sequence. In our machines, other processes might be listening in on your program; if nothing else, the operating-system is out there awaiting your keyboard, which might want to stop the program if it's broken and frozen.

Programs often have exception-handlers once called error-handlers. As a courtesy, you might want to trap incoming input where some idiot using your program has put in, oh, a zero where your program is dividing by the input. So you "throw" the exception before the procedure divides by that zero and crashes. C#, further, has delegate / event functionality: if it's done something important, it "raises" the event so that anyone listening can handle it in its own way.

If I am reading the documentation aright, then the "effect" coagulates exceptions and events. It leaves to the handler, not to the function throwing it, what to do. If there is simply nothing left to do, like that division about to be SINGULARITYed by a /0, it's an exception; if there's more to do, you put in a "resume()" command and it's an event.

Okay, you've consolidated a bunch of stuff. Have you really simplified it? We programmers view Sloth as a virtue; we don't waaaanna learn a whole new language. What raises Effekt over all our other blubs as C#-with-threads?

Ante explains why even do this: Bob Nystrom's colored functions. For those not going to read all that, I'll spoil it: they mean that horrific "async" zombie plague effect where, if your function can be async, those calling it must "await" it and, at best, be marked async too even if they're not. Nystrom thought that "await" wasn't a cure such that C# devs should all RETVRN to threads. Ante's term, for their own vaccine against the plague: polymorphic over effects.

They need a new language for this because they're talking to compilers: continuation-passing style, from the disco era. Ante implies their particular language isn't even imperative. So instead of (C) "void" or (structured-BASIC) "sub", it's "Task" - which they label "Unit".

Nathan Robinson instructs us

Last week we got Nathan Robinson's deboonk of the Marxist University. Most academics don't bother with Marx as an economist. The academy instead is centre-left. Therefore everything is fine. Those dumb MAGAts are just shouting at clouds. Because they're stupid.

I can strawman with the best of 'em.

I suppose I'll start with my pat distinction between the Marxian and the Marxist. The Marxian uses Marx's dialectic and consciousness of class struggle as tools, for historiographic models. Bernard Lewis, for one, was a Marxian; maybe we all are. The Marxist takes Marx seriously that "surplus value" is a problem which an economic policy can, or should, solve. The latter are few among smart people. This much, Robinson gets right.

An intellectual Right does exist; this Right holds a pedigree that gives to the dead a vote. Robinson pretends he's somewhere in the centre. To that: the Right argues that the Right is the centre; as Yarvin once put it, Hobbes belongs on the Left (and Locke needs to be hanged next to Cromwell). Surely among Robinson's peers are those who can teach him that extremism depends on where you sit. Claiming your own stance as the baseline is an act of smuggery.

Robinson ends with the Right's dismissal of the Left's Marxian oppressed / oppressor dynamic. He thinks this is his kill-shot - that the Right doesn't care! A better Marxian response would be to step back and consider that the Right might consider other groups who are being oppressed, for whom their sympathies are more directed. Victims of "crime" for instance, where the regnant party has chosen to ignore it. The Right proposes that unpunished crime represents policy. It was not the Wehrmacht who enacted the Night Of Crystals; in Robinson's world, does that absolve the German state?

Robinson may have a point that mainline American Conservatives don't have the belly to draw these lines. But... how well would a Moldbug perform in Robinson's woke madrassa?

THAT LAST LINK 5/28: In case you were wondering why I entered Pinker's "defense" into evidence for the prosecution: Kaus. Those on the "rational right" taking Pinker seriously simply aren't paying attention

Vienna AP 1854a-b

This may be a good time to catch up on David Vishanoff, who delivered a fine lecture at IQSA 2018. He is editing the Islamic Psalter, of 100 "suwar". Yes, there is one. Not the Sajjâdiyât of the Shî'a nor various Umayya bin Abî'l-Salt quotes. But also not a translation of the actual Hebrew beyond "Sura 1" being our Psalm 1.

