Blue Mars week

Over this week ScienceDaily has been sending a lot of Blue Mars stuff at me, so let's just dump 'em. Monday was the day at the beach. Tuesday, the red dust was marked as ferrihydrate. Wednesday? the adsorptive index of the regolith.

Flint Dibble, master of time and space

Mike Cernovich is helping gin up the mob against one Flint Dibble, linking to someone contrasting Dibble to politically-compromised Peter Hotez. I don't follow Dibble, myself (Colavito-bro, here); the claim is that Dibble is blocking work on Gunung Padang, the Sundaland's answer to Baalbek (and not to Gobeklii Tepe). Funny, Dibble doesn't look Javanese or even Dutch.

In Colavito's circle Dibble is most-known for beating the pants off Graham Hancock; some months after said ass-spanking, Hancock cried about it.

As for Gunung Padang: again, I am not doubting the intelligence of ancient Southeast Asians - on water. But the Hancockians're talking about deep inland. Since I posted on this topic in late 2023, the paper scored a headline in... Retraction Watch. I wasn't aware that Dibble was such a dark jedi lord to stop research on the other side of the flat earthglobe. One learns a lot from CernoTwitter, I guess.

Das koranische Paradies

For old-school Darwin Press appreciators: Josef Horovitz didn't just write that treatise on the early muhaddiths. He also wrote an essay "Das koranische Paradies" in 1923. This is still cited by serious researchers into the Quran's debt to Arabic poetry. In particular is noted sura 76's debt to Maymun al-A'sha.

In my opinion this essay holds up, today. So, over the last couple months, I have translated it: "On the Koranic Paradise".

A few updates could be made. Horovitz seems not to have had Sukkari's diwan of the Hudhayl poets, instead noting where the Jamhara - a sort of Greater Mu'allaqat - might transmit them. Also Horovitz took pseudo-A'sha's praise of the Prophet, and Labid's poem ed. Khalidi 1880 #3, at facevalue. Such would - if authentic - enroll both in the mukhadramûn. I think such poems' authenticity needs be proven, not assumed (and if I read Khalidi's editorial notes correctly, he'd tagged Labid's poem as being too Koranic).

But that is a task for Horovitz' readers, which now - I hope - will include more English readers.

Improved methanol from carbondioxide

Much as the Right loves breathing into plastic bags: here's an improvement on the Sabatier. This is what Terraform is trying to do... but we'll forgive them.

What matters is what this can mean for Mars, or just for scrubbers in industry.

The Sundaland navy

Before Polynesia was Melanesia. 38kBC, humans got around the Philippines and as far as Timor. We're getting some idea how.

The article's Philippine authors are impressed with the tech-stack. It is, after all, some of their ancestors.

BACKDATE 2/26

Thutmose II

Yuuge news from Egyptology: the tomb of Thutmose II. "Tuthmosis", for Ptolemy of Mendes.

Most pharaonic tombs were looted in antiquity. The most-famous exception, Tutankhamen, was left alone as a result of cascading events: the king took the throne as an Aten worshipper so had his name erased as a heretic, his tomb was set up as temporary-housing until the new dynasty could figure out what to do with him, and the shoddy conditions led to a local landslide. Tuthmose II, by contrast, was buried "properly" and protected by his widow (and sister) Hatshepsut. His problem was that the tomb was too close to the Nile. Which, deerrrr... floods.

His looter, then, was his widow the king or (more likely) their successor the greater Tuthmosis III. The royal corpse was removed to a place where it could be found... by us. Most of the grave goods were removed thither too. What has been found this week, then, were nonvaluable rubbish and wall-paintings. The inscriptions so far just look like quotes from the 18th-dynasty book-of-the-dead. Nobody since bothered looting any of this, unto this week.

Unfortunately the floods appear to have damaged the content. But perhaps not beyond ability to research. I don't think much happened during his decade-or-so of autocracy, toward the end of a boring 15th century BC. What we hope to get out of this, is wiggle-matching on the wood of the royal funereal furniture; and an index of foreign imports of pottery-style. We would hope to improve our LBA chronology.

The Iranian West and the Aniranian communities

Simcha Gross argues for taking the Sasanians up some notches.

