An agnostic case for not summoning demons

Let's assume for the sake of argument that I don't believe in G-d. (That much shouldn't be a difficult assumption for my longtime readers.) Let us further assume that the barrier between this our Universe and the Warp is impermeable. (This much, for sake of argument only.)

The Jezebel coven last month called into the Warp anyway, against Charles James Kirk. Said coven received what they requested. The Cernovich side of the Right, like Megyn Kelly, are crying foul.

We Catholics are told, constantly, that prayer works. If you are an agnostic, the case for prayer - even if you don't do it sincerely, or can't - is that the object of your prayer might feel that he's getting a powerful Patron on his side. Also it might inspire you, yourself, to do something concrete to help, because there's something tugging at you that "thoughts and prayers" are empty. Maybe even especially if you are bad at praying.

It happens that Catholics believe in a god of mercy and justice. It is not in us to pray for evil deeds, or it shouldn't be. Jezebel have appealed to different gods.

If prayer works for agnostic reasons, then prayer works no matter your motives and no matter your request - for those same reasons. A prayer to the Dark Powers hardens your own heart, and it makes unstable people ponder if the Dark Powers might give them aid. That aid would, of course, be towards doing fell deeds.

In short, Kelly is right. Jezebel engaged in a dehumanising discourse and raised the cause of evil against that of good. No good could come of it.

The Getting Started math subs

So we got a TRS-80 Color Computer and it came with manuals. At the age of nine I got interested in the Getting Started With Color Basic subroutines out back; in the 1982 edition anyway. These were for cosines and other functions not offered in the baseline 4-16K versions. We had a 32K Extended CoCo, so a lot of these were in fact offered in this manual's sequel. So why bother with the original?

My interest then was in how come there wasn't a SQR(-1). The "SWR" algo in the first manual seemed like it might allow it; when I duly typed this in I saw the numbers never coming to a stop. Later on of course Gleick would be mooting the Imaginary Number, which opened up plenty of other angles, but we certainly weren't taught those in the third grade.

It occurs to be that the BASIC square root function might retain some interest otherwise. There exists also a function for exponentation. Why not just... ^.5?

In the manual, what happens is iteration. It starts by setting up a value Y, which is just the input halved. Then comes the incrementor W: (x/y - y) * .5. Repeat until W=0. There is also a Z to remember the previous value of W.

This is, clearly, Newton's iterator. Why we need Z I dunno. I also get the feeling that initial Y doesn't need to be the input halved. Can we not bithack the input like q_rsqrt? That'd start with VARPTR in this tongue. Although maybe that would require we do all this in assembler.

On topic of assembler one Walter Zydhek in 1999 wrote Extended Basic Unravelled which - I trust - does what its cover promises. Behind the scenes, the CoCo was running Taylor (12) Series for the ATN function. Which looks much like what the manual's ATN was doing. The EXP also uses Taylor (8).

We find the SQR in assembler was not Newton. It just sets the exponent to .5 and then slips into the power (^) operator. Which then does the same LOG-then-EXP calc as the manual was doing. Why even offer the SQR in the first place?? /rant

One should point out further that Taylor means self-multiplication, and a lot of it. So x^2 is (much) more expensive than x*x. Honestly even Newton SQR should, generally, not be as bad as the ^.5 we're given. Hence why Q_rsqrt exists against ^-0.5.

John Brown's body of literature

Since everyone's talking about some body in the grave, here's Mark Tapscott. Tapscott in the 1970s hoped to be an authority on the topic; both he and Brown are/were Republicans, after all. Tapscott says he'd done a few draughts before slipping out of college into partisan politics and whatever-it-is he's doing now.

Tapscott's contribution is that he uncovers that John Brown actually had a political programme of his own beyond 1856 Frémont north-state freesoilism. It's little known, but the North abolitionists under William Garrison considered the US Constitution a "pact with Hell". From the abolitionist faction, against Frémont (who'd lost, so'd slithered away), Brown in 1858 cooked up a "Chatham Convention". Brown would be a Commander In Chief, a stronger Executive. The Confederate Constitution, on the funhouse side, had more states' rights, excepting slavery which was close to a Honduran forever-clause.

Brown also had an immanent blood-atonement theology, around Hebrews 9:22, to read same as a Mormon or Gazurtoid should read it. We who appreciate René Girard read this passage rather differently.

