So much for K2-18

Anyone who still cares about K2-18 has, like its planet, no life.

The planet "b" still holds interest as a waterworld without, it seems, steam. They say it is a "cold trap". The abstract spots methane and carbon-dioxide, and no ammonia nor carbon-monoxide. So there may be hydrogen in that atmosphere - they say. Although they don't say they spot that hydrogen in the noise.

The molecules they do see could recombine into the "DMS" reported in earlier studies, at trace amounts - without life. But they don't replicate even that.

The lamentations

Liz Boase at TheTorah has reread the Lamentations - as a plural. Traditionally, Jews and Christians have ascribed it to Jeremiah, on account the Bible itself ascribes lamentations to this man. Boase accepts that the first chapter aligns with Jeremiah's theology.

They don't always agree with Jeremiah's use of the cant. Jeremiah 1 and 2 each evoke "daughter-Zion", for pity's sake. Jeremiah might refer to "daughter-Egypt" (50-51 / LXX 27-28) but, to clarify Boase, notes "Bat-Zion" only in v. 6:2 which is contested in Greek (where her "pride" is taken away). "Bat-" is a trope; also mooted in Isaiah 37, in context an antiAssyrian oracle but - I don't find where this is controverted - extant in Jeremiah's time for an antiBabylonian purpose. As we all know, Nabu-kadri-usur II falsified that purpose and, indeed, Zion herself.

The second Isaiah in our chapter 54 will sketch Bat-Zion returning home in glory. It is overall an antiLamentation, if not antiJeremiah. Cyrus II of Anshan has fulfilled Isaiah's promise, one might argue, if belated; I suspect, anyway, that's what Isaiah's editors argued.

I accept that Lamentations 1 is, actually, Jeremiah's (or Baruch's). It fills in the Bat-Zion which the prophet inherited but didn't himself use - in the oracles. Recall that our chapter isn't an oracle. It is a theological reflection.

Skeptics are on firmer ground with the other works in this collection. Lamentations 2 confronts God as an angry, pitiless ... enemy not just of Zion but of all Judaea. Even Jeremiah wouldn't go that far. I am amazed more "counter-Jewish" posters haven't picked up on it. (I am not that poster, for those new here.) Lamentations 4 meanwhile is sympathetic to king-in-exile Zedeqiah; the legal husband of Bat-Zion, some might say. Jeremiah famously hated the man. Lamentations 3 curses Babylon which, also, Jeremiah wouldn't do; by whose authority may we curse the scourge which G-d Himself is wielding?

Jeffery Epstein - boy that was fun

I went through this my blog and found a few mentions of that weirdo with his private island and connexions with the Rich, Famous, and Political. Not many mentions, but he was mentioned. This blog was never QAnon but it did (lazily) take the Epstein claims at face value. All the best villains are here: Clinton! Gates! . . . Trump!

Everyone is focused on the Trump angle now. The Left is calling him a "PDF". The Right finds odd that the Left didn't run on this in 2016. They didn't even really do this 2017-2024, beyond the odd pic of the two hobnobbing in New York in the 1990s. Now, finally, some Right figures are peeping out to say what they should have said a decade ago.

As a philosophic look as to why Epstein (and, before him, QAnon) has been so important to the Right: Scott Greer.

For the psychoanalysis on what Jeff E. actually was, in life: Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry makes an attempt. He paints a social-climbing Talented Mister Ripley type, or maybe Saltburn. Jeffie was a walking void. He put all his energy into charming others; and in New York high society, people like to be charmed. And some people honestly loved the man. Take those pictures of Ghislaine and Jeffery canoodling. They look sincere.

People like that don't grow up, though. Hence the yen for the underage. If it's offshore, American consent laws might not apply. So the Epstein couple told themselves.

From that, Gobry rules impossible that foreign intelligence services would ever trust this guy. Especially not Mossad, who might hire Jews, but certainly won't hire Jews as Jews when they're on private islands like freakin' Ernst Stavro Blofeld. Maybe THE JEWS aren't as smart as they think they are. But Mossad/Shin Bet is smarter than most Jews. They have to be.

For Gobry, "the Epstein files" amounts to every New Yorker whom Epstein ever ran up at, which is to say, every Giuliani-/Bloomberg-era New Yorker who ever scrounged the cash to attend a charity event or cocktail party. The New York Times who, you know, actually live there, have copped to it. Hanania figures the whole thing is settled.

Moldbug argues for pursuing this noncase even knowing it is shark-season booshoo. I guess so attention-whores like Vox Day get to keep having stuff to post about. This is cynical. But if the other guys are going to be cynical too, why not set up a soundproof kennel for everyone to bark at each other - whilst Trump does real work.

Nippur-12501

Nippur-12501 is a Sumerian tablet from the 2400s BC with mythological content. It was found and its facsimile published, sort-of... as a pretty image for the cover of some book somewhere. It was not, however, edited much less translated. Until now.

The myth concerns Ishkur, the storm god.

If that name seems obscure, that's because Sumer didn't care about the rains - as Jana Matuszak points out. Their waters came from the highlands - as in Egypt. The big stormgod-lovers were out among the Semites (famously): Baal-Hadad; or the Indo-Hittites, as Tarhunta. The Hurrians had a stormgod too and I assume so did the Elamites. Just everyone else but in Sumer and Egypt.

Nippur's myth of Ishkur didn't spread much. Even in Nippur they didn't much copy this tablet; their main god was Enlil. Which is all making me wonder if this was someone else's myth which got carried over here, maybe because someone found entertainment in it.

Fredric Brown

I may or may not have mentioned on this particular blog that back in the sixth grade, we had Read magazine. This sometimes put out classic short-stories, like "Harrison Bergeron". (The later Reagan years were a high water for antiprogressivism; the 1980s decade explains perhaps everything about Gen-X.) One issue, Read devoted to an author whose name I'd forgotten since. I recall two stories in particular: "Rebound", and "The Weapon".

Last night I found the author: Fredric Brown. His most-famous story is certainly "Arena" which became an iconic Trek episode, even keeping the title. I don't know how many know it was Brown's.

I am ashamed to confess that, after forgetting Brown's name and most of the story's content, I rewrote "The Weapon". My main change was to step back from the Weapon premise; my macguffin was a total-conversion energy source (itself inspired by another forgotten Asimov story, who had it from Einstein). That made my protag more sympathetic than Brown's, but also more naïve. Still, TC like fusion could only be used as a weapon in the meantime - and my punchline was regrettably near-identical to Brown's, which words were just that memorable. I submitted this patchjob as a GCSE English Language project (so, tenth grade). I was not called on the four-year-old plagiary-by-memory - but I suspect it was caught, since I ended up with a B in that GCSE where I was expecting an A (I had an A in Literature). I reckon with more work it could have been less Brownian and more focused on Good Intentions Gone Awry. But what to do with the punchline?

That aside, and from the perspective of adulthood and many decades of intervening adaptations, Brown was something of a hack as a writer. He was most pleased to deliver Shaggy Dog Stories. His stories were very short, as exist to deliver The Punchline. I think his less-effective stories have The Punchline as a coda. Think less Trek, more The Scary Door I mean, Outer Limits. (The Twilight Zone is, at heart, more 1960s-bien-pensant than Brown, the cynic, would prefer.)

