Out Of Israel

With the h/t to Moldbug (for the title): David Reich floats a hypothesis. Not co-written unless he used AI, which I suspect he didn't. This claims a strong modern-human presence in the Levant that never ventured east, but led to 3%-7% of the resultant Neander genes found not only in Iberia but also in the Neanders they'd replace.

Because it was that early: 300kya. That'd be the long downslope from the MIS 9 Purfleet peak before MIS 8's false subpeak. I'd assumed some modern humans mixed n' mingled but, if Reich is right, they did this well before Eemian MIS 5.

This wasn't intuitive to me. We are aware of Neanders roaming the Levant before the modern-human expansions of the 60s kya (and the contemporary Iberian Neander expansion). Reich's conclusion implies all the Neanders would have pushed into the Levant since MIS 8 (and Eemian).

I don't know how this accounts for the ghost lineage of "modern" Eurasians which avoided all Neander contact until finally reuniting with their modern kin (us). Said modern kin meanwhile subsumed the Neanders of the Levant.

But most of Reich' conjucture seems to be cluster the 300kya horizon. When we hear of modern-modern humans (including subsaharans) being 80/20: the 80% - for Reich - is east Africa ("Kush"), Nile, and north Africa. That's what spilled into the elder Neanders. The 20% was... erectus, pretty-much.

There may have been a green-sahara at the Purfleet peak. This would have dried out pushing the hunter-gatherers there southward, maybe northeast too.

Habakkuk's song

Earlier this year I looked into Joshua Henson's look at Habakkuk 3's language, which he claimed for ABH. I figure it might be worth extending that to theology. The chapter has one. It is highly ancient, even Canaanite. I ask if it's truly ancient or just reactionary...

The consensus ABH corpus includes Psalm 18 (which might have come from the pre-Psalter "Jashar"), Psalm 68 (presently elohist), Exodus 15:1-18 (maybe with l. 19), Judges 5, and Deuteronomy 32-33. In ABH, YHWH is recalled as coming from the south.

Various projects as venture beyond ABH bring also Psalm 29. This is notable, or notorious, for treating YHWH as the god who assails the forces of death and violence at a sacred mountain, striking them with a storm, which storm restores life to the dead land. As is too well known to repeat here, these tropes trend northern. They are rife in Ugaritic lore (where the mountain is Zaphon) and in various stelae of the neoHittites (spread around the Cilician plain). Psalm 29 is I think considered CBH (it shares its mabbul flood with P/Genesis 6-11) but this may reflect the Canaani/Punic syncretism of preDeuteronomic Carmel (since the psalm is otherwise hardly Priestly).

Psalm 77 is also brought, despite also not itself being ABH; as to be read alongside the ABH Exodus lore. Habakkuk 3 (I think) evokes a canon CBH-era assemblage. These would assume the Deuteronomic Moses cycle and the coming of the House of David.

Gert Prinsloo has taken the above dataset, which I suspect most will agree is relevant; to deliver a highly spicy conclusion, that the author deliberately composed a ABH-style poem as reaction to Habakkuk 1-2. The chapter is "Towards an Intertextual Reading of Habakkuk 3" in Intertextuality as Reinterpreting. (We also learn here of the non-Septuagintal alternate translation of Habakkuk 3: "Barberini".) Habakkuk 1-2 leans upon Isaiah 1-39 (perhaps already assembled as such); Habakkuk 3 - for Prinsloo - leans mainly upon the ancient ABH core and some exceptions like that Punic song, as well as upon those first two chapters.

Henson might object that we can see scars of the archaist process in Psalm 78 which is properly CBH although pretending not to be. Henson didn't find such scars in Habakkuk 3.

But... this may be less that Habakkuk 3 was truly ABH, and more that Habakkuk 3 relied on so ABH-weighted a collection of poetry. Our poet might postdate MT's Psalm 78 but rejected it as a clumsy and unworthy effort. Other non-ABH had crept into the collection like our Psalm 29 and, Prinsloo adds, 74 and 77. Our poet allowed these because, let's face it, they're awesome.

It follows that Habakkuk 3 would have read the old songs in accordance with a Deuteronomic proto-history, which history consensus already suspects of existing, just without the Joshua and Judges we know, and of course without the Holiness content. Prinsloo sees his subject as an "inset poem" but in a prophetic book and not, as usual, the narratives. Mind, other prophetic books have included their own psalmic content that doesn't read like the usual oracles.

More Neolithic maths

Earlier we had attempts to apply Gini - social inequality - to Neolithic states. Here, Ukraine and Germany are looking into their potter(ies): diversity versus standards.

The maths here are Shannon. Enough pots have been dug out and (reasonably) dated that the paper can watch them change over time. In Germany, that's Linearbandkeramik LBK; in Ukraine, it's western Trypillia aka Region C (more on the Cucuteni side). The former ended ~5000 BC (soon after 5040 on the chart) and the latter featured almost a full millennium afterward, before declining itself. They skip, say, Achenheim and the arrival of the rodent.

Luckily they do use BCE (here-on, "BC") rather than "BP" which has always been a pain in my ... neck.

Start with LBK. This enjoyed a rise in social complexity over the 5000s. As that happened, the ceramic styles proliferated. It would appear that the artisan behaved as an artist, such that his customers purchased accordingly. Also I recall that LBK towns were internally diverse, perhaps on a model like mediaeval Central Asia where herders might even speak different languages from the farmers, but more-or-less getting along in the market-place. At Vráble one group ended up walling itself off from the other(?) plebeians 5075 BC.

Trypillia was already important 4800 BC; the paper discusses the 4100-3600 BC half-millennium, because data fall away over the 3500s. There they at least got the ox which they could use for plowing rather than, one suspects, making women and serfs do it. At first, 4100-4000 BC, they had six local styles. Here social complexity led to the opposite of old LBK: ceramics were made standard, like in a factory. The paper marks the century 3950-3850 BC as a cultural, or political, era when locals' choices got limited. The paper says that the pottery, being simplified, would have been faster and cheaper to make. This - further - would have allowed for standard rations, and easier identification of foreign imports. These towns - cities really - might not have had cultural (or national) diversity, and if any did show up (like, a trader from Anatolia) the city leveled it.

The "megasites" like Maidanetske (region A, well to the east) were generally egalitarian, best they can tell, and given that some Gini did exist. Mind, those cities were abandoned and/or downsized 3750 BC (one ponders architectural disease mitigation). Smaller sites carried on that ideal before the 3500s BC general collapse. That was probably plague-driven. I don't think the cat had been domesticated; although the culture may have been aware of arsenic as a pest-control.

Blogger takes sides

It looks like Google-Alphabet is about to turn the screws on content posted here. It might be related to a certain upcoming election.

Keys here are "hate", which goes beyond violent threats (absolutely actionable, I don't want them against me) into inciting more "hate" against such characteristic as be associated with systemic discrimination or marginalization. What if we can argue that a characteristic is intrinsically marginal - don't, says Goog; or we'll call it "hate" and block you. Let me raise here that every system must have a centre, surrounded by margins, and the whole point of debate is to argue for one's centre against alternatives.

The "misleading content" rule is even worse. This is defined as such that contradicts official government records. Included here are medicine, which we recently found was wrong; or harmful conspiracy theories, such as that the fact of the medicine being wrong was covered up. Seems that the theory had harmed those people who messed up and tried to hide it.

The multi-aperture telescope

Spyware is constantly trying to improve upon resolution constraints; Raytheon have been funding quite a bit of it. But as our Nancy Grace Roman telescope shows, what is designed for spying on people can be repurposed to spy upon other stars and dwarf-planets. Today we're discussing the Rayleigh criterion. The minimum resolvable angle is proportional [1.22] to the wavelength (λ) over the diameter (D) of the aperture of a monolithic telescope. Or: tyranny of the aperture limit.

They want their multitude of 'scopes to be pushed into orbit or the Lunar farside or, most-likely, some SpL2. In space it's presently constrained by the Starship (D = 9 m), which compares with the Chilean 8.5 m mirror-'scopes.

In 2023, Stephen Fleming with Amit Kumar Jha and some others presented a telescope which might obviate the "monolithic" side of that, kind of like putting rockets in series to boost thrust. Last year they got their idea published.

They want to image other worlds without having to go there. We want to go to the Uranian moons and Triton again, so the project isn't for them. It might however be of use to get some better imaging of the KBOs, and Sedna.

They are teasing this for other systems. In that case they think they can remove the starlight from the array of images, without blocking the star in the 'scope itself (like with the Coronagraph). I expect the prime targets will be the Proxima and Trappist worlds.

The (smaller, cheaper) mirrors in space will have to stay at 20 meters, or whatever, from each other. So - pack poles? A better idea is to give Beyond Reach something to do.

Precedence

Over my time studying early Islam through Islamic sources, I stumbled upon Gerald Hawting's The first dynasty of Islam. This was published 1986; I had some 2000 paperback, but it really hadn't absorbed much 1990s scholarship. It was anyway hard to read - for me - because it concentrated on internal debates about who got dibs on all that pelf. In particular I had trouble with "Muhajirun" versus "Anṣar".

Adrien de Jarmy (with whom readers will be familiar) offers some help, which we may read in preprint.

For sura 9, Mahajirun and Anṣar are peers. What matters is precedence - tasbîq - within each group. This may even react to chauvinists in one camp or the other. These sentiments become rife among the poets, but such may be earlier: I suspect Ḥassan bin Thabit as an Anṣarist representative. I find in Ḥassan little contact with suras 9 (or 48).

