Priestly John, the jester

Olga Fabrikant-Burke asks after Jeremiah's false prophets.

Jeremiah exists in two versions, everyone-else's and the Greeks'. So his Divine word comes to us after much skub already. Even the pure-r Greek is, itself, a product of earlier skub because, if nothing else, not all those translators were on the level. OFB is excavating deep. But let's hear her out.

Jeremiah's foil was one "Hananiah". OFB is looking into "Hananiah's" speeches and finds them to depend on Jeremiah's own words. She believes the easiest solution is that Hananiah exists, only, to be the parody and ape of Jeremiah. Hananiah even acts as (malicious) exegete of the Divine Word. And the easiest solution to that, is that Hananiah never existed in the material plane; that he is a narrative character, of Jeremiah's narrative editor. Traditionally Baruch.

To back her up, somewhat, I propose that a court prophet shouldn't happen. I've noted here that the Zionist court by then owned plenty of homespun pious text: the Deuteronomist, his History up to Josiah, and a royal(ist) Psalter. Jeremiah would have inherited, in such courtly literature: YHWH's Rescue Of Jerusalem under Hezeqiah, and then the great religious restoration under Josiah. Josiah's thus-theocratic court could call upon its priests. The Deuteronomist, as OFB notes, had warned against false prophets. The priests would then call out Jeremiah as being the false prophet here exactly because he claims prophecy, which "we don't need anymore".

If Jeremiah's Hananiah didn't exist, his scribe Baruch has permitted to us critics a similar authorial-liberty. We may imagine our own character - as the court's fool. Maybe call him... "John". At least allied to that clumsy author of Psalm 78, if you read this blog.

Jeremiah, living in times of priestcraft, also inherited a prophetic tradition. But then so had the priests. At first Josiah's priests might have trouble with the (vast) antiAssyrian rantings of Amos, Hosea, and of Nahum and Isaiah 1-33 (latter who, might be the same guy). After Josiah though, all those rantings could be repurposed. The Syrians will tell Herodotus how Babylon may as well be Assyria's new capital. Jeremiah could look like he was preaching a gospel alien to that of Nahum, more like the position of weak king Ahaz and of puppet Manasseh (there was yet no "penance of Manasses").

In hindsight Jeremiah was proven right. If John existed, and I allow a clown like him could exist, his japes got reinterpreted in the light of False Prophecy. He got promoted, if you will, from the weapon of the loyal priests, to the mouthpiece of Melkor.

A chud rebuttal

Been a (checks) halfyear since I last checked in on Bulwark contributor and midwit extraordinaire Bret Devereaux. Last month he owned the chuds. He said the only history that we, who aren't signing up as Kristol's cabin-boys, know is Caesar and Alexander. Latter whom, Devereaux pompously styles as Alexander III.

Leave aside the truth of any of this chudbash; for Aurelian, especially, I suspect you could get a fair hearing on /pol/. Let's talk how come nobody is talking Seleucus I Nicator.

Well, yeah. Not everyone knows the full Seleucid story. (This blog has put in a good word for his calendar.) But... do they need to? The Seleucids after the eponymous founder started falling off. Antiochus III was a contender but not a permanent one. If we look further afield, we could drop several more names. But whom are we trying to impress by floating Suppiluliumas I, Trajan, Nabuchadrezzar II, Ashurbanipal, Tuthmosis III... these men although great didn't really leave much behind them.

Personally I wouldn't mind floating some of the beta people. Porcius Cato the Elder, Empress Livia or (maybe more so) Julia Domna, Agrippa, or freakin' queen-mother Olympia. Belisarius and Narses? Theodora? ...anyone?

It's not that the "chuds" can't drop names they got from skimming Wikipedia or Grok. It's that it's a waste of their/our time. We're trying to spread historical knowledge, however onesided as Devereaux might think it be. Devereaux is doing little more than dropping names and waving wingwang.

Which is a very Lincoln Project thing to do. Kinda gay tho'.

How the Internet became AOL

If you own an ancient DVD you may have seen reference, in movie teasers, to "AOL Keyword" in lieu of a website URL. This was Steve Case's bid to create his own private Internet based off his telephone-switchboard in Virginia. 16k bandwidth if you could get through. (Went up to the 50s by 1999 if you bought the bespoke phone modem but by that point, the Dot.Bomb was about to hit err'body. We now measure bandwidth in G.)

So Arctotherium's history dropped a few days back. Outgoing President Obama and his allies, in late 2016, chained the Internet. This made it close to AOL-by-cartel. The first excuse given was Russia. So we had to become Soviet. If people had any further questions they were directed to the Safe Edgy Store of "breadtube".

Arctotherium is an antivaxxer and they cannot help themselves from outing themselves as such. And he runs up against the same problem as other "free speech advocates": he has to allow for the likes of Jack Kerwick (laundered through JJ Sefton). We are now Askin'-Qwesschins about The Virus Assumption. And for 1980s-era televangelism.

There exist some gullible people and these are prone to scams. Scams will become only more profitable as more internet people get up in age, bringing their wealth with them. I am tempted to suggest that these people deserve it, especially boomers given their vast sense of entitlement. Except that wealth - and power - would shift to the scammers who, I dare say, don't deserve to profit. Privatised theft isn't better than government theft.

Given the fury being fanned by these personalities, who by the way have no problem shutting out anyone pushing back upon them, I fear for Anthony Fauci's life.

Middle Hunter Gatherers

A few days back we primitive European hunter-gatherers got some notes that, alongside the famed Spanish and Italian refugia, we should take seriously the Balkans 'fugium as well. Maybe foremost.

"Cro-Mags" got into Europe in the latter 40sKBC, for good this time, forever ending the Neanders. But then the Others returned and pushed everyone there into those refugia. These papers are talking about what happened when the ice melted.

The Balkan peoples went west, to mix with the Magdalenians in Italy and Spain. That's the Epigravettian replacement noted here. Likewise that Italy proved a poor refuge although some Italian DNA persisted. Here are your WHG, gentlemen.

Bacho Kiro remains none-of-the-above. They're IUP East Eurasians in Europe. They had perhaps brought a little (male?) DNA to the Magdalenians, earlier. Not on this scale.

This Balkan group further spread east, along the steppe. That branch might be the source of the EHG.

Cofnas' most questionable take

Everyone hates Nathan Cofnas. The far Right can't stand that Cofnas read Kevin MacDonald and engaged with his work. High academia calls Nate-Dogg a "racist". Here, perhaps, is the biggest hit on him: he's no biologist, rather a philosopher, so prone to just so stories.

There is an "iron constant" in sociology, involving standard-deviations, usually one-sigma. Suffice that when prior generations wanted, basically, any African American presence in a skilled profession, they set a quota. (Alternatively you can skim the cream from Africa or the Caribbean; but the Caribbean - being an island chain - swiftly runs out of cream. There also exist those Rachel Dolezal types who play off the one-drop rule but these tend not to be the cream of any race.)

Cofnas was impolite-enough to state that this wasn't a mistake; you must do this. John Derbyshire said similar. You're not supposed to say this. You're just supposed to act on this, and babble excuses maybe sometimes citing Jared Diamond. During Obama's second term, Equity started to kick in and everyone had to act on this but turbo.

Cofnas continued, though: that West Africans are jungle / savannah tribes who can't into Neolithic. Uh.

