Nippur-12501

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

The myth concerns Ishkur, the storm god.

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

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

Fredric Brown

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

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

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

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

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

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

The new rules

Collective Shout is a shadow government.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Roundup in Classical Biblical Hebrew diachronics

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

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

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

CODOH, against Unz and IHR

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

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

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

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

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

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

BACKDATE 7/20

Nesili and Hattili

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Space couscous

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

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

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

Make it rain

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

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

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

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

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

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

BB(5+)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DRACO slain

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

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

Precision metal in spaaace

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

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

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

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

Tarmod

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MUNUS in Knesian

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

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

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

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

Sumerian pronunciation

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

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

The charitable anathema

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Muir, future bishop

Our bulletin gets John Muir's meditations.

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

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

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

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

A11pl3Z

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

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

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

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

We should be spinning up a Project Lyra.

The Old Kingdom's genetics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FOXP4

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

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

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

That long-teased Henry George post

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

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

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

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

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

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

Denver is not a MLB city

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

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

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

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

Or hell, there is always cricket. HOWZAT

UPDATE 4:30 MST: Rockies won!

Move over, Erdős Pál

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

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

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

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

Ahead of the wave

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

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

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

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