De Jarmy finds the crux at the turn of the 2nd/8th century. That implies AH 80-100 / AD 700-720: the reign of al-Hajjaj in the east, after the fitna of Ibn al-Ashʿath. In the Madina, the family of ʿUmar was paramount: these included ʿAbd Allah bin ʿUmar's (d. 73/693) mawla Nafiʿ, and the governor ʿUmar future caliph. Anyway before the Ashaʿitha, the muhajir was the man who went out for the sake of God in the conquests. This agrees well with suwar such as 3-6 and 8 (not 9 - nor 48), and with the consistent Syriac term mhaggrayë (which will naturally lag Arabic semantics). De Jarmy sees an attempt to define the sabiq first in al-Kufa: he is one who pledged the oath to the Prophet himself AH 6 in al-Ḥudaybiyya under a, uh, tree. These are the ahl al-shajara. The anṣar don't figure in this side of the paper's conclusion and seem an afterthought in the tradition; some anṣar may well themselves have been muhajirs.

This paper sees the Madinese offering their alternate definitions. Such may have been floated in the Madina first, only getting out to the rest of Islam after ʿUmar the governor became ʿUmar II the caliph. This city restricted the muhajir such that one only existed in the time of the Prophet; if you emigrated to Iraq after that, that wasn't a real hijra/hegira. All those muhajirs are sabiq by definition; the Anṣar may or may not also count, depending on when their ancestors joined the crew. De Jarmy promises a new paper to explore another clear implication, that the Madinese had also raised the Madinese Hegira to preëminence.

Amateur thermodynamics

American Thinker is posting Douglas J Cotton's theory on Planetary Core and Surface Temperatures. This addresses the "carbon" theory of global warming on Venus and, on Earth, "climate change".

Until the late 1970s, we had no real consensus on whether Earth was heating or cooling. We had Venus' surface temperature from flybys, a knowledge of main-sequence evolution (effective over hundreds of millions of years), and the historical record. This wasn't enough.

Soviet landers, including near-landers, got us the temperature gradient of Venus' (long) atmosphere. In the 1980s, the Scientific Community settled upon the bathtub-drain theory of global warming for Earth. 1361 W/m² are coming dayside; less than that are radiating nightside. So the joules are accumulating. To blame: the manmade (anthropogenic) change in atmospheric chemistry. We got more CO₂ now, also CH₄ and H₂O.

Cotton is a degreed physicist, but not of a high degree. His findings here could work toward a Masters if any university saw fit to reach out to him.

He argues that gas doesn't work like a greenhouse. A greenhouse glass is transparent for entry, but translucent for exit. This allows internal higher equilibrium temperature before its sheer heat must radiate into the chill of the Boston Zoo. A non-ionic gas lacks a specific direction. All it can do is slow heat transfer, going in as well as going out. So there is no "greenhouse gas".

To explain Venus and Earth, Cotton proposes instead "heat creep". This is the effect of gravity on a temperature-gradient, which Cotton takes from Josef Loschmidt (1876). Maxwell had rejected Loschmidt as a vio of Clausius (1850) no process is possible whose sole result is the transfer of heat from a body of lower temperature to a body of higher temperature. Cotton points out that Clausius was ignoring the relation between temperature and pressure: Gay-Lussac, or Amontons. So where Maxwell rejected, Maxwell should have sidestepped: "assume uniform pressure, such that we neglect gravity". If we are talking planetary scale, Cotton refuses to neglect gravity.

That's about where I'll leave the dispute, which is presently one-sided, Cotton having failed to attract serious attention, only the attention of unserious bloggers. I will however suggest that it seems falsifiable. It might be testable at - say - Uranus, whose own composition is presently unconstrained.

Berber revolt!

Among the early converts to Islam were Imazighen from Morocco. The way conversion worked in those days was to get adopted as mawla by a Muslim. The Africans' sponsor was one Musa bin Numayr, and one of his proteges - Tariq - proceeded into Spain.

The jealous caliphate then recalled Musa and executed him. In AH 122, his mawali back home - still being called "Berbers" - revolted. 740 for Christians today; 778 for the Mozarabic Chronicler.

Antonia Bosanquet in 2023 published a survey of Islamic historians' view.

Robert Hoyland had flagged the Mozarabic Chronicler for using a rah-rah Umayyad source (in Latin) probably extending past the revolt to Walid II, since it is synoptic with another chronicle that stops at 724 but assuredly written after that. The pro-Muslim stuff ends after this caliphate, at which point the Mozarabs - living in an Islamic state (and probably an Awza'ite jihad state, at that) quit offering religious opinions on the Islamic side. It doesn't much touch even Christianity besides supporting Catholic bishops against Sabellians and other in-house heretics. So the reports on Arab and Berber affairs in Spain (and eighth-century Africa) are purely secular, to be judged on how well the people are being ruled. Unfortunately - for our purpose - that's where Hoyland loses interest, because now we are outside of the "origins" period he'd inherited from Crone.

MC 84 is what handles the revolt against Kulthûm of Damascus. This became a real black eye for the waning years of Hishâm (and Walid II) back in Rusafa. I don't think the Umayyads ever really did retrieve that part of Andalus.

It turns out that the Muslims also viewed this 122 revolt in secular terms. The Mozarab blames "Arures"; the Muslims historically blamed the Sufriya. (Later ones added the Ibadis, but that sect likely came to the west later, apparently subsuming the Sufris.) I sense parallels with the Khurasani movement of Abu Muslim. The former were, they say, at first led by a self-styled prophet, but this prophet was soon overthrown for blasphemy, justly in my opinion. As a more-orthodox movement the Berbers could appeal to the caliph as loyal Muslims, or at least could make a show of it, and rally a pan-Muslim coalition against the Umayyads. We'll note that Abu Muslim's entourage of absolute weirdos will switch to support the 'Abbasid family.

Tabari even offers some of the rebels' propaganda, although here we must be cautious, because we could be reading Tabari's brief against caliphal ('Abbasid) tyranny put in the mouths of faraway people in little position to rebut him. Ancient historians were prone to making up speeches. I do think Muslims were more scrupulous, given that Tabari's peers expected valid chains of transmission and didn't tolerate forgers. So: let's be cautious.

For Tabari, the rebels actually were Muslims, in comparison with the Umayyad court anyway, and deserved a hearing. Khalifa bin Khayyat agreed that as "Haruris" went, the Sufris were more like Ibadis in today's Oman: moderates. (Contrast, the Jarudiya among the Zaidi-Hanafis.) Khalifa by the way disagreed with the revolt in a way Tabari didn't. Khalifa just figured the rebels were angry at the disrespect shown their patron Musa.

Rapa Nui and Hawaii

Undeterred by anklebiters, Alexander Ioannides and others are rolling on with Hawaiki Ultima. This posts the origin of Rapa Nui (which Christians found on Easter Sunday AD 1722 Gregorian) and of our "Hawaiï" chain - here-on, Sandwich - as from Mangareva.

I had to look up Mangareva. I only just heard about this one, like in 2020ish I'd first heard of Marquesas.

Okay: mostly undeterred. There's a DEI statement at the end. They stick "ethics" in there to make it DEEI. #woke isn't dead; it's prepping the battlespace for after-November. At least the buncombe is sequestered.

I had thought that Rapa Nui, at least, was peopled by the Marquesas. I take it that the evidence was too broad at the time to say more than "eastern Polynesia". Mangareva is further south than the Marquesas, so in better-position for South American exploration (Rapa Nui is so near that continent, that Chile now governs it). It is, however, very far from our Sandwich Isles.

Present Sandwich genes come with some admixture, not to say pollution, from the waves of immigration from elsewhere in the Pacific, Europe, and Africa in modern times. That makes difficult to tease possible South American admixture of old, from what happened over the Age of Exploration. Some Sandwich genes in the recent study have "AMR" influx; but some have zero. This is telling me that Easter Island got to South America separately, carrying on their new crops around Polynesia secondarily.

Also possible: in between the dual radiations to Rapa Nui and to Sandwich, Marquesas took on a new wave of visitors from their western Hawaikan cousins. This may have blended their genomes more with Tahiti, leaving Sandwich and Rapa Nui as outliers.

R-M12205

The Balt / Iran split in language also has a genetic component, which is being hashed out among the mostly-Semitic Tribe. Specifically there is an old R1a signature in Levites, who then assuredly are not Levides save by adoption.

Jewish Genomics has the scoop. Which it is, because @FamilyTreeDNA is supposed to get more-formal publication later.

A "Tajik" from Pamir shares R-Y2619 ancestry but was clearly no Jew. The relevant Levites are now reclassified: R-M12205, counting down from AD 750.

So far the Levites in question are Ashkenaz, which is why - beforehand - it was a tossup if R-Y2619 were just East European. Pamir is now Badakhshan so decidedly Iranic. Something like Avestan, Parthian, Bactrian et al.. 'Twould be later that the region became Persianate (or, before that... Buddhist).

"Dienekes" Lazaridis thinks some north-Iran tribe off to itself from 700 BC to injection into Judaea, whenever that was. They'd have drifted west. Lazaridis could call them Medes.

If Lazaridis be right that the injection was so early: I find personally difficult to understand how this bloodline got restricted to the Ashkenaz, "the Scythia" to Greeks and "Saka" to Seistanis (and it's probably not them anyway).