Going back to @Evolving_Moloch and Alexander Gusev, they point out that although jungles and their tribals do exist in West Africa (e.g. that Liberian coast ain't great for permanent structures), such tribals weren't the Africans targeted for the various slave-trades. It was found in the Americas that when a hunter-gatherer was nabbed, he proved a poor worker in the fields, as in the crop-fields. It was found along the western Indian Ocean that sugar needed a force who could swing a machete. The phenomenon may well have been noted in Carthage before them all; Hanno seemed unclear on any differences between a chimp, a "gorilla", and a pygmy. A plantation, in short, needs farmers - Iron-Age farmers at that.

The Zanj was eastern Africa; we've handled that elsewhere. On our side and in our more-recent times: along the Atlantic, the Bantus... Expanded. Farmers, all. In fact a lot of the problems in Africa today are problems between herders, who usually adopted herding after their vast experience in hunting; and farmers, overwhelmingly Bantu or at least generally Niger-Congo. The "Black" peoples now in the Americas are generally Niger-Congo; I suspect Brasil being further south and hooked into likewise-Portuguese Angola, as Bantu-skewed.

Farming happens in the savannah as well because the upper-Niger part of that duo allows for irrigation, like the Nile. These more fed the Saharan trade than the Atlantic. As Gusev notes: that side of Cofnas' argument is simply irrelevant. The Atlantic trade wasn't taking the savannah's herders. If anything the savannah's herders were taking the savannah's farmers and shifting the latter, northward.

Interestingly Jared Diamond himself pondered if hunter-gatherers like he'd seen in New Guinea might be of intelligence superior over ... whites, like him, also the product of farms. But hey.

Personally I think Gusev is at least as big of a prick, to use Gregory Cochran's term; since Gusev sideswipes Cofnas as a sland'rer, where that "slander" is about David Reich's lab blowing off Davide Piffer and generally dabbing on other rivals (like Watson) for specious "racism" despite repro'ing all their results. Reich was a social-climber in 2018 and he remains a social-climber today. Reich doesn't want to suffer Cofnas' career. Cofnas, by contrast, doesn't want to be Reich, with all his ethical compromises. I doubt Cofnas wants to be Gusev, that pick-me, either. Anymore than Cochran wants to associate with anysuch "pricks".

None of this is to confirm or deny the existence of the Iron Constant. Nobody seems brave enough to confront Cofnas on this. (Or Gregory Cochran. Or Charles Murray or Nicholas Wade or...)

I will say Gusev is right on this much: if Cofnas wants to step onto palaeo-sociologic turf, he needs to learn the history of that turf.

The abortion jab (or not)

The COVID-19 jab was an abortion jab, say Ron Johnson and Katie Pavlich. Now Ace of Spades, whose motto may as well be "True If Big".

'Cause it ain't true. It was debunked last year.

The whole reason the Senators are bringing this up now is to distract voters from seeing all the work they're not doing for the SAVE Act, although there's plenty of votes for illegal-amnesties in "farm bills" and for Middle Eastern wars.

MUTANTS 8/11: Cool story, ace. Sport. Champ.

On skipping Phobos

A decade ago Hoppy Price, John Baker, and Firouz Naderi wrote "A Minimal Architecture for Human Journeys to Mars", doi 10.1089/space.2015.0018. On the assumption of SLS, four launches of those could get sufficient cargo to hop to inner (6000 km) moon Phobos. This would - they said - allow for the main prize some years later which is the Martian surface. Some have of-late proposed additionally supplying Phobos from the Belt; supplying Mars from the Belt, too. This blog doesn't endorse Martian surface missions exactly, preferring outer moon Deimos, but we can allow for supplying either moon from outside.

In 2021 Drake, Rucker, and Cianciolo henceforth DRC evaluated the earlier trio (pdf). Deimos - I think - has its own merits, which aren't Martian merits. Phobos on the other hand - they think - is still looking for purpose. Inasmuch as it's being sold as a waystation to Mars, DRC say it's a cuckshed.

DRC nod to Deimos as having similar issues as the inner moon. They don't really consider it however. Perhaps because indeed it is not really a Martian waypoint (I say an interplanetary waypoint).

The issues had in both, which are not shared with Mars, include gravity 3 mm/s² (twice that for Phobos), and yes that is in millimeters. Also they are entirely airless where Mars' atmo may be compressed for CO₂, nitrogen, and argon. On Mars water may, further, be drilled and now you have most of your requirements for feeding plants and housing us animals. More: on these moons regolith cannot be shaken off gloves as it can on Mars or our Moon. So you are going to have to send over two different kinds of life-support: one for whatever moon, and one for Mars' surface. Three if we count the craft getting everything over there (one assumes, a cycler).

The 2015 architecture was proposing just to land humans on that moon and then "teleöperate" robots on the Martian surface. In that case, life-support on Mars is to be built on Mars, by those bots. The 2021 DRC review denies the point of this. Just land everything on Mars all at once, they say. Maybe get into some lavatube tunnel, aerate the place and teleöperate thence.

It is further difficult to catch Phobos from the surface, and likely harder still to catch a tether dangling thence. Here Deimos has the advantage because it's almost in areosync (martistationary at that, it's equatorial).

Overall I must agree that Phobos is the also-ran in the Mars-or-Deimos competition. I still think Deimos deserves consideration as our first port-of-call however. Although here we'll have to be serious. We'll have to build a whole city from that rock.

Tales of Canterbury

Geoffrey Chaucer composed the Tales of Canterbury and it got copied - early. Barbara Bordalejo and Peter Robinson have a URL of that name.

These two believe that their predecessors had overcomplicated the manuscript tradition. Hengwrt and Ellesmere are good MSS, they agree. To these they'd add Christ Church 152 and Bodleian 686... to pretty-much ignore the others. Because they're all dependent on the four noted (or maybe on CC152's original, but CC152 itself is good-enough here).

The title "book of the tales of Canterbury" seems almost to roll off the tongue. Was it "Cantérbury" in Chaucer's time? A few centuries before him it was "Cantwareburh" or "Cair Ceint". I can't see the accent falling on the second syllable of the former... unless we allow for some lost Latinism. But in 13th-century Latin the Normans were using variations of "Dorobern" based off a tradition of Roman "Durovernum Cantiacorum". Chaucer was self-consciously English and no Norman. I think he'd rather say Cánterbury like we say; the "book of -" preface is tacked on, by scribes, because these Tales are poems which people declaimed from memory for sport.

As to the epigones: "Canterbury Tales" is a fair reduction in my opinion, but it remains a reduction. Also some Tales got memorised to the expense of others, which may explain how later editions might be wild compared to the originals. But - say Bordalejo and Robinson - we have good-enough originals. One might compare Homer, whose two main works seem deliberately-composed such that later copies don't deviate as far as, uh, sura 11 from sura 7.

That's a spicy meatball

Lucas Beveridge is talking about something he and Sam Piper did for Atomos Nuclear and Space. Suppose we only shipped one reactor to a HEO. That reactor hands over neutrons to some neutral metal... which then becomes radioactive, including in the gamma spectrum - one per mission. This transfers "enthalpy": energy to tungsten plates. The plate then delivers those joules over time, in kilowatts. I hear beryllium too.

Here's how it was tested; here's what was tested.

At HEO - as in, GEO or higher - is way too high up for Earthlings to care. You can fuel up a lot of space tuggery. Take Tory Bruno's Blue Ring, which needs one tonne of xenon for four of payload. That reactor looks like it would in fact deliver the 5.5 kW needed to propel to Gateway's lunar NRHO. To get a mission rolling "for weeks or months", Beveridge prescribes Scandium-46 with its low 84-hour halflife. Maybe tugs; maybe Venus injection. Sc-46 is allowed to deorbit after three years.

