Lee's bill

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Severus of Antioch, last evangelist of Thomas

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Denisovans of Manchuria

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

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

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

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

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

When the steppe spoke Arin

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

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

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

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

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

Advice for Viennese Schiklgrubers

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

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

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

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

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

Fanfiction.net has too many spammers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fantasy content

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

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

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

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

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

The hyperneutrino KM3-230213

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

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

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

Map generators

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

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

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

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

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

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

BACKDATE 6/17

CO2 saturation

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

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

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

BACKDATE 6/19 from Issues & Insights.

Kaskaean and Kalashmaean

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

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

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

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

BACKDATE 6/16

The Mac Piasts

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

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

BACKDATE 6/13

Radiocarbon follies, Daniel edition

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

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

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

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

BACKDATE 6/12

Neander migrations

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

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

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

BACKDATE 6/11

Nanotime, second-hand

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

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

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

They're going to test this on superconductive circuits.

BACKDATE 6/11

When Bronze Age Europe got poor

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

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

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

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

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

BACKDATE 6/10

Time or space

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

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

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

Araminta Ross

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

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

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

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

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

Mani as a Tatianist

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

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

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

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

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

That darn vaxx again

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

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

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

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

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

Prognosis still uncertain

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

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

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

Prospects for exomoons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

קולורדו

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

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

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

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

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

Well, probably not the Boulder police.

A short relief of boredom

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

That might an oversimplification.

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

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

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

Venus' co-orbitals

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

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

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

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

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