Vishanoff and one Ursula Hammed are now looking at Vienna AP 1854a-b. This contains bits of suwar 4, 5, 7 and all suwar 8-13 before switching topic. Vishanoff and Hammed can draw no daylight between these and the rest of the corpus which the former is editing, as far as composition. So they're a witness to the whole. The specific redaction looks like Florence 267 - oftclaimed for the Sufis, against other MSS. The other texts in the Vienna MS are preoccupied with death and some hope for forgiveness, in advance of the afterlife.

The paper argues that this psalter dates early in the Zuhd and Israiliyat movements. Ibn Mubarak and Ibn Hanbal did a lot of zuhd; Wahb bin Munabbih (as the paper notes) is credited with Israiliyat. As to how early: the paper assumes sura 38 exists. That's where David muses upon his own "status gratiae". Also assumed is Islamic tradition although this paper isn't scoping the full argument.

Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre professed Catholicism, and our Church let him do it. He was a Communist once, but professed to have left them in 1959. He's most-known for After Virtue, whose third edition of 2007 can be had gratis at the Archive. From that American university professing the name of nôtre dame.

I have only heard of him because various X folx are alerting me that he died recently. That's one way of showing how well-read you are, I suppose. Of interest, some of those xweeters doing the "RIP" thing are linking elsewhere to articles showing how well Catholic societies do once not socialist, like Poland.

It has long been noted that reactionaries become Thinkers when they have a reactionary patron. Socialists become Thinkers when they have a socialist patron. It's always nice not to have to deal with the business of feeding yourself or getting health checked up. But doing this on the backs of other labourers has never sat right with me.

And, in support, I can point to Poland, whose liberation MacIntyre - best I can tell - did nothing to help. I see little self-reflection in the 2007 edition.

As noted earlier, I have a backlog of Stuff To Read. I've seen little reason to read MacIntyre. Enjoy the Purgatory.

Ancient Allah

I don't know when we're going to be allowed to read DOI 10.1093/JSS/FGAF012, but I do hope so soon. Here, al-Jallad - finally - traces the genealogy of the Arabian high god. The missing-link is site MH09, in the Ḥarra of transJordan.

Some who have the text report that the Arabia imported him, from the northwest-Semitic god Ilu. He seems to exist in Ugarit, also Canaan and (maybe) Tayman.

Ilu will be a god of light, opposed to darkness and by-extension death.

This certainly puts paid to the Jack Chick moon god nonsense but I hope my readers already know all that. Durie's thought that Islam is voodoo might still have a leg to stand on. Except that Durie proposed, specifically, a wind god.

The paper might be reconciliable with Durie inasmuch as the paper argues that Allah is a RETVRN, as the 'chans call it. The paper cites Wilson-Wright that Ilu was never far behind the YHWH of the Bible. The path Ilu > Allah was an indirect one, caused by Arabs picking and choosing portfolii.

Further: as of this paper, we still lack since AD 500 any Arabic inscription as can note any divine name other than "God" or such arguable attributes as Rahman.

BACKDATE 5/23

What transubstantiation means

Almost four years ago I claimed to know what transubstantiation means. It strikes me that I haven't demonstrated that gnosis, at least not on this blog. Earlier this week I stumbled onto CS Lewis who refused Tolkien's Church precisely because Lewis thought he knew and, famously, rejected it. Lewis published this in one of his "letters to Malcolm", a Pastoral if you will.

Lewis doesn't present an argument, as such. He presents, rather, an Agnosticism. He has chosen not to understand, in his case likely because the topic disgusts him. I'll interject here, to "steelman", that we all have priorities on what to ponder and what to avoid. I for one have chosen not to believe in Faster Than Light travel, because that topic terrifies me. (Plus: math.) So I'll raise transubstantiation as if I were addressing Don Lewis.

Our bedrock is the Real Presence. Christians may not avoid this. Paul already notes this in his letter to the Corinthians which he treats as a shared custom between him and them. I can conjecture it was uttered around the Passover Seder as a Christian overlay and, thereform, spread to the Saturday evening service; but the history need not detain us. The point is that either Christ is present at the Eucharist or else whatever is going on in front of that table is not a Eucharist.