The test used Manganese-56 which decays in 2.6 hours. This can deorbit rather sooner. Maybe use the Mn-56 for high-thrust tugs between HEOs and be done with it. Like if you just want to hit the Spaceline cable at the 80 Mm this blog has promised.

Various enthalphy-rockets have been recommended for station-keeping. Further: with this much power in a small package, we could go up to Martian landers. Solar flybys with Oberth?

For longer missions, he's talking Cobalt-60 at its 5.27 year halflife. We might not want this in Earth orbit... ever. Beveridge is suggesting this for a Uranus orbiter, or series of orbiters. First it has to get there but we can probably do that with a Starship. And/or with a fusion-driven ship launching off Deimos. This one burning constantly might also do without radiators, since this whole setup is the radiator.

The asteroid/Martian economy

Mark Thompson last April relayed a Swiss(?) study by EPFL on how to deliver materiel to Mars (to its well, anyway).

Serena Suriano, Shamil Biktimirov, Dmitry Pritykin, Anton Ivanov seem to be picking up where Zubrin left off; they're not stopping at Deimos (like I'd stop). Except, Zubrin wanted Martians to mine the 'stroids and these three Russians (and one Sicilian) are asking the Belters to do it themselves and sell to the Martians.

To read the article, they want to deliver the goods to a Low Mars Orbit 500 km. Phobos, for reference, is at 6000 km. Why not just send it all to Phobos? Gravity there is higher than Deimos' and this place should be able to dangle a tether to 500 km. Our authors are already aware of the doi-10.1089/space.2015.0018 mission architecture which targets, exactly, Phobos.

On the Earth side, all this assumes a depot at STL2. That's "ST", not "TL". Somehow they have to stationkeep that.

The 'stroids they want are metallic, like 332 Siri. Guess they want the tungsten... or Beryllium. That one sails out 2.7 AU where Mars is, what, 1.6 and Vesta 2.36.

But... isn't Mars literally littered with meteorites of all sorts? If it's volatiles you want, just drill for the ice. And if we're staying at Deimos (or Phobos), it's probably mafic such that there should be a few iron and siderophiles right there. Or anyway sicila fit for anhydrous glass fibre.

NASA's new tungsten mine

There is, today-announced, a vast tungsten reserve in Nevada. Tungsten as you know comes with other essential elements like boron and lithium. Some of the land however overlaps with 17 square miles of NASA. NASA say they need the land.

My suggestion is for NASA to earmark a tax on the land they've inherited. Materials from that part of the land go to NASA as first-choice customer, for NASA's own use.

Meanwhile I guess NASA should calibrate its satellites elsewhere; the Feds can scout around for other parts of its enormous Southwestern lands for anything likely. Southern Cali? Utah?

BAqDAyT 8/7 from Stephen "Vodka" Green.

What was wrong with the Sack of Troy?

One of those prefaces to The Odyssey is The Sack of Troy, summarised here. In antiquity, most agreed that Homer didn't write it. It tended to be attributed to fellow Milesian, Arctinus. Aristotle wasn't complaining about this one particularly when his Poetics lambasted the likes of Cypria for being Just A Bunch Of Stuff That Happened unlike Iliad, which promised a theme and, he thought, held to that theme, this-or-that chapter aside.

But even if Arctinus wasn't Homer (some today doubt Odyssey was Homer)... Hesiod wasn't Homer either. And what Proclus and others claim of The Sack of Troy is that it is in fact restricted to a single episode, after the Horse. So Aristotle shouldn't have minded... right?

Giampiero (or, Jean-Pierre) Scafoglio has an essay, "Two Ways of the Epic Genre in Late Antiquity" discussing the Homer / Aristotle reception in works such as Triphiodorus' epic about the "Capture". This epic, you can read today. And this, wikipedia is saying a lot of authors did read. Latinists of course are aware of Virgil in Aeneid Book II covering the same episode, but self-consciously a preface to the epic of Rome to come.

Triphiodorus clearly didn't think Arctinus got the job done or he'd not have bothered. I do not see where Triphiodorus chose to rewrite a "Wrath of Achilles" or "Tragedy of Hector" (there's talk he redid an Odyssey however). Our man may have been right, given that I cannot link to a full Arctinus. As of this decade the 2020s, it looks like the Sack was no longer even in the late-antique libraries (pdf)... which puts Proclus under suspicion as well.

What we can do, perhaps must do, is to compare Triphiodorus to his peers and middlemen.

Against Virgil, our man chooses Cassandra over the other prophet Laocoön. For the great tragedians, that's Aeschylus over Sophocles. As a narrative choice in a postAristotelian epic, Laocoön doesn't work here and he's also not in the two Homerics. Arctinus did note that the gods chose now to knock him out, but this episode serves mainly to get Aeneas out of the city before all the fun starts.

Triphiodorus and Virgil do seem to agree on Sinon. Also Triphiodorus agrees that Aeneas was at the sack so tacitly sides with Virgil against Arctinus here.

Ultimately, Triphiodorus feels like a writing-exercise. He seems to be showing that he can write a "Sack of Troy" as might meet Aristotle's rules, if not his approval - because personally I doubt that Aristotle liked writing-exercises, of which a lot of those elder-epics smell. Virgil on the other hand wants to bring us into the Trojan side as to see the full iniquity of the Greeks' crimes. Like Nolan this year, Virgil has a point.

Going back to Arctinus: if I was doing a writing-exercise in years B.C., I'd play up the glorious deeds of the Achaeans sacking this city. I'd tick the boxes of the Homeric heroes in Troy meeting their own ends and/or causing appropriate ends to other heroes. As to, why; because Miletus was precariously maintaining its autonomy against the Anatolian barbarians in Lycia, Caria and especially Lydia and, before that, Phrygia.

Yeah, Virgil probably wore it better.

BACKDATE 8/6

SDI's plasma-core rocket

In lieu of Cassenti's microfission-catalysis for fusion rocketry, for interplanetary missions Omira and Mourad suggest "plasma core". Interstellar is another matter (heh). So let's look at plasma-core. This is an idea from 1985 to power NERVA/NΘP.

The core is Uranium Hexafluoride, either U-235 or -233. In theory a Curium-247 hexafluoride also can be made. Anyway, UF₆ is a solid at reasonably-warm temps (<56.5°C). As a plasma the fluorine ions are likely more problematic but we're hoping to make a nuclear blast out of it so noöne cares.

In 1985 they were trying to contain a sphere of this plasma, swimming in a mutually-immiscible noble gas; and why not, in microgravity. They picked argon, probably-obviously. They measured 50km/s exhaust. We divide that latter by Earth 9.8 to make of that a ratio independent of SI or Freedom units, called Specific Impulse; 5.1 kiloseconds. (Although now it seems dependent on Earth being that frame-of-reference.)

They got it running for about two minutes. After that, they lost enough uranium that the critical-mass went subcritical. Also there won't be microgravity during the thrust phase. Before anyone could figure out how to make this practical for a space trip, after January 1986 the launch costs per kilogram hit the Challenger wall.

Spacenerd life is better now. But the middle-1980s flights of fancy have been forgotten... mostly.

Hence such fission pulse engines as in Howe two years ago, which promised 5ks specific-impulse which would have compared nicely with 1985. Or last year centrifugal NERVA... 1.8ks. They'd make it up in thrust though; so if they just wanted to push loads to Deimos or Venus rather than all the way to Jupiter, it might work.

Gerald Marsh seems unhappy with Howe and, more so, with that lumbering 1.8ks solution.

Marsh proposes to revive Ronnie Raygun's tech: with magnetic confinement, in a spheromak. Marsh seems an expert in magnets, working on them in 1996. Marsh must however conclude that one (not he) must also find a way to generate the plasma with the field configuration chosen, maintain thermal stability, and find a way to turn the rocket engine off; opining these are non-trivial engineering problems.