Brown hoped for a Mutazilite Caliphate against the South's Hanbalite Caliphate, we might say. I think Brown at least kept the judiciary apart like the Deuteronomist proposed, so wasn't quite abolishing ol' Montesquieu. Tapscott would argue this judiciary would be toothless.

That said: AI is holding Tapscott up to task. Brown presented his document as provisional, and may have meant it; a true Garrison might not do so. We would call it a wartime-constitution. If Brown was going to rule Southern States, would he expect to rule them long? I doubt Brown expected to live that long. He assuredly thought he could submit his crown to the Union having won the Civil War for them, after wringing some concessions, like the 13th Amendment we actually got. I mean, Lord-Protector Brown was going to be dealing with a majority-Republican North. We can compare the 1830s negotiations between the Texian Republic and the earlier Union.

Brown was, nonetheless, living a delusion. This is certainly a take Tapscott could have taken. He's turned into a lazy thinker and it's quite possible he had constructed a lazily-founded thesis. Probably why the college didn't let it through the door.

The Hilbert mapping

In the 1980s, computers got good enough to display fractal patterns to the home audience. James Gleick put out Chaos at about the right time, for the PC-Jr. In mid 1990 I figured out how to render some of these for the school Nimbus (remember that?). We're here to talk the Hilbert tasselation.

Hilbert rendered your 1D array into a 2D spacefilling curve. It is, or maybe was, considered superior to the usual x + y*maxx mapping since proximity in the array would approximate proximity in the mapped plane, also. Hilbert himself used the square grid; Gosper's flowsnake does it for the hexagonal beehive.

In 1984 Antonin Guttman invented the R-tree, which indexes multidimensional objects: "find bookstores within two miles". Hilbert gained a real lease on life here. To be noted, I think technically Gosper is better out of doors, as a wilderness map.

Hilbert's classic square, rather, has use in human-visualising the nature of 1D data. It also compresses images and/or dithers them.

BACKDATE 9.26

Baruch in Syriac

I got into one of those Biblical rabbitholes and pondered, hey: what's up with Baruch?

In the Masoretic / Protestant tradition, Baruch is an apocryphal book that doesn't belong in the Bible. In the Greek tradition, it's part of Jeremiah. Jeremiah, by the way, is itself different in both; the Greek tradition ends in Egypt and allows that Baruch is about equal to Jeremiah, thus making that whole text a Jeremiah-Baruch cowriting exercise. Presently scholarship agrees that the Greek Jeremiah accurately translates a text, from which the Masoretic has reassembled. Perhaps, exactly to exclude the Baruch parts.

In the Dead Sea is no Baruch, excepting the "Epistle of Jeremiah"... in Greek (7Q). On the other hand, the Hebrew behind Greek Jeremiah famously survives. So maybe they did have Baruch like they had Nehemiah, except not preserving the copies. Ehh. Qumran quotes Nehemiah where it doesn't seem to quote Baruch.

Anyway, off these merry texts went outside the Hellenistic world. Jerome didn't translate Baruch to Latin, since he didn't have the Hebrew; but somebody did, since its in the Vulgate now. Meanwhile it also went to the Syrians.

In modern scholarship, all those Baruch/periJeremiah "apocrypha" went fairly ignored in Syriac studies - until the late 2010s, at the latest. That's when (Atlanta, I think) a total amateur like myself stumbled into a session on "2 Baruch". 2 Baruch seems to have been very popular as an apocalyptic text out East, on par with the Revelation in North Africa. You'd think the other Baruch books, being lost in Hebrew and preserved in Greek, would be simply ignored in the East, like Jerome was hoping to ignore them West. Ah but then there's Paul of Tella (re)translating all the Greek stuff for his colinguists.

You can read about Liv Ingeborg Lied 2022 free of charge, thankfully. The Baruch corpus seems complex to me, like the "Nehemiah" book and Ezra corpus. The "Second Epistle" of Baruch in the East, is what Catholics refer as just "Baruch" and, before us, the Greeks had appended to Jeremiah and treated as part of that book. And yes: iggerta not kitaba (Arabic may well be "risala").

Seems that the "2 Baruch" apocalypse did indeed come to Syria first. In Syriac the letter is to Babylon, where the Greek after en had the dative forcing "in". Dr Lied, engaged with paratext, sees that as evidence that indeed the "second epistle" came after 2 Baruch which was for Babylon, thus forcing this translation. I don't think Lied takes seriously that the mistranslation inspired 2 Baruch's authorship; I wouldn't either.

