Sargasso farming

I still can't say I got a lot going on, but I did come across this Youtube about the Sargasso. That's the sea which discouraged the Lishbunatis from further west, or southwest. Today I learnt that in 2020 it shifted south. I don't know if it has shifted as far south as Barbados, but it's dumping a lot of sargassum onto the northern isles. Where it dies, and rots. This smells bad for tourists and kills fish for everyone.

The good news is that rotting weeds can be contained to give off methane, a more-or-less clean source of energy on small scales... like what they want for small islands. It's not like it's any worse for "Global Warming" than letting the rubbish dump the methane right into the air before the locals can use it.

Also - apparently - this weed can supplement brickmaking.

They are even making biodegradable shirts with it. That is nice overall given the planet has too many junk shirts, and Caribbean nations have to be tempted to dump their waste overall into that ocean. For whatever reason Shein is being blamed for textile-pollution. Shein is already unpopular given their record on, uh, slavery (ain't there a Commandment against that?). But back onto topic: good plan.

The tidal civilisation

Sumer is considered a river civilisation like Egypt. Phys.org has Liviu Giosan and Reed Goodman, on Uruk which they date 4000-3200 BC (Wiki would say, overlapping Ubeyd down to 3700 BC). They argue that this Uruk civilisation - yes, Sumerian - started not along the Tigris (much less Euphrates) but through the Marsh.

The paper points out that the flood/farm cycles don't match in Iraq like they do (rather, pre-Nasser - did) in Egypt. I assume the Nile Delta could have supported a low-level culture too, but didn't need to scale up to a river civilisation. Well-fed Upper Egypt could just conquer the villages down there, mostly to establish trade-ports.

Back to Sumer, this has two deltas at first: Euphrates and "Khuzestan". The locals weathered the 6200 BC freeze and the various droughts. But the deltas merged over the next millennium. 5500 BC commences the "Ubeid" ceramic style. The tides had declined so by the late Uruk era 3500 BC, there's no direct record left in Sumerian - save myths, about separating the sweet water from the brine, tropes alien to the Semites and Egyptians.

The good news for Sumer: lessons learnt from that elder hydrology could scale to the impressive irrigation of Uruk and beyond.

A pack of marsh Karankawa suddenly ratcheting up to agriculture explains why Sumerian is an isolate, unrelated to Hurrian / Semitic / Elamite. Everybody ignored those swampy yokels, excepting the odd trader. Until suddenly they couldn't be ignored. If the culture had come from the Euphates we'd expect it to be Akkadian-only; likewise, if across the Tigris, Elamite-only.

I would however like to know more of Ubeid upriver. They weren't as good as irrigation, but they did do some, and herded cattle as well. Their villages weren't as hierarchical as was Gilgamesh's city; Ubeid was more like Cucuteni in this. City-names like Arbela-Erbil and Babil (Babylon) are still not comprehensible as Semitic or Sumerian. So who were they?

Pons-Brooks again

Pons-Brooks, or "12P", is a shortish-period comet which Daniel Kirkwood calculated had got diverted - by Neptune - AD 991ish. Carl Sagan made it famous by not reading Kirkwood and claiming it had something to do with Chinese history - which it did not. It got to aphelion again last year although I wasn't paying attention.

Nature Astronomy was paying attention. So now 12P is famous again: its water is Earthlike. Of course it didn't contribute any water to us; the comet is still out there. But it formed with other comets as reached the inner solar system.

Trappist 1-d

I've been on other projects which I am hoping to post on other fora, so have neglected this blog. I do wish to discuss Trappist 1's inner planets meanwhile. JWST has a report on -d.

The present consensus runs that -c is airless. This was thought for innermost -b too; now, JWST claims -b has thick supercritical carbon-dioxide atmosphere "with a hydrocarbon smog". The present study looks at -d. This like -c has turned up nothing.

"Turns up nothing" doesn't mean nothing; Mars has something, but Elon doesn't care, since we cannot breathe on it. More of interest for -d is the counterclaim: that a thick cloudlayer shrouds the dark side. We'd be able to see the edges of that at the edges of either transit. Climate models - they say - allow this for such an insolation around such a red-shifted star.

My counter to the counter: planetary-formation models. Trappist-1's planets are in mutual resonance. They formed where they are without interference. Then the star did its T-Tauri thing. The T-Tauri phase enforced a coal line, which starts far away from -d. These planets, then, did not form with water. Nor with ammonia, methane what-have-you.