Other commenters are reviving the Khazar hypothesis - was Elhaik right for the wrong reasons? Or maybe this is old Radhan, spreading out to the Caspian shores to the Tatarstan around Kazan. I mean, I know only my femme ancestry and that is decidedly Oriental.

I suspect that we have an incomplete record of male Y-DNA from Sephardic and Mizrahi populations. To be kept in mind: occasional "Ashkenaz" signatures can be imported, like in AD ~1666.

How the Persians failed to make their case

I skipped chapter 2 because it's covering similar ground as Mark Durie. Between chapters 1 and 3, one might explain why it was that Europeans thought that the Persians had degenerated under their Achaemenid shahs. To use the Middle Persian for xšāyaθiya.

Germans and, maybe, Russians and certainly Greeks and Latins could see that the Persian language changed 500-350 BC. I pick on those four because they retained, stubbornly, the inflexions of their own languages; against such pressures as applied to English and French. But the English and French orientalists were saying the same. Since Beowulf and Tolkien I suppose some of the English have inflexion-envy. Frenchmen might, also.

Value-judgements might also be brought at the empire filling its palaces with eunuchs and harems. Van Bladel, head-scratchingly, makes a point of refusing to judge. Okay. The Greeks sure diagnosed the Persians as an unsteady empire, and literally wrote the book on politics. Eventually the Greeks proved that thesis by destroying their empire. Difficult to dispute results.

Even before the disaster of Alexander III's takeover, Persians already could see that the spoken common language was not that of Behistun anymore. This embarrassed some, who then tried to spell their monuments in the good old way. It appears they had no textbook for that; so such inscriptions ended up being... wrong. Like the Book of Mormon (in its first editions) did Tudor/KJV English wrong. If what you put out there isn't evolved but is just wrong, someone is going to point and laugh at you.

A linguistic history of Persian

Old Persian was an inflected language like Avestan and Sanskrit. Farsi is so, no longer. Apart from the vocabulary and the Semitisms (Aramaic then Arabic), it is pretty-much a pidgin of the ancestral tongue. As of last month Kevin van Bladel is explaining it all - for free.

The pidginism thesis, for van Bladel [POST-READ 10/10 -semicreole], came from a chapter in John McWhorter, Language Interrupted (2007). That was before McWhorter's late disgrace. The chapter in 2007 was impressionistic, but still insightful, so van Bladel is now doing justice to a topic which McWhorter - I fear - cannot anymore do himself.

Van Bladel sees the most drastic pidginification in the Achaemenid era. Old Persian was still inflected for Darius I, at least for Darius' monuments. Darius III presided over a language well on its way to the Middle Persian of the Sasanians which, in turn, isn't too far from late-mediaeval Farsi.

This process is what the book essays to sketch. For van Bladel, pots come with people: one people brings language - the pots - and other peoples must react based on how the pots are presented. Greeks, Indians, and Armenians all had to learn Persian; perhaps less hard for them. But so did Aramaeans and Elamites. First, these two languages simply weren't/aren't IndoEuropean, nor are they relatives to each other. More importantly these two were the preponderant populations at the imperial core, where "Javonia" was, like Egypt and Caria, peripheral.

Looks fun. Will read.

Fake myths

The Homeric Iliad contains summaries of maybe hundreds of old legends and myths, mostly Greek and found in other summaries of that legendarium. Eight years ago André Lardinois pinpointed two - which are disputed elsewhere in the epic.

Lardinois believes that the poet intended them to be taken as lies. He brings seven criteria for their ... I suppose, barbarity. Specifically his choices are what Homer calls "Phoenician": that great Other for the Archaic Greeks, what with their Canaanite book-larnin' and mathematical sorcery.

One concerns Tethys and Oceanus, parents of the gods. Here Hera is begging of Aphrodite her magic Venereal bracelet; and of Sleep, because Hera is trying to knock Zeus out for awhile. Sleep, at least, is aware that Oceanus is parent only to rivers... if you're Greek. The Babylonian Enuma Elish, contemporary with Homer, assumes less-ironically that the world came from the salt and clear waters, an ancient Iraqi trope that might even be Sumerian. For Eudemos of Rhodes, likely looking to Aramaic, the two waters were Tauthe and Apason. It's not that Tauthe<*Tjavat/Tiamat had any real etymology with Tethys; for Lardinois, suffice that the names were close-enough for the goddess to lie about it.

The other concerns the division of the cosmos by lot. That sounds positively Deuteronomic. And indeed we don't see this in mainline Greek or otherwise IndoEuropean storytelling. Zeus is simply the god in heaven; Poseidon gets the sea, and Hades gets the underworld. Where we find three gods of heaven, sea, and earth casting lots is in Ugarit. I take it that Greeks didn't really own an earth god, instead having various earth mothers: Demeter, Gaia, Rhea and I'm sure I'm missing some. Seems reasonable that this be Phoenician as well.

Your gold is safe a month after H-Day

In the 1950s came a rash of nuclear-war books. The worst is, I think, Nevil Shute's On The Beach, worse even than Ryder Stacy's porn and the Gamma World oeuvre. I just got through Pat Frank's Alas, Babylon. That one was mostly okay, for a Kennedy voter. You know... a voter for the guy who put Confeds in Portraits in Courage.

My recent interest has been in neutron activation. Which is a sideplot in this story, as the gathering of gold becomes the undoing of several characters as beta-decay hits the higher isotopes of precious metal.

Except that gold-198's halflife is 2.6946 days. Push that up to mercury-198, and after that... nothing happens. (Hg-199 would be trace but that's stable too.) Maybe the bulk of the gold, annealed as it will be with mercury, will chip away a little more on the outside. Would mercury poisoning be a problem for rings and watches? Either way, after a few weeks it shouldn't be radioactive no mo'.

Silver-108 and -110, they say, stay hot for longer.

T-FINER, the alpha dog

The starfire / sunbird engines fuse elements to make helium propellant. You know what also emits helium plasma: α-decay. In 2024, quite the year for deep-space rocket ideas, Loura Hall posted how to do it. A yuuge wall poster of its powerpoint can be downloaded (pdf); the project released an update last year.

Thin Film Isotope Nuclear Engine Rocket. But not TFI-Ner[va], oddly, they prefer T-FINER.

This is a sail of (foully) radioactive metal, maybe 36 m². This sail provides its own propulsion, backward. Alpha particles, which are helium-4 ions, blast away up to 0.05c. That calculates to specific-impulse you... you might not even believe if I told you; in the millions (refer to PDF). Mass-ratio would be the mass of the radioactive metal (+ cargo) over the mass of the waste (+ cargo). This ratio would decline by half-life of the element, rather than the rate of burn.

The structure would be to drag the cargo behind. The sail is thin, like 20-50 μm for Thorium-228.

I didn't do the delta-V maths, but NIAC has, and they say they can get 100 km/s. That's a ticket to anywhere in the Solar System. ²²⁸Th (1.9 years) might get us to the 550 AU solar-lens in 25 years. Cf-254 is advertised as 300 AU in one year! (After which, they can maybe flip-and-drag, to 550 AU.) Outside that, this system will stall out so it's not a serious Centauri candidate.

Launching rolls of thin sheets of radioactive sail from Earth is less a problem, I suspect, than making it all in the first place. Alpha-emitters are neutron-deficient and trend heavy. Those meatballs we can spice in space are the opposite. The consortium is talking about skimming reactors or making in cyclotrons (e.g. Ac-227... and Ra-228). That's done on Earth.

Initial thrust remains a problem, unless we just use this to putt around various Earth orbits. One option is to bring layers of this stuff.

Cargo will have to be low-mass; they aim for 8.2 kg. I don't see a comm relay onboard. So I don't know how well it can beam data from Sedna or wherever. This would compete with the sunsail. Because there isn't 'nuff sun out there and, better, the vessel can be steered.

Meanwhile they hope for demo missions. Uranus, with Ra-228, to launch 2034. If someone else sends a full relay to orbit that planet, T-FINER will demand less comms.

Going bananas

Kalium-40 famously has one too many neutrons, β-decaying to argon-40. Not quite radioactive enough to give you argon burps; so it comes up from the mantle with normal potassium in eruptions. How radioactive, is the trick; if it's too long, as with bismuth-209 (2.01×10¹⁹ years) the halflife gets imprecise.

Pumice is telling us more-exactly how radioactive is ⁴⁰K: from Vesuvius. This is done in tandem with recent work verifying the Plinian Eruption against the first months of Titus' imperium.

The latest coins in situ predate 24 June AD 79. I guess the Romans wanted to wait a bit in case someone assassinated the likely heir. It turned out his bro Domitianus liked the guy, better than he liked anyone else in Latium anyway. I don't know any coins got minted in Campania for a year or so after the eruption; Roman coins after 8 September get the "IMP XV" sigil, the fifteenth acclamation of their new imprah. Also "P P", pater-patriae.

The town with the pumice in question was Oplontis. With the assumption of a July-August eruption - Pliny says 24 August - the halflife is narrowed. 1.2044×10¹⁰ years, twelve billion. Give/take 88 million.

Which they then overlay back on the eruption for 1,938 ±13 years before 2025. Which is AD 87. So uh. I guess they added these calcs to some others to get the halflife. The precision is still not what we'd prefer, but ¹⁴C is also a pest.

A spirit-haunted church

It's October! And a new year on Mars...