Also when Brown steps from fantasy-horror or noir, into science fiction, his science fiction is simply not scientific. I mentioned "Arena" here but the parasitic decorative earrings in "And The Gods Laughed" relies on ridiculous assumptions about our solar system's planets. We can allow for life on Mars, but on Ganymede? Really? At least we now know whence the brainslugs so-common in Futurama and now Stellaris. Probably by way of Puppet Masters more than Trek this time.

To the extent I have a fiction writing style, I often cop to Dunsany, Poe, and Ashton-Smith. But now that I know Brown's name, I can at least add him too.

The new rules

Collective Shout is a shadow government.

I hadn't heard of them, or if I had I'd filed them with a host of activist Groups who push to Change Society. They are not grifters - they're not, oh, Sweet Baby or - dating myself here - Rainbow/PUSH. They're not, as far as I know, in this game to get their friends positions in Human Resources or in some quasigovernmental quango. They are, so far, what they say they are: they accept donations, they pay staff, the staff puts out communiques which the rest of us take or leave.

They got on my radar for pushing Mastercard and VISA to threaten to yank their services from Steam. Steam is a game platform; and is considered a very independent and reputable platform for what they do. Disclosure: I was just on Steam a week or two ago to purchase the game Faster Than Light (2012). Which has its own philosophical Problematics.

What was Steam doing which got them collectively shouted at? Let's read the Shout's own words: Since our launch in 2010, we have achieved many wins: billboards objectifying women pulled down, sexualised childrens clothing withdrawn from sale, sexually violent games banned, Andrew Tate’s pimping courses removed from Spotify, and an age verification trial underway to help protect kids from exposure to porn. Last year saw a record 34 wins.

The idea of forcing corporations on the scale of Mastercard to debank others, I consider, on principle, as paragovernmental. Mastercard and other banks have been too-easily swayed to ban conservative and/or traditional content over the past five years. Well now they're banning the opposite.

Suppose gamers, a libertarian bunch to put it politely, decide to be less libertarian? Lots of gamers dislike LGBT content, and that content gets sold in Triple Ayayayyy games. What's the difference between that and the CSAM which just got #cancelled?

"Consenting Adults!" - yeah, but the games aren't solely sold to those adults...

Roundup in Classical Biblical Hebrew diachronics

Very little has come by in the past week, so I'll just run a link-list tonight. We're on-topic of diachronic biblical-Hebrew linguistics.

Specifically: Classical, as opposed to LBH which everyone seems to agree is its own (Second-Temple) thing. Tania Notarius is working the other end, the poetry, which tracks closer to early offshoot Ugaritic. Aaron Hornkohl thinks he can sus the prose, which he's done in open-access (yay!). But Hornkohl has critics. The Hornkohl critics at least take him seriously which we don't do (say) for Eric Weinstein.

To the degree I am a Semitist, which isn't much, that not-much is even less much in Hebrew. So I'm not here taking sides.

CODOH, against Unz and IHR

I usually don't bother with the "Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust"; but late last June, Jorge Besada has offered what could be CODOH's new mission statement: why we should all be Holocaust deniers. More like Base-ado amirite?

I am pretty sure this Besada character is the Mises.org guy. This comes from the Mises / Hayek [/Rothbard] palaeo-Libertarian side. Think, Reason as of the 1970s, before lol-weed-lmao.

It is Besada's contention that Holocaust / Shoah revisionism should not be restricted to Jewhaters. The Holocaust-as-narrative should be assigned instead to Stalinist propaganda. It would go to Vyshinsky, the Show Trial guy, still around in the 1940s. And if we're talking about the Shoah, instead of persecutions (which interwar Poland was also doing) then we are in the 1940s and not the 1930s.

Stalin as of the 1940s was hardly Good For The Jew. If he hadn't died when he died, we would assuredly be asking after the Russian Jewish population of the 1950s. But, you know - "what if" is practically a punchline in historiography. To the extent the Soviets were pinning the destruction of European Jewry upon Nazi Germany, that was opportunistic, to browbeat the Germans and Austrians half of whose territory the Red Army had now taken. (Later they'd hand back their part of Austria, but annex much of eastern Germany into Poland and "Kaliningrad".)

Not for Besada, the smarmy sidespeak of Daniel W. Michaels and, by extension, the Institute for Historical Review. For that, Besada deserves credit. Still: in my opinion, Besada remains too kind to Ron Unz. Unz opposes the Talmud on one side - and Zionism on the other. That leaves little space for Jewry itself. So what is Unz is of Jewish descent; he wouldn't be the first Jew to allow for the uprooting of Jewish communities.

It may be that Besada feels he is sufficiently out on that limb that he cannot afford to make further enemies.

BACKDATE 7/20

Nesili and Hattili

Academia.edu has been sending me links to Bronze Age contact-languages, probably since showing interest in Hitto-Sumerian (with certain Akkado-Sumerian roots). Like this nine-year-old paper on Ugaritic-Hurrian, Hurro-Akkadian and Canaano-Akkadian.

This evidence serves to show how a foreigner would sound out another language phonetically. It also might illustrate the spread of languages across diplomatic and trade networks. How might languages accumulate loanwords in which direction?

The best paper in my opinion is still Petra Goedegebuure's 2008 paper on The Luwian substrate of Hattian. Many ancient languages are VSO (Semitic) or SOV. Among SOV were protoBaltic and Indo-Iranian (and German!); which all should point to Aryo-Baltic being SOV, and in those ancient times Mitannic Aryan. Italic and Anatolian also trended SOV suggesting this for the whole of protoIndoHittite.

It happens that paraSemitic Akkadian wasn't VSO; it was SOV or even OSV like Yoda. This is ascribed to Sumerian being SOV. The same has happened to fully-Semitic Amharic, following Cushitic as SOV. Apparently late Byzantine Greek returned to SOV not under Anatolian / Persian / Latin influence, as you'd think, but Turkish. (Boo!)

Once hattili was identified in the Hattusa archive, scholars have painstakingly identified its nouns and verbs based on bilinguals and whatever words in Hittite can be flagged as parallel. Goedegebuure p.146 notes that Melchert and Soysal in 2003-4 could count under thirty loanwords from Hattic into Hittite, total. The Hittites, who were ancestrally Nesians occupying Hattic cities like Hattus (and Sapinuwa and Nerik), fossilised Hattic, rather, into the civic rituals of Hattus and Nerik. It happens Hittites recorded that Hattus was, uh, cursed; by its conquerors, Pithana and Anitta. So those who were squatting in that city perhaps felt they needed to propitate its gods. The Kanesh-origin Anatolian Hittites didn't alter their own grammar to be more Hattic.

Oddly there's an exception to that: KBo 18.151. This is an Old Hittite ritual - and may even deserve to be called "Old Hittite" against nesili. Its grammar is atypical of Old Nesian. It looks more like Hattic should be. But were KBo 18.151 a mere translation, the archive should hold the original; and where translations do exist elsewhere, they're in pure Nesian. Soysal in 2000 argued that KBo 18.151 preserves the Anatolian Hittite dialect spoken around Hattusa by non-Nesians. After the conquest from Kanesh / Nesa, the "proper" language was imposed.

