Cretaceous Park

Geologically 70 Mya wasn't that long ago and ... we got an egg. NYPost thinks there may survive DNA.

That won't be the last egg we'll find. Elsewhere we're hearing that dinos were doing fine here in Parias until their asteroid-intercept system blinked out. This blog's readers will recall hadrosaurs were out-n'-about the whole time. To the extent fossils haven't been found, much of that is because our continent remains lush.

It would be a supreme irony if the Americas were an outlier; with dinos doing more poorly in the Old World, whence the most successful placental mammals spread out. Because of course the Chicxulub target-site was right across Our Gulf.

Gliese 251

GJ 251 is within the ten-parsec range (18.2 in ly), and is known for a close-in planet b. Today the news feeds are pointing me to c.

This planet orbits at a 51 day year and is, I suspect, tidally-locked. It is unfortunately four times Earth's mass. Whilst that does mean it likely still has its atmo; this also suggests a crushing supercritical atmo, such that "atmo" might not even be the word. So: no life.

At least we've seen c. The 51 day periodicity might be easy enough to spot in a high-mass planet against a M dwarf this close, but... GJ 251 is a flare star. That is why it has taken two decades to nail c down. And we only tweezed b in 2020.

Ayy lmao!

Sabine left this open for comment: Palomar transient events.

If we don't believe in aliens, and today we should believe less in aliens than they did before Sputnik, the answer seems obvious - to me anyway. The early Soviets were covertly researching how to get Sputnik to work. At the time, the US was concentrating on aerodynamics (and nukes of course) and not on space so much. Even ICBMs were designed to land ballistically upon Russia, not to circle the planet back to the Americas. That is why Sputnik was a shock: it leapt frog all over DARPA.

If the Soviets launched a sat that was broken and not circling the planet many times, that didn't count and the Soviets basically hoped the US wouldn't see 'em.

The dumbest Habsburg

The last Austro[I]-Hungarian[IV] emperor was a Karl, "Charles" to Anglo-Normans. I am unsure why he is first-of-that-name in Austria; several other deutschsprachig Habsburgs had ruled Austria before him, not least Charles V.

Anyway he's beatified. OnePeterFive just treated him with a tongue bath. Those who knew Karl I/IV best, said he was a thirty year old who looked twenty and had a ten year old mind. So who's right?

The Allies, which my ancestors were for, can appreciate that the man reached out to France to nope out of the war. Geopolitically: the correct move, given the Americans' imminent entry and the Russians' weakness. But he botched the handling of it. Austria stayed in there despite this move, and famously lost.

Karl got Religion in his final years, but then... so did John Plantagenet of England (and not of much France) 800 years ago, also first-of-that-name. When are we getting a second John? Probably not for another eight hundred years.

That OnePeterFive slobjob reminds me of those tiresome hagiographies littering the Church Of The East, like Thomas of Marga, as Victorianly translated by Wallis Budge. Catholic laity are cheap dates.

BACKDATE 10/22

The plagues under Akhenaten

Disease was just an unfortunate fact of life in the ancient world, and Egypt had some malae ariae on the Nile Delta. So when records reported diseases under Akhenaten, historians naturally connected these with the turbulent in-and-out of the new capital at Tel Amarna.

New reports would disconnect these plagues. They might have been ill down north, but not in the dry land - not much, anyway; tuberculosis did affect some, and others suffered from the effects of hard manual work. In fact that was likely good motive for the 18th Dynasty to stick with the lands of Amen away from the delta of Ra: it was just healthier up there.

Plagues would be a better suspect for the failings of Dynasty XIX which followed the Amarna Age.

BACKDATE 10/24

The Way of Horus

Tuthmosis I of the 18th Dynasty is considered, presently, to have ruled 1504-1492 BC. This was well after the Thera eruption and at a time the Hittites weren't doing great, also the Minoans seem to have been sharing Crete with the incoming Greeks. Whatever was going on in Libya or Nubia, the Pharaoh didn't care. His eyes were on Canaan. Problem: desert.