I counter that turning the rocket off is the least of this rocket's problems. What you do here is to calculate the cooloff of the rocket and let the spacecraft reduce its acceleration naturally. It all gets tested in the field like SpaceX tests its Starship. If you're asking after an abort sequence then whatever, just separate your craft from the engine and push the still-running engine to the side as it makes its own merry way to the outer AU fringe.

BACKDATE 8/5

A proposal for the House of Representatives

Cambridge University is, presently, a disgrace and one excellent reason for its disgrace is politics. So, sigh, let's listen to Cambridge on politics.

Britain (not part of the EU) runs on the DSA system. It has a Parliament. The majority of Parliament votes for a Prime Minister, even if the people didn't want it. Margaret Thatcher was the Prime Minister throughout the 1980s. To her, is attributed the comment "we have an elected dictatorship". However you think of Thatcher or, if you're DSA, Burnham: I don't think Thatcher ever cracked 50% of the popular vote and we jolly know Burnham hasn't.

Similar has happened to Denmark. Frederik Ravn Klausen, who sounds like a Scandinavian, nonetheless works out of Cambridge (he should leave); he has teamed with Sebastian Tim Holdum in Copenhagen. They propose instead "geographically ranked guaranteed proportionality". Buroughs / ridings / precincts / parishes still exist. But the election winners are chosen by popular vote. So if your Albertan ridings (screw it, let's be Canadian) voted for the Tory, and everyone north and east of the Lakes voted for the Grit; the Grit votes override most of you. Some of your Tories will get through however. From the truest-blue ridings.

As they note, regionality is here sacrificed. It rather has to be, because someone Federal (or Royal) is going to have to guard the ballots wherever the score stands to be run-up. Historically the cities.

An expressly-regional second chamber would counter this. Americans have such a body: the Senate, wired into State boundaries and once-upon-a-time appointed by State legislatures. This is why Americans deserve to take Klausen-Holdum seriously where, frankly, I would never recommend the above system for any unicameral state. Fer cryin'-out-loud, Denmark is made of islands (and a peninsula).

Drawing up the constituencies is still up to the States I guess. On the plus side, if their constituencies might get overridden by their neighbo(u)rs anyway, gerrymandering might not be as hot an issue.

The issue wot I see as hot is if these States' voters are overridden by other States' voters. They already have to suck it up when Senators from Delaware and North Dakota dab on 'em.

Pekah, Shalish of Israel

Pulu wrested the throne of Ashur in 745 BC, from a "Shalmaneser V" whom Pulu's family then disavowed. Perhaps similar breaks of memory were had in Israel at the time. So: Carl Lederer, and now youtuber "Dig."

The eretz-Israel had been a united land under Jeroboam II, but as all men do he died. His heir Zechariah was ousted in a coup and that coup - under Shallum - collapsed. Menahem and Pekah picked up the pieces. The Bible says Menahem ruled for ten years and Pekah for twenty.

The maths don't add up under scrutiny from Assyria however. Menahem gave tribute to "Pul"; that emperor claimed he'd had it from Pekah as well. Luckily, we have a local report: from Hosea the northern prophet. His sermons made a point of the twin iniquities of his land. Hosea didn't consider Judah in this calculus, despite that it was starting to matter again; Hosea's twinland was Ephraim-and-Israel.

According to Lederer's reading, Pekah had a base in Gilead and simply slipped over there, keeping that base. The face-saving fiction was that Pekah would hold the title "Shalish" and not "king of Israel". In practice, yeah, Pekah was sulṭan across the water, as it were.

I must inject here that per Rendsburg (pdf), Amos especially Amos 6 is also writ in a nonJehudi Hebrew to be considered northern. Amos didn't preach about Israel/Ephraim's twinship for the simple reason he preached under Jeroboam II when that kingdom was one. His kingdom likely included Judah then; maybe then Edom (so I'm not getting into which "Tekoa" here). So for Amos, Jeroboam's court was the court which mattered.

Pekah would eventually switch to being an ally of Damascus and make a bid to take Judah. Ahaz squealed to Assyria who then attacked and got all of it. Israel, from Samaria, would end up a rump and tributary Assyrian vassal, under Hoshea.

More Trappist-1 constraints

On the (excellent) assumption that Trappist-1's planets are all differentiated, Emeline Bolmont, Alex Revol et al. offer "Estimation of the tidal heating in the TRAPPIST-1 planets". They are admittedly constrained by the uncertainty of what these planets' cores actually be, that Love Number we'd noted here once.

Also they don't know the eccentricities of b or c. Frankly I doubt they're Keplerian, so they need some postLaplacian model. Eccentricity tides would bump up their estimates especially inward.

What Revol (especially) thinks he does know, are the obliquity and the libration of each planetary rotation: less than one degree, each. But Revol does not hold these planets as tidally locked: a slow drift of the substellar point, which therefore leads to a day-night cycle.

I find intriguing this space elevator design for e. However Revol argues that the rotations for all planets are slow such that day/night appears retrograde. GEO is, then, high. Where GEO extend past Hill, all space elevators must be floating tether.

Even with low eccentricity it came out that b and c are superheated like Io (if not technically lava); it's elsewhere been noted they've lost everything volatile by now and are airless like Io. Planets d, e, f get more internal heat than Earth; e, they submit, may have a crust and plate tectonics. And we hear e has air. Although I am still not hopeful for photosynthetic life.

Kleisioti et al. move on to f, g, h asking after ice shells, quite reasonable for these cold planets with, further, lower measured density. Planets f and g might have thin Enceladus-tier ice shells; h's would be thick like Europa's. They think possible for us detecting cryovolcanically generated water vapor on f (maybe g) for which we haven't looked. 20 transits should do for seeing it on f.

The patent for a supercloud server

A patent now exists for the heliosync orbit: US-12679564-B2 at ppubs.uspto.gov, for datacentres which I'd written off two years ago as "cockamamie". Various factors as of 2026 are making this less silly. Sophia Space has press-releases, linked at Zim's place.

Heliosync in theory runs 400-1000 km so, LEO. In practice they don't want drag: superfast atmo, which degrades... everything. They also don't want the congestion which reaches further, maybe to 600 km. So they're thinking 800 km. They must beam the data to a comm array anyway, which may as well be SpaceX' constellation of Starlink v2.

Heliosync around Earth gets about 1.361 kW/m² "flux", more than that most the year because of eccentricity. The patent illo assumes they can drive 1 kW/m² from the solar-cells, which they expect η=.3. They leave the material to others; maybe Perovskite. Anyway I read 400 W/m² available to the computer, not 1000. Also here are transmitters, of data.

Some of that flux is reflected (5% here); less is transmitted. Most that heat needs radiating-off, still maybe 1.3 kW/m². The good news, if they insulate the computer: the computer is wide, flat, and narrow. They think that the shaded darkness will allow "passive" radiation through the shade, into space. More good news: most office CPUs seem to run in the 45-65 W range as long as you are not gaming on them. 400 W/m² might make for a respectable server-farm.

The design is simple if they can stow the volume onto a rocket chassis. Direct 800 km looks like a Starship job.

In addition, if the Lunar south pole gets a superstructure, similar architecture might work there too. For a start. (Later we expect coolant-cycles underground.)

Loanwords in Choltian

In pictographic old Egyptian, loanwords are easy to suss. Not having any indigenous roots, such words are spelt phonetically and never otherwise. Magnus Pharao Hansen has been applying the same principle to classic Choltal inscriptions.