This works in reverse as well. If any Anatolian ever crept into Hattic ritual, the pious Hittites tried to purge such like modern Greeks refuse Turkish.

Hattic sentences for their part were caught, by the scribes, on the way between VSO and SOV. Goedegebuure notes that Hattic is a prefixing language. So the verb came first; Hattic was being forced into SOV. (Is Semitic prefixing? I suppose those taf'îl, mufa''al, and maf'ûl nouns, and the han- and al- definitive-articles; but those seem late, and we can point to suffixes, like Aramaic's emphatic-state. Although Aramaic had influence from late-stage Akkadian.)

All this should aid in telling the most vexing problem of Hattic: if it has any relation to other languages, as VSO not being IndoHittite nor Sumerian itself (nor Cushitic obviously). But it also is hardly Semitic. Causasian, Hurrian, Kaska...?

Space couscous

China was able to grow rice in its space station. Problem: what if there's no ... space. We're still working on inflatable habitats. Even tethered to large rocks or lava-caves, pressurised environments cost money.

Del Bianco et al. are researching dwarf crops in microgravity. At least to get started before available space comes online.

We Earthlings want this for efficient bases in the Arctic. Maybe down in caverns. But they seem serious about its space applications because that's Del Bianco's focus.

Make it rain

The granola animists whom Trump so-unwisely allowed into his coalition have a long history of blaming THE CORPORATIONS for the weather. No less a "light" as Viganò pinned the west Carolina floods on cloud-seeding. Every now and again we also hear of contrails as "chemtrails". Nobody tell them about greenhouse gasses.

In a page straight from PJ O'Rourke's Parliament of Whores, the American Thinkers have spoken so their representatives must Do Something. The EPA is going to release a report.

Augustus Doricko has been all over the Right's spaces to explain what it is his company "Rainmaker" does. In brief: taking irrigation to the skies. If he drains water from a humid front in South Texas, they get water and Central Texas gets... less water. If Central Texas was suffering a drought his detractors would have a point.

The chemical used is a silver iodine salt. This for life is inert - or even antibiotic. Remember Stan Jones? that blue guy who ran on the Libertarian ticket in Montana 2002?

This Administration's most-recent sop to its base of paranoiacs was to investigate Jeffery Epstein. Y'all know how that went. As for Doricko: I dunno. I fear Zeldin is going to make a scapegoat of him.

Personally I'd scapegoat the Austin fire-department which wouldn't move resources to Kerr County. Because Climate Denial, and Equity.

BB(5+)

Alan Turing posited the state-machine in 1936 and we, programmers, are still living in his world. Think of a state-machine as a flowchart; we'll define the "order" of the machine with how many circles are in it. Esther/Ling Fu and Sarah Pan have a succint summary (pdf); lately youtuber "Up and Atom" has a video.

Alonzo Church proved that Turing Machines (TM) are equivalent to algorithms. So "language" means "possible input": the set of strings that the machine accepts. Programmers know the "machine language" as the possible instructions the running CPU can understand; in turn your program is in a language, which all those layers of dot.NET hopefully interpret as making sense, down to the machine-language. Your enduser sends more strings to that running program; these are in the language you've told your enduser will work on your program.

Turing's machine comes with its own mathematic, rather metamathematic, quirks. Fu and Pan start with the "Acceptance Problem". Say there's a "language" which includes every TM as accepts an argument ω. Yay recursion! Turns out, that language is "undecidable". That seems... obvious; an infinite set of infinite possibilities. A subset of this language is those with all TM as halt on ω. There's the Halting Problem: that's undecidable too. Hence why any decent interpreter forces call-stacks upon our recursive functions. Which adds more circles to your flowchart.

I'm not here to prove the above. I'm cutting a lot out because (1) I'm rushing to the good bit and (2) you should read Fu and Pan.

So: not all flowcharts halt, and you can't tell if the flowchart halts ahead of time. What about the flowcharts that take too long before halting? That's the pathologic case of the "Busy Beaver". A halting flowchart of order 1 halts at the first step OBVIOUSLY. A two-circle 'chart, through the two-circle "maze", maxes stepcount at BB(2): six. They call that stepcount "state shift". BB(3)=21.

BB(4) and BB(5) proved... harder. It turned out that finding BB(n) was uncomputable if not undecidable: there's no equation or algorithm for "public ulong BB(int n) {...return??;}".

I wonder beyond a certain n, pathologic arbitrary-shift can be pseudocoded for inclusion as circles in the chart. Thus making that BB(n) infinite, if countably so. Looks like ZFC.

At the time of writing, Fu and Pan and everyone else knew BB(5)≥47176870, since someone wrote a function for that, but nobody knew if that was the highest-shift function for 5-order. Just last year, it was proven. This was shown, also, through a Turing Machine: by the "interactive theorem prover" Coq, which since everybody hates laughter is now in v.9 called "Rocq" (what would Alan think??).

BB(6) is at least 10^^15. Nobody ain't solving that until some major breakthrough in metamathematics is made, not even by "quantum".

The Goldbach Conjecture, per "code golf addict", has a 31-state halting TM since reduced to 27. The solution of BB(27) is, then, the limit to how long to wait before the Goldbach Conjecture will grind either to a solution or be nonhalting. The solution - if it exists - will be the proof that Goldbach was wrong. Riemann, meanwhile, over 2016-20 was sitting at BB(744).

DRACO slain

DARPA at least isn't doing nuclear-propulsion anymore, having been halted for awhile. They believe that propulsion can be done chemically for the immediate missions they want to do; with aid from Hall Thrusters between LEO and MEO. DRACO was always kind of drastic for Earth-orbit tugs.

I don't know how this affects General Atomics. For long-reaching probes, nuclear-electric is fine. And fusion is coming.

Precision metal in spaaace

Today may as well be space day. Let's start with this piece from late last month: University of Florida bending metal.

The idea is to keep sending cargo in small packages, absent a working Starship as we are. Contrary to the fools at Issues and Insights, I recognise that SpaceX actually is able to reuse a rocket and a capsule. And they're still working the problem. Meanwhile LEO astronomers cannot count on Starship so, here we are.

Once in orbit, or maybe on some regolith-bearing rubble pile, the metal can be re-formed into the shape the astronomer wants. Obviating some need for Starship.

This metal-bending project is also DARPA, in need of some Ws since dropping their DRACO drive. They got use of the Marshall facilities to test in low-pressure.

Tarmod

I thought last Thursday was going to be slow but boy howdy, did a lot show up in my feed. First was Cardoza, "understanding Islam from the light of earliest Jewish Christianity". Before mine eyes had finished rolling, Paleojudaica delivered: Haggai Olshanetsky's "Zenobia", she of Palmyra = Tadmur. Christians remember this queen as a Jewish queen in alliance with Paul of Samosota, forerunner of the archeretic Arius and his emperors. Jews remember her as a persecutor, and refused converts from "Tarmod".