The position of Orthodox Christianity, in history, has held that natural processes and the movements of the planets are driven by angels. In the past few hundred years, scientists - with mathematicians' help - have dispossessed most of our universe. Some questions remain, yes. But increasingly beyond the purview of, say, the accretion of our Milky Way galaxy.

Modern Orthodoxy seems to be arguing that, yeah, we were a bunch of superstitious ignorants up to Epiphanius and John Damascene. But you can totally follow us when we do necromancies!!

Unlike the veneration for the angel of planet Malacandra, or maybe for the angel who is that planet; necromancy is contradictory in the Bible. On the one hand it's forbidden. On the other hand, as Alex Sorin points out, you can call upon the Sancti for intercession; and the saints are not restricted to the angelic movers of wind and planet, but include also (certain of) the dead. Somewhere in between: king Saul, then barred from asking intercession himself, once called upon a woman in Endor who might bring up a saint on his behalf. That differs from a sinner begging a nun at Agnes' convent to pray for him because... because.

Catacombs and tombs tend to survive the ages and, indeed, Christians could be found down there doing veneration - and begging intercession - from very early years. So Sorin wins on points. The intercession of saints has existed from the earliest days, and extended to dead humans from scarcely-later days. For "great apostasy" restorationists, this happened (I think) too early to extricate from Christianity as the first authors intended. Note that the most notorious restorationist sect, the LDS, goes as far as to post their dead righteous to rule over exoplanets.

Some Christians did attempt to eject necromancy from the faith. Ephrem refused it for the Syrians; over here out West, Vigilantius had taken up that cause. Jerome - a Latin - took this one to school, as mah boi does.

To invoke practical necessity, as Gavin Ortlund might, I sometimes dispute Jerome. Jerome was one who preferred the dead to the living. That can be a problem.

I propose here that it is not a problem at base; there is indeed wisdom to be had from the departed, if not from the process of departing. Here I think practical necessity supports Jerome. So - perhaps Sorin could have stopped there.

Aphrodite's girdle

Stephen Kane gets cited a few times around here, mostly for exoplanets. But he also sometimes ponders planets close to Earth. So here is something making waves in the Youtube sphere, alongside Sean N Raymond. It's about whether Venus had a moon.

I don't pretend competence in these fields. At any rate Kane's paper is talking about a hypothesis: if Venus had a moon early-enough in her history, then that moon would have been crushed and would have fallen by now.

I will, however, note that Venus is presently rather flat. We do except those volcanoes, mighty Maxwell Montes (the rare male exception to the naming rules there), and the Alpha/Beta Regiones. But widest of all, lies Aphrodite Terra. The "continent".

Aphrodite Terra tracks the Venereal equator. This always has stricken me as strange. Venus orbits extremely slowly, and that retrograde; such that the planet is more spherical than Earth's geode. Earth can run solar-synchronous satellites in orbit; for Venus, I guess they can stationkeep something with a sail at SVL1.

If a moon disintegrated in low Venus orbit more-or-less coplanar with Venus' ecliptic, that might account for colossal masses atop Venus' equator. Venus has resurfaced much of its plaons, yes. But maybe Aphrodite Terra was simply too massive for this effect to cover it all up. (Alternatively the moonfall happened recently.)

Nestorius and Cyril in context

As an occasional "Nestorian" blog, and certainly a pro-east-Syriac blog, I have some interest in that history. Matt Crawford traces the history to Nestorius' roots in Antioch. Good luck to Crawford; I hope he fares better than some others.

Cyril is meanwhile (somewhat) rehabilitated as not just making up theotokos (Latin, deipara) himself. Most people (like me, and Candida Moss) have seen Cyril as a base opportunist. We here have inherited Schwartz in 1928. Even if, of late, we have had to back off some of the Agora slanders against this Miaphysite saint. [EXCUSES 10/13: Ancestral wisdom, if you buy it.]

Emperor Julian, born to Christian (Eunomian!) emperors, among his Christian foils had to address such as were saying theotokos or something like that. As a pagan, he recognised this term as pagan, like a mortal-ess birthing Heracles or Dionysus. The Eunomians weren't saying this; only a Miaphysite could say this. So Cyril was heir to a Miaphysite tradition. Gregory of Nazianzus knew this as of Apollinaris; later authors would see Eutychianism or "Julianism". Nevertheless Gregory (somehow) affirms theotokos.

Nestorius (and, I could add, John Chrysostom before him; and Diodore of Tarsus) grew up where Apollinarianism was staking its last redoubt. Theotokos could be tolerated anywhere else. Not in Antioch, says Crawford.

My reading of Crawford suggests he personally supports theotokos, or at least some form of Christian unity without taking that seriously. He wants to humanise Nestorius without accepting him. Maybe he can. I'll leave that aside for now.

The story may start with Paul of Samosata, all the way back in the middle 200s AD. He had posed, perhaps clumsily: for the Word is from above; Jesus Christ, a human being, is from here. The Council of Antioch shut him off AD 268. Eunomian subordinatism owes to this thought - if taking Paul's words literally. Athanasius devoted at least half his career against Eunomianism, maybe more than half. Nestorius' dyophysic might descend from Paul, also; but I think it turned out better, and I don't know how far Athanasius would have disliked Nestorius.

Gregory and (maybe) Athanasius could have threaded this needle. Real problems started emerging out West. Not the problems I'd expect.

One Leporius of Marseilles had propounded a notion of Christ as the merger of God and man. We don't really have the exact words he said, but the Masillians booted him out. Leporius then met Augustine in Africa and, basically, did the apology tour. The ensuing libellius survives through extensive quoting by John Cassian who brought it back to Gaul, with Augustine's personal imprimatur (if mostly an antiPelagian text, here). Cassian's aim was to rebut "Nestorians" who may well have preserved Leporius' earlier work.

Crawford carries over recent scholarship on Cyril's oeuvre, also: On the Incarnation of the Only-Begotten and that There is One Christ and Lord according to the Scriptures. This - for De Durand - preceded the whole feud with Nestorius. Nestorius' accession as the Patriarch of Constantinople, for Crawford, was unlucky for Nestorius, because Cyril was already an enemy of the dyophysitism who also shared his antiApollinarian credentials (or so he claimed).

I admit, I think Leporius got it right first-time. Augustine was always a momma's-boy who could easily have fallen in with the Ephesus councils, had he been born that late. I like to think - say - Jerome would have known better, hence why his work got translated to Syriac and passed East.

Some high-Isp experiments

ToughSF posted a few avenues of research, early last weekend. Both definitively drawing-board. I'd have said something but I couldn't click the link to one of the actual papers then, so - you get my take on them, today.

One is laser-hits on a liquid propellant. It splashes. As far as ToughSF knows, nobody's solved this one. Then he went on to note how lasers sploot droplets. Next!

The University of Surrey is asking about magnesium rockets. I'd heard of burning aluminium (as Surrey spell it) in oxygen, or maybe some even stronger oxidant like ozone. Burning metals isn't for Earth or LEO, but it intrigues me for low-grav takeoffs like our Moon - once bermed. Magnesium is just as common over there. But again, this looks rife with Unsolved Problems. The link will be here (pdf).

Absent a pdf, we do get an illustration. It looks like AI and makes little sense to my mortal eyesight. I just see magnesium is not planned for surface-to-orbit roggets the way some were talking aluminum. They want mass drivers, to take this fuel into orbit which rockets burn it up there. Into that topic, PlanetaryEngSys has butted: that mass drivers should start small, such that the capsule then fire the engines on that (parabolic) trajectory, to bring it to orbit. Seems more reasonable than Surrey's proposal frankly. ESA should pay that grant to them.

VIDEO 10/10/26: Space Startup News.

Quirinius

This blog has had some occasion to look into The Third Gospel's use of material and into its general tendency. Some of Luke's changes can be illustrated with textual-strain. Among the more-diverting results is Jesus' long gestation: he was conceived in Herod's reign (d. 4 BC) as in Matthew, but he came out among us during Quirinius' census (r. AD 6). Mary bore a burden quite unlike those of most women.

Miracles, or snark, aside: at least Joslin McDowell never entertained that notion, Protestant as he is (yeah, he's still alive). He prefers that Quirinius was there several years before. And maybe this Roman was; but he wasn't doing census in someone else's kingdom. Especially not Herod's.

Michael Kochenash explains Luke's plan. Luke knew of Roman-Jewish talk that the census was a flashpoint of rebellion, and this rebellion in particular. Kochenash goes further: he notes Josephus (a Galilean friend of Herod Agrippa II) in The Jewish War and Antiquities. The former, Josephus completed before the Campanian volcano buried Agrippa's sister; this eruption received note only in the latter.

TJW is well aware of Quirinius' census and of the revolts around it. But this book does not connect those events with the Revolt. The connexion becomes explicit only in JA. Kochenash does not see Josephus, here, arguing that point for or against other historians like Justus. It seems an idea that Josephus had just... come up with. A reasonable idea, to my mind anyway; but never mind that.

Kochenash does not think that Saint Luke had come up with that idea, either, by himself. Instead - Kochenash argues - Luke made of it a trope. Roma and Judaea came into serious Imperial contact through that census. Luke associates this contact with Jesus' infancy. What the Jews do to Jesus, is going to post a milestone to the Ninth Of Av; which the Jews perhaps could have averted, by embracing him as Christ.

Crossan would supplement, here, the Holy Spirit as Divine gloría. This has abandoned the Jews to settle upon the Apostles, and - finally - upon Peter and Paul who are headed westward.