Whaddabout Venus, I hear my readers. To whom I am sympathetic. I did think T1-c, closer to the star, would be a Venuslike! but... it's not. As for T1-d, Venus is more massive. When our Sun was T-Tauri, Venus was further away than T1 b,c,d to T1... by a lot.

I'd hold the counterclaim for some other inner-HZ planet in a nonresonant M system.

Let the dildoes hit the floor

In theme with the Why Do They Hate Us commenting this weekend, let's speculate on why it's raining men (ay-men) on the WNBA courts. To the point there's now a dong dome.

I must throat-clear that this blog opposes the schlong. The author has one of his own which causes him more trouble than, perhaps, he deems worth keeping. I don't care to see more. Harrumph! ... but.

I used to appreciate the Girl Boss in adolescence. Relevant to WNBA, our family would go out to see the Comets in Houston. It was a passable and inexpensive way to pass the time - and a safe space to watch girls in motion, which most boys rather enjoy. If the fans in the stands were also girls with less reciprocal interest in boys, if they weren't being hostile to boys I could take it.

What has happened lately is the hostility to boys. Articles came out whispering of a lavender mafia in the cloakrooms. Lately the WNBA put out a po-faced conference where they were talking about the dildoes being yet another manifestation of "sexualizing women". They could take gaslighting lessons from Lord Roberts.

The WNBA has other issues. Garner got busted in Russia and her comments about men trickled out, also. (For whom, we traded the subject of Lord of War.) The WNBA blathered about paying them what we owe them, as if the free-market wasn't doing that already. Somewhere around here was the racism against Caitlin Clark, although that's less an issue for me I'll admit. We might also discuss all the PRIDE flags waving around, and good-luck if you're wearing a MAGA hat because that's "political" which the PRIDE isn't we're told.

As noted, I don't support throwing stuff on the court. I agree, it's dangerous. If you don't like the way the WNBA treats men or even normal women, then don't go.

Pay the WNBA what we owe them. Which - to me, right now: is nothing.

Power to Truth in the House of Lords

I had access to a printed Wall Street Journal this morn. In it was a "Review" piece by some Lord Andrew Roberts, about Churchill's legacy and those who oppose it. The Lord couched the piece as an explainer: why do certain people, clearly not the Lord's sort of people, drag down this hero.

In it was a side-swipe at David Irving as a "neo-nazi historian". Which you can just... say, in the Yookay; because Lipstadt won her libel case. The nuances don't matter, you can say things and dare anyone to come to this man's defence.

With that in mind, Roberts goes on to say the reason people "hate" Churchill on the "far" right is because they like authoritarianism. Theodor Adorno lives!

If you actually listen to the antiChurchill / altRight intersection, they aren't shy on telling everyone the real reason. It is because they feel like they've been cheated. Moldbug Yarvin used to talk about feeling "jobbed"; hoe_math is lately talking about how we tried MORE than you. hoe_math for one feels bitter about this; that his kinfolk have given over their cities to those who say you are sad, worthless individuals destined for the hellfire; unless you embrace Islam.

People like that, like William Golding's avatar in Free Fall, stuck on the outs, will ask how they lost their freedom. One answer offered to them is - Churchill took it from them. Or maybe the Jews did; whatever. That isn't the focus of this post.

The focus of this post is what should have been Roberts' focus, why Rightists out on the fringe reject Churchill to the point they feel hatred. Roberts did not answer that question. And his non-answer went to its own extreme, as a refusal. Lord Andrew Roberts is the mirror image to a Holocaust denier. Roberts is even more far gone than an Occidental Observer editor.

The question one might pose is, why does Andrew Roberts hate the Right so much. Although I suspect the real emotion he holds is fear.

BACKDATE 8/10

The American lemur

Vox Day linked University of Reading on primate origins. Ideologues like Beale never link "scientody" for its own sake; it's always about casting new discoveries as "epicycles" against "Darwin".

If you read the article for its own sake, we learn how animals evolve - through where, and when. The geography wasn't the same in the Eocene as it is now. Neither was the climate. In the elder days of the early Caenozoic, Europe was more like an island-chain, with a Pannonian Sea in what's now Hungary. It was also warmer: a common ancestor to the falcon and the parrot flitted about Denmark. There was much rejoicing among Monty Python fans.