As the Eucharistic Miracle goes, I hazard that most Catholics and Orthodox have not experienced this directly. Bread and wine remains bread and wine usually. Some exceptions apply but, even here, most such cases are mystical experiences not subject to independent verification. In short, it's faith. As such... let's turn this around to Dr Lewis. Is Lewis going to contend against all such experiences? If so he's a better skeptic than me and I've been dropping evolutionist content on here, not to mention heliocentrism.

As to why the Catho/-dox communion(s) insist on what looks like ritual cannibalism, I propose that's why it is sacralised. The hunter or the herder implores the spirits of life over a sacrifice to offer respect to what gives its life that he and his may live. The Neolithic farmer observes how a crop must die upon a fallow field before being reënriched with nutrients, for another crop. The Eucharist pulls from this imagery. It carries a deep connexion with the human past and the human condition. Lewis may deem all this more pagan than Biblical. I'd answer that the theology had been worked out long before Lewis (or Tolkien), featuring in John 6.

To sum up: transubstantiation represents the "Circle Of Life", which the Orthodox communions including Rome play out in our central ritual. Further - speaking for my part - I do not mind if the Eucharistic Miracle is not always clearly manifest for every parishioner every Sunday morning, including those in a state of Grace. I can conclude that of all the axioms which various Christian churches would have us accept, transubstantiation is not one worth this blog's efforts to contest. I doubt it should have been a problem for Lewis either.

Rotating detonation in flight

Venus Aerospace did it, those mad lads: got a rotating-detonation engine to work in flight. Also it was tested in New Mexico, which I hadn't thought was the best political environment for it.

I don't know if they 3D printed this.

They're not looking at space. They're trying to push aircraft, from a runway through our atmo. They think they can reach Mach 6 - which, as they note, is where they can get a ramjet effect. Going much above that is a problem for others.

I think Venus' aim be to shave steps off that smithsonian-to-orbit problem: no need for a booster, from normal flight to Mach 6. The components get simpler (ramjets are already simple) so less prone to failure. It also saves on fuel. This space can be used instead for cargo: they're talking a Mach 4 passenger craft, which they boast would be reusable (they couldn't reuse the others?).

I don't know about it being commercial however. Boom Supersonic still thinks they've got something. But it's illegal: in the 1970s the US banned it, because they couldn't be made quiet, but Boom is supposedly quiet. Bills are pending Federally to allow supersonic if quiet.

Hudson does history bad

Unz has a transcript of a Michael Hudson interview.

First, the good: Hudson demonises Cyril Alexandrine, as a demon deserves. We could quibble that Cyril at least did not murder Hypatia, despite what Cyril's Monophysite heirs like John of Nikiu have since claimed. Hudson also notes Cyril's antisemitism. But: was it as pronounced as that of Cyril's rival John "Chrysostom" up in Constantinople? And how many Chalcedonian-filioque Catholics even want to talk up Cyril these days?

Hudson claims himself a supporter of "industrial capitalism". Industrialists might not be wonderful people, but they produce. Hudson opposes "financial capitalism", which is capital as Number Go Up with nothing backing the number. Hudson doesn't cite Marx and Engels except to agree that blaming the Jews is "retarded". The economist he wants us to read is one Thorstein Veblen (whom I haven't read). As to usury, it's Hudson's thought that the worst offender in mediaeval Europe was the Church Herself.

As to the bad... wew. Start with, Cyril allegedly raising Mary to the Trinity. Didn't happen. I assume Hudson is pondering theotokos (=Latin deipara); if so, he's got the wrong take. Theotokos meant to muddy the human and divine natures in Christ, really before "Christ". Cyril foisted that title upon Mary to coöpt Marian devotion. We Latins prefer mater dei, more expansive than deipara. Such devotion was already prominent among such Latin protoCatholics as mah-boi Saint Jerome. There was no christology in here.

I further don't get how Hudson thinks any of this is bad. Hudson is by nature a Monothelete... like Cyril's heirs. He'd have executed Hypatia himself. Also his claim to support industry rings hollow given his comments against resource industries namely mining.