BACKDATE 9/25

When science is put to the vote

In 2009, some geologists met to decide upon the consensus for the disputed Silverpit Crater in the North Sea. Impact was a popular second choice.

So much for that. Now we know it is an impact. Not one of the impacts anyone should care about, it having little, uh, impact beyond making waves.

The real takeaway is on why they held the vote in the first place. This is some Jesus-Seminar nonsense. Something is probably right, or wrong, or "don't know yet". If you have to hold the vote then you don't know.

Cleon Skousen

Dr Benjamin Carson, an antiestablishment figure who lost to Trump in the 2015 primary, is still touting [W.] Cleon Skousen. Skousen in the 1950s was a LDS thinker. He is best known for The Naked Communist. Today Communists like David Corn don't like it.

But when Mitt Romney was mounting his own run, in 2007: Hemingway over in National Review noted that Mitt Romney was citing Skousen too (disclosure: I never voted for him). So also Glenn Beck (disco 2 boogaloo: he's nuts).

Skousen's ideas were terrible. Hemingway notes that Skousen's exegesis of LDS scripture is in the modern LDS mainstream (probably why Skousen didn't want blacks in there); also his analysis of Constitutional Law tends to be well regarded. But Carson wasn't citing those parts. He was citing the anti-Communist parts.

Luckily I don't think Kirk cited Skousen, himself, anywhere.

When Georgia was Iberia

I'll inject a couple of articles on Iberia before it was Georgia (or Gruziya SSR). First is an attempt to link the languages to genetics. Then, uh, came a bioarxiv of the genetics. The Kartvel before the Horse, maybe.

Svan split off in Time Immemorial, like "7641 BP" which, in myyy daaay, coïncides with the Black Sea Flood. Roughly. The paper seems legit excepting its claim that IndoEuropean started in the Zagros or Alborz. I feel like that's the exact wrong side of the isthmus.

I'm more interested in Late Antiquity naturally. We are told of an influx of Huns, with their skull deformations. The locals had some deformation too. But they deformed their skulls differently. Also: is there Hunnic (Yeneseyan) or Avar (Mongol) influence in the languages? Not seeing it. Alan (Ossetic) is assuredly here, and Turkish of course (it's blown out a lot of old Laz, now preserved in Mingrel), but not Hun nor Avar.

The genetics are noting less Greek than we'd expect of Lazica, famously tied with Trebizond and Crimean-Greek trade. What does turn up, after Christianity AD 400s, is Near Eastern and Anatolian influx. These were by then calling themselves "Romans", not Greeks. Trabzon/Pontic ByzanGreek survives to this day.

One event of some import was in the AD 600s-700s, when the Iberians migrated down the river and split the Laz from the Mingrels. Iberian "Old Georgian" then became the language of literacy. I guess Roman-era Lazica never was literate on her own. Their elites - even when Christian - simply communicated in Greek or, later, Armenian.

BACKDATE 9/23

The Pauline party in Ephesus

Jacob A Lollar has submitted to Academia, "The Meaning of Ephesians: Competing Christianities in Second Century Ephesus". We all know "Ephesians" had nothing to do with Ephesus. Lollar has taken upon himself to explain what "Ephesians" was trying to do; and, why it got associated with Asia's capital city later.

Lollar notes that Ephesian Christendom was better associated with John. For some values of "John" that is even true. The Revelation came from a nearby island, and Ephesus was first in the Apocalypse's recipients. There exists also that answer to Luke's Acts, John's Acts. (The various versions of Luke/Acts floating about, don't matter.)

Given the above, I do wonder how come Ignatius hasn't been noted. To Ignatius is ascribed another letter to Ephesus. Unlike the Pauline "Ephesians", nobody serious contests Ignatius' content and recipient.

Ignatius parallels some Pauline phrases. Clearly he meant to evoke 1 Corinthians. Colossians and even "Ephesians" 5:2 also get parallels. To dovetail Lollar I do not read where Ignatius says "as Paul wrote to you". Compare how the Romans under Saint Clement levied Paul's Corinthian correspondence, also against the Corinthians. (At least 1 Cor, also I think the Lachrymose Letter which we don't got no more.) Rather, Ignatius is accepting "Ephesians'" consensus of Asia Minor Pauliana. To the extent "Ephesians" possibly exists to smooth over dispute over Colossians, that dispute was no longer a problem in Ephesus, anyway.