They have a loanglyph too: the Striking Owl. This iconography is Teotihuacano. I think everyone agrees that the Place Of Reeds knocked a lot of head down in the Petén. The empire even installed a prince to rule over Mutul ("Tikal"). But we're talking about intrusive words that haven't a contemporary Maya-family etymology.

This'll be a placeholder. (I am not a mayanist.)

Dr Hansen has been arguing that the loans are in some paraNahua dialect and that, therefore, the Place Of Reeds was, if not called anything like "Teo Huacan" at the time, also paraNahua. Mind: this depends on his ability to reconstruct what that dialect would have sounded like, a thousand years before Catholics came with a Latin alphabet. We can do it for Choltal, precisely because sometimes an author could get phonetic. But not many outsiders were using so good a system, then, for writing.

That central Vale was shared between Nahua and Otomí as of AD ~1500. It may be some sharing had happened already. One does wonder how the Purempecha interposed themselves into Michoacan in the meantime.

Anyway if you want to give Dr Hansen a hearing, try "What Happened When?: Relative Chronology and the state of pre-Nahuan in the Classic Period. Paper presented at the Relative Chronology workshop at the University of Copenhagen, June 30th, 2023".

n-body, near O(n)

After Newton discovered the equations behind Kepler's 2-Body solution, he ran afoul of the n-Body Problem. A limited solution presented itself in the equilibrium point; the full five solutions were offered by Lagrange. Further refinements handled special cases of the 4-body like when Laplace sussed out three of the heaviest (and largest) Jovian moons. So here we are in the computer age, when computers struggle to handle particles numbering more than maybe five. It's O(n*n).

Kepler and Newton assumed that the bodies are rigid points and that we ignore Einstein; so Io's tides and Mercury's depth in the well don't figure. Also computers have to approximate floating point numbers well above Zeno's quantum level (Planck?). That means we have already sold the horse for approximations. And that means we may as well approximate some more. Keyframe Codes has a little primer on the available algos.

Midlevel nerds have been using Barnes-Hut. This method runs on multipoles: it buckets the particles in squares-of-particles, finds the center of gravity, and runs the calc for the centers. The buckets are identified with quad-trees; Barnes-Hut ends up O(n * ln(n)). Leave aside for now if we want to run this 2D or 3D; we'll pretend perfect ecliptic. What if the cluster doesn't behave like a square (or cube). Real astrodynamicists need the particle swarm where most particles would be clustering. They will be looking first at Lagrange's L4 and L5 "Trojan" haloes especially for Jovians. These haloes are elongates.

In 1987 Leslie Greengard came up with something else, the "Fast Multipole Method" - usually FMM. Not only does it claim O(n) but, depending on how often you want to run each n, the error can arbitrarily diminish. This was Greengard's thesis and, it seems, got a refinement under one Vladimir Rokhlin. Discontents exist: Srinivas Aluru in "Greengard’s N-body Algorithm is not order N" (pdf) showed that the choice of precision must depend on n (at least ln n), therefore cf the title - to the tune of O(n ln²n). That extra ln(n) is, then, the price for accuracy Barnes-Hut must pay in the Trojan haloes. Dr Greengard's peers seem to have agreed; he got to keep his PhD and the IEEE considers FMM in the top ten of twentieth-century algos.

This starts by keeping each interaction as a field vector Φ and treating that vector as a number on the complex plane. The vector acting upon particle "i" is the gravitational parameter of counterpart "j", times the natural logarithm of the i-j distance (plus iθ); that's the force. The iθ exists, here, to make it a vector as to place the particle on the coördinate plane; a computer may ignore it now to figure the coörds when it's display-time.

Some might then use "numerical methods", which is mathematician for iteration. The FMM, in the complex plane, may use the Cauchy-Riemann equations. At this point I'm leaving the rest to the nerds.

The scouring of the land

I am continuing my scan of Elitzur's dataset. Yesterday I added some words I recognise in Arabic: BKY, ḌḤK; this morn have I removed his first example elón. I got intrigued with example #5 GLY so have held off to poast that, today, separately.

The Quran will use GLY for exile. The Arabs didn't, at least not in the Safa. There it meant cut off, erased, exposed. So when I look at Elitzur's data, he turns up Judges 18:30 for which authenticity he argues: which I think vocalised some gelút há-aretz in CBH construct. Clearly you can't exile the land. Meanwhile GLY as exile comes nowhere in the Hexateuch (to Joshua), despite exile being a central theme.

By parallel with Safaitic, gelút há-aretz implies a scouring. Elitzur applies this term to the land around Judges 18:30-1, whose candidate is Shiloh's temple which, by then, was dismantled. That collapse was an enduring scandal for the North [UPDATE 8/12/26: with which Psalm 78 must deal]. Whenever Judges thought that was: Gath's invasion? Hazael?

At this point I want to bring example #1, elón; I further suspect the há- as late in Hebrew's evolution (it was probably *han- prebiblically). Elitzur finds elón in Genesis and Deuteronomy, then through to 1 Samuel. Once David takes control we no longer read the word. For Elitzur it should be something like the Archaic Greek chora (district/ viable-flatland)... like aretz. Why does it end with Samuel, if it was Deuteronomic, he asks. I counter that everywhere, elon had been fossilised - into placenames (construct, without há-!) and/or semantically become "oak grove". These elón texts existed to place scenes into a landscape of memory. For Judges 18, either Elitzur must abandon its status as an ancient account or else he must admit that elón was already a fossil.

For my part I accept that Judges 18 be early. As for why the Pent-to-Hexateuch didn't use GLY, Elitzur would put that down to not knowing Judges 18. For Elitzur the Hexateuch is simply earlier. The Deuteronomic History, having read Judges 18, shifted GLY's semantics to exile. Elitzur fn. 17 is aware of GLY for exile in Akkadian (which might have followed a parallel shift) then Aramaic.

I won't argue that point for Deuteronomy alone. For the rest of Torah (and Joshua) I propose, rather: refusing this use of GLY. The authors and editors saw the term as belonging to a later time.

REPOST: I don't know WTF happened to the URL, but let's try to fix it

The end of the bombardment

We haven't discussed the "Late Heavy Bombardment" on this blog. As of 2024 we've rather been skeptical. We may, however, have some timeline for the end of some kind of bombardment: Universe Today reports from Tim[othy] Johnson. And from Hamed Gamaleldien and some others.

The issue here is that the Hadean has, in fact, ended - but the crusts came later than that ending, agreed 4.03 Gya. Crust first formed 3.9 Gya. There should have been, what, 400?500? My after the great Theia crash and all its debris; Earth should have cooled enough by then. Johnson argues that the crust had been heated exogenously. That is, Theia wasn't the last crash.

The "L" part of the LHB implies a surge at the 4.03-3.9 Gya ... I guess we can call it a "period", 130 My as it would be. We've been marking this period as the Archaean beginning. Johnson doesn't need a surge. A continual pounding from our uncaring universe would do the job just as well.

The constant heat over this extent of time continued the process of differentiation, at least at the crustal layers. We have a mostly "felsic" land surface up here, dominated by silicon and aluminium and all those lithophiles... just like the Lunar regolith. Granite looks compositionally felsic. The "mafic" rock, of iron and its siderophiles, clusters in some rare upwellings and on the ocean floor. That's básalt or should we say défault.

Our Hadean is defined by committee, basically: Ten oldest zircon U-Pb ages in the Acasta Gneiss up in Canada's NW Territory. Gneiss is metamorph granite so it was a crust once, exposed by glacier. These zircons are however preserving siderophilic (heavy) metals. So I dunno. They might be mafic and precede our crust - and the crust of Acasta.