For basis: the mammalian life that emerged after Chicxulub was dispersed and very different between South America, Africa, North America, and Europe. North America had dogs, horses, camels. South America of course was marsupial - spreading across a then-temperate Antarctica to Australia. Africa had the elephant, and hyaena/cats I think.

The paper-proper argues that primates should be listed with North America and not with Europe. North America does not benefit from the currents which keep Europe from being East Labrador. The paper argues that North America wasn't always temperate back then, either. It might even have been worse than Antarctica at the time.

The ur-primate would have been like a dwarf lemur, with hibernation properties. The primate could also migrate better than other animals at the time. I am reminded of Dinosaur (2000) with lemurs and dinosaurs witnessing the asteroid together.

Now: if the dwarf lemur originated in America, I am keen to understand how it got to Europe and then Africa (thence Malagasy) before rafting back to South America / Mesoamerica. Because the Americas nowhere have lemurs. I admit, this won't be the last time North America spawns a species as dies out at home: cf the camel.

BACKDATE 8/10

Justinian's adventure

In 2018, Peter Heather published Rome Resurgent, a military evaluation of Justinian's foreign wars mostly in the west. Academia.edu has raised Parnell's review of it.

The Greek and Slavic Orient has long hailed Justinian as "the Great" or even as a Saint, like Louis IX for the French. Secular Westerners have also tended to see Justinian positively; more so as his legal code was rediscovered in the High Middle Ages. The primary exception has been the Church, still sore about the kidnapping of Vigilius. Lately, Western scholars have asked if Justinian was right to carry on to a large war over here, rather than concentrating on the Persian front, which - as Procopius already observed at the time - was existential.

Heather splits the difference.

The Vandal kingdom, from its first African beachhead throughout the various Roman and Byzantine efforts to dislodge it, had been lucky. Its army was optimised for fending off Berber raids; its navy was a pirate flotilla. Justinian, more competent than Leo and better supplied than Majorian, tore through it handily. And then Justinian was able to hold it against those Berbers. Heather argues that the expedition paid for itself. (We might, in hindsight, ask if the East Roman Empire needed another potential base for rival Emperors.)

The problem of course was Italy (Heather adds Baetica, the province in Spain). Nobody can argue that the Italian wars were anything but a headache - well, nobody excepting star-struck mediaeval romantics.

I don't know that Heather has added much to our understanding; in 2018, a cursory flip didn't uncover any, and I didn't buy the book. Parnell's main questions concern common army life, which featured in 2010s-decade monographs Heather didn't read; and the plague. That is a burning question in scholarship which - I agree- requires an accounting in any study of the post-536 years.

BACKDATE 8/10

Metastable nitrogen

Awhile ago I was pondering metastable nuclei as a detonator. The notion is that when it releases energy, what's left isn't pollutive nor radioactive. Late June, we heard of hexanitrogen. That's N₆ in a chain; the authors call it C_2h-N₆.

The advantage of this molecule is that its decay-product becomes part of the propellant. It's not just a fast-n'-furious heat source. That makes it a rocket-fuel, perhaps in a 3D-printed ring of nozzles (I cannot see controlling much of it in one place). As the decay-product should, further, just be nitrogen (we better be keeping oxygen far from it) it should also be good for blasting at sea-level and not be a space-only thing like, oh, hydrazine.

What I don't know is if this molecule will store well. People keep talking hydrogen as fuel but it doesn't store. This fuel looks like a monster.

BACKDATE 8/4

Why Scythia failed

Fructose is considered harmful, and now we're doing something about it. This reminds me of a genetics article I should have posted last month but didn't: the Scythians didn't like it either.

On the one hand, this may explain how come Scythians (and Cimmerians) although able to conquer Anatolia, and beyond, weren't much able to keep these lands. Other Iranic groups had less trouble. (Hello? Persians?)

The deep steppe couldn't handle the wine, dates, and raisins. The genetics claim the Scythians did better among their Balto-Slavic kin, hence all those Iranic (read: not Baltic) rivers: Don and Dneiper and Danube.

I have one question remaining, given Scythians didn't eat fruit. Whence were they getting their Vitamin C? UPDATE 8/10 Fermenting the fructose into cider?