Ignatius faced a different problem in Ephesus, shared with those who accepted that collection like Ephesus' bishop, Onesimus. The problem too was shared, as Ignatius writes to bolster the bishop. The dispute was getting to the point of violence. Ignatius argues that as they are cruel, do not become cruel in return. (Ignatius pretends the cruelty is all done by the baddies, as usual in disputes. We may ignore this.)

I don't think anyone involved knew the Lukan corpus; Ignatius' appeals to the life of Christ are famously paracanonical. Luke's absence means Acts of John weren't there either. Ignatius further parallels some events now found in our Gospel of John, like the anointing as integral to the Passion. But Jesus' very title was "the anointed". Some anointing scene should be reified in any useful narrative. In fact such a scene is not restricted to John 12. The parallel to John 12:32 is bereft of Johannine tropes so likely precedes both.

As to what the schismatics actually taught, Ignatius brings the Physician Creed, which has become famous: There is one Physician who is possessed both of flesh and spirit; both made and not made; God existing in flesh; true life in death; both of Mary and of God; first passible and then impassible — even Jesus Christ our Lord. Ignatius implies that the other team by not accepting this cannot be cured. One might read this creed to bar the doors of episcopal hospitals. I do not read such: instead, Onesimus and Ignatius were dealing with Christians who refuse medical treatment on grounds flesh be nothing compared to spirit. Christian Scientists, one might say.

The Physician Creed is at the core of Ignatius' thought generally. Ignatius must elsewhere end-run around Mark 15 as he cites Peter against Christ being an asomatic spirit. Some skeptics even wonder, as a result of Ignatius sidestepping Mark, if Mark's Gospel yet existed. I think this Gospel did exist by then, but Ignatius can't use it. (Mark elsewhere is facing headwinds, as was the Gospel in the Egerton papyrus. We are lucky to retain Mark.)

I suspect that Onesimus' problem was the spiritual tradition, beyond even Mark. This tradition can be identified with that around the Acts of John, which - again - wasn't yet written, but a lot of similar lore had been written. The tradition may already have been associated with John. Ignatius won't dignify it with John's name, but that doesn't mean his enemies hadn't. Ignatius' angle was instead to bang the codices of Paul.

So much for hyceans

The "hycean" world, theorised a few years ago, has been hard to pin down in practice. It might not even be possible in theory, say the Swiss.

The subNeptunes forming out past the snowline start out with an ocean... of lava. The hydrogen and oxygen react with that. By the time it's cooled enough for a water ocean, that water is an also-ran. The atmosphere left over is itself binding hydrogen into methane and ammonia, oxygen into carbon dioxide. What water be left is illiquid. I think the model would be L 231-32.

Which makes me ponder "water rich" planets found here. Although they're smaller.

Theseus' Ice Cream

"Ben and Jerry" just lost Jerry. Unilever, who now own the majority share, had to decide if they were to continue Jerry's vision of political campaigning through the supermarket fridge door, or to sell... ice cream.

Unilever has chosen ice cream. Jerry has flounced.

I expect John Muir will be buying his ice cream elsewhere. Perhaps imports from some Lebanese or Syrian "resistance" outfit; maybe he can whip up a sermon against corporatism. He's certainly not one for fasting.

As to the brand: If it becomes "Bengieri" or some other corporate mush I'll laugh, and buy lots of it.

PseudoCarian

The Carian language is ancient but its dictionary is very recent, like about two decades old. You'd think its inscriptions would have been deciphered earlier, given its obvious-to-us derivation from Luwian. One stumblingblock appears to be false etymologies dumped upon us by Late Antique grammarians.

Usually the grammarians have been more helpful than this. I understand that Phrygian, for instance, was fairly accurately brought to us. Also Lycian and some other Carian words; but the mix of good and bad in Carian just made people suspicious of the good too.

Which inspires the question - where the "Carian" words aren't Carian, then whence? A couple years ago Orçun Ünal pondered the classical Scythia. For Greeks (and Assyrians) that means the wider steppe. Ünal picks up three words: κόον "sheep", γίσσα "stone", and ἄλα "horse". Words that sound like this can be found in the odd IndoEuropean language, but are not protoIndoEuropean for which all three have famous derivates. None of them are Anatolian.

Ünal thinks they're Altaic. In some cases, other languages had borrowed them from Altaic: kwn appears in old Mongolic, the Mongols not being much for raising sheep so presumably trading for their pelts.

