The Chibcha move south

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

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

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

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

Whom the Tocharoi met along the way

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jupiter goes to the gym

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

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

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

Flight 9 postmortem

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

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

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

Let's get Flight 10 up there soon.

Aryo-Baltic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Africans in exile

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Algebraic effects

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nathan Robinson instructs us

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

I can strawman with the best of 'em.

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

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

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

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

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

Vienna AP 1854a-b

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

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

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

Alasdair MacIntyre

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

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

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

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

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

Ancient Allah

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

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

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

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

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

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

BACKDATE 5/23

What transubstantiation means

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rotating detonation in flight

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

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

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

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

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

Hudson does history bad

Unz has a transcript of a Michael Hudson interview.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Industry and identity

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

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

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

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

Ahem.

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

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

Gathering a dataset: black holes and neutron stars

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

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

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

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

Before dark matter, dark light (maybe)

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

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

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

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

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

Power series for quintics are impractical

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Martian gullies by carbon frost

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

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

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

BACKDATE 5/16 whilst we're looking.

Visual Studio's project creator is a PITA

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

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

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

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

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

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

RSA cracked (to 22 bits)

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

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

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

The next planet

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

Since that other candidate was scotched...

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

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

Unity still harmful

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

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

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

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

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

BACKDATE 5/10

The postDahmer movie

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

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

Proposal: Jeffery Dahmer.

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

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

BACKDATE 5/16 based on Anglin re Sinners.

The furry future

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

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

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

BACKDATE 5/15

Tails or thumbs?

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

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

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

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

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

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

BACKDATE 5/15

Sicilian refuge

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

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

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

Pagan Thetford

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BACKDATE 5/11

January 1865

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

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

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

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

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

Hyper-Catalan

This might be the biggest news in arithmetic computation in my lifetime: N. J. Wildberger and Dean Rubine, "A Hyper-Catalan Series Solution to Polynomial Equations, and the Geode". It's all over the place, like ScienceDaily.

Polynomial equations are ax^2+bx+c=y; the notion is, y=0 solve for x. This here was a "second order" equation, since up to some x²; n=2. For such, exist up to n solutions. For the second-orders, called "quadratic": Sargon of Akkad might not have known, but Hammurabi sure did. That's how old it is. The solution of x^2-2=0 could be shorthanded as its "radical", root-two here; the Greeks found that was as good as they could do, since it couldn't be expressed as a fraction (or a decimal, which is just x/10^n you know). The Greeks then found that no equation could encompass π; it wasn't algebraic.

It took until the gunpowder-and-caravel age, but then some Italians came up with good equations to dig out x in third- and fourth-order polynomials, called "cubics" and "quartics". Those solutions could be expressed as radicals like ol' root-2. There was actually something of a rivalry in Italy between cities as could solve these secret equations and those as hoped to. Nobody, however, could suss out quintics beyond "up to five solutions, real or complex", barring blatantly artificial concoctions like x^5-2=0. The Newton-Raphson method and maybe some others can approximate solutions but they're algorithmic. (Remember that π was already off this table, these mathematicians didn't bother with that.)

Abel, Ruffini, and Galois in the late date of 1822 finally proved that radicals cannot always be found to express an algebraic number. However in 1844, Gotthold Eisenstein floated x^5+x-t=0; although the x quintet of solutions ain't radical, such can at least be expressed - as a powerseries. If the decimal numbers trail off into infinity who cares; same holds for the two-radical (squareroot) of two. Just like for the "Genus One" ellipse which, incidentally, isn't even polynomial.

That is where Wildberger and Rubine step in, two centuries later. They are expanding Eisenstein's nonradical expressions to cover the whole much of the plane of polynomial solutions. No more Newton-Raphson: want the solution? just go crunch. In retrospect, we should have been able to do this before we did the ellipse, but then... the low-genus curve was being used for crypto.

INTERJECT 5/21 As provisos go, of course we are anchoring the coëfficients, in c + c₁x + ..., such that c not zero. I mean, duh: if c zero in a quintic then what you got is not a quintic, but a quartic (where x isn't zero itself). Less-intuitively: if c != 0 also c₁ can't be zero.

That could be big for repetitive calculations in 3D graphics and astronomy. We'll see. SEEN 5/21: Your laptop can't do it. Sorry to repeat the bad news in this, about the most-viewed post in recent history of this blog.

The godless monothelete

Last year I got wind of Michel Foucault. Foucault's life work was in demonstrating the interdependence of Power and Truth. The Power defines health, to which any deviation is sickness. What I didn't add, is that Foucault died early - of the GRID.

"I demonstrate it thus", indeed.

I mentioned earlier that maybe Foucault's readers be better off reading Girard. In this case I suspect Достоевский would have aided Foucault more. Foucault based himself, whether he admitted it or no, upon Monotheletism. The monothelete, once he relieves G-d from duty, is left with only Power. His morality becomes ... whatever he can get away with. Dostoevsky - an Orthodox in Russia - saw the same phenomenon among his more-secular peers. The ensuing events in Slavic Orthodoxy proved Dostoevsky right.