Johnson and Gamaleldien earlier had evidence for water in those transCanadian zircons, which they haven't disavowed. So I guess they can continue to have a waterless Hadean, just like in the Gospel of Luke. Archaean is, then, defined by still-no-crust but now with uneasy pools of water. Maybe a steam period.

The implosive fusion pulse rocket

I woke up today with ToughSF poasting Gradient Field Imploding Liner Fusion Propulsion System. This report is fairly recent, like 2018. I wasn't quite blogging Atomic Rockets content then but, soon.

The "field" here means magnets. The liner is of some metal that can crumple when subjected to the Tesla. This implode-the-liner-with-dekamagnets tech is not new. Here is something from 1976. Also given the heat of the fusion around there, they cannot use superconductors - not 1976 niobium, not 1986 ceramics, nothin' under 125 K. Which puts MR Lapointe at some engineering conundra. For instance he only has 30 Tesla to play with, which he's wrapping externally. 1 T, internal.

Luckily for him and his, "magneto-inertial" designs had been an active, uh, field of research up to 2018. And he doesn' t have to keep the plasma: we're going to spaaace. The drive works by pulse like an Orion; unlike Orion they have to start in space.

This is about where nerds start talking z-pinch (or ζ-). This report is talking θ-pinch.

To load up these interplanetary missions, the 2018 paper suggests a couple of SLS boosts to eject 260 "mt" off our well. "mt" looks like "metric tonnes" so I'd say "T" or "Mg". As of last Friday Elon can sell you a Starship with throwaway booster (supposedly 188 T); he might soon be able to rent you one as well (for 115 T). They'd allow assemblage in orbit, some of those T being sufficient fuel and orbiting Starship to push your fusion rocket out of Earth's hair.

Where we speak of specific-impulse (I_sp) as usual the time-savings ramp up beyond Mars, like this takes 50-100 "mt" to Saturn in 200 days. In this context, 20 mt is a crewed mission. The report requires for the Earth-to-Saturn mission no less than 20000 s of I_sp, which I take as a function of deltaV more than of distance.

I_sp depends on what to use for the crumpling liner. Table 5 lists 32,200 s for Lithium (7.8 kN thrust), 17,145 s for Beryllium (14.45 kN); compare Sunbird's 15ks, Howe 5ks but 100kN. So lithium is how we, Earthlings and Venereans, get the direct lines to Saturn and beyond. Definitely going to have to construct the former in some anhydrous and anoxic environment like, uh, in space. Table 5 further calculates the energy required, for Mars: lithium to expend 165 MJ.

Asimov-approved beryllium would appear to work best where we don't care about longterm I_sp. A three-month trip to Mars ain't that much better than a six-month. Here we're optimising for thrust and, it seems, for energy (153 MJ). Energy aside that looks better for anything as far as Jupiter; inner-planetary travel or Oberth toward the Sun will give us lots of that energy, as well. With the extra thrust comes more payload and, we must add, more payload affords more options for crew comfort. Like spinning the hab, protection from radiation, all of it.

Also, pipe dream here, if we had stations on Vesta or on Deimos, beryllium could probably hit up Saturn thence (and it might even be mineable on that differentiated silicon). Launch windows will be a bear out there however. Keep in mind that Deimos also gives to ecliptic travel, 1.35 km/s of orbital velocity on top of Mars' 24 km/s.

Age of Mangione

Sunnyright, who got linked by Stephen Green, points to a 60 Minutes ep where a company invested $3B to develop a drug, which company now has to recoup its expenses. Commenters, who Deserve treatment, are calling for Luigi. They mean, for an army of DavidsLuigi Mangiones.

Green assumes all these commenters be Left. They are not.

A few days ago Ace of Spades posted this juxtaposition:

I'm just going to say it: I am now ready, willing, and eager to begin inflicting punishments on communists for what I consider wrongthink. If they want to criminalize my thoughts, I am now ready to use state power to criminalize theirs.

Mike Lee wants to defund schools that insanely continue to force students to get vaccinated in contradiction of their religious beliefs.

Ace has been so "ready" for some time longer than just this past week, I suspect. This whole side of X has been sliding into this, yes, fascist direction.

Meanwhile Richard Hanania wonders how come Bill Gates Jr hasn't st[oo]d up for himself and for public health, generally. I might so wonder, too.

The evolution of Classical Biblical Hebrew

In 2022 Yoel Elitzur, or "Joel" in German, laid down a challenge. Google Scholar reveals basically nobody as take this seriously; I consider Joosten's cite as an opportunism (and Joosten knows better). So I'll try :-

Elitzur pinpoints 17 Hebrew words and expressions as appear over the early Biblical corpus, and where they appear. Many cluster in specific sections. Some are quoted later but otherwise don't appear (e.g. the Chronicler quoting Reigns), some change their triconsonantal root so probably pronunciation, some change semantics. From that, Elitzur argues for no need to budge the Masoretic (and, honestly, Septuagintal) order of the historical books from the Pentateuch through Joshua-Judges through Reigns. Nor to budge the historically-understood dates of the Prophets - with the dramatic exception of Isaiah 40+ (I've been arguing 34+). The Psalms don't seem to figure.

The paper admits that some cases be stronger than others. The infamous he who pisseth against the wall is used in the Saul-David cycle and not earlier nor since. You'd think there'd be occasion for an author to bring it up in Judges or in the Ahab-Jezebel sequence, or when the Assyrians arrived, or for one of the more visceral Prophets like Ezekiel. Elitzur concedes the possibility of one author later subsumed into a longer history. But that might even help the paper's case: he's arguing that the later editor, or perhaps Editor, assigned earlier content to their correct place.

The largest tub o' skub develops from the implication of no later major editorial intrusions. He might allow, oh, the tweaks to Joshua against 4QJoshᵃ or the airdropping of Judges 6:7-10. But he doesn't allow for the Documentary Hypothesis in the five books (claimed) before Joshua. They're historical books too and they end with the Testament of Moses which is Deuteronomy.

[We'll deal with elon and with GLY later.]

Elitzur brings also ḌḤK as a basic Semitism. This is ṢḤQ for Genesis, which needs to explain the name יצחק; the root is also in Exodus (thus Ezekiel) and once in Judges. Alternative Hebrew is ŚḤQ from... Judges again, and Jeremiah and 1-2 Reigns/Samuel, and the Psalter and Proverbs. By the way Psalm 105, Jeremiah, and Amos(!) agree that Isaac's name is with S not Ṣ. The majority principle leads to ŚḤQ for the actual Hebrew. 'Tis a little harder to figure in Arabic because I cannot find it in Safaitic. Once it gets into the postNabati script it could just as easily be ḌḤK - or ṢḤK.

BKY is a good Safaitic root for weeping, which these herders on the Nabati fringe did over cairns and graves. Elitzur sees this root in the earlier parts and, yeah, I suspect it was always Semitic. From Isaiah 1-39 on, Prophets like Jeremiah use DM῾ and it also appears once in Kings / 3-4 Reigns, then Ezekiel. If Torah knew DM῾ why didn't Torah use DM῾?

"Maidservant" amah and shaptah exist only in quoted dialog, like -na. In each case here, the woman is rendering an appeal. Elitzur here does not read these female words in Pentateuch, even in narrative sections where someone like Rebecca in Genesis 24:18-19, or especially Sarah [in Gen. 18], could have used it but did not. One might also ask after Rahab in Jericho; here, we can contrast that -na which does appear in Genesis. Elitzur here argues this means the usage (amah first) started in the Gibeah episode [of Judges 19] to continue throughout Reigns although maybe dropping off in final 2 Kings. As Joshua precedes all that; so does Torah.

asa for "fire-sacrifice" is of course Levitic. Elitzur however refuses it for P - he overall refuses all P - because it's also in Deuteronomy. Then it recurs in Joshua and even Samuel.