Not to defend how the Orientalists treated the Sasanians - until Mary Boyce, I agree scholarship has been biased and Whig. I can however excuse, why my forebears so treated them. If we made the Sasanians exotic, we learnt it from the best - from Ferdowsi, in his Arthurian Shahnameh. And to the extent we treated the Bavli Jewry as an Ottoman millet, we learnt that from our own Western Jews in the university.

Also the bare fact remains that, if Sasanian ideology was at least equal to pagan Roman (and Hellenistic) ideology; against Christian Rome, it failed, and against Islam it died.

I can pick nits here and there. If we bemoan the lack of witness to the Parthian-/Hellenistic-era Iraq, that's where we bring Josephus. Also "Iranian west" isn't... really an improvement over "Roman east". The Sasanians themselves saw Iraq and maybe Khuzestan as "Aniran", as not-Iran but rightfully subject to Iran. "Iranian west" as an ideologic term would apply narrowly to Armenia whose Hayots' people they worked hard to Iranise. And Pourshariati, even moderated through Daryaee, teaches that the Sasanians as "feudal" were less French or English, than Holy Roman. When the shah meddled with the local dynasts they did not do so lightly.

This last, by the way, goes some way to bolster that Iraqi Jews were, in fact, as autonomous as they could get away with, and they got away with much. They certainly were more autonomous than the Christians, even in Iraq, who raised even more martyr literature than they will under Islam. Christianity seemed tailor-made for Aramaeans under empire; Iran could never make us Iranian.

Punic loanwords in Tamazight

Marijn van Putten lately uploaded his work on protoBerber roots. They are called "Berber" after the Greek mockery of those who speak poor Greek, I think starting with the Macedonians in their days (cf. Pherenike v. Mac. Berenice). Most indigenous Saharans tend to call themselves, er, the Fremen.

As others witnessed the Imazighen, so the Imazighen learnt from others. The Arabian dromedary must be a case in point (I don't think the old African camel was remembered). I have in mind here the stem əlməd. Van Putten sets this word first on his list, which is nonalphabetic; it boasts pride of place, for him. This əlməd means "to learn". Any Jew - who are just G-d fearing punici - can tell you lmd bore the same understanding in old Canaanite. An Arab would have his own terms like 'rf and 'lm.

Immediately to my attention is that əlməd isn't in Sanhaja / Zenaga. Van Putten uses Zenaga copiously elsewhere. Also the Zenaga in Mauretania today are proud scholars of (Islamic) literacy. They absolutely have words for learning, and van Putten absolutely would know those words. The Zenaga have simply chosen not to use this word.

I submit that the Sahara got əlməd from the incoming Canaanites [UPDATE 3/11 Blažek 2014, pdf] I submit, after the Zenaga went their own way. This would have happened during or after the Third Phase in Morocco. It is difficult to pinpoint further on account the Kabyle, who may have split during the Bronze Age, continued contact with the wider Med even where not with fellow Berbers. They could have taken the root on their own, as Syriac and Coptic will each take from Christian Greek.

I wonder how many other Punic words are hiding in the deep lexicon, ignored because they look Arabic so late.

The loonlike duck

On topic of the fowl of the Cretaceous, modern research has been pondering... Antarctica. As of 69Mya, Australia and Antarctica were separated by not-much; they both had territory inside the then polar circle. Zealandia also existed, I think.

Antarctica was famously not wholly frozen then, because that current was blocked by sufficient land the vortex wasn't strong. But the winters were just as dark. So these continents were seasonal; their forests still coniferous, like the southern Andes.

That means the continents housed a prime spot for the new migratory birds, like those South Pacific guano islands, except more so. We are now learning what sort of birds. The answer is not "penguin" - they had waterfowl. But not As We Know It.

It's more like a diving loon. So I guess these lakes had a lot of crawly crabs and shrimps, down where physics says nonfrozen water resides through the winters.

Sweeping away the debris

The HPV vax is a success-story. So is the measles vaxx.

In the interest of Fairness Doctrine, Dr Syed Haider asks us instead to normalize measles and other mild childhood illnesses that simply train the immune system. Haider goes on to include mumps(!) and rubella. I haven't asked the good doctor his ratings for polio or hepatitis-B. This feeds into a (selfish) narrative of too-many from the Baby Boom generation and older: they believe they are stronger for surviving what their peers did not.