As a Turk himself he has an interest, to stretch the Turkic connexion to southwest Anatolia into Classical times. But if we nonTurks force him to acknowledge that, we must acknowledge our own interests. We are left to view the paper itself. Which actually looks good, at least to my amateurish eyes.

I would point out that the γίσσα soundalikes in Altaic trend not to stone in the general, but to stony badland in the specific. That is the stone which poses a barrier to the wandering shepherd.

Ünal raises the three words might be real loans into Carian, but cannot find them in the graffiti. He concludes the later Greeks simply erred. Like I said: Ünal is not to be dismissed as a nationalist. As to why they erred, we can only speculate.

This is a blog; let us speculate. Perhaps some barbarians brought along some Turkish shepherds: Slavs would be a good Late Antique suspect. These shepherds would, perhaps, identify themselves as never-Slavic; on settlement, they interfaced with the local Carian shepherds directly. Those latter shepherds had quit speaking Carian, themselves. So these three words because Carian-by-geography. When the Byzantines found these shepherds, they immediately recognised these three words as not Greek nor anything they'd seen in the region. "Carian" it was, then.

Eskimo and (north) Tungusic

The Eskimo family, our exonym for Inuit, came from northeast Asia. A few correlations were noted between its Asiatic branch and Tungusic. In 2015 Alexander Vovin showed that the synopsis exists only in north Tungusic, never trickling to (say) Manchu.

I am no Manchulogist. I didn't even know this split in Tungus until "now". Apparently it goes back around to Christian Year Zero, about when Octavian became the august prince and when the Han empire hiccoughed. The Tungus homeland is the Amur.

Should Vovin's finding be true, means the Eskimo lived much further into Asia than hitherto understood. Sirenikskii would be a sub-branch there. Perhaps the north Tungus pushed them east.

Another blindside, more of interest to this blog: Uwe Seefloth "Die Entstehung polypersonaler Paradigmen im Uralo-Sibirischen" (2001), that Eskimo // Uralic.

BACKDATE 9/17

Le heckin' BASED Caffolick Cherch

Today was the feast of the Exaltation of the True Cross. This is the AD ~630 event by which Heraclius made a deal with the crumbling Sasanian authority to retrieve what the last effective shah, Khusro II Aparwez, had taken. That shah by the way had been Christian-curious himself; but on his death, the West could hardly trust that his mutually-fighting successors could keep this relic safe.

From what I have seen today, I wonder if Heraclius should have bothered.

What we parishioners got in our homily, almost fourteen centuries later, was general pablum about self-sacrifice and the Cross of Christ which Charlie Kirk himself might have delivered. We did not get any note about the risks Kirk had himself taken for this faith. We did however, after the service during the announcements, get rather a lot about... Gaza.

Sure: Kirk did not die in this Church. I understand that he came into Christendom from the Protestant or even Waldensian direction. A hardcore might argue that if a pagan (jack-Mormon, possibly, I didn't look it up) hits a heretic, that Problem be Somebody Else's. Maybe.

That would, I counter, go double for Jew-versus-Muslim. When I think of Catholicism, I typically do not see Gaza. Christians in the Holy Land at this point are willing hostages to one side or the other. Presently in Gaza that side is Islamic.

I suspect what is going on, among our Bishops, is a distraxion. They see that the terminally-online youth are increasingly in the Third World Ideology, which is anti-Jewish. They are pandering.

Two nations

The statements "I disagree with X when he says Y but I don't think X should be executed for it" and "people shouldn't be executed for saying Y but X said Y" sound alike. But they are not alike. Allow us a thought experiment, here.

Okay: for me it is not much of an experiment. I never approved Turning Point, that "Coffee Party" of the Right. They got themselves involved beyond just those "prove me wrong" tables; where they interfered with Biblical-scholarship classes, they stepped in my turf. I don't know that TPUSA kids similarly interfered in biology; but I know Prof. Mike Adams did, and you'll find rare in TPUSA circles to say of Adams what I am here saying of TPUSA.

I respected that TPUSA were pushing back against the Left, but that says more about the bankruptcy of our Left than about TPUSA. I mean, QAnon might - might - have ginned up voters in critical moments. Longer-term such voters gin up meanwhile the antiRight vote, and distract the Right itself. TPUSA wasn't this bad, as noted they weren't even as bad (in-public) as was Adams. They were still, at best, checquered.