We get a slew of solecisms in this interview. Rome was the fifth-place Episcopy in the... 12th Century? Really? This doesn't even make sense in Hudson's more-accurate reportage. Rome had allied with the Normans in the 11th, exerting control over Britain. Gregory VII built upon that with the Gregorian Reform. My side of Europe was Latin, increasingly literate in classical Latin; Greek tended to be had secondhand here. The test of relative-importance must be by the economy and the military. Trade networks in the Pirenne-era Mediterreanean can be mapped by coinage (revived): a cluster in the bipartite-manorial world of the Rhine, and clusters around Byzantium and Alexandria. Yes, Rome is lower-tier. But if we are talking about "Catholicism" then we must define this as the Roman Christendom. That was driven by the Franks - and the Normans. The Norman superpower, then, supported Roman importance. (This pattern will continue deep into the High Middle Ages as postNorman England supported Rome over French-influenced Avignon, but we're not there yet.)

By the end of the 11th Century Urban II was able to mount the successful Crusade. Really not seeing that Antioch and Jerusalem, which Rome conquered, were more important than Rome by then. Constantinople and Alexandria were bystanders.

Beyond Cyril, who as I noted isn't in the Catholic top tier, Hudson takes Pelagius' side against Augustine, who I admit is. I hadn't looked into Pelagianism much except that they had a more works-based praxis and weren't predestinarian. The Pelagian Epistolary seems mostly Jerome's excepting they preserved an old reading of Philippians, wherein Paul pondered if he was Justified. Jerome's main problem was with their impietas. I catch the scent of African Donatism: peasants in debt running to a priesthood which will justify their uprising. They probably had a line to the Gaulish Bagaudae too.

I think in Augustine's day the Church wasn't the moneylender yet - that was still Rome. But the Latin church in Africa was assuredly a landholder. This mattered most in southeast Spain and in Africa, where agriculture was near-monocultural: farms were subsistence at the edge of Sahara, but flat-out haciendas facing the Med. It wouldn't take much to squeeze out a free peasant. It would take still less to recruit that peasant - say, to a Vandal host.

Augustine's relation to the civitas Romana is touchy. Maybe someone could write a book about it!

Luckily (for once) some of Unz's smarter commenters showed up to point out that, no, Augustine did not change the Lord's Prayer against "debt" toward "sin". Which means we might still have to host that conversation... but we'll need to exclude Hudson from it, because he doesn't know what he's talking about.

Industry and identity

ht. HBDChick - Basilica "Vicky" Fouca speaking for the paper she cowrote with Theo Serlin. Both outsiders to Mid-Industrial-era cisvalline Britain, they've shown how the people and the culture changed going into the twentieth century. Scotland is not noted.

They are going by "surname". This becomes family-name. I am unsure how they fine-tune it: some surnames are, like, "the guy from Clwyd"; others, "the thatcher", still more "[ma]pEvan" or "the Scott". Maybe "de-" or "fitz-" if we're talking some Plantagenet-era lord or bastard thereof. Maybe "Whitehouse" or "Hall", for the latters' bondsmen.

Staffordshire - which went hard into manufacturing - seems at the three-corners of North Wales, the Midlands, and a North Midlands. The Midlands will suffer the fate of the Anglia and the West, getting blown out by that greater lower Saxony which is the Home Countries. North Midlands get exiled north into the North which itself gets pushed northeast, northeast retreating into that Northumbrian tip. That Salopian enclave of Gwynedd (again, not South Wales) also falls to this united England.

From the born-late-1700s map I suspect already a vast migration into Staffs, north Welsh "Lloyds" and "Bevans" moving southeast: where the jobs were, where public order was stronger, and where the weather was more clement. I'd not be surprised if this was actively Tudor and more-quietly Stuart: Henry VII, James I, Charles I. Offa's Dyke? More like Offa's Gay amirite!

Ahem.

The Anglo-Welsh census kicks in 1851. Over the early 1800s those Tudor Marches seem eroded by Midlands. Even before then, over the 1600s and 1700s, first East Anglia then North Midlands, West Country, and the Severn- and Dee-/Mersey-mouths had the colonies for outlet.

The new industry in the Wolverhampton / Stafford region gave those left-behind something to do, at least.