Elitzur brings a fair dataset. I think, however, his cases aren't as strong as he thinks. Just because a bundle with some word exists, that says nothing about the sequence before-and-after.

For "thy [maid]servant", we have outside data: Late Bronze Age texts, wherein Canaani or Ugariti supplicants abase themselves before some Pharaoh as "thy servant". The trope's persistence in the Iron Age would parallel the world of Judges 19-to-Reigns. For Elitzur the trope should be even stronger if Genesis truly was a text of early iron or even bronze.

Now take asa. Since Wellhausen, most understand that even without the "Holiness Code" P came from a central altar. D and D's history was arguing for that central altar. Just because a sacrifice was burned does not mean the law came from P. D would do just as well, in which case P simply developed the theme and drew up a whole ritual around it.

The story Nolan told

I still have no intention of watching Nolan as, I hear, Emily Wilson isn't bothering. I am still checking out the reactions; Benjamin Shapiro seems to have a good one. He argues Nolan has written a Christian story, inasmuch as the theme is Odysseus' sense of that Christian emotion guilt. Nolan might deny this himself.

Rebbe Shapiro has some interest in this era, as he claims descent from those who skipped out of the House of Ra around then. This blog has noted the earlier Libyan attack on the House of Ptaḥ. That pharaoh Merne Ptaḥ noted Israel, in his own time. Israel wasn't around for the great naval run against Ramses III "1177 BC", but the Tribes will have to face the Philistine allophyles. Back to Shapiro, I'll circle, below.

The Romans, who like the Jews are not Greeks, unlike the Jews did inherit the Greek pantheon or something close-enough. So they produced something suitably Roman: the Aeneid. Virgil set out to retell Sack of Troy but from the Trojan point-of-view. Aeneid was so good, at least books 2/4/6 were, that we no longer actually own Sack of Troy. Theodore Nash points out that Virgil had good Greek predecessors for his concern for Troy's victims.

Shapiro's people own their own Aeneid - on land: the Exagog(u)e, in Egyptian Greek. Shapiro himself prefers the Haggadah but I doubt he is ignorant at least of The Prince of Egypt.

You know what Virgil and Ezekiel didn't do? They didn't rewrite Odysseus' story for their own. These shenanigans did sometimes happen then but Virgil and Ezekiel were too good for that. They found or inherited, respectively, their own protagonists. Nolan, I submit, should have written his own fanfic, as Virgil had done. It may be that Nolan can't.

I wonder if Nolan has created here something like Cameron's Avatar. Big money now; big noise now. Low cultural impact.

2 Isaiah did not preach in the wilderness

It is now 10 Ab in my timezone, so to my fellow Semites I hope your fast was easy. Let's talk Shabbat Nachamu.

Pump Up The Volume (mis)cast a twentysomething Christian Slater as highschool student Mark. That is a portentious name; the evangelist we call "Mark" (and this blog holds as authentic) started his "gospel of Christ" with reference to Isaiah 40, in the form of a voice crying out in the wilderness. The Mark in that movie, we learn, is a Yankee lately transported to the "wave of mutilation" which was 1990 suburban Arizona.

R. David Freidenreich in TheTorah is arguing that the movie got it wrong. He admits in all fairness that it's not just a Christian interpretation; the Aggadah of Genesis had elided the same verse by the time of the movie. Although I'll suggest here that this text still depended upon the Christians' base.

That base was the Leontopolitan Isaiah. It was in Onias IV's interest to remove the Prophets from Zion.

2 Isaiah, like the prophet of most Isaiah 1-33, was a man of Zion. The Lord was coming to His Mountain and it was time to prepare His way - and, soon, His House which is the Temple to come. The rabbi here cites Joseph Blenkinsopp, that this passage intended the ceremonial path to the Lord's Advent. (It might further nod to the Persian highways, and to Cyrus II's call for the exiles' return; although Blenkinsopp and the rabbi dismiss both.) Zion was not, itself, a wilderness in God's sight. Either Isaiah would find absurd to build paths to a place that didn't yet exist.

Tell you what was a place of no particular value to the Lord, as of the second century BC: Leontopolis. Where Onias was stuck.

It would make sense to tweak this verse so that, in the "elder" days, the Prophet was calling from the desert that is, not Zion. The Lord is coming where He pleases and we must house Him there.

Psalm 45 as the ode for Solomon

Psalm 45 (MT) might be the Catholic core psalm. Biblical scholars love it too, usually assigning it to Athaliah's wedding upon a base of Ahab-and-Jezebel. Lately however one Yazdan Safaee suggests it is better placed with the Persians - pdf at the link.

The language turns out to be Late Biblical Hebrew, with parallels in 3 Isaiah and Esther. It may even be Templar, paralleling the Hebrew parts of Ezra. As ideology goes the king's throne is God's throne, and for him is the glory which Psalm 104 would reserve to its (sun) God. Even the most promonarchic texts of the Deuteronomist History wouldn't dare that.

Rather, this khwarrah permeates where the Chronicler (in LBH) adjusts its own base in Reigns. We know the Chronicler owned a psalter, parts of which he mainlined into the narrative. Psalm 45, as Safaee would have it, is for Solomon - like the Canticles. The messianist would say: for the new Solomon to come.

Safaee now must explain how this Psalm ended up with the songs of Qoraḥ 42-9, Elohistic redaction. For Safaee, this editor wanted to cap Psalm 44 - a song of exile - with a promise for the better future.

The verses 45:11-16 remain outstanding. I don't know if Safaee explains that as well as he could. I might suggest a "fan fiction" where the gentiles of Lebanon are marrying into Solomon's house. As, perhaps, an irony, this revives Hugo Grotius: who argued for the Psalm as the wedding song of Solomon to an Egyptian princess. Such had been accepted into the Geneva Bible also.

If we are looking at Chronicler fanfic, very little room remains for Ahab or Athaliah theorists (or, indeed, for Grotius). Such would have to argue that this Psalm somehow avoided notice until after 2 Isaiah. Unless... they can find witnesses to this Psalm before the LBH corpus. But given Psalm 104, which is considered late (and Egyptian), that is going to be difficult.

Peter McCullough is a disgrace

I'll say up front I am no biologist - but neither is CatTurd2. It may be pointless to argue with the convinced and especially not with paid partnership. What we can do, is explain Dr. Peter McCullough. The American Board of Internal Medicine last year decertified his ass.

As to why, one reason is he's a liar. Not just in the makes-inaccurate-statements sense; any one can leave sausage in the litterbox. In the, "I speak for Baylor Scott & White Health" sense; which untruth attracted that company's lawyers.

Cloth masks and social distancing - indoors - worked too by the way. Not as well as the vaxx, but enough to slow the spread. UPDATE 7/25: Can we call it fascism yet?

How stiff is spacetime?

This is one of my titles ending in a question-mark, which I reserve for special occasions. Like "not having anything good to type about this evening".

Anhydrous glass, beryllium, and graphene all share a property: the Young Modulus. This stress:strain is called "stiffness". It turns out that gravity bends space. Kip Thorne in 2018 delivered the Hamilton Lecture “Exploring the Universe with Gravitational Waves” on the topic, after a lot of this bending had been measured. Someone in the audience pondered spacetime's Young Modulus; Rainer Weiss gave an answer.