To steelman further, advocating for the government to exert force is the woman's way around exerting force one's-self. Politics is war, says Clausewitz; Heinlein says the vote is sublimated violence. Curtis Yarvin knows this. Andrew Anglin is saying this.

All this might sound like I'm talking myself into the position that this was a righteous hit like what took out Suleimani. Indeed some people on the Left are blaming exactly a Rightist for this crime. Or they're blaming Israel / Mossad, assuredly what passes for the Right in Jewry.

This blog must take the brave stance that it disagrees with Charlie Kirk but that it would be wrong to kill him for that. (Dumbass.)

If TPUSA was wrong, they should be told that they are wrong. Then people don't attend their events because they know such events are a waste of their time. Administrations don't ring up Charlie Kirk because they know his word is about as useful as that of a TypePad blog. For whatever Charlie Kirk believed, with the warning it is impossible today to ask him, I understand he would not have recommended that we do unto a Marxian history-professor (say) what has been done unto him. He would have had an agent float that professor's nonsense into public scrutiny, which might be adjudged accordingly.

The one exception that should be made is when they endorse violence outside of the legal structure. The Nation of Islam should be allowed to preach. We can argue the point about, oh, Yakoob. The Zebra used to do murders. There's no arguing with that.

Back to the first paragraph here: how you arrange these statements matters. By "well yeah you shouldn't be deleted for saying Y but he said Yyyyy" you are laying out your marker that Y matters more than the shooting.

The Nazi-punchers don't go to college

Hollow Earth TERF: He dropped out of university after a semester and then got radicalized on discord. If anything, college would have kept him on a normal path. In fact Tyler Robinson was going through vocational-tech, which is what the Right suggests more people should do for a Normal Path. But whatevs. I am here to suggest that the college path isn't as Normal as she'd like to think.

College is for the nurses, teachers, administrators and laptop-people... cheering the thugs. And perhaps for the Црна рука arranging the sale of horses.

Thugs, or thugs-to-be like Tyler Robinson, meet the college grads on Discord (or on IRC if they are full-on autists rather than basic ass-burgers). Robinson has the temptation to look up to these people. These grads sure know their "facts". Grads like Representative Seth Moulton; a real hand for statistics, on that right arm. 76%! Wow.

One hopes that Pam Bondi and Kash Patel came out of college with some numeral skills, themselves. They sure started out in the Administration with a lot of support, that we citizens'd not be suffering this level of terrorism.

Maybe they should be rolling up these networks.

Why Korea doesn't always love us

AFP, which is the French press I think, is reporting on the camp towns. Every now and again some foreign nation sets up a base in Korea. The Koreans, not exactly Earth's most xenophilic race, segregates this base as far as possible. But Koreans are as human as are the rest of us, so occasionally a slut or a criminal crops up. Disgraced from fellow Koreans, and not wishing to starve, such a one will look for nonKoreans.

The Korean government could kick out the scoundrel, or scound-rette; or just quietly disappear the problem. In fact these solutions have been resorted-to over the decades. But sometimes they just... let things happen. Things get really spicy when orphaned or abandoned children were involved.

The Mad Corean is attempting nuance, although it could certainly be argued - commenters are arguing right there - that the nuance is kinda stupid and clickbaitey. I am not a Korean nor any kind of East Asian (I am literally more South Asian). So I'll let you judge.

It would be smashing if all armies everywhere were staffed with gentlemen who always doffed their top-hats to the native ladyfolk, wot. But sadly America has a few scumbags of its own, and its Army has been known at times to make Allowances. That is why a "UCMJ" exists, to catch such men after, perhaps, it be too late.

The usual pattern is that somebody brings up a crime from back in the 1960s - now 1970s - and a deal is struck. Once such deal in Korea was struck 2014. Well, the Korean courts floated it up again in 2022 and found it was still illegal. Whenever there's a pro-America government in Korea, politicians on the outs can score easy points by dredging this stuff up. So can edgy entertainers like the wretched Psy. Like how American opportunists bring up the USS Liberty whenever Israel gets off the leash.

Moonscape in the front, Titan out back

Some news today, so I'll go with the good news: TRAPPIST 1-e. This blog has been dismissive of b-c-d as likely-nonatmospheric (or Venereal; -c turned out nonatmospheric). We were saving our hopes for -e.

Some constraints are in. Might be nitrogen and... methane. Wonderful Anton Petrov is pondering a Titanlike.