Gathering a dataset: black holes and neutron stars

Sometimes we just gotta collect a dataset, to establish a base to run our calculations faster. This, I learnt from that hypercube of quintic root power-series coefficients, viz. my failure to scale Eisenstein's. It may be relevant that quantum theorists are in the same boat: the fifth post-Minkowskian (5PM) order. This involves Calabi-Yau three-fold periods.

Do I understand any of that guff? LOL no. I am an applied mathematician at best, software simian at base. I am here for the software tools, here KIRA.

They want this tool for gravity waves and colliders. Those colliders might constrain some Dark Matter theories but maybe not the more-promising.

Calabi-Yau involves string theory which, note, the aforementioned CDM candidate does not. Be nice if Peter Woit could shift from slandering Trump's Administration (hypocritically) for a "fascist dictatorship" (which is going after a group Woit himself must admit are vandalists and meanwhile whose main threat, uh, is to loosen the grip of central moneys upon academia) and get back to mathematical physics. We must admit, Woit is at an... age.

Before dark matter, dark light (maybe)

Earlier today Liang and Caldwell floated to their university press yet another Cold Dark Matter candidate: the now-baryonic cooper-pair of a lost massless fermion. Which Dartmouth needs explain. I'll take a crack at this too.

Dark Matter is dark because it doesn't interact with light, nor (as far as we know) with charge. Matter only does it attract, and that by the weakest interaction: gravity. At least the neutrino can, one-in-a-quintillion, hit a particle: our detectors count on this. We are also not talking about hydrogen clouds, like "Eos" lately, which interact as hydrogen usually does such as present its transparent annoyances for us. Dark Matter is deduced only for how it spins up entire galaxies. Thus opening up unCDM theories like Milgrom's MOND (at least a testable one, if defunct now) and the scalar field.

The new paper invokes the Cooper Pair of electrons. At sufficiently-low temperatures, electron pairs go superconductive: they pass on charge without resisting - without interacting. Suppose, this Cooper of authors suppose, dark-matter express the Cooper Pair of something else before it.

The dark predecessor would be analogous to a dark light: massless-with-energy. Light happens to be a boson in electromagnetism, but massive bosons exist like the W and Z in electroweak and that darn Higgs. The dark light would be a massless fermion, in reverse - I assume lepton if it's like the electron. On transition (paired-up), that energy would be preserved (in double) as the mass: now subject to the Special Relativity, c^2/E. (Warning: Caldwell himself in the pressrelease is muddying his own paper when he says "near-massless". This is a rare occasion when the presser presents the paper more accurately than does the interview-subject himself.)

The authors propose how to test this theory. Testable theories are always good, like those theories which propose a charge to Dark Matter. Even not finding a charge - which hasn't been found - crosses a theory off the list. Dark Matter if by pair won't express charge to observers but could have done so at the Bang, so would be visible in the CMB.

Power series for quintics are impractical

It's been twelve days since I got the Wildberger-Rubine PDF. After some adventures in C#, I can now report on my first W-R construction of my first quintic. This is the easy one: -4+x+x⁵. Eisenstein picked that one in 1844, which holds a powerseries to solve x for 0.

Newton, Raphson & Co. told me the answer: 1.22634... ish, for precision 0.000001. Given start 1, this took five (5) iterations. How does Eisenstein hold against that?

Eisenstein actually forced negatives on the first two quintic-coefficients: -4 > 4, +x > -1. So I get 4 - 4^5 + (10/2!)4^9 - (15*14/3!)4^13 + (20*19*18/4!)4^17 [at m₅=4].

At precision 4 this thing is running away and I'm not seeing relief as I increase that. "Extremely tedious", indeed.

Also, to get the series-coefficients, we have the choice of calculating every time we do it, or else compiling a "geode" based on the polynomial. Quintics get a 4-dimensional hypercube. As precision "number go up", hypercube go up by, what, 4^n? Tell you what, there's no storing all that in RAM. Precision 7 is about my limit before this machine starts wheezing. This needs to be dumped into the file-system, whence the function must stream it.

By that point to find the correct factor is getting slow. I'm sure I could index it... at cost of still more space. Eisenstein can drop a few coeffs.

But astronomers want quintics for Lagrange. The physics are the physics.