Jews of whatever denomination had inhabited Tadmur before the Arab Kingdom erupted in it. Several late Latin histories note young Gordian's death in Circesium, after Herodian quits; and his tomb. This burial was in scope for Eutropius and for John the Deacon's Epitome De Caesaribus. Here the Historia Augusta would inscribe the imperial cenotaph: in Greek, Latin, Persian, Jewish, and Egyptian. The HA / Eutropius / Epitome synopsis lately is considered Victor. Olshanetsky vouches for the HA plus, thus: Jewish names served in the XX Palmyrenorum legion, stationed at Dura-Europus.

So I cannot dismiss the existence of a "Jewish Christianity" in the Arab/Aramaic interface to which political adventurers might appeal. (I got yo' "understanding Islam" RIGHT HERE, Bozo.)

The Jews outside her anti-imperium might have sniffed her out even at the time. The Tadmuris were converting to Judaism under a "persecutrix". Olshanetsky must conclude that she was a heretic. Christians wouldn't accept Paul; Jews - from the Sasanian Iraq - couldn't accept Zenobia. "Tarmod" itself reads like a reversal of "Tadmur", as nonSemites write a word. And, in postZenobic text, the metonym stuck: יִמַּח שְׁמוֹ

I suspect these texts against Zenobia and her "Tarmod" arose when Paul's doctrine was dominant in that Roman Empire of the first Constantines.

Palmyrene Judaism has been termed "Hellenistic", by Jews and by their Protestant sympathisers; inasmuch as their text was not the Talmud. Olshanetsky dislikes the term. If I may - the Iraqis may have distrusted Palymra as Hellenist at the time. Zenobia was no amica of Rome; but her late husband had professed to be, and inflicted more damage to Iraq than to the Roman provinces (whence, after all, he was extracting rents). The Palmyrene coinage identified even more with Rome than with Greece. It's not like Semites cared, any more than Westerners cared about the Parthian / Persian distinction.

Later Iraqi Jews could see the Constantines reviving the Tadmur doctrine in a Christian dress. Their Father was monarchical; the Son was simply of some other substance, human and inferior. Their Talmud, compiled from the later 300s to the 600s, moved to a blanket ban on "Tarmod", a herem by any other name. By extension: to any "Jews" who got that way under the Constantines. Constantinople agreed fully, as John Chrysostom blasted what we'd call a "LARP" of Judaism.

MUNUS in Knesian

Half a decade ago I looked into some hinterland Hurrian femininity in which, offhand, I noted that in the Hittite tablets, "woman" is ideogrammed. Specifically MUNUS (you might see SAL in older quotes); pronounced "mumble-mumble-n". Nobody knew the pronunciation before the 'n. Hittite taxmen, it seems, preferred to account, oh, seamstresses (here, seam-iššara) rather than just plain "women". We see the same in Linear B palaces.

Unlike in Linear B, the Hittites did have a place for pure phonetics: rituals, where it mattered that the pronunciation was right. Unfortunately the relevant rituals are imports: hence, that Horite (if I may) witchcraft ritual is scripted phonetically. The same held for Luwian (and, later, Lycian and Carian); and for Lydian: wana and kana respectively. So we can project the paraKnesian as *whána. Problem: that was a sister to Knesian, not the common Anatolian ancestrix. It does at least look something like the Proto Indo European *gwón-eh₂ however, as our Matter-Of-Britain avalonians will remember from names like Guenevere and Hen Wen. Or, more prosaic, "gyno". (One suspects QU-NA- somewhere in Linear B. If they weren't using ideograms too.)

Meanwhile the Ortakoy / Sapinuwa archive is being - painfully - reassembled. In 2019, Süel saw a feminine personal-seal. But he punted: it could be Woman or it could be Fate(!).

Based on the protoLuwian and on IndoEuropean, most scholars expect something like kuwan-. But people may simply have given up.

Sumerian pronunciation

If you go through older articles on cuneiform, sometimes you have to retranslate (e.g. Upper Hani as "Hani-GALbat"); and sometimes you have to make the retranslation happen in Sumerian itself. Was he UruINIMgina or UruKAgina? Is she MUNUS or is she SAL? It turns out that the Bronze Age found Sumerian at least as alien as does modernity.

Aygül Süel (and Daniel Schwemer) in The Akkadian and Sumerian Texts from Ortaköy-Šapinuwa (2021) illustrated how the Hittites sussed out sumerograms: they understood their pictographic nature. Then they used other, monosyllabic sumerograms as transliterated Hittite, to sound out the sumerograms in question. They did this for Sumerian numbers like "eleven".

The charitable anathema

OnePeterFive argues for the practice of "charitable anathema". This reminds me of dear Jerusha at Rice University in the middle 1990s who "prayed with me". I was in fact being prayed AT.

Now: I deserved something like that at the time. I was flirting with the Gnosticism. I didn't know better since I had no grounding in the Apostolic Fathers at that time; I really only understood the Didache and 2 Clement, hadn't fully grappled with 1 Clement (which was long) and Ignatius (who was alien). But I'll never forget Jerusha's theatrically pitiful face. I am ashamed to admit, I was angered. No really, I am not now proud of my emotional reaction even if I did, I think, succeed in hiding it. One might even ponder if I had a demon in me.

In self-defence of my resistance, if not of how I felt at the time: I do not think Jerusha handled this well. I think a better interlocutrix could gently explain that the gnostic texts are all secondary, by contrast 1 Clement and (more relevant) Ignatius are less secondary. Unfortunately for both of us, Jerusha did not have these tools any more than I did. She just had... well, she had a pronoun. The appeal anyone of XX might have over an XY.

Here is what I can report on what does not work. Dumping New-Testament cant upon that guy: circular. Psychoanalysing him: his wife or his mom might be able, but you aren't either of them. Invoking prayer: are you so sure your god is the right one? simple statistics would show that you're both wrong. We might be seeing a pattern - a particularly XX pattern. Instead of entitlement wrapped in therapy speak I might have received epistemic-closure wrapped in cant.

One can dress up arrogance all one likes. One can tell the other person he is "spiritually dead" and in denial of Christ's Love or Not Having The Truth In Him or Making God A Liar or - whatever. But: you don't really know the other person. I mean, he could well be jackass wrong; I certainly was. But that is not the same as refusing the truth; he mightn't even know where to look.

And if you don't know, yourself; you are less likely to win him over than to make an atheist of him, even (G-d forbid) a hater.

John Muir, future bishop

Our bulletin gets John Muir's meditations.

Muir was born and raised in Burlington, major city of the state Vermont. He was appointed by Cardinal Dolan; he now serves in Phoenix. Muir was a public mourner of the late Pontiff. He loves Ben and Jerry's.

In today's bulletin, Muir called George Floyd's death in police-custody a "killing". He associated this wilful unaliving with "racism", which we need to fight. He was pretty ambiguous about whether this fight meant spiritual struggle against a sin, or the dismantling of a social structure. Inasmuch as this is an "-ism" most would read this as the latter.

Muir is in line with how the archbishop of Denver reacted in 2020. I think it safe to assume Muir speaks for the majority of bishops.