It's a little warm for a Titan-proper, you'd think but... this planet is tidally-locked. The starfacing side could be barren and rockey, yes. (None of these planets are as dense as is Mercury.) But the other side could hold those "ices". Like water, in ice form. Methane can exist as liquid under colder temperatures with a thick-enough envelope of some inert gas. Over Titan that's nitrogen.

Typepad is going away

Typepad ain't the strongest blog platform - Wordpress still exists, and these days Substack is probably best. What's left of it is going away; to which I am only now alerted. So I gotta look through this blog.

I've dug up two links, both last year, to Ancient Hebrew Poetry and Harvard Press.

The latter link was from 2012 and is just an excerpt from The Anointed. The HUP haven't updated their blog since 2023. John Hobbins last posted to Ancient Hebrew Poetry in 2017.

Won't be a problem to update those links I think.

BACKDATE 9/11

Raptor redux

Gary Jennings back in the middle 1990s wrote a book Raptor, set in the decades of the Latin/Gothic Late Antiquity. Jennings argued (by illustration) that these decades weren't a Dark Age... quite yet. The age was however a fragile one, with the darkness pressing inward.

In AD 476 Odoacer was king of Italy by the legal-fiction of being the Christian Empire's agent, which sole ruler reigned from Constantinople. By this fiction, Odoacer kept the legitimate Western emperor Julius Nepos from doing his emperoring from actual Rome. Four years later, Nepos was dead. Odoacer then let his flag fly as a German king. He held no respect for Latin or generally-Roman norms (losers!). The surviving Roman Emperor, Leo in Constantinople, took this as the insult it was. It happened that Leo was a Thracian ruling over lands which not all the Goths had yet vacated for the west. After much mutual conflict, Leo sent those Goths west - under Theoderic.

When I read Raptor I'd figured this whole span as an historic detail at best (pardonnez-moi pour le Lepenisme). Apparently people still care about it. Hans Kerrinckx has uploaded a review he'd done in 2016 of a book in 2015, Jonathan J. Arnold's Theoderic and the Roman Imperial Restoration. This he did, I suppose, before Peter Heather could write such a book first, as Heather was hitting up Justinian instead.

I'd like to report that Kerrinckx had read enough about these years to critique Arnold. Kerrinckx at the time was a MA or at least candidate. Sadly he does not, delivering only a book-report. He even whines about Arnold's prose being difficult. I would red-mark this if this were a BA-candidate essay; it does not deserve MA status. Further: does Academia.edu need book-reports? As they say on 4chan: get a blog.

BACKDATE 9/14

The day of vengeance

Christians promise the Day Of Judgement. The Islamic term is, as all my readers assuredly know already: the Yawm al-Dîni. I was having trouble finding a Yôm had-Dyn in Hebrew. In 2009, Drew Longacre may have found something like it.

The proof-text is in Deuteronomy 32:35-37. This is the famous quote that vengeance is Mine, lî. But maybe it wasn't lî. Maybe it was li-yôm.

Although the latter is not in MT, neither is it noncontextual (excuse the 2x-neg, plz). After the Lord discusses nqm; He goes on to talk of time, even unto The Day. Also the Greek here translates en hemerai ekdikesios.

The MT lî enjoys support from the Targums. It gets formidable support in the Christian translations. These latter, anyway, may depend on Saint Paul: who - exPharisee - notoriously quoted from a protoMT against the LXX. The Epistle of Hebrews however did not... excepting right here, which also has "vengeance is Mine".

Longacre notes here Qumran and the Samaritans. The Samaritan Torah proves that the Greek didn't just cook this up. A real Hebrew text was here in the centuries BC.

I'll also note that the Hebrew is nqm and not dyn. Our "Day of Judgement" looks like something brought from the MT, that Graeco-Samaritan variant being forgotten. It was assembled from other text.

BACKDATE 9/13

Water-rich terrestrial planets

Trappist-1's planets are in mean-motion resonance. Since we're still looking at this system, most of its planets remain unconstrained - except that they are not very dense. Alejandra Ross et al. have a study on similar MMR systems, not Trappist-1 itself.

The dataset numbers 24 systems. Kepler-36 and Kepler-105, specifically -36b and -105c, are standouts. Not only are these less dense than the others; they cannot even be made of stone. The Ross team implies that most MMR systems had formed in-situ.