Capstone of prophecy

Adrien de Jarmy seeks to make a wave in sira studies. Namely to separate "Constitution of the Madina" therefrom.

He points out that the Constitution hails Muhammad by titles taken from sura 7 and derived from sura 25. The document also delivers taṣliya, as the Dome of the Rock upon Muhammad - and upon [sura 3-4's] Jesus. One title, "sayyid of the mursalîn", is not on the Dome at all. That title, to boost the Arab Prophet over that other Semitic prophet, would be a development from 70s/690s Umayyad thought.

That tracks closer with the sura 33+48 complex, that Muhammad is the "seal". De Jarmy posits that it is overall 'Abbâsid. Huh.

According to Crone-Hinds' God's Caliph, the Umayyads were shifting to the ideology that the Caliphate was the postProphetic dispensation. For this, they could use sura 48. Just about any 'Abbâsite propagandum about how Muslims need to come together and avoid fitna can also be found in Umayyad sermons and poems; which Crone and Hinds did so find. The only real distinction is that 'Abbâsids (later!) came to interpret their caliphate as the stand-ins for the Prophet rather than, as earlier, shadows of God.

Overall I'd like to see comparisons of the Constitution with the treaty-literature. De Jarmy can make of that, his next project.

CI origins

B type Bennu, like Cb Ryugu, corresponds to CI meteors sent down here from Above - like local CM, CO and maybe CT.

Now Maria Schönbächler et al. have formally published this, as reported in Switzerland Wednesday.

When the CIs accreted, they accreted with water ice. That "when", for Ryugu and arguably for Bennu, could have been as early as 2My after CAI formation. They take those "calcium-aluminum-rich inclusion" chondrites to be the eldest of them all, I assume marking that 4.567Gy age we keep seeing. Our CI, and I assume CY also, would precede CM and CO (and CV). By this time, Jupiter had grown to 20 Earth masses.

The paper accepts that Bennu is rubble from a parent. But, without naming 142 Polana. Polana presently rolls around 2.4 AU. This is well within the 4-5 AU ice line today, and assuredly in CM times then, therefore has migrated. The paper's "figure 5" speaks of something called "ureilites" to be native down at ~2.5 AU, sooty achondrite rocks from some differentiated parent destroyed 5 My after CAI beyond Vesta.

Such chaos may account for why the authors seem cautious about assigning general CI/CY (for asteroids, B/Cb) distance from our (very) young sun at this time. And they don't speculate on the Grand Tack; this may be because they must admit hazy understanding of asteroids beyond Jupiter. CI was once mooted as far as 7 AU, assumed for instance here (slushball Ceres remains, I think, a migrate from up there). Other papers have put CO out 3.7 AU so, hey, why not for CI.

Redshifts

This blog has typically left the vagaries of the Big Bang and its cosmologic models to better bloggers. Lately we have a few hits on this topic, so I've decided to annotate them.

Key to deep cosmology is deep time. The universe expands, which by Doppler is colouring the further galaxies to the red. So the unit of time is like the unit of Marine Isotope Stages: the higher the number, here z_sys, the deeper. By the way using z means we can leave aside the vexatious Hubble Tension, as to compare stratum to stratum.

The Turtle is pointing to cosmic daybreak, a term connoting more abruptness than "dawn". At z≤15.1, we have stars and galaxies; hydrogen and helium stars, anyway. Never before/greater-than. Pace Zim.

Three galaxies, where we can better see them, are already forming "metals" at z=7.2883, 7.8 and even 9.31. There is a reïonism event between 8 and 7, ending 5.3, which, I take it, had been obscuring our sight of higher z's. (Damned if I'm going to use the -isation suffix like some Star Control 3 alien.) 7.65 is where this SMBH lives.

At z=7.76, estimated 660My from the start, comes a Black Hole Sun. So that isn't at the cosmic daybreak, pace the title; it's older than the 7.29 galaxy but younger than the other two.

I think these ancient red dots could provide furnaces fit to meld all manner of heavier elements. They point to the creation of early black holes generally. Neutron stars, I'll grant, might take a mite longer to form.

From the swamps to the hills

The consensus has been that teosinte was cultivated along the Balsas about 7000 BC. Then it has gotten vague, until that backwash from the Chibcha 3600 BC. Keith Prufer et al. are delving deeper into the spread of Mesoamerican maize.

I assume Mixe-Zoque for these first farmers.

Agriculture in Mesoamerica, they say, started with squash 8000 BC. Teosinte spread from the Balsas to Panama after 6200 BC and crossed the Darien a millennium later. (That Road To The South was always nasty for us.) At the same (belated) time it reached the Peten, which the paper calls "the Maya lowlands" although I question how Maya the place then was. After 3600 BC some intrepid northern highlanders crossed the now-yummy maize corn with some hardier altiplano breeds, making something that upland peoples (Otomí?) could live off of. This trickled back to southern Mesoamerica where, I understand, were other (relative) highlands as could now farm it. This breed got to South America too.

Except that even the post-Chibchan "Maya" stuck to lowland near-marsh farming of this crop. It took until the second millennium BC before they dared the hills. Overall the impression I get is that wetlands when farmed became non-wetlands, which then had to worry about changes in rainfall. This reminds me of how the lower Iraq suffered from droughts. And indeed the 2100s BC seem drier here as there.

I don't read where the American marshes got salted in Prufer's paper. I just read that they dried out. That was less a worry in the hills which, even if they don't rain, can catch ocean breezes and fogs overnight. The hills instead worry about keeping their soil at all. Indeed, after 900ish BC, I detect terracing: to actively manage erosion through slope stabilization.

Arabe 6982

This blog has had occasion to discuss how the Malikite branch of Islam brought their Qurʾāns with them, to Spain and to Sicily. Mostly these were of Nāfiʿ d. 169/785, through the intermediary Warsh. Other codices existed, such as that of Ibn ʿĀmir. The Umayyads preferred that one; some of the earliest (canon) Qurʾāns preserve it, when/where the Umayyads yet ruled. Malik (d. mid 790s) compiled his jurisprudence in a post-Umayyad age, when Ibn ʿĀmir too was on the outs.

I am elsewhere instructed that the ʿAbbāsids were - then - settling upon Abū ʿAmr d. ~152/770. So why not Nāfiʿ, eh.

Marijn van Putten is looking at BnF Arabe 6982. This, in the process of utterly trashing a work by Ala Vahidnia (who, and whose publisher, better be more careful in future).

We agree MS 6982 isn't quite the Nāfiʿ codex as in standard publication. (Leave aside how it has come to us.) Given that Spain was an Umayyad stronghold before, later, going Maliki; mayyybe this MS is a witness to its Ibn ʿĀmir phase.

No! says van Putten, who has access to Dani's taysir (and to Corpus Coranicum, which Vahidnia should use in future). MS 6982 is indeed Nāfiʿ, but along a side branch. Mostly Qālūn. A couple of minor exceptions: one - yes - Warsh (and someone else) and one other someone-else. The script anyway looks ornamental unlike like most Umayyad work.

I don't know who's done any work on what heifer the parchment was pulled off of. They say the binding is of North African style and "recent". Qālūn remains in print in Tunisia and Algeria; Libya too when they can keep the power on. For MS 6982 I can report that a terrible job was done, as the leaves are pretty-much random here. Q. 4:54-19:83, so already so curtailed when the binder got it.

I don't know that our MS ever breathed the Spanish air. At a guess it was commissioned in Kairawan or even Tunis, as Malik's disciples (like Ibn Wahb) were spreading their madhhab and their texts westward circa 185/800. Then brought to wherever-it-was before Warsh had quite nailed down the Nāfiʿ tradition over there. And then botched, I must assume by a Frenchman.

Athanasius' manifesto

Athanasius' 39th Festal Letter is famous among Bible-believers, as a seminal text for their support of the present canon. It stands with the "Muratorian Fragment" here. Unfortunately like that fragment, our letter is also a fragment.

In 2015, David Brakke presented the [Sahidic] Coptic to fill in one of the missing pieces. He also published all he could find of the whole thing. More context is thereby provided. Brakke further takes time to revisit an earlier dispute against Alberto Camplani.

Athanasius' opponents are the small-g gnostics. These aren't necessarily the mystics of future Nag Hammadi. These are anyone who thought it groovy to add to the canon apocryphal - as in, supposedly secret but nonetheless true - traditions. This has been a bad habit among the Jews in particular (see here) but Christians too had inherited (among others) the Dream Visions in 1 Enoch, all 1 Enoch 1-36, and some version of Jubilees. Clement of Alexandria knew "Thomas" didn't deserve to be in the Four but cited it anyway. As late as Severus of Antioch we'll be seeing Christians draw from this well. Don't get me started on Cave of Treasures.

Athanasius raises the devastating point that the forgers knew just as well as we know that if (say) 1 Enoch 22 existed at the time of Moses, Moses would have quoted it and mandated it as a rule from the aeons. That is why the forgers have to claim apocryphism: that everyone kept this a secret. But why wouldn't the Levites want the best law for the people at the time?

For Brakke, Athanasius might boast of his clerical standing, but not of his intellectual standing. Someone like Arius or, worse, Melitius might. If their erudition comes from heaps of Oxyrhynchite garbage, that erudition is of equal value.