His assumptions on the righteousness of the Derek Chauvin verdict may or may not be true, but they haven't hurt his position in Phoenix. They'll likely not hurt him when he becomes a bishop, either.

A11pl3Z

The object "A11pl3Z" is confirmed hyperbolic. This makes it extrasolar. It would join 'Oumuamua and comet Borisov, and maybe some Centaurs.

I've been hearing it nicknamed "apple". How about "A1, please!"? - but they are going with "3I/ATLAS" and "C/2025 N1".

It is bearing in from Sagittarius / Scorpius so Zodiacal, inclined a bit north. It was 10 AU last February. Luckily for us, none of our outer planets are in the way and perihelion will be 2 AU. I don't know about asteroids however.

They don't speculate whence C/2025 N1 came since the spectrograph isn't in; HIP 88477 seems the nearest star. This object looks like it has a coma, which would make it a comet. At 20 km long it's pretty big.

We should be spinning up a Project Lyra.

The Old Kingdom's genetics

After the unification of Egypt, a man was buried along the Nile. His genome is now published, and is continuous with modern Egyptians (especially Copts)... given historical introgressions since. We'll get into those, later.

The burial is dynasty III or IV, backed up with radiocarbon admittedly vague. That is early Old Kingdom, so Pyramid-era perhaps immediately pre-Cheops. He was a shortie at slightly under 160 cm. He seems to have been a potter, earning enough in the end to get his upper-middle-class burial. One hopes he rested in peace since his work injuries rendered him stooped and arthritic.

The genome is under 80% Moroccan, with 20%... Mesopotamian. There isn't any Kushite here; although - supposedly - our man was dark skinned. Both contributors seem far from upper Egypt; presumably the African DNA is what darkened him as much, but also hey - this climate selects for that. His male lineage was E1b1b1b2b; female was I (=N1a1b2). I do not find in his paternity Levantine J, but the mix overall may hold a little Levantine.

The Levantine, the paper argues, came later. Instead came earlier, a "Neolithic package" of agriculture, in Egypt 6000 BC. I recall this follows that nasty 6200 BC frigidity which, in the Sahara, would have been an aridity.

The paper further evaluates how the genome changed from the Late Bronze through the "Third Intermediate". Egyptologists since Herodotus have accepted Saite propaganda that the dynasty XXVI Pharaoh Psammetichus was Magnus, and forget he started as an Assyrian stooge. This paper picks a burial from 787–544 "BCE". Anyway, this king's Egypt was now a sight more Levantine than was Cheops' Egypt. They got BLEACHED.

This paper, then, presents the baseline for the Old Egyptian people, therefore culture and language. It should assist in constraining models for the Tamazight and Semitic languages as well.

We still have some millennia between this burial and the Saites (meaning, Assyrians). How did that BLEACHing occur? I understand we do own some Pharaonic DNA but the paper doesn't bring it. They might not represent the common riverside potter. King Tut / dynasty XVIII was R1b (I still don't know if my sort, or Chad's V88 sort); Rameses II and III were more-natively E-V22 downstream of E1b1a / V38. The pharaonic DNA seems corrupted and incomplete.

FOXP4

Far be it from me to rain on the MURRKA PARADES MAGA MAGA MAGA with autistic Covidianity, but: here is the gene for Long Covid. FOXP4 locus; rs9367106 variant C[ytosine, against Guanine]. Nothing to do with FOXP2, the so-called Language Gene.

The long-Covid variant is high in East Asia; 7% of Finns (Asian of course) got it too. Most actual Europeans don't got it ... except for those with some later hapa ancestry, like me. Summary Dominic Ng (substitute nitter.net or xcancel for such of my readers tired of Elon).

The variant is an asthmatic response. There are additional mental and metabolic health correlations - which I'm not sure I believe. Asians aren't known for obesity, and their IQs are too high to be insane. Pardon the racism. The asthma / allergenic response, on the other hand, I wholly believe. Kill the virus whatever the cost? Could be a legacy from the Denisovans or their ancestors. Nowadays we're saying that Alzheimers is allergenic too.

That long-teased Henry George post

I have been only-peripherally aware of Henry George, one of too-many political philosophers touted by the coffeehouse set. I know the name because McEachran revered George, and several teachers in Shrewsbury revered Kek - this despite, or maybe because, Kek's students ended up servitors of Stalin. Anyway the American "Thinker" recently associated George with that crackpot Mamdani, linking to a summary which... doesn't consider George a crackpot. Timothy Taylor last March linked an historical critique. Kek, the Liberal, didn't let results inform his principles; Liberals rarely do.

In plain English, George liked property-taxes. He ran for Mayor in New York City, on that platform.

I am slotting this poast for Independence Day. Arguably, Constitution Day would be better. The Declaration was done by landowners but supported by the likes of Henry and Paine. The Constitution devolved the franchise upon the States only demanding they be "republican", small-r. Several of those States, famously, restricted the franchise; those outside it (excepting women, and such Nations as the Cherokee) would count for 3/5 of the purpose of Representation-therefore-Electoral-College. Landowners are exactly the people George wants to screw over I mean, "tax". We are, then, dealing with an antiConstitutional movement; a movement such as has driven our most famous Amendments.

Midwits could talk how "land value" means that apartment-complexes must shift the cost to their renters, but feh. I do not write for midwits. What I want to flag, is that the supply/demand curve gets distorted. George doesn't encourage owners of the land to increase value - by, say, adding floors as might increase supply. The YIMBY/Abundance crew cannot join George's coalition. Probably why George lost, and his ideas had to be tested afield in Blighty.

For my part I live in a state with a lot of land which is marginal land. George would understand that and not tax it, I hear the midwits - rather halfwits - squeal. To that: take rich mercantile interests, perhaps even not American, as would bid on the land. That would drive up the value, yes. But the rancher cannot pay his bills from that. The best he can do is borrow. George's tax wouldn't fall upon the speculators; it would fall upon the rancher. The rancher can barely keep his tractor in repair for all his "wealth".

To sum up, go away Georgists. UPDATE 12:30 MST: I'm in good company.

Denver is not a MLB city

As the 19-66 Rockies struggle to overscore the Spiders - if you haven't heard of them, that is because their notable season was AD 1899 - I am breaking early this week to link the Mile High autopsy.

Various cities have various quirks in climate. This doesn't much affect how fast or which direction the ball moves; just on how well players handle the environment. Denver is able to field hockey teams, football teams, and basketball teams. I have come to the conclusion that Denver will never field a baseball team. When the Rockies take the field, they waste the MLB's time. They are the comic-page in the annals of this sport.

Yes, atmosphere and gravity do matter. Denver is on a different planet as, oh, Pittburgh and Baltimore (to pick on two other towns TOTALLY AT RANDOM). Its pitchers can't throw curveballs: that's just physics. To pick on another city, the Washington Nationals might be having a bad year, but they are capable of good years. Denver is not so capable.

Colorado (like Idaho) needs to accept that it is a plateau and that its baseball is, intrinsically, regional. Coors Field should host regional-games and away-games... only. The Rockies' owner needs to scout some lowland.

Or hell, there is always cricket. HOWZAT

UPDATE 4:30 MST: Rockies won!