To sum up (heh) I don't see the utility in Wildberger-Rubine's expanded-Eisenstein powerseries for quintics ... let alone beyond. Newton remains archangel of the three halo-orbits.

Martian gullies by carbon frost

On 10 May, some constraints were leveled upon postHesperian waterflows on Mars. h/t Zimmerman who imputes same to a less-definite past.

Pace Zim this particular paper is all about the "Amazonian" era, or aeon, which Mars is still in, and will remain in until the Sun gets too hot for us down here on Earth. It doesn't even mention the Hesperian 3.7-3.1Gya much less the Noachian.

Which is not to dismiss the paper. It is valuable to know how the postHesperian gullies have formed. For now, is implicated carbon-dioxide. It gets cold in a Martian night, cold enough to make a dry ice of the CO₂. This frost, however thin (hardly glacial), suffices over millions of years to carve out the gullies. (But not billions.) One might also consider windbourne dust.

BACKDATE 5/16 whilst we're looking.

Visual Studio's project creator is a PITA

I will take tonight to rant about Visual Studio 2022. But I'll start with what Monte Cook would call a "rave": in 2017ish, Microsoft updated C# to "version 7".

This added the Cbrt() to the System.Math statics. No more imprecise Math.Pow(x, 1.0/3.0), between Sqrt and Sqrt(Sqrt). Our boys in Redmond brought in centuries of work for a cube-dedicated algorithm. It would run faster and read easier; with the bonus that it supports cubing a negative number, which .Pow preempted. The only cost, being some extra code in the 'base.

I want my older code to use this. The issues here: csproj .NET 4 Properties throws up a brickwall at 4.8; 4.8 doesn't get the new C#. Not unanticipated; bro just upgraaaaaACK.

The best means I could find was to make a new Class Library, or Winforms whatever; then shift all the classes over there, for recompile. This creator, rightclicking from the .sln, has two options. The first is the Class Library; the second "Class Library (.NET Framework)". You don't know which is which until you choose it; the latter is brickwalled to 4.8. Only the former gives you options for later .NETs.

I spent rather more time than I wanted on shuffling all of this around. But now finally: I get real cube roots.

UPDATE 5/25 You know what we get in C# 8? We get generics "where T : notnull". And .NET 7's system.numerics offers INumber.

RSA cracked (to 22 bits)

So China has published a claim they've broken RSA. Sabine is on it. The comments are saying that they only got 22 bits so have some way before hitting 1998-era 256-bit, let alone what we're up to nowadays.

Longterm the better banks are pushing past 2048 bits to 4096 bits (which quantum probably won't reach); or are just plain using something else.

I expect no encryption is based on solving for high-order polynomials (bitcoin's not what we want them for). Last I heard the cryptobros were looking at stuff like "ECDC". That's elliptics, which aren't polynomial.

The next planet

I don't have much this week, so I'll just drop the hype about Tyche - rather, Fortuna, since we're Latins. This isn't the name I'd choose... but it might actually be the anti-Nine. That is: what they've seen on the plates is incompatible with the orbit which Dr Brown and Dr Batygin have predicted.

Since that other candidate was scotched...

If Fortuna does exist, I'm happy with that name. But if the predicted Nine is found, it should be Proserpine.

UPDATE 5/21: 2017 OF201, maybe 700 km if tholin-rich 0.15 albedo. That would be a sub-Orcus. Tholins are, I think, a product of stellar radiation: Eris and Sedna are icier and brighter than Pluto. If this new body shines over 0.4 albedo, it is smaller. The main point stands: this too flies against Planet Nine (usually "X" there).

Unity still harmful

For almost two years, Unity had scaled back their nonsense. Unfortunately they seem back at it, this time scrounging for licences.

The rogue logins, to me, look like workers taking a function home to check out on non-Professional versions. Those versions would be legal. They'd also not be used to compile the main source. Why are they marked as an extra licence? Apart from the usual Goodfellas "eff you pay me" vibe of this place.

It is elsewhere revealed that Unity doesn't provide a licence manager, like better companies do. "Just swap out with Notepad bro" (or Bash script). Some redditors are saying that's part of The Rules. Arguable. One counter is that if those are the rules, the game is rigged and it were best not to play.