Two other outliers: WASP-47 e, and good ol' 55 Cancri e. These, the study proposes, formed where they are like the other twenty. They were once Neptunians; but, in the heat and the tides, have boiled off most their atmo.

Those two Kepler planets - therefore their systems - must be migrates from out in the coal and ice regions, with (relatively) less stone and iron. Now they have supercritical "oceans". The paper wants to label the two, Icy Core Worlds. Various models are possible; suffice this blog that K-36 b is 1-5% water and K 105 c is a whopping 11-25%.

On the other side of density, Kepler-107 c is marked a superMercury. It happens this is the only one in the 'set. Elsewhere Trappist-1 - say - doesn't have any.

BACKDATE 9/13 Kyplanet.

Kevin van Bladel saves his skin

Dr. Kevin van Bladel wants to retire the Biblical term "Semitic". His argument is that there is no such thing as race. If Jews and Muslims agree to apply "Banu Sham" to themselves, they shouldn't.

In fact several genetic markers do cluster with those ethnoi, or gens if you like, who call themselves Semites; terms like "Natufian" and the "J Y-chromosome" are rife in the literature. The linguistic affinities have been known since antiquity, as van Bladel must admit. If "race" be political, that is because politics evolve among clans to advance the clans' interests. "There is no such thing as race" is an ideal, not a fact. It is "ought to be" against "is".

Van Bladel cannot be unaware of this. To be blunter: he is lying.

Which leads us to query his motive for the lie. It must be difficult for a "van Bladel" to survive in modern academia. I must add that the Plattdütschman in question is hitherto best-famed for pointing out sura 18's dependence on Heracleian propaganda, and maybe even postHeracleian.

This man, to use the chromosomal definition, will likely come out a decade from now like Gladwell admitting that he said things in order to keep his position.

Venezuela is a narco-cartel

A day or so ago, the US sank a boat carrying deadly drugs and armed Venezuelans. Said boat was in international waters and, legally, should not have been granted port access anywhere. Once they entered those waters they became pirates. Or, a Venezuelan offencive forse. (Sorry, I sometimes like switching up those c's.) It was up to Venezuela's President to decide which.

Maduro has decided which.

The first bloodland

The genetics are in for what we call the AD 500s - when Christ and His Angels slept. The Slavs, or people with Slavic DNA anyway, pushed into Pomerania - and into Croatia. This transfer of population is politely termed "Demic".

At the back of the migration, these populations became 80% Slavic.

I don't know that the culprits in Pomerania were properly Slavic however. Isn't this seen in the Middle Ages as "Prussia"? No Slavs there; the language used to be considered instead "Baltic", but now I understand is termed a third branch of "BaltoSlavic".

As usual, talk of "ancestral" languages get rough before Late Antiquity. Most agree that the territory wasn't originally German, although the ?Slavs ?Prussians took it from Germans. Some call the ancestors here, "Temematic".

Inspiration for dungeons

I have offloaded one more project, a bit more adventurous than the last two. If nothing else, the logic is mine save the algo's (so I am playing the rôle of Mark Barnes).

Enjoy Cellular Automata, or "Cave" for short. If you do C# and don't mind the /unsafe tag.

Ringquest

In 1982, BYTE was running a competition for games. We've met the "winner" which nobody remembers. Enjoying a better reputation today is the number-five loser: Gordon Mills' Ringquest - at least, for the Redditors. This game is available in the MicroM8 emulator. All for the higher-end Apples, like 48k RAM.

This game is a fanfic / alternate of Lord of the Rings where/when the bulk of the Fellowship has failed in the depths of Moria. Now the Balrog owns Sauron's Ring. Your job is to get down there and pry the Ring off him/it, before everybody else is screwed. Treasure can be found. Mills switches-up the usual Nethack / Rogue conventions such that you can use the treasure to bribe encounters out of a fight; except for the Balrog itself of course. Your aim is progress toward the MacGuffin, not to gain loot.

The comp winner was in Forth. The fourth-with-a-u also-ran was in Basic... mostly. To input this thing into your machine required manual entry of many, many hexadecimal bytes: this is how most the data were separate from the program, which prog took up 6k RAM. I suppose the step after that would have been to compress the data which at least might have cut the manual entry (but could you do that in 8-bit?). The map, at least, was procedurally-generated.

I feel like the author should instead have saved it to cassette and sold it. This was wasted on BYTE. Maybe the use of the Tolkien Estate's property was the problem; Beyond Zork solved this with the "Coconut of Quendor".