Move over, Erdős Pál

h/t Reynolds: the monostable tetrahedron, courtesy Gábor Domokos and Gergő Almádi (and Robert Dawson). The former two names might be reversed in this language off the steppe.

Tetrahedrons are four-sided dice, or as we Dungeon-Masters used to called them: caltrops. They're looking for a loaded die that always falls on the "4" side. John Horton Conway and Richard Guy thought it existed but could not prove it. Now they can: if they hollow out the thing, and overweight the "4" side. Like, by thousands.

In material-science, those proportions can be had by using tungsten on the one side and carbon-fibre on the others.

They tout this for Lunar landers which, lately, keep falling over. [UPDATE] Although that's not the issue; the issue is constraints on moving cargo from Earth atmo direct to some other planet, forcing bad geometry.

Ahead of the wave

Western Iberia from Galicia down to the Algarve is more Morisco than the rest of - well, we gotta call that "Spain". This is also concentrated in the men. Jacobo Pardo-Seco et al. verify this - but.

They affix the admixture to AD 620-70. The Arab-Berber invasion wouldn't happen until AD 711. What gives?

One possibility is that these were runaway Nafris. Deserters: who wouldn't fight the Sasanians then the Muslims but also disliked their change in status. From AH 20 / AD 640 on, "Islam" barely existed; the Arab invaders treated this as a cover for Umayyad / Syrian supremacy. As I keep reminding you, no written Qurân worthy of the name existed until 30/650. These people having the resources to leave slipped into west-Iberian societies as their elites. Many may have professed Judaism.

Alternatively, the admixture happened in north Africa in 620-70 and did not, at first, join the Iberians. It swamped the local population in the 710s without admixture. Clannish populations burrowed in and persisted.

Mark Goodacre's third Gospel book

Last week Mark Goodacre announced his book on John, The Fourth Synoptic Gospel. I'll lay out what I expect to find in such a study before glancing at it.

I expect Goodacre to explain how John uses Mark (the earliest complete Gospel) as opposed to Matthew/Luke, and why. I also would like to see how John handles Luke versus the noncanonical scraps: looking here at Thomas, the Petrine fragments, and the Egerton Papyrus.

Presently I doubt we have enough primary sources to tell which of them John was using. I don't think Luke-Acts even existed until very late in the Apostolic era; the earliest Patristics pull from the Petrine tradition (I'd argue, from the Gospel of Peter of which we presently own only the Passion). Luke became important because Marcion was touting it, forcing all the Matthew and Peter people to scramble.

The argument I'd like to see addressed - if we're going down the road of John the Last Gospel - is whether the Gospel of John was reacting most-forcefully against the Gospel of Peter (rather than, of Mark). Because Peter is anything but the hero of John 1-20.

The Ashkenazim intermarried later

Joseph Livni and Karl Skorecki have teamed up for Distinguishing between founder and host population mtDNA lineages in the Ashkenazi population. The argument here is that our ancestors did not form from Levantine men marrying Italians.

The mtDNA from nonLevantines is still there; I got some myself. The authors account for this by later admixture. We are after all talking about many centuries. The point is that our founders had already founded the foundation. Presently they can ascertain 54 Levantine female lines: not all direct (so again, not mine), but still in the genome overall. M33c (say) got there later but, by the luck of the draw, persisted a direct line. We introgressed Jews number under 15% of the Ashkenaz population, before modern intermarriage of course.

Khazaria sees such Asian intrusions as Khazar-mediated. Khazaria stresses that ancestrally M33c is not Khazar; it is southeast Asian, where Khazars were Turks from northeast/central. M33c rides with N9a3 which this website likewise cannot pin to the Khazars, although doing its best so to do. Isn't N more western?

Before bilateral symmetry

h/t Reynolds: chordin. [The article has a clickbait title to be ignored.]

For us animal eukaryotes, placozoa branched away first. Then, within the Knid branch, we learn that anemones branched off. We of bilateral-symmetry (worms, chordates, bugs, fish) share "chordin" with anemones. So bilateral-symmetry happened sometime in that Vendian-now-Ediacaran period.

For bilaterans, chordin "shuttles" Bone Morphogenetic Protein around. It's not just bone; this protein ensures cells build up organs wherever they need to. Anemones lack BMP but have other proteins for their own organs.

Field of the nephilim

The demonolatry synod is in session at Bozeman. The MC is one Timothy Alberino, latest expounder of antiCatholic conspiracy-theory.

Sure is a lot of sCIeNCe going on over there. I don't know if that Wall Street Journal report will make it into the lineup, that the "UFO" craze was cooked up by the 1950s-era Pentagon to hide DARPA projects. I rather doubt it.

What Bozeman needs more than anything else is an exorcism.

Selfhatred and misanthropy

Every GenX schoolkid has read William Golding's breakout Lord of the Flies (1954). The kid might not know that Golding kept writing. If you were reading Golding when he was writing, you might have caught Free Fall. For later generations as it happened for me: I found the latter as a spare book at the school nurse's. The former by contrast was everywhere.

Golding was, as hinted, young when he wrote Lord of the Flies. Later, that 1966 stranding at Tonga will put that book's male psychology to the test. Those six stranded boys were able to make a functional camp that did not take the Ba'l-Zebub as its Lord. Admittedly not sixty boys; but Rutger Bregman for The Guardian still cannot defend Golding. Many schools and parents agree so have refused Flies (#woke aside, muh banned books aside).

Bregman sees a "good German" parable behind this book's takeoff. Maybe. I am more interested in how so many schools got hold of this one and kept it to the forefront of Required Reading.

I suspect that schools pushed Lord of the Flies because it supports a benevolent authoritarian Adult World. Golding spins out the second half of Belloc's epigram: And Always Keep Ahold of Nurse, For Fear of Finding Something Worse. The book is "edgy", yes... but safe edgy. How many schools recommend Le camp des saints? or anything Camus. Flies became the Adolescence of the 1960s-70s school system. Over the 1980s, first the satanic-panic and then political-correctness started coming for it, but schoolkids like me still saw the 1970s editions tucked away in this shelf or the other shelf. You would have to hunt, or be lucky, for Free Fall.

I'll lay it out: Free Fall is the better book. I will go further: it serves as Golding's confession, explaining why his view of male nature is as dark as it is. Golding argued for men as a problem because he, as a man, was a problem for a certain woman in his life. When he was writing Flies he tried to get the planet to see how all men are as bad as he once was. But no. It's just Golding; and with Free Fall he copped to it. Arguably too late.

Sometimes the BOOKBANNERS are picking on books which kids don't need anyway; don't get me started on Ted "Seuss" Geisel's didactic postwar output. Let's let him and them fight.

The fall and rise of the Maiones

Here is why we cannot just laugh at Kloekhorst and ignore his paper: it's not limited to the tyrsenoi. It also discusses the Lydians.

What became Lydia, in the Bronze Age, spoke Luwian, which is not ancestral to classical Lydian (we'll get to this). The name "Lydia" does not appear in the Hittite archive, as do the Luwian offshoots Lukka (>Lycia) and Karkisha / Karkiya (> krk / Caria). Neither does the ancient Lydian term Mâionía, unless... it does: as Masha. There's a lot of sh/y flip in the western lands; we just noted Karkiya, and Wilusa / Wiluia is long-suspected. The Masha heartland would be around that lake of Nicaea southeast of Marmara.