This Pharaoh figured rather than bypassing the desert, he should build a land route. Yesterday was announced a fortified waystation: Tell el-Kharouba. Latinbros will know it as the via maris; Egyptians called it ḫꜣt Ḥr. (The "King's Road" seems to be the road right through Sinai to Eilat.) It's dated to Tuthmoses 'coz pottery got his cartouche on it.

BACKDATE 10/24

Pleistocene lead exposure

We are all, I think, aware of arsenic exposure upon early Americans from Albuquerque to Chile. This led to the survival of the AS3MT mutation, expressed in the liver. It turns out that the Old World had toxic mineral exposure too. In our case: lead (plumbum; -208 mostly).

These early hominins had to have ingested the lead somehow, because it's right there in the remains. And we can't blame modern contamination. The bones are dead, dude; if there was ambient lead it should coat only the outside.

The claim is that lead salts had dissolved into cave water. I'd have thought that sedimentary caves like limestones and sandstones go more to calcium and silicon. But some caves are volcanic, or are simply ... downstream of the mountains. It gets worse: lead acetates hit the "sweet" tastebuds. So people - meaning, anthropithecenes - would actively seek out the lead-infused "mineral" water against pure tasteless water.

Eventually, back in Africa, our shared ancestors evolved brain defences against lead. Which, in Roman times, evolved brains as could tell that lead should not be ingested; and in modern times, that could tell the rich not to blow it into our environment.

The first Australian tektites

About 780kBC something scattered tektites across the Sunda. Here, slotted for 15 November, is an earlier field: 11 Mya. h/t ScienceDaily.

They haven't found the crater for this. There should be one: tektites form when the meteor hits the ground. Australian ground tends pretty dry today; but the Pliocene was warmer for Australia (which is also a moving target) so might have been more erosive.

Sedeprivated Canterbury

The see of Britain collapsed with the Roman province, so had to reëstablished: in AD 597 at Canterbury amongst a Saxon people. Thence Saint Paul's Cathedral was set up in London-wych AD 604. Canterbury weathered the Danes, the Normans, the murder of Becket, the Magna Carta, and even the Reformation. The last Archbishop in communion with the Romans was Reginald Pole under Queen Mary I. The present "Archbishop" of the Anglican schismatics is AWFUL, as the acronym goes.

Presently the leading Cardinal who speaks in communion with Rome in Britain is Nichols. That does not mean Cardinal Nichols is "Canterbury-in-exile", symbolic as that would be. It does mean that should Anglicanism be dissolved sooner rather than (inevitably) later, it would fall upon Nichols to choose his cathedra.

Unfortunately Nichols is not delivering results, either.

Collision detection just got fixed

According to Dr Carroll of "Two Minute Papers", Ryoichi Ando has fixed A Cubic Barrier with Elasticity-Inclusive Dynamic Stiffness (pdf).

Collision detection in games and movies had been done with a logarithmic barrier. If the object was too thin however, seems there might be a singularity (Carroll calls it "panic"). The collisions would not get detected and the thick object would break through the thin one.

If you are playing with late 1990s polygons then you just sucked it up. But movies - for one - are supposed to be photorealistic. So if Superman has a cape or, worse, you want realistic flesh and skin over a skull, "artifacts" of the thicker structure would seep through. So editors would waste weeks and millions of dollars fixing these bugs.

Various methods of "clamping" could be used to kludge the collisions before human editors came in. It all reminds me of the Ricci Flow With Surgery by which Grisha Perelman fixed the singularities in Hamilton's partial proof of Poincaré's Theorem - and beyond. Which made it a perfect proof. Some might grumble that was kludgey too; but if the kludge is mechanically applied and works by induction, it's a proof for any given finite or even countable solid. Unfortunately for artwork, the clamping didn't catch all the (literal) edge cases.

Ryoichi Ando would use cubic barriers. They don't have to post-process the artifacts. On the flip side: the new algo seems to be slower.

So it probably won't be used for games except in cutscenes. The speedrunners and plain ol' cheaters will be fine.