It's not that Athanasius was anti-intellectual. Syrians could call him malpana with the best of the Fathers. I would go further than Brakke however. Athanasius might have inspired modern Biblical (and Quranic) fundamentalists (we may assume he was a creationist himself) but I don't see that he was closing down "debate" as such. I don't see Athanasius talking up flat-earth like, oh, Lactantius. It's that Athanasius drew a thick line between real sciences (what Beale calls "scientody"), and snowing everybody with obscure hokum (see Beale for further examples).

Suppressing Chalcedon

Under weak Zeno, the Empire made its bid to smooth over the rufflings of Chalcedon AD 451. The Henotikon takes the novel course of not mentioning it. As if it were one of those councils nobody anymore remembers like Serdica.

Philip M Forness has uploaded his thesis to academia.edu; this will become his 2018 book Preaching Christology. The Aramaic script used here is Estrangel...ó. There exists a colon to title each version. The key to the thesis is Jacob/James of Serug. Pronounced "Serugh".

Jacob is a saint of longstanding with the Maronites, presently Catholic. It is through early-modern Maronites that we have most Jacob's work, and - more importantly - how Jacob's legacy got advertised to Latin Christendom as small-o orthodox, ensuring it got copied and translated out here. But in Late Antiquity, the Maronites really weren't Catholic. They sort-of affirmed Chalcedon but more-enthusiastically affirmed the Monotheletism under Heraclius. Forness stands to explain, why they jumped onto Heraclius' project.

Like other authors of dubious orthodoxy, lookin' atchyoo Ephrem, Jacob had a ready talent for the memra' form. He was able to take Zeno's Christology and translate it for a popular audience. This ensured a party, not yet a schism, of Ephesian fanatics. Of course after AD 496 under next emperor Anastasius they were simply the only recognised Roman church.

Others in this party included Zachariah of Mytilene (not yet the Pseudo- continuator, of which Forness is aware) and Symeon of Bet-Arsham. Forness brings them to illustrate how these authors used Henotic (if I may) jargon as a marker for their acceptance of Zeno's full text. Jacob used the same tropes.

At first that party also counted Philoxenos of Mabbug (Arabic Manbij). This one confronted patriarch Flavian II of Antioch, AD 509 (or AG 820), demanding miaphysitism and acceptance of the Henotikon. Two years later, Philoxenos went further than just dismissing Chalcedon; the Antiochenes would have to denounce it (one suspects, by Imperial command), and denounce pope Leo's "Tome". His ally Severus behaved similarly.

Come AD 518, Justin the Illyrian would succeed Anastasius. Justin appointed one Paul, perhaps a convert from Judaism, to be Antioch's Patriarch - under orders to reënforce Chalcedon in Syria. Their decisions led to Severus removing his bishops out of communion with Constantinople as well as just the city Rome.

Barḥadbeshabba (inconsistently-spelled, here) will claim that Narsai wrote his homilies to rival Jacob's out east. Although Forness doesn't bring Narsai himself for this.

The new covenant became Torah

For Jews, MT Jeremiah 31:31-4 promises a new covenant. The Messiah will come to rule justly and install it. In a world where "sin" as we know it simply has no meaning, this Dispensationalism must apply.

The various "documentary hypotheses" problematise this notion.

We argue for the rearrangement of the Jewish Scriptures - plural - into the five books "of Moses", the epilogue to Deuteronomy (which Moses didn't write) and the book Joshua. Anchoring it all is Leviticus 19-25. This happened after the return from exile - after Jeremiah. Might Jeremiah have been laying out a programme for this, our Torah...?

Jeremiah as an oral preacher might not have intended any written law at all. (I am fairly sure of similar for Ezek 36:26-8.) One problem here, as ever for Jeremiah, is that the Greek differs. Joachim Krause (pdf) has pointed especially to v. 33. Here, is it "my torah" (Hebrew, singular) or "my nomoi" (Greek, plural)? The former implies God is going to abandon the One Torah which, in modern Judaeo-Christian agreement, equals the Masoretic edition of the Five Books (thereby assumed known to Jeremiah). The latter implies laws in these scriptures. Krause notes that the translator was loose with singular/plural elsewhere such that it might translate the singular in the basis.

I suggest that the translator, here, understood how his (yes, male) contemporaries understood tôrati here. He would have been reading this alongside Ezekiel 20:25 and Jeremiah 7:22. The former has God dismiss his own laws (explicitly plural); the latter denies that He ever sent anything during the desert wanderings (which wanderings, by Jewish consensus, did happen).

In that light, where to find these new Prophetic laws which weren't in the scribal schools? For Krause, Jeremiah is saying to trash all that stuff as to stick with Prophecy.

Long-term, that didn't happen. Maybe it couldn't. Baruch came along as Jeremiah's scribe and delivered the only version of his work we got. (And then later Jews botched the transmission but never mind all that.) And the Holiness Code scribes arranged the Hexateuch and following books into near-exactly what we got today. They could, somewhat honestly, tell us all that this is the New Covenant. It certainly has turned out to differ from the old Deuteronomic- or Priestly- content. Jeremiah had refuted the former and Ezekiel, the latter.

Jews sometimes interpret things, as I've noted, in whatever language. They sometimes say that by "new", Jeremiah meant "renewed". I'll let others answer that. I'll concede that as a rule, interpretations may be early.

I suspect some Jews continued to chafe against that their now-rewritten Bible was much improvement upon the earlier stuff but, unfortunately, we no longer have any of that earlier stuff in its own form. Thus, Paul. Thus, Muhammad.

q_rsqrt comes to the Jerk Store

Almost four years ago, I asked: how come q_rsqrt didn't force ufloat or udouble or whatever in her input. The Quake games never used this func for a negative input; this might raise a nasty native CPU error. Why not - I asked - force the positive input and crash gracefully?

Today I was watching some video on Youtube - I won't link it, it was AI - about the Year 2038 Bug. That's when the 31 bits, counting from the new year 1970, overflow. It's not 32 bits because it's a signed integer and they wanted to allow negative years, back to some time in 1901. I'm told December. Most people they cared about were born after then.

Another issue is that ye olde compilers from the earliest years of C, Ada, and Pascal were "type safe". If you had a big uint, they didn't like it when you made it an int. There was a chance you'd lop off the highest bit and make the whole thing meaningless. The compiler is your friend!

No really, he was written to be your friend. Programmers need to work with the compiler, not against him. Leave aside 2038. What could the Id Software doodz have done in the 1990s?

I'm thinking that before calling q_rsqrt, they could have sent their vectors into another function: which takes a float and squares it. "Pffft they probably did that already, x^2 or, better, x*x." Yeah, sure. And the base multiplication left the float as a float. We need a function that knows when x^[even uint] happens it sends back an unsigned value.

The problem is with the type of x. IEEE 754 didn't bother with "ufloat". There was no such thing in the 1990s. Why not? Because what "floats" is where the "point" is at, and sign is just one bit. They'd have to decide whether to add that bit to the top, or to the decimals. For the purpose of normalisation, which be taking the sum of three squares (so could be large), let's say we agreed to put it on the topside.

Now that we've decided to monkey with the structure of a hardwired type, which we can't do in software; we go to Intel HQ and we ring the doorbell with our proposal to alter their processor. It's 1994; maybe 1985 (Elite). Who's got space for that? And why does it matter so bad in, you know, a shmup game.

Blah blah blah, not worth the bother, never has been worth the bother. You know it, I (now) know it... everyone knows it (except apparently me). So why write alla'that. It's because here:

long i  = * ( long * ) &y;

This type could be unsigned. (It also happens that "long" then meant 32-bit.) I just ran this by Google AI and...

uint32_t i;
memcpy(&i, &y, sizeof(i));
i = 0x5f3759df - (i >> 1);
memcpy(&y, &i, sizeof(y));

Chew on that, Kasper Nielsen!

Early writings of Jacob in Edessa

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Paul Ulishney a couple years ago got Correspondence of Jacob of Edessa and Eustathius of Dara into print. Jacob, per Ulishney, was then a forty-something monk esteemed as a theologian and an interpreter of Greek work.

Complicating matters, many of these names have other names. Jacob is (in English) sometimes called James. Edessa was usually Callirhoë in those days, which somewhat has a memory today as "Şanlı'Urfa". And Eustathius seems to have been in charge of saecular affairs in Dara to Ruha's east. Because, per Ulishney, Jacob addressed him as "the petty lord (kyriosuna)". But affectionately!

Also complicating is that little Jimmy whilst in Edessa veered off-and-on between being a monk and full bishop. We do know he wrote one of our letters at the age of 42 (bald, by then) but that one ain't dated and lacks any other real markers so, maddeningly, we still don't know when our man was born.

Wikipedia still thinks AD 672 was a possible year for Jacob's installation as bishop. Ulishney's rearrangement and interpretation agrees more with (early-)684 / 995. Such is the majority view since Omert J Shrier 1991 and is so assumed in Hoyland 1997-8. Ulishney doesn't defend Best O.J. against freakin' Wiki since, why should he condescend. So I'll do it.

In the earlier 680s - AG 990s to nonbarbarians - a small schism broke out cutting the "east" from the Antioch-Edessa mainline. These will be the now-historic sees of Tikrit, Singara, and mount Alpap. The patriarch, taking that saintly name Severus, wanted to be a Syrian pope like his contemporary in Egypt acted as pope, appointing bishops or at least demanding a veto. (Investiture was always a problem for churches.) Severus enlisted Jacob as secretary. Ulishney reasonably assumes they'd not force this upon a bishop, but the bishops may well call in the smartest monk in the area. And Jacob, much as it pains us dyotheletes, was a genius. His contemporary Athanasius of Balad agreed; as Athanasius II he'll get Jacob that episcopacy as one of his first acts in office. I don't hear that anyone in Edessa complained... at the time. (Read on.)