The language of that lake is obscure to the Hittites, lumped in with all the Luwi-lands like Lycia and Caria, Assuwa and Arzawa, Seha-River, Apasha, and the rest. Kloekhorst believes that the *Mashanians hadn't distinguished their language from the others. Classical Lydian is today thought to be a parallel language to Luwian, like Palaic and lately Kalashmaic. But who knows what in future they'll find in the Hittite archives. Or maybe the scribes just gave up and ordered the locals to speak in Palaic or Luwian. One language which scholars agree was not spoken in Masha was Phrygian, which will invade from Macedon.

When the Phrygians invaded, they pushed out the Masha-people (Phrygia would later become a great empire). As further evidence, or conjecture, Kloekhorst reads "Lydia" as an exonym, something a Maionian might use upon Luwians (w>d). Thanks to Phrygia, now they had to live in Lydia. Don't worry, they'd get their own back.

So far I... don't see the problem. It doesn't account for the Troad but it doesn't have to; Masha and Wilusa never laid claims to each other's homelands. Those two were reasonably-pacific neighbours and often allies. Let's adopt this as our baseline.

Tyrrhenia contested

As long as we're looking into Phaistos-Disc- / Atlantis- tier elements of Aegean prehistory, let's get into how the H. E. Double-Hockeystick the Lemnians ended up speaking Etruscan. Alwin Kloekhorst proposes that they came from Troy.

Kloekhorst's problem is Etruscan in the LBA Troad: there isn't any. By contrast, Luwian is found in situ and the Hittites, famously, corresponded with an Alexander of Wilusa. Also we'd expect Anatolian loans in Etruscan; which is - yes - a common expectation, but unfortunately almost wholly a false expectation.

Kloekhorst could have produced a more-effective paper if he had restricted its scope to Lydia. I'll do it for him: "I'm not discussing the Troad, which was not part of Bronze Age Masha nor of classical Lydia". Then maybe a footnote with "I hope to study this in a separate paper". If he must.

Crete contested

Peter van Soesbergen thinks he's deciphered Linear A.

The script shares the majority of its signage between A and B. We can read B as ancestral to Arcado-Cypriot Greek. Since A and B coëxisted in Crete, several placenames coïncide, notably pa-i-to > Phaistos. The libation vessels also preserve transcriptions, like qa-qa-ru > qa-qa-ro. Thus the temptation not just to read Linear A aloud, like we do for Etruscan; but to translate it.

Cyrus Gordon thought A was Semitic; Frederik Wuidhuizen thought it Anatolian, specifically Luwian. These languages were spoken in ship-reach to Crete, both easterly - which is where the Middle Bronze Age palaces oriented before 1600 BC. Gordon could point to Semitic-like terms in the Linear A ledgers: compare ku-ro to (say) Arabic kull. Wuidhuizen could compare southwest-Anatolian nonGreek place names like Tarhuntassa - with its Luwian possessive suffix - with Cretan placenames from the centre-east, like Knossos.

Somewhere around here are claims that Linear A is a wayward Greek dialect, like Pictish is some kind of Celtic. Remember pa-i-to? It's not "pa-i-tu". Linear A didn't much use *o-grams but it had them.

Gordon's problem was that technical-jargon may wander across scribal communities, cf. English "total". Wuidhuizen's problem is that the Luwian suffix is not shared in Hittite, which has a genitive like protoIndoEuropean and indeed Greek; so Luwian probably borrowed its suffix. Likewise borrowed could well be the libation-formulae, as Catholics once prayed in Latin and indeed the Hittites were praying in a dozen languages. A problem for err'body is that Linear A/B synoptic placenames cluster west. Oh right, and before the 1700 BC reforms and great feasts, Cretan foreign trade was going south, to mighty Egypt (and the Qeheq?). And what shackles one script to one language? Anybody could write cuneiform, like I'm writing English in a miniscule Latin alphabet.

The ~1600 BC Thera tuff / tephra blew to the southeast, as it happens; so perhaps we should be unsurprised that surviving Cretans had to shift to the poorer west. There, I think, the Greeks were waiting. Surviving Linear A, mostly clay, looks inscribed between-days, when Knossos was weak. Phaistos was then stronger: most Linear A is from nearby Hagia Triada. So we get lots of Pa-i-to in Linear A, but Knossos is difficult to ascertain (Ku-ni-sa?). Of course in Linear B, Ko-no-so is king of Crete again, but Greek now. (The Hagia-Triada palace is Linear B Da-wo, Linear A Ka-pa.)

A key assumption to van Soesbergen, is that the Cretan brand of Arcado-Cypriot didn't distinguish aspirants. So ka-ko (copper, bronze) wasn't just a naming-convention for our classical Ionic khalkos; 'twas truly *kalkos: on its way to khalkos, or the latter existed in dialects only outside Crete (many say that Doric already existed on the mainland). Sounds begadkepat to my ear, what will happen to Hebrew and Aramaic.

With that assumption, 1500s BC Cretan Greek lacked kh-. What this "Kalkolithic" Greek did have, from the IndoEuropean days, was the "labio velar": qw-. Van Soesbergen questions that Linear A had the labio-velar; Semitic Q is instead emphatic-K oft-writ "Ḳ", and Greek itself would lose its Q later. He posits that something else in Linear A got repurposed, in Cretan Greek "B", to transcribe that qw-. Linear A "qa-qa-ru", then, was not "quaquaros" except for Greeks.

Van Soesbergen elsewhere points to the common ending to personal-names, -te-ja. This -teya is shared with Hurrian cuneiform, where it swaps out -teshub as a "hypocorism" that is, dimunitive (*Alexandros > "Sasha"). He restores Gordon's reading -ja here where some have read -pi.

Elsewhere-elsewhere, van Soesbergen finds that Linear A is agglutinative and ergative. There are elements of these in Sumerian; but why would Crete use Sumerian on clay without the cuneiform? Nah: this guy sees here instead, aspects of Hurrian. He would reconstruct the B qw- in Linear A: ḫ-. Which is rife in Semitic and Hurrian; and indeed maintained in Anatolian (but not Greek) from IndoHittite h₂.

Van Soesbergen has the benefit of doing a lengthy transcription of every Linear A text he can find; and he doesn't shake the tree too hard for previous readings of the script, besides that admittedly-drastic q/ḫ switchup. I would take it seriously, which I never did for Gordon. Although honestly, whatever we think of Wuidhuizen's bombast, scholars also rate Finkelberg highly. The Internet notes that van Soesbergen simply hasn't addressed Finkelberg's argument, which bodes ill for him.

How to worldbuild habitable-Venus

If you're worldbuilding science-fiction, you start with a height map. If your world has a hydrocycle, you then set the ocean.

Said ocean is water, in habitable worlds. Your frigid moons - think Titan - take methane and other hydrocarbons; hints exist that some exoplanets maintain permanent lava seas. I've been pondering carbon-dioxide for water-poor planets but that takes some legerdemain, so we'll ignore that.