Meanwhile, Amy Proal ponders corona spike proteins. Proal is talking the virus; some on the RFK side are more-concerned with spikes from the vaXxX. (Especially if they've been off on Slay News and/or Vox Popoli looking up the fake journals linked there. Or listening to Viganò on Hoft's site in between accusations of climate-tampering. BUT I DIGRESS)

My knowledge of immunology might not be on par with Dr Haider's (I'm more a math nerd) but I do recall that antibodies are not the spikes; they kill the virus bearing the spikes. So any vaxXXx will less-likely injure you than it will injure viruses like the one I contracted earlier this month. That the spikes do remain adrift is important. Cleaning those away, should be something all agree on.

The let-'er-rip crew should be something we all agree against. What does not kill does not, here, make stronger.

A habitable system's second wind

A few years ago a planet was found in the habitable zone of a... white dwarf. The usual A or F type would have expanded to delete everything out to, like, 2 AU. We have plenty of polluted dwarfs out there, even one in the act of gobbling pollution. But not all the disrupted matter would have become pollution. A planet this close to the star must have collected itself secondarily from the debris left over from the star's exit from main-sequence.

Last week UC Irvine asked after habitability prospects in a tidally-locked secondary planet. It might actually work. If somehow volatiles can be delivered down here.

Taproot

The Church tends to juxtapose its readings and psalms by shared theme; these are a mine for correlations. This Sunday's OT reading is from Jeremiah 17:6-8 and the psalm is the first. They share the similitude of the plant by a body of water. But more: the follower of the Lord is a tree rooted near a stream, and both texts compare him with something else.

Jeremiah 17 just has this as a follower of the Lord, alone; and the comparand is the bush in the desert. The psalm introduces the "Torah" and behaves like a wisdom-text. Classically the psalm is understood as the introduction to the Psalter as a whole; even Muslims have taken the time to translate it to introduce psalms of their own. It is general consensus that the psalm depends on Jeremiah to which it adds (Temple?) tropes.

Phil Botha posited about the same in 2005. He figured that Psalm 1's "Torah" was the general Divine wisdom vouchsafed to prophets, starting with Moses (in Deuteronomy) then Joshua, and most-lately Ezekiel and Jeremiah.

I think we are looking at a redactional layer of the Psalter, which went on to append or interpose sophiac matter to, for one, Psalm 19. This was done by the school of Baruch scribe of Jeremiah.

Trump and the GOP have endangered your children

To the surprise of nobody, least of all this blog (which stayed quiet lately), Robert F Kennedy's promotion is already sowing the wind. Louisiana is now off the vaccines - all of them. This when a measles outbreak is already ensuite (I'll spot you one and blame Biden).

Vaccine-injury for all its hype is not a thing. The crazy moms - their own word for themselves - swear up and down that they are arguing against interest: Do you think we want to blame the vaccines? We denied this until every other cause had been ruled out. You think we want to feel guilty? They are lying, first of all to themselves.

Yes, I say: you do want to feel guilty. You do want a world where you have answers that are not in your genes, but (somehow) in your own agency. You do want to reverse time and change a decision.

If you did change that decision and your kid ended up "damaged" anyway, you would now be a fanatic for the vaccine. That's the gene in yourself. As Calvinist as this sounds.

Now herd-immunity is going away and more infants won't have that reprieve before the first measle hits.

Mitch McConnell may well be the only Republican left in the Senate with integrity.

CROW 2/20: Vaccine injury is a thing for mRNA. How hard a thing, is now the question.

Permian neurodivergence

News here is that birds and other reptilians have different brains. By brain they mean the pallium, basis of the neocortex; the article has reptiles as an afterthought, but treats them as alongside us synapsids.

So the split happened during the Permian, each side developing its dinosaur or mammalian brain on its own. (Or turtles or snakes or whatever.) One imagines that the Permian fauna were all basic dunces.

This further aligns with news to lighten the Hard Steps toward sentience. Once life grunts itself off the swamps, that life enjoys several routes toward some degree of intelligence. The Chicxulub blast was a setback, but something found its way to be human-smart [insert political joke here]. Some form of clambering dino might have figured it out first.