Anyway here is the github, refactored a fortnight ago. It's in CUDA 12.8 which looks like C. The paper was published last December, so as you see nobody took it seriously until some actual code was produced (which I totally understand). I don't get Received 20 February 2007; revised 12 March 2009; accepted 5 June 2009 in the paper's end though (since it relies on a lot of recent work); that looks like a stray from a template.

55 Cancri grows again

The 55 Cancri system technically has two stars, but most astros have neglected B. B is a M4.5V red dwarf at 1065 AU from the barycentre. If you consider how dim our own Sun shines at that beyond-Kuiper distance, you'll get a picture of how Cancrian colonists might even forget their companion exists.

This might be changing. B has planets. One of them is in its habitable-zone.

I'm pondering how stable this cluttered menagerie. It may be we need to keep watching this system to add, or rule out, more planets.

BACKDATE 10/19 ht Kyplanet

Zernaki Tepe

Tepe means "Tel" in Turkic. Zernaki is a Tepe around Lake Van. Yesterday, excavations found some inscriptions.

It seems to have been founded under Aramaean influence, given the new inscriptions, whose content we aren't provided. I don't know if that means Assyria - it seems, not, although the use of Aramaic couldn't hurt. Later I understand that Urartu extended its hegemony over that lake, which would explain why some of those inscriptions are defaced. Eventually the Assyrian Empire would crush Urartu.

I suspect the main contribution of this site to History will be insights into the preImperial state of the Aramaic language(s).

BACKDATE 10/24, yeah we're behind.

Martian ozone, past and future

Mid last September, we learnt about Martian ozone. Venus and Earth have polar vortices. It turns out that Mars, with an Earthlike axis but much less atmo, also produces ozone.

Mars might not produce all that much ozone; but when it does, the O₃ stays there. Because the Martian caps are - presently - 40 K below the temperature of the rest of the planet. Also although the perchlorates might (I think) help produce those infamous CFCs, said perchlorates are locked in the Martian soil. To the extent they're kicked up in the dust storms they're not getting to the vortices.

Now: I don't know how long this will last, because unlike Earth (and I suspect Venus) Mars' tilt is unstable. Earth has a heavy moon. Mars has a couple of drifting rocks. As a result the feedstock of Mars' volatiles is eroding.

BACKDATE 10/19

Constraining Prox B

Just to fill in the gaps: RISTRETTO. This is the proposal to constrain Proxima b's vitals.

Since we do not yet own a manned lunar or asteroidal presence, and since LEO isn't for shadowed 'scopes, it is expensive to do SCIENCE from a space environment. So squeezing the most out of Earthbased 'scopes is the best choice. When I say "Prox" I mean that closest system in the Centauri constellation which is southern, so the South is the place to do all this. There, the best altiplano is Chile's (although I wonder about Antarctica); which already has a ESO 'scope.

I wish them well. They say that RISTRETTO can study our ice giants too.

BACKDATE 10/21

For hate's sake

Jane Goodall was, in life, a brilliant primatologist whose insights led to a revolution on how we see primitive sociology. I don't think "chimpout" will ever leave our lexicon.

So it distresses me to hear that, with her final breath at 91 years, she wanted me off this planet. Two years ago she was talking about how a third of this planet was unnecessary; Elon Musk called her out for that. Goodall has (vindictively) added Musk to that list of people she didn't want to see anymore.

Goodall after a lifetime of studying amoral animals died an animal's death. Talk about taking the wrong lessons.

Planet Y

Planet Nine has taken on some brutal constraints up to last July. Then in August, Amir Siraj, Christopher F. Chyba, and Scott Tremaine instead proposed a planet with different parameters. The study has now trickled into NASA Space News.

The study is of the classical Kuiper Belt. Some KB-Objects have entered capture or at least resonance with that monster Neptune: Triton, the Pluto system, Orcus. These are excluded (unless/until someone can figure out whence they came). The paper looks instead at the reservoir as has avoided, thus far, this fate.