Anyway, here's Seed of Worlds in 2021. He started with a random heightmap, from Torben since (summer 2024) updated. This looks like classical heightmaps, without tectonics - think, Starflight (or Venus). Also there's a "biome" option.

SeedOfWorlds didn't like the "biome" so saved the Mercator Greyscale of his map, to feed into a climate generator. That would be Agatha Mallett's SpaceCalc. She is aware that this assumes no axial tilt nor eccentricity nor regular occultations but again, Venus also has none-of-the-above. More-serious might be effects of surface gravity, air pressure, and air composition. But if your world isn't 1/5 oxygen, 4/5 inerts, and 0% CO₂ at 1 bar sealevel then it may as well be Venus, so see above. What you do is start here, then say "this is springtime".

The above will work with terraformed planets, which got their oceans from the H'riak and/or sentient colonists - like Paul Birch, over Venus. If you want a world which got its oceans the natural way, your heightmap needs tectonics. You might consider drawing these lines on your generated map - maybe you got lucky and some mountain-ranges turned out long and thin. Otherwise: ProcGenesis; or, Kenny Pirman's World-Synth.

Thomas ten Cate tried some worldbuilding but he seems to be redesigning around a cylinder, for code reasons. Shh nobody tell him about ballistics.

Carbon ocean world

Carbon-dioxide can exist as a liquid at high pressure. Venus is a planet with high pressure CO₂. But it is hot there: high pressure CO₂ is a greenhouse gas. Once a world has already gone Venus, a megastructure might shade the place to cool the high-pressure atmosphere into a true ocean. How might this happen elsewhere, naturally?

I suspect that the natural starting volatiles in planet-building are ammonia, water, hydrogen, and methane. These are all hydrogen compounds. How do we lose the hydrogen: by raising the temperature, and boiling it off. Hydrogen gas boils first; then, ammonia and water. Radiation further breaks water vapour into hydrogen and oxygen ions: hydrogen escapes, oxygen burns the methane to water and CO₂, repeat for the water. Ammonia likewise but the leftover nitrogen is just... nitrogen. That is I think the process which did for Venus.

It occurs to me lately, however, that planets can migrate outwards as well as inwards.

Propose a planet maybe in the 1.3-flux range. A smaller planet, around the same time, is beneath it, in a mutual Kirkwood resonance 2:1. Both become hydrogen-poor. Add maybe a miniNeptune at the 0.25-flux range, like Ceres. This exists to soak up water-rich asteroids and deny them to the soot field.

The inner planet gets pulled into eccentricity. It uppercuts the protoVenus. The conjoined ball of molten rock shifts to a higher orbit also more eccentric.

[INTERJECT 6/26: Why not instead a Hot Jupiter getting sucked into the star, like Io raises tides on Jupiter? The problem here is that such a planet is assuredly a migrate. Anything outside that orbit (which there probably isn't within 4 AU) started water-rich.]

Now the planet cools. Again: low hydrogen. CO, CO₂, nitrogen, nitrous oxide is left.

I don't think this atmo is very thick. But luckily we still have some sooty rocks. Since our newborn dustball is in a new orbit, all those planetoids should find a lot to talk about.

Niche dispersal

As we're (well, HBDChick was, some days ago) talking about Early Man: Emily Y. Hallett et al. This deals with "human niche" versus the north and east African habitat-types.

This paper notes that we humans - and Denisovan humans - were already capable of symbolic language through tool specialisation in "MIS 5", which "5e" includes the close of the Eemian 120ka+. But we hadn't used these tools to get far into the Sahara, nor into the jungles. After the Eemian, the climate reverted Pleistocene.

Say they: the human niche progressively expanded to include more habitat types beginning around 70 ka and that this expansion peaked at about 50 ka. 70 ka will be when Takarkori.

So if we could do symbolism and we could live in various environments... what took so long? They seem to be arguing for a "critical mass" of bare human numbers. Tribes of thirty couldn't outdo the wilderness. Tribes of three hundred, could.

Solar system dynamics over (too much) time

Some youtube or other flags this May study by Kaib and Raymond. This looks at the net dynamical effect of field stars on our planets' orbits. I think that this is the wrong study, but it may lead to the right study.

To start with the positive, dynamical studies be hard, yo. More math is better math.

"Net" means over the next five Gigayears; that's the classical life expectancy of our Sun. In particular is suspected a 0.25 mass star running within 55 AU, around 1.3 Gy from now. Sure, that would be Bad. But. Terrans should be looking only as far as ~250My from now, when our continents recombine under a more luminous (if less massive) sun. That is when we become an enormous desert, the Afar writ large. That is when (warmer!) Mars starts looking good. Especially when Jupiter vonZeipels it back to circular.

Which means: the study we need first isn't some somewhat-literally nebulous net effect of the stars we could run into. We need a study of the stars we probably will run into. We must start with K class Gliese 710 through 10kAU. The paper to its credit knows this, repeatedly citing Brown-Rein 2022 on Neptune.

Flybys tend to transfer orbital momentum off-system, pulling most planets away from our Sun. Of the planets, the Kaib-Raymond study rates Mercury's effect worst. (A higher Von Zeipel inclination-eccentricity may crash it into Venus, pushing superVenus into an Earth-annoying orbit.) If Mercury is, more-mercifully, yeeted away; the rest of us inyalowda might end up closer to our Sun; which none of us want, save Mars. Inner planets should fret further the movement of major asteroids into a Kirkwood Gap. Or the increased eccentricity of all these bodies... including Mars. THEIA II LET'S GOOO

If naught else we must ask what this flyby do to our Oort. In 2010 was found a 140 km monster, C/2014 UN271. This is now 16 AU. At 1/256 Earth irradiance it is expelling carbon-monoxide, an ice which (apparently) sublimes away at this temperature. It won't cross us. But what happens when hundreds of these things get dislodged?

Best case scenario, longer-term: the GJ 710 flyby raises Earth's semimajor to lower eccentricity. Earth gets colder, and still gets its supercontinent; but it emerges from the other end with the irradiance we get now.

Derrida discredited

The best postmodernist Foucault had his good points and his poor assumptions. Among his best points may well be the points he scored at the end of his life - against Derrida (pdf).

It was, I think, Foucault's mission to problematise core assumptions. But I do not find where Foucault argued that power should trump Truth. He argued mostly that power just... does so trump, at least in hierarchical human societies; leaving aside where it should. From what I read of Foucault, he does not sneer. Derrida sneered: at logos-centrisme, on the assumption the Western philosophies were Platonist. Foucault pointed out philosophies preceded and postdated Plato: he himself was a philosophe of sorts, claiming descent from the Cynics.

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.)

MAP 6/23: "Jag" comes through, at least for nonAlaska. Wouldn't it have been nice if a staffer had done this a week ago? Anyway if this can be tacked to the bill, Congresspeople can more-intelligently vote upon it. Although I do see a plot in Four Corners which I'd throw back to the Hopi.

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".

KET 7/6/25: Another Yeneseian group was the Jie, pronounced "Kiat" at the time.

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