All this stuff is in the British Library, still in manuscript: "Add. 12,172". Still unedited. On the other hand, now that Ulishney has organised it better, maybe we'll get to read it soon. Put Alison Salvesen on it. Is there some Copt who can send a grant?

Eustathius will enjoy a career after these letters, as well. He was the Nicodemus of the north Christian Arabs, founding a martyrion for Muʿâdh of the Taghlib. Michael the Syrian will post that to AG 1020 which we call 708-9 (against some "Muhammad" but assuredly under al-Walîd's command), I assume based on that church's records and plaques.

In these letters Jacob also dealt with the Romans and the Nestorians, as well a Syrian Miaphysite might. Jacob as an intellectual was no enemy to Greeks as such; but he might have grown disenchanted with the imperial Romans, Latin-speaking or otherwise. Constantine IV was asserting his primacy in Constantinople (681/993-on), and preparing to throw off the Monotheletism which his father had tolerated. As for the Nestorians: Jacob and Athanasius would have to worry their rivals might be eager to embrace their wayward brethren. There's also the issue that Jacob knew the earth was round unlike some idiots over there.

Jacob will outlast his pope, but not long outlast him. Athanasius was known in his (meagre) correspondence to be a stickler for, basically, Christian halakha. For instance he forbade to consume halal (Holger Zellentin has a good book on this). The next patriarch Julian - contemporary with Justinian II - proved more lax in such ordinances. By then and for this, the Edessenes preferred Julian over their own neoRabboula. Jacob resigned in a huff and retvrned to monk-ing. And to writing manifesti.

Per Salvesen's translation, Jacob's frustrations spilled into the scholion on the edition of 1 Kings / 3 Reigns 14 he was compiling there. Also extant is a "Testamentum Domini" from this circle which may well be by Jacob himself. Dunno about that Pseudo-Methodius tho', that Sinjari seems more oecumenical.

Hot shot, part deuce

So I kinda/sorta trusted VAERS when deciding on the booster in fall 2021. I rolled those dice having taken Pfizer's original schedule that spring and then catching some yuck in June. Stayed un-boosted.

That RS means it is a reporting system for the V.A. Events. That database accumulated a lot of such reportage. Less from Pfizer than from Moderna I think, but the second jab I took had some statistical problems. And people were freaking out over - all of them, as the same "Clot Shot". Which might skew the results, like all those geezers and morons freaked out over sudden acceleration in the late-1980s Audi.

There could have been some signal-to-noise correction in how various agencies read the VAEs from the RS. The British Medical Journal est. 1840 must report on what happened.

This journal is not some Slay News fly-by-night; they are generally pro-vax, like for shingles.

The journal notes that by mid-2021 the FDA knew there was a noise problem in VAERS. It further uncovers a letter which, in September 2022, then-CDC-director Rochelle Walensky sent: Walensky was worried that it was all getting stupid over at the FDA. The FDA meanwhile was muzzling the people raising the concerns the prior year.

By noise, BMJ means the FDA simply ignored myocarditis, pericarditis, or tinnitus as not-counting as a real vaccine adverse event. The "-card-" root means cardio - the heart.

The FDA honcho during this time was Peter Marks. He'd been a big force in "Operation Warp Speed" in May 2020. Robert Kennedy demanded Marks' resignation 28 March 2025. You can now find Marks at Eli Lilly in DC.

Starshot v Starfire: the race to Sedna

Given the ongoing investments into sunsail and Direct Fusion, outer system missions are coming into view. In one case, the outer system is coming to us: Sedna. We have until 2075 when this visitor from the Oort gets into perihelion (76 AU). Last year, Elena Ancona, Roman Ya. Kezerashvili, Savino Longo compared the two methods.

Other methods had earlier been mooted such as VASIMR (perhaps-foremost), but these run in the timeframes of decades. Democracies don't build cathedrals.

Other important constraints include that the mission requires a power source that isn't solar, that far away. It also needs communication with Earth. These techs were last refined in New Horizons - a flyby.

This DFD, which is assumed Princeton's Starfire, would be running 1.6 MW under its own power. This is to extend the lifetime of the superconductor over ten years; the ceiling would be thirteen.

With as much time as they have, either could (and should) borrow Jupiter for gravity-assist, probably Venus too. Dunno about outer planets. The DFD would further be able to flip-n'-burn and inject into the planetoid's orbit. That would however add some years onto the trip.

One-way sunsail would get out there in seven years; the Starfire in ten. There is no reason that exploration-agencies cannot do both, given that a sunsail might be cheaper. Especially given that other missions will be bidding against Princeton for its 300g of He-3.

On-board variable propulsion

Ion drives like VASIMR, and adjustable NERVA like the shockwave rotor, can squeeze more efficiency from their drives by feeding in energy and/or adjusting the exhaust throat. It occurs to me that this means recalculating the rocket equation in real time. As in: on the rocket, not outsourced to orbital data. That drinks more energy for compute, which then must be controlled somehow; probably by radiating out.

These are exponent and logarithm equations. If we were using a TSR-80 extended BASIC processor, welcome to Taylor series.

Needless to say, that is some bull-tish. Don't we have some tricks to turn a float into a 32?bit long(ish)int? Just shift the integer over bro. *(long*), subtract some magic number, then <<= bro. Like when the exponent was -1/2.

That'd be great if the ratios were all integers. They... probably aren't. Because they aren't, this method requires to poll the ratio until it reaches an integer and then run the calc.

We'd hope to force integers on all four values of the Tsiolkovsky to some cromulent unit-length, like millimeters and grams. We'll see. Instead of exp(dv/ve) it's exp(dv) × root-ve(e). One multiplication operation. Gotta be better than Taylor(8). Ln(m0/mf) meanwhile is [lb(m0) - lb(mf)] × ln(2). Now we have to ponder overflow: 32-bit integers go only to 2³¹. So, no; these are going to be km/s maybe even Mm/s which we have to rescale after the calc.

Depending on the unit-lengths I might even consider storing the exponent-powers and the e-roots in tables. Data got corrupted on Voyager but I suspect our triage is better today; so's our shielding. On arrival at the destination our need to punch the engine shouldn't be as dire, so the memory used in the tables can be wiped, for reüse in the actual mission.

This was imprecise for q_rsqrt and will be imprecise now. Those 1990s gamers applied Newton's method upon that approx "y", thus: y * ( 1.5F - ( x * 0.5F * y * y ) ). Lotsa multiplications, here. And that's second-order because this was just a square. And, to remind: we're talking about high exponents and high roots. May as well devolve to Taylor.

Kasper Nielsen's cheat-sheet of "float tricks" may offer an out. We have NVIDIA's "piecewise linear approximation" which shouldn't overflow. Ian Stephenson does one better for Pow2 which "approximates the error with a quadratic".

There are other unsafe-code solutions in the roster, some just straight assembler with no overflow checks. Good news: I doubt we need 'em for the floating fractions. The mass ratio as wet/dry[-er] even at some Apolloesque 96 isn't going to have ln(x) all that high (4.6ish here), and this is going down as we drive. The velocity ratio working with inner-system delta-V and as-good exhaust as they'll allow us (like, 14 km/s) should also be low, enough for exp[x] anyway.

MEMORY COPY 9/19: If you know we're on positives.

Types... deletes... and stuff

Sydney Sweeney should not be supporting gambling in sports. This support is a failure of character on her part.

I recall when Instapundit lambasted Busey for appearing in the Turkish film Valley of the Wolves. I recall he called Busey a "whore". Euphoria, I propose, was just as disgusting a project. So it is not like Sweeney hasn't already telegraphed that she, like Busey, was willing to appear in whatever paid.

If you think I am being cheap: some of the shots which Insta is levelling at her detractors are cheap. (And if we must Go There, the lady northwest would probably look about as good as 30-year-old Sweeney sans makeup and airbrush. I've personally dated northeast.)

I might further ask, from the support of Instapundit and others, to what degree they have been bought off too.

So you want 70 tonnes in Venus-Earth Hohmann

The Superheavy has pushed a 75 tonne load into LEO; maybe some krauts have pushed 70 t. This load is headed for Venus. v_inf, for that, is 2.5 km/s. Leviathan expect to pay Elon Musk MONEY to send it all in a 160 tonne Starship; and MO' MONEY, for the fuel top-up in LEO. Presently the paper hasn't stated how much fuel they need but Google has told me, 400 t (megagrams). In this poast, I compete for that blank cheque. We are all about branching paths here.

An interplanetary Hohmann operates by regular launch windows, Earth/Venus on that pentagram synod of 583.92 days. In this case we're not sending any time-sensitive cargo (like monkeys): Leviathan is supposed to work for a year, so what's a coupla'more months. This means I don't have to blast immediately after getting to LEO and topping up. I can afford to wait; to adjust my cargo's trajectory from LEO to something better nudged into.

We start by renting the Tamil Tether. This yanks my cargo into HEO, here standing for high eccentric orbit. Apogee 200-300 megameters well over GEO. Weee!