And some are unsure how far those Rules will hold up against The Law. The best comment is probably P S Lumapac, on the options Unity did not first apply. Unity could have notified the (possible) miscreant, get him on record as to what these noncompliant logins are actually doing, THEN go to Legal. Every corporation getting a notice like that knows what's at stake; they'll limit the damage as far as possible. But Unity went for the threats first.

My previous comment on Unity (which is harmful) mooted Godot as an alternative for C# devs who can't (or won't) into C++ with Unreal. Lately I've heard Godot leans more to the "liberaltarian" model of jumping into culture-wars. Dissidents have taken the hint and, er, forked off - namely, into Redot.

BACKDATE 5/10

The postDahmer movie

The first Blade movie came out in 1998. Wesley Snipes starred with a few also-black supporting-cast members. This did well and so did its first sequel. Spawn also had come out, as comic-book movies go; doing less well. I'll treat the first Blade on account the sequels only exist because that first movie did as well as it did.

John Derbyshire considered this back half of the Clinton Administration an intermezzo in (black-) race realism, post Bell Curve and the OJ acquittal. So: why, if everyone was racist, did anyone bother greenlighting this script with this cast?

Proposal: Jeffery Dahmer.

The screenwriters and producers weren't intending an antiwhite parable, exactly. They were sketching a cabal of predatory pansexuals (avant la lettre). The whole movie starts in clubland, where a newbie realises in horror what his (female) date has brought him into - before funnybook action. Stephen Dorff, many critics complained, was miscast. I counter that the movie knew what it was doing: it wanted a hipster. Slightly fey. All creep.

The movie assumes not every young man always gets the choice when initiated into this world; Dahmer's prey certainly didn't. Whether or not Dahmer represents the Lived Experience of vulnerable black teenagers who get mentored by white male liberals... doesn't matter. In the late 1990s, a potential audience thought he did. Snipe's titular character, the "daywalker" or perhaps dhampir, presents a vengeance fantasy of victims. He fights this cabal where it lives.

BACKDATE 5/16 based on Anglin re Sinners.

The furry future

To follow up: primates - and we can add squirrels and, hey, leopards - had two routes from tree-runners to tree-swingers. One route was to make the tail stronger and the other was to make the thumb stronger. But the Gutsick Gibbon video offered a sideline: leave the trees, become a nimble landbased thief. A scavenger: namechecked here was the Barbary Macaque. We might add the raccoon.

I'm thinking that animals like the Japanese macaques have been watching us humans since we (well, the Japanese) were Denisovans. Cats already treat us like magical mommy cats. Youtube is full of videos of this beast or another flagging down passing cars so that we African voodoo gods can help their offspring.

I get the impression that the After Man future won't be of RETVRN to the Miocene. It'll be of several animal species having selected for nimble fingers and expressive vocals, as they got into our trash and begged for our help. Bears, raccoons, and several monkey species would evolve to lose their hair and winter-tails as they sussed out blankets.

BACKDATE 5/15

Tails or thumbs?

Last year, Gutsick Gibbon linked Bo Xia et al. Or, as it were: sans tail.

We learn about the Loris. This is an anciently-diverged primate which has lost its tail. Like an ape. Yet the loris is not an ape.

GG mooted an ancient tradeoff between a swift branch-runner and jumper, which requires a tail for balance; and a larger, slower brachiator. The brachiator has two paths open: to go all-in on the tail as a fifth limb, or to invest in grip-strength. The New World went for prehensile tails; in the Old World, we apes increased the opposable thumb. The New World lost the thumb and the Old World lost the tail. Pace Bo Xia, who had involved losing the tail in the transition to a non-arboreal lifestyle.

The gene is TBXT. This appears also in Manx cats and, last year, they tweaked it for mice.

I take it that Chicxulub and South America's general latitudinal conservatism since then (compare, India) had allowed a persistent Amazon, until those Old World primates from Portugal showed up.

At stake here is the route to sentience. Obviously the Old World can scale: because we apes were able to get physically bigger, compared to monkeys. The New World can, too; not as apes, but as prehensile-tail monkeys.