The big neutrino

Today was reported a muon detection, from a cosmic ray. Big deal, right; they get detected all the time, that's why we have detectors. This one, though, was special: "KM3-230213A" came from a neutrino collision.

The energy to create that muon was 220 PeV. Yes, that's a P[eta]: 2.20 x 10¹⁷ electron volts. Scary.

Annoyingly because this was so record-breaking it is like a "wow signal", because it doesn't come with friends to narrow whence it came. My suspicion, in which I doubt I'm alone, is some quasar from near the Big Bang.

On watch for the camel-rider

The set a watchman verses Isaiah 21:5-9 are, as too-often, contested in Hebrew tradition. This watchman is to beware of rkb: of horses, asses, camels in succession.

By qere/ktib, the Masoretes want rkb to be chariotry. That would force Isaiah to be talking about chariots as remembered from the Bronze Age and still occasionally used on the plains (as the Persians at Gaugamela). However before the Masoretes got their hooks in, many Jews were reading rwkb. That's a participle: riders, not chariots. So this was translated in Vulgate, Peshitta, and Greek; all mutually independently. This full reading is also in QIsa^a. As a result John Reeves in Trajectories (2005) sides with the majority against the MT. For my part, elsewhere I think Isaiah himself wanted gml read out gmwl.

We Christians... don't really care, despite preserving the plene in all our translations. The New Testament well-aware of the camel (and of Arabs) does not implicate the beast in Palm Sunday; horse and donkey are from Zechariah 9:9. The problem has appeared as the Arabs have laid claim to a Biblical inheritance. For them, Jesus was indeed the man with the donkey. What happened to the man with the camel? [insert goose chase meme] If this other man did not enter Zion on Palm Sunday, then he must have been waiting outside.

Was Odenaethus / 'Udayna aware of the camel prophecy? I wonder. How about old Ghassan, or the Tha'labids claiming descent from them?

Anyway I don't think the other man would make sense as Muhammad. He would make better sense as 'Umar, the Farûq. That presents a problem for the 'Alid Shî'ism, and honestly for the 'Abbâsids; but perhaps less a problem for Imam Malik and his low-key support for 'Umar's line.

BACKDATE 2/21

Why the dromedary was domesticated

Camels are a North American genus, which spread throughout Eurasia - and to South America, as llama. They were sometimes able to cross into Africa and cross they did, as camelus thomasi. They were hunted out here at home... and also died out in Africa. African petroglyphs witness to this camel - but, we must conclude, as game for the hunt. The Sahara wasn't as bad as it is today so, for cavalry, the local nomads could still use the horse, as did the Numidians.

When the camel returned to Africa, it was the Arabian dromedary. Which camel indeed was Arabian, perhaps extending (if concordiae counts) to Syria. Rock artists recall camel-hunts in central Arabia 3000 BC, perhaps moreli. The last population of wild dromedary was in monsoon Oman, where the Mehra live today, per Almathen et al.'s much-cited 2016 paper.

To Egypt the camel was barely known down to the Eighteenth Dynasty. Joachim Friedrich Quack found gmwl in Demotic and then the Coptic dialects - absolutely Semitic, complete with Canaanite-shift. (The Greeks instead have *kamâl from a pre-shift Semitic, perhaps Taymanitic.) This word is not in hieratic or hieroglyphic, so is assumed taken during the Iron Age. If the Berbers have an ancient word for camel, this would I think be taken from Demotic. THE WORD 3/25: alúɣəm in Awjila, consistently alɣəm or (rarer) aɣləm. The word skipped the Egyptians over.

Arabian trade kicked off after the 1200 BC crash of the ocean trade. Given that we hear of "Sea Peoples" but not of "Desert Peoples" (Libyans were not desert peoples yet) I assume that the crash forced trade into the deserts so forcing the domestication of this famously grouchy beast. A good thing for the beast, or else it should have died out like the others (and the Bactrian would inherit al-ard).

BACKDATE 2/19

Kephalaia

A rather confused summary of scholarship, with inline critique, is had in the 2020 book The New Testament Gospels in Manichaean Tradition, now on academia.edu. In parallel with this, because mutally-independent, is Zsuzsanna Gulácsi "Diatesseron Themes" in a 2019 conference but published only last year.