Our solar system has an "invariable plane", close to (but not quite) the ecliptic plane of the Earth's present revolution around Sol. The paper defines the invariable plane from the angular momentum vector of the whole system. The KBOs within 80 AU, where not Neptune-resonant, remain Invariable; but those past that, cluster at their own angle, which is not the Invariable.

Siraj-Chyba-Tremaine would resolve this by proposing a Mars-to-Venus-ish mass in the 100s AU inclined over 10°. At that distance I'd expect a lot of bright ice and lacking Pluto's dark tholins. They think the Vera Rubin should be able to see it, with its LSST survey.

Karnak

University of Southampton has posted Ben Pennington's history of Karnak. We learn that in primordial Egypt, this was a sandbar which became dry land after the Nile Flood. At some point the Egyptians thought this a symbol of the emergence of land from the Ocean. So, 2200s BC, the Thebans built a temple on it.

Even then the pyramids downstream were a few centuries old. To give an idea how colossally ancient this civilisation is.

Thebes followed the Sun-god as Amun, as you'll see in the Pharaohs' names of the 18th Dynasty; the more-Delta-aligned 19th preferring Ra. We're starting at the Sixth Dynasty - or later; the rise in Thebes' profile might herald the intermediate period when Egypt fractured into "nomes". It seems suggestive there's already a ref to "Ra-Amun". The Amun-Ra syncretism is famed in the Pharaonic Dynasties, so it surprises me to see this so early.

The "Ra-Amun" ref comes in the 2000s BC from one of the three Intep petty-kings. It may be they were aiming to reünite the Two Lands. Not long after 2000 BC, Egypt would be one again.

The Global South in the premodern age

A couple days back OnePeterFive ran a (qualified) defence of our Pope. That site caters to Catholics on the furthest Right, and as such became rebels against the previous Pope we had. That Pope was a north Italian raised in Argentina. Argentina, when Bergoglio was there, was a sort of decrepit Southwest-European colony. The present one is a Chicagoan whose main ministry was Peru. Argentina was not really a poor nation. Peru, on the other hand...

OnePeterFive is trying to get across the concept of "real poverty". The American South had this after Reconstruction and its failure, when the South lost its slave structure and evolved into a serf-to-peasant structure. We are now hearing the same held for India. Early seventeenth-century England was hardly a nice place to live, true; that's one reason they had a civil war, and so many fled west. India at the time was more like the fourteenth century.

I think it fair to call the Mughal administration a colonial empire on about the same level as the French in Saint-Domingue, or the Spaniards in Peru. Where is a throng of cheap labour who are not you, you don't better their lives. You pay them the least possible and invest in personal security.

As for the American South, from the youtube I linked the farmers were already (belatedly) replacing their sharecroppers with machines. The children of the liberated sharecroppers just remembered not seeing their parents over their childhoods, which they resented. Do we judge them for their resentments? The Pope would not judge them. OnePeterFive is not ready - yet - to judge the Pope.

I suspect however that 1p5 won't be long in following me.

Boron salts for rocketry

On topic of efficient rocket fuels, here's something on the chemical end: Manganese dyBoride.

MnB₂ is a halide salt which is a solid at the usual inner-system temperatures, like pure aluminum. It also seems about as safe as a table salt... until you add kerosene, or maybe methane if we're adventurous. It's not so much the weight that excites them although that's good too (20% more energetic than aluminum); it's the volume (150%!).

They conjectured that this salt should exist in the 1960s but couldn't actually make any back then. Now they have Arc Melting.

The scale of production cannot be high. I think they want it for low-earth satellites. Unlike metastable nitrogen we should be able to ship this stuff up there without it blowing up en-route.

BACKDATE 10/6

The other Mubtada'

In 1989, Gordon Newby produced the Madinese/'Abbasid Old Testament, which he or his editors mistitled The Making of the Last Prophet. It's his translation of an assemblage of mediaeval quotes from Ibn Ishâq, mostly Tabarî. Newby presumed that Ibn Ishâq had composed a book which he, speaking Qurashi, would call the Mubtadâ. This summarised, for Madinans and for 'Iraqis alike, the foundation the Muslims were supposed to accept from the Christian Bible. The "Book", proper, was by then no longer fit for Islamic instruction.