BACKDATE 5/15

Sicilian refuge

During the iciest Pleistocene, Sicily remained an isle of beech, oak, and maple. These results come from a burial cave, near Sweetwater (Acquedolci). That cave, in 1947 Paolo Graziosi mooted was a caveman cave first. Graziosi was right: 14500 BC, late Evolved Epigravettian.

By "Epigravettian" they imply: from Italy, not Africa. I don't think there was a natural causeway but Solutreans over in Spain, perhaps-infamously, could boat. Looks like the Epigravettians learnt how.

BACKDATE 5/13 b/c article, like the Thetford article, is April. Archaeology (the source for both) is gettin' slow on reportage.

Pagan Thetford

I hadn't heard about the Thetford Treasure, except that it is one.

In UK law, a Treasure is a find of silver or gold. Since UK uses a fiat currency, unowned silver and gold are legally biens nationaux. If you find it, you get reimbursed half the value of the metal in UK scrip. The owner of the field gets the other half. I learnt this in a Roald Dahl story, on the Mildenhall.

The Mildenhall is more-famous because it has Latin words and so is dateable. The Thetford, by contrast, is nonliterate. It also doesn't have coins. Based on criteria apparently retrieved from some East Anglian haberdasher, the Thetford was considered late fourth century.

It's now got a redate. The imagery on the Treasure is cross-ref'ed. Either there was trade or there was culture-contact. Doesn't matter: the date comes out about the same. The main correlation is with the Hoxne. In space this is Suffolk - reasonably close to Thetford. In time, matters more: the Late Antiquity.

The big hype is that the Thetford Treasure contains "pagan" ware. I will just post this. If you are thinking: if they're rich enough to have accumulated a Treasure, wouldn't there be imports, which would be of whatever religion; and wouldn't local sophisticates still do art referring to Greek myth, like Renaissance Popes might - then you have a brain to think with.

The only way the hype makes sense is if this ware cites specifically Roman cult imagery. Like signets of some god; perhaps beyond that Mercurial wanderer. Thetford has 22 rings and these seem Italian...

We can assume the interment was committed less to hide from a then-ineffectual Catholic Church than in advance of invasions from the wrong pagans.

BACKDATE 5/11

January 1865

As I'm writing this, some whites are disillusioned with blacks who've paid toward murderer Karmelo Anthony... and have retaliated by shifting money to some blonde racist Shiloh something-or-other. The father of that kid who got stabbed, meanwhile, hasn't gotten anything but contempt. Also Mississippi has been distancing itself from the Northern Virginia flag, you know which one. So I figure: let's look at how we got here.

The Archaeology roundup, which Jessica Saraceni used to run, has pointed to a mass murder in Kentucky. As of January 1865, both sides of Mason-Dixon could count on another four years of President Lincoln and a more-radical Congress just elected. The Confederate States weren't winning the war and everyone knew it. The article claims Kentucky, subDixie, was "neutral" but if so, that neutrality is to be read as Sihanouk's during South Vietnam's later struggle to exist. The CSA's army had earlier invaded Kentucky ensuring that nonCSA State's angry politicians, by 1865, would allow USA bases in its territory. Which included free black Union soldiers. Did anyone ask the Kentuck farmers? LOL.

Adding to the ugliness of that January was Sherman's March the month before, through Georgia. Atlanta had already been ruralised, as defeated cities are. Following that election, it was Union policy that the CSA had no civilians. If a city supported the CSA, it deserved fire. Sherman delivered that fire from Atlanta to Savannah.

It was hard for Dixie sympathisers that year to deny the Union that to the extent the CSA ever existed, it was dead. The North Virginia Flag, however, was spreading north. Rural Southerners knew that a Reconstruction was coming. They shifted to what Spaniards called the "guerrilla" - to terror. "Redemption", they'd call it.

This mass murder in Kentucky was an initial blow, to thin out the troops which Southerners predicted would be enforcing the coming Reconstruction. And I suspect black soldiers remembered this atrocity; or, if not this one, then just a general atmosphere in all the "prostrate states" where their soldiers were subject to getting picked-off. They would enact some brutal retaliations for instance in Galveston, once Texas ran out of cash and surrendered.