Both papers mine the Kephalaia, an enormous Coptic compendium found at Madinat Madi in Fayyum. This is not Nag Hammadi; that library came from a Christian monastery as eschewed Manichee text. Of course Mani's ouevre was postChristian gnostic too; other gnostics viewed themselves as properly Christian and Mani as a prophet-too-far. The Kephalaia had been translated from some form of Aramaic, which Gulácsi says is Syriac. In those years of Aphrahat and Ephrem, the Syriac Gospel was one: Tatian's Diatesseron.

Diatesseronic and generally-Syriac studies seems, to me, a low-hectare field. In the past years I venture that Gulácsi and her publishers should have been made aware of the 2020 book. I venture further that they all simply refused it. For my part, I understand why; its introductory summary is doing too much at once, so overreaches.

At present, absent a rebuttal, Gulácsi stands: the Kephalaia is a Syriac text dependent on the Diatesseron foremost, with some side ventures into such standalone Syriac-translates as Matthew and John, probably also Peter and Thomas (and not Luke or Mark). The third century of our era just Hit Different.

BACKDATE 12/16

AeroKessler

Stepping out of my weeklong blogfunk, here's a worry about deorbiting junk. In our world, most air-traffic runs where we live: around 25-45° N. This overlaps the equatorial orbits of most satellites especially low-orbit comsats serving... 25-45° N.

One can imagine an alternate, hotter and/or equatorial-oceanic Earthlike with few equatorial settlements, such that its own air traffic runs more 45-65° N or S. Their sats might not interfere as much with their air. But that is not our world.

In a world where our air traffic control is already suffering from legacy tech and ideology, this is yet another wakeup-call to fix the tech and reward merit.

BACKDATE 2/15

Neutron stars as laboratories

Chiral Effective Field Theory is a Popperian (testable) theory on nuclear physics. We are still working out what a proton or a neutron actually Looks Like - that is, how it bounces off other particles (not just photons). On the small scale this is difficult. But if you get a whole star made of neutrons, by averages we should be able to get a good picture of the one neutron, or neutrons bound in atomic nuclei. Neutron-star-quakes are how we get a better view on the thing's deep innards; so far this blog has considered only quakes in softer stars like Ks.

At least, so I gather. The article from Bath Uni (and Ohio and the good ol' Texas Aggies) is one of those In-Search-Of deals. These go to the press to justify the departmental budget(s). But it does seem justifiable research.

BACKDATE 2/15

The 1150 Project

The Cahokia fall AD 1150-1350 really did a number on North America - the number being 30%. The population then ticked back up until Caboto, the Floridian conquistadors, and the fishermen brought their diseases.

That 30% drop echoes what was going on in South America. Mesoamerica in-between seems to have weathered it better.

One contrafactual: if Europeans had arrived a few centuries earlier and faced much larger Indigenous populations and well-organized tribal confederacies. I'll take this seriously. Genetic-drift is a thing. The population-crash was obviously not driven by any disease known to Europe - or they'd not have suffered those diseases later. (Tuberculosis?) The bottleneck might even have left most of the survivors more vulnerable/susceptible: the surviving scattered hunter-bands lose resistance to salmonella-type diseases from unclean urban water, also don't need to process alcohol.

The contrafactual's problem is that Mesoamerica and (postapocalyptic) Peru had exactly those "well-organised tribal confederacies", and the first thing they did when the Spaniard came was to politick amongst themselves to overthrow their own elite in which course they bowed to the Spaniard. How loyal were the locals to Cahokia?

Caucasus Lower Volga

Before Davidski/Eurogenes poops all over everything, here's the Indo/Anatolian split: Astrakhan. My paternal ancestors went to Ukraine and took over from the dying Cucuteni. Our cousins went into Anatolia and ... took over from the Hattians. Ebla will be meeting these at Armi (probably Samosata).

Hall thrusters predicted with AI

This blog has had some interest in the Hall Thruster, ionising some noble-gas and spewing it out at near-relativistic speeds to maximise I_SP. That energy of plasma is hard to model. KAIST are using AI neural-networks.

The Koreans will test this thruster November.

Molybdenum again

Four years ago, I heard of chloroplasts, which spiced the Boring Billion 1342 Mya. We already had the water of course - but also molybdenum, which must come from the outer solar system. Our moly' was claimed from Theia. I couldn't square these data; so I mooted the moly' was buried under the surface, much-later ejected by volcano to feed the future plants.