Newby got some reviews (pdf); the most famous might be the one Ibn Warraq reprinted, back when the Internet was weaker. Personally I dislike Newby's output where he opines on current events. But I never call him a "pseudo scholar". Newby's book remains an excellent index to Ibn Ishâq, and a cogent argument that the Mubtada' did exist - if only in Ibn Ishâq's own notes.

I just found out that someone else wrote a Mubtadâ, and that this one survived in real manuscripts. These (three) MSS unfortunately are fragmentary. However some of it may, like Ibn Ishâq, be reconstituted, from later quotes. Ibn 'Asâkir seems to hold most of them. We owe this, once more, to the indispensible Tron Honto: Ishâq bin Bishr. As these authors were addressing Easter.

I know, I know: a lot of Isaacs are running around over here. Maybe their oh-so-Israelite names inspired them to go on that hunt for Israiliyyat. They related some Christian lore as well; except, so Sean Reynolds argues, that this too was had from the Jews. Unlike the Jews these good Muslim felt that dear departed Yashô' was, nonetheless, still the Christ. I'll leave all that to the Honto.

I'm here to ask how come we haven't got a publication of this other Mubtada' yet. Get on it!

BACKDATE 10/6

Trajectory

Philip Lawler has a column over at Catholic Culture. Most Catholics were on the "cautious optimism" level a month ago. On 18 September, Lawler was still there. I had abandoned regular Mass attendance by then, after the 13/14th (Vigil); this pope was leaking support even before that. Mike Cernovich had called out Cardinal Prevost as a false shepherd years before; Prevost is now "Leo XIV".

Subsequently archbishop Cupich, also highly despised in the "trad" circuit, bestowed an award upon Senator Richard Durbin, an excommunicate for other bishops. But not for Cupich. And not for Prevost / "Leo".

Moving off of Lawler, bishops like Cupich are promoting a bad Bible. That's no problem for those who can read the languages and navigate their versions, who can take or leave this or that mistranslation - but how many of us do that? This problem is for the layfolk: what gets read in Mass is supposed to be The Word Of The Lord.

Catholic Culture hasn't even got into the blessing of a block of ice lately-performed. By The Old Gods And The New: water is "Living" when it runs through the font, and only then is it fit for washing. You do not bless the Others.

This may explain why churches are targets now. The Communion is weak. It doesn't stand for anything. Its congregation is legacy. The Scripture that bests suits it is the scripture of Solomon in sura 34.

Christian Identity is not Christian Nationalism

I don't know that Mr Greenblatt will still have a job after all the hits he's taken, but one of his recent tweets does raise a good point. This concerns "Christian Identity".

This isn't Christianity. It is not, either, neither: "Christian Nationalism". Christian Nationalism is what Peter Hegseth believes in: a Crusader / Church-Militant mentality. This is, arguably, Latin-coded. It is not racialist. Pope Gelasius and Saint Augustine were African Latins; Columbus' whole mission was to recruit Americans. We can argue to what degree any of this did any good, or if these men were Good For The Jews - but we cannot say they were racist.

Where Christian Nationalism is a stance within Christianity; Christian Identity is not. You have to listen for "dog whistles" with the 'Nationalism; which tunes honest Christians cannot hear. Christian Identity is the howling pagan wolf. The Jerusalem Cross is not the "Celtic" Cross.

As dogs go, in that old fight between the ADL and the TPUSA: I had none. We did however note how the ADL considered TPUSA "Hate" which it did not for Antifa. The ADL has a defence for its definition of Christian Identity, and we should accept that defence. There was no defence for the slanders the ADL levied against TPUSA, and we've found the ADL deleting its glossary as a result.

As the ADL's future goes, honestly I wish it well. Jews need advocacy as any other nation does. Its commentary on the Celtic Cross remains useful. The ADL should build upon correct research, and should be more careful about its positions against neutral parties (like TPUSA) who do not intend harm to Jews nor to anyone (even if we disagree).