That is delta-v 2.83 km/s; if I'm shifting only 75t, momentum 2.1e8 kgm/s. This can be spread over a minute or two so most tether materials would work. The 2.3 terajoules of total energy will, however, lower the tether's altitude. Raja's tax must be paid.

From this apogee, I'm in range of a possible second tether which promises up to 100 t - although here the tether material must be ... stiff. In this case I must spend the remnant 25 t budget on a dedicated Venus-entry vessel because I'll not fit a full Starship on that poor thing. Copilot didn't even suggest the idea.

Instead Copilot adds solar-electric tugs operating for several weeks in that 200-300 Mm domain. I could even have a near-empty spare 160 t Starship hanging around up there (which is why we discussed only the 75 t above). We don't need to park them on the spaceline although that will be nice too.

Above all (heh) the tugs can push my 235 tonnes into a Molniya trajectory, that almost hits Earth. It is at perigee, the velocity is highest, yay Kepler, at 10.8-11 km/s. At the right moment, we do the Crazy Hermann off to Hohmann. This delta-V is 248 m/s. For this push, propellant mass runs just 16.1 metric tons. With 16.5 MN thrust allowed by six Raptors, it is burned in 3.65 s.

Leviathan conceded a multiple-launch mission, the moment they mooted refueling. My mission architecture reduces the launches to two. One sends the load, which competitors can bid for; tethers hurl this into HEO. The other sends a whole Starship (under)laden, which... tethers hurl into HEO. The 16.1 t (plus) of fuel is probably in the latter, for simplicity. The load and the 'ship, they dock (because Leviathan assumes docking is possible) in HEO. At some point, I send my mission via Oberth with much less fuel than that for which SpaceX will charge them. I do assume infrastructure, but that infrastructure is available for future missions. Like for that Sunbird > Saturn mission.

I might add that Elon could use something like this architecture to get his 'ships back. Could be he's loaded enough propellant for a cycler-trajectory, to drop off the cargo and keep goin', so Earth gets it back... whenever. 3-0-2-9 promises 4.8 sidereal years; Hop David's scheme awaits the whole eight year metonic. Maybe Elon doesn't want to let his 'ship rot in the Solar well for years so sends over propellant, to load onto the 'ship, which waits in high Venus ellipse-orbit for the next direct Hohmann.

Either way there's likely to be additional burn, for 3-0-2-9 probably on its next return at Venus, to adjust the angle as to intersect Earth. I say likely because over eight years, cap'n Hop David might be able to trim thar sails.

Coxon was an op

I don't desire to speak much on the topic of AI dangers, so I'll just flag a few people not to heed. Not ever.

First up is the oh-so-principled Coxon whose resignation was coördinated with news announcements all over the Google-approved outlets. All this doomerism is being Dustin Moskovitz funded. It is all an op.

It turns out that the whole "Hugging Face" hack was, likewise, an op; driven by nefarious (human) agents. For those who still think "effective altruists" are human.

Anthropic, we learn elsewhere, may be trying to get AI nationalised, or - more likely - attain a state-ordered monopoly. The latter has an ideology and the ideology has a name. It is not such a name as online fora much allow to use.

So I'll keep watching my slop kthxbai.

The Median myth

Two decades ago Karen Radner floated a key thesis about the "Medes" - Madayë in Aramaic - down to the late 600s BC. The Assyrians never quite could tell that the hillfolk were coalescing into some "Median Empire". Skip ahead a few centuries and Herodotus has all manner of lore to relate about these "great kings". Most of these Medes overlap the Babylonians, starting with breakaway king Nabopolassar. But the Babylonians say much less of these hillmen than will the Greeks. They do know some latter leaders: Kashtariti, Umakištar, finally Ištumegu.

Theories of "secondary state formation" may apply here. Alongside the Romans, "tribal confederations" along the Rhine and Danube limes start taking on the character of kingdoms; we may say the same for the later Arabs between Iran and the Rhomania. I'm thinking here especially of the Libyans who enlisted "Sea Peoples" against the house of Ptah at Memphis. Nabopolassar, here, struck a deal with "Medes". These weren't his granddaddy's dirty hill bandits anymore. Copilot leans toward a real kingdom at Ecbatana/Hamadan.

We last hear from these Iranian plateaux in the "Nabonidus chronicle", recording a war between an "Ištumegu" (Iranic v->m in this script) and a Cyrus. Cyrus won, so got to relay his genealogy, that he was the grandson of a man with an Elamite name - which name he also took. Cyrus' ancestral lands were important, but not the heartland of the Medes. So who was *R̥štivaigah? - apart from a man perhaps more Iranian than the Cyruses.

The Greeks record elsewhere that "Astyages" also came from a dynasty of sorts. His father Cyaxares fought the Lydians until "the eclipse of Thales" today marked 28 May 585 BC (usually). This name is widely distributed, showing up even in Phrygian, albeit a common name for Medes. Nabopolassar commanded his Medes under their headman "Umakištar" who must correspond to Herodotus' Cyaxares.

Later Darius must contend with the family of Cyaxares, rebelling against him from the east. One was Fravartish "Phraortes" the Mede, who took the name Khshathrita when he got crowned; this regal name is known in Babylon ("Kashtariti") where, interestingly, Herodotus' Fravartish is not. Another pretended Cyaxarid was one Tritantaechmes of Sagartia; we should take him less seriously.

Herodotus got his data from Darius' successors, mainly Artaxerxes Longhand. Of course these successors were steeped in Darius' lore; Artaxerxes is going to be succeeded by Ochus who'll call himself the new Darius.

I propose here that Fravartish remembered that Cyrus had posed as the Assyrians' heir. Fravartish invented a legendary past around Kashtariti and Cyaxares, those great liberators of the Medes therefrom. Darius, reconquering his usurping lying ass, left-alone that particular fib. Darius would give them the Cyrus they deserved, putting down this upstart neoAstyages "this time as farce". Meanwhile the Persians as a whole could inherit the glory of the Medes, again; which Fravartish had lately made more glorious.

As evidence for Herodotus taking his Median lore from this filter, I bring his name for Cyaxares' father. He relates nothing like "Kastrites" but instead delivers "Phraortes" - close the truename of the late Kashtariti usurper, but a false name for the history-book.

Hand, shown

Beale:

Intelligent Genetic Manipulation. We have no idea by whom. But I suspect all the recent alien disclosure stuff is because it is fairly obvious that the genetic record is going to prove that the human species, at the very least, was constructed. With a few more advancements in genetic science, we may even be able to figure out more or less when it happened.

I've unbolded the silly. We've more-or-less been over this. But in light of new findings let's return to this vomit:

When humans emerged from Africa, and for that matter when contemporary humans in Africa emerged into other African environments, the environment hit us but hard. We couldn't control how to handle the coronavirus, nor the malarial parasite. So it was, until came the Late Glacial Maximum, or "Mesolithic", or whatever you call the slip from the general suck of the Pleistocene into 24kBC's full-on Ice Age. Selection was natural. Over hundreds of thousands of years, sometimes supplemented by distant relatives who had been out there for millions.

By that point humans of all sorts still hadn't domesticated any of our neighbouring animals. Well okay: so Alpha (2018). That movie hasn't much been deboonked. Maybe some coëxistence happened with scavenging wolves in the 30skBC. Don't care.

It's in the Neolithic we start seeing goats, sheep, oxen, donkeys, llamas. Again: this isn't the poast to pick apart millennia. Just to point out that, after the Ice Age, a slew of animals got selected - by intelligence. Our intelligence.

It would be a surprise if we hadn't intelligently designed ourselves as well. We had the smarts to pick friendly sheep; why not friendly farmers. To a Sumerian king, a farmer is just another beast of burden.

Or, for Beale... a Cahokian or Chaco Canyon king.

Ebrahimi progress

A subset of the VASIMR process is the Ebrahimi, alfvén recombination. This is being evaluated in the lab. I'd not say "tested" yet.

They can get 10-20 km/s upstream. This scales with the strength of the magnetic field, for which they got good tests up to 9 kV. Thrust in turn correlates with plasma density which their equipment kept low, 1-3e-6 kg/m³; and with the velocity-squared of the exhaust; and with the area of the plasma column cross section. It has so far transpired that their speedy upstream velocities suffer interference, and that they want a bigger lab but they would say that.

Keep in mind the very physics are still young and may involve Navier-Stokes.

VASIMR update

As long as we are looking in on orbital manoeuvres for low-mass craft, and/or entheppy drives: let's check in on VASIMR. Especially if we are getting space actuators.

The main practical uses thus-far have been high-isp high-efficiency trips. That's the outer system. Like far out: Eris, for one. This blog was considering gradual spin-up of space stations before humans set foot in them; heaven knows we all have time before they get there. Teased was (elsewhere) a human Martian visit in 39 days, which demands 200 MW[e] (if they want that cargo, I'd add: several roggets). I don't think such missions rate high on the priority-lists, given that what I'd linked came out 2011.

The company testing VASIMR is Ad Astra. Looking around the news, reporters are aware of Ad Astra's existence to itself and to the space community at large. Because the power they need is high, they need nukes. If we go back to 2024 they had a deal with SpaceNukes. At higher voltages in megawatt realms, Ebrahimi will surely follow. I think at that point, a thruster-customer may as well use fusion. Although, if either's customers stick to stationkeeping Venus in the hectawatt range, they might all get by with solar.

From Ad Astra I smell the scent of Howe. Company going quiet 2025-6.

VASIMR is clearly not a bad tech. I suspect it might have been a premature tech.