Rutgers today is talking late-accretion, with moly' and also ruthenium - although you need into the paper for that. Rutgers' summary makes little sense to me.

Best I can tell from the paper: the moly' seems linked with the last noncarbon chondrites. This is tagged "10 to 20 wt%" by time, such a chunk as would precede the Theia merger. After Theia was buried, when our Moon formed (less far) above us: comes the "0.5 to 2 wt%... veneer". This has the ruthenium our miners can get to. Apparently ruthenium is so ironloving ("siderophile") that preTheia ruthenium would have just merged with molten iron, to sink to the lower mantle.

A bit surprising to me, the preTheia moly' seems to come from carbonaceous chondrites... which I guess it would. The later veneer is heavily stony, by contrast. They're mooting that by then we already had that asteroid-belt barrier. Stones are mostly what was left, all the way out to Mars and Vesta (both very stony themselves). Here's the last para':

The finding of an NC-dominated accretion during the late-stage of Earth’s accretion implies that the putative Moon-forming giant impactor was NC in nature and presumptively originated from materials formed in the inner Solar System. If the interpretation that CC materials originated in the wetter outer portion of the Solar nebula is correct, then these results suggest that late-stage accretion may not have provided the bulk of Earth’s water.

So I guess the water was always underneath us and has simply bubbled up.

Le Guin the failed distributivist

"Orwell" Blair gave perhaps the definitive illustration of Sapir-Whorf in 1984's Newspeak. Words do not affect reality; they cannot affect reality. 2+2=4 in any language. But a tyrannical government can force people to affirm 2+2=5; can remove even the ability of the subject to express himself otherwise. In the early 2000s we had Jeff Goldstein at the ProteinWisdom blog to remind us of as much.

I was introduced to Ursula Le Guin at an Anglo/Jewish household in the early 1990s. I never quite got into her oeuvre, but since then I've learnt she has a following; I did get around to "Omelas" maybe a decade or two ago. Earthsea is her most esteemed work. This holds that words actually do affect reality / effect change to reality (pdf).

I do not think that Le Guin missed Whorf's point. I think she - deliberately - refused Whorf, and opposed Blair. She came out as a Bakhuninite toward the end. I don't know that she quite figured out how "anarchism" works with socialism; although she was more solicitous toward Tolkien than fellow extreme liberal'tarian Moorcock was and is. Her second-wave feminism might agree with Celtic Britain. I suspect her most pernicious legacy, unfortunately, lies more in The Secret.

Tolkien should have taught Le Guin that only the Valar may will something to being by voice, and that only when in harmony with Eru. Otherwise we are Sauron.

I don't know if I dare pray G-d have mercy on her soul, but I can pray G-d protect others from Le Guin's poor advice.

BACKDATE 2/14

The last courts of the Judaean province

So I got sick on Monday night and this morning, the hot water heater broke. I gotta find some amusement as I'm digging out of all that today. So: P.Cotton.

This is a cursive found in the Judaea / Arabia provinces. That, for those paying attention, restricts our time period to AD 106-135ish. The document further cites not-yet-divine Hadrian and his agent a "Rufus", who in turn would be Tineius "the Red" AD 129-132. The rebellion which became Bar Kochba's Jewish amirate hasn't started yet.

It took them all this long to get it translated because until 2014 it was misfiled, amongst some Nabataeana. The cursive here was rather Greek. As to what-all was going on, the preservation hasn't much helped. What we do get is Roman legal cant transferred into Greek without the medium of Hellenistic legal culture. Famous phrases still used today like "in good faith" / bona fide are simply calqued. This papyrus can sit alongside Aegyptian provincial law texts from Oxyrhynchus.

Enough survives to assign to it a genre: a legal stage-script, for the courtroom. The defendant's counsel is drafting-up scenarios they'll likely hear from the prosecution. Their clients are known Rome-haters and cheats, but that's not what they're in court for, right now. Their (unenviable) task is to clear their clients of forgery and tax fraud, in the service of such crimes they were shuffling slaves about (somehow).

Dolganov et al. observe that a storm is coming, so can't say if the trial ever even happened.