Thus far, 25 minutes into Physics Explained's youtube.

Looking around, other physicists have questions, like David Izabel and A. C. Melissinos. They all agree with Weiss that spacetime has a Young.

Weiss was caught backfooted. He thought the Young depended on frequency of gravitational waves, and based on 100 Hz threw out a number: 1e+20 more than steel. Melissinos gave it a little more thought, and from "first principles" calculated 1e−9 Pascals, which is 1e-14 that of... jello. Maximum. An uncharitable soul might compare these results to Bottke and Loeb tussling over Chicxulub.

The Youtuber pulls further, I think, from Tello-Strong asking at what point the space-time... breaks. I think that question is a secondary at this point.

Making Chicxulub

Everyone agrees Chicxulub wasn't from here. Since February 2021 a consensus has formed is that it was a carbonaceous chondrite. These are rare down here but they do get here; 142 Polana, for instance, is in the B class of these and has spawned many a pile of dangerous rubble. But I don't think many believe that Polana dropped the bomb on me (baby).

Instead, Makhatadze's team say: the Ornans class, CO or maybe CT. They did this by measuring the nickel isotopes. A CO / CT might be, or have been, carboniferous but the harder stuff is in there, even prevalent now (see below).

As hinted, carbonaceous chondrites are diverse. Which one was it? Hence the check for nickel. This comes in five isotopes as might have halflives beyond the 4.567Gy after coalescing into CCs. Each type of CC formed in different environments with their own recipes for nickel. They say CI is special here, and that CY (which is new) groups with them. Which led them to exonerate this whole subgroup from our crater.

Previous estimates had clustered around CM. The nickel rules closer to CO. They formed around the same place, sooty 3.7 AU; they are differentiated, as it were, in time, CO forming earlier. CT is also possible but they aren't as well-constrained as yet, and as North Americans say when they hear hoofbeats, horses be more likely than zebras.

CO Chondrites are also, they say, dry - until this one splashed into shallow water that is. Previous estimates on the sulfur sent into the atmosphere had been estimated from the assumption of a sulfur-rich CM so those estimates are going to have to change. Unless the monster struck an oil field admittedly, and this is the future Gulf of America we are discussing here.

They point to Bottke 2007 as one line of evidence, on this rock coming from a 160Mya breakup. That would be the 298 Baptistina hypothesis. I know Bottke's been around awhile but I personally would not do this, except as a nod to those discredited pre-CC theories. Because it's the wrong rock (it's S) at the wrong time (80 Mya). CO rocks instead formed past the present (and CM era?) snowline although perhaps not the 2.7My-after-solar-system snowline. We are here not discussing the Grand Tack.

I have to wonder about 495 Eulalia ...

The Precambrian Asteroid Punch

800 million years ago, the Boring Billion ended as our Moon broke its nineteen-hour tidal resonance and started its gradual march outward. There was nothing naturally geological going on down here; supercontinent Rodinia had formed 100My before (supercontinents are even more dead and boring) and would last another 50My. Perhaps we might have been pushed from outside.

Bottke et al. say our moon got a surge of craters (including Copernicus); Earth too should have had still more. Keep in mind that Bottke like Loeb has a history of meddling in Chicxulub and getting it wrong, although Bottke hasn't since gone as totally stupid as far as I know.

A lot of this relies on simulation. The craters match if a swarm of loose asteroids had reached the 3:1 Jupiter resonance all of a sudden. A big impact would push fragments into 3:1J (they call it "J3:1"). So, a bunch of impacts immediately; then the Yarkovsky Effect kicks in for more of the surviving rubble, heating and outgassing the volatiles to 3:1J over the next 150My.

That resonant region, noted on this blog, includes 495 Eulalia and 142 Polana. Eulalia is currently 1:2 resonant with Mars; Polana more like that 3:1J. Polana, we know, is tossing stuff like Bennu at us. But the Bottke Boys be pointing at Eulalia because they note it broke up ... 800 Mya. Polana has probably not been where it is for long.

They also blame these inner-crossing rocks for a surge of volcanism over then-dead-already Mars. And with "shifts in the biosphere" here. At that time nonplant life here was still stolonic. Wiki points to a "Choanozoa" postfungal but not yet animal.

Back to LHS 1140

Three summers ago I got moderately excited about Gliese 3053 = LHS 1140 b - the M star's outer planet, 24.7 days. I didn't really look at later-discovered c, which I thought would be irradiated and airless. The Alfvén surface habitability criterion looked good for b however so it got attention at the time.

I started pondering underground water as might deflate the rocky part's density and raise its radius, so held off on saying much more about this unconstrained planet. I had questions needing answers about its atmospheric composition.

So: more data's come in (h/t Zim, but poorly worded). Still looking at a mass of 5.60 ±0.19 Earth masses (M_⊕) and a radius of 1.730 ±0.025 Earth radii (R_⊕). Star is just under 15 parsecs away. It hasn't been flaring, and spins 131 days; so is deemed 3+Gy old. Planet b only gets 42% incoming flux but that's enough for HZ status on its sun-facing side.

The star probably used to flare which is how come c, just over Earth mass, is blasted out. The paper is going to float implications for the Cosmic Shoreline (to the extent I hadn't already). I don't believe any further planets are detected here; there might not be room below the 25 day range.

What is found here (and not down on c) is "metastable helium". That is the 2 ³𝑆₁ excited state, bumping an electron to a higher ring; as on WASP-107b. Once excited it takes around 7870 seconds to cool back down again. As Collin Cherubim et al. say in their title, Helium escaping from the atmosphere (pdf). And the helium isn't always found: it was found 2024 (when this blog was looking) but not 2025.

Also there's not much hydrogen. Although the planet is ill-lit, it should still be warm enough for low-melt methane to rise past the "cold trap" of the convective troposphere (so the paper), where it would be broken up. So no new methane is being created downbelow. Water on the other hand can form into clouds below all that helium. Venerians will pipe in that so can sulfuric acid. Good case for the Sudarsky II.

Don't watch Emily Wilson

The Odyssey was a fanfic of Homer (and, possibly, also of The Sack of Troy), and we cannot rule out that a woman composed it. Emily Wilson has made the text relevant for a modern audience.

And dvorstone explains why I ain't watching Nolan's rendition of Wilson's vision:

The Odyssey is not a universal story. It is not a detachable “hero’s journey” that can be stripped of its cultural origins and modernized for contemporary audiences. Its power lies in its particularity. The audience must do the work of closing the gap; the text does not come to us.
The values that animate it, xenia (reciprocal guest-friendship), oikos (the household and its obligations), mētis (cunning intelligence), kleos (glory), and timē (honor), are not interchangeable with modern liberal abstractions. They are embedded in a specific ancient Greek moral and social world.

All this, besides Claire Lehmann promoting it whom I don't trust one bit. Besides Razib Khan linking whatever this is I guess because that particular midwit had read the word "xenia" back in philosophy class once.

If we're going back to the Palatial Period, LHIII before LHIIIC, I suspect mētis won't show up much. The Linear B tablets float plenty of -klewēs names suggesting every other one of dvorstone's themes; the wanax presided over an honor-culture. Mētis however seems unhelpful to the Palace, more helpful to the peasantry (and to the slaves).

But mētis we do want to see in Odyssey. This might be a tale of a man of mētis redeemed back into the oikos. The postArchaic story. Pity Wilson can't tell it and Nolan won't.

ERRATUM 7/21: it's Wilson not Watson. Gaahhh. I'll leave the URL up.

The Grand Tack, or not

Kyplanet is pulling up Franklin et al. ... from 2004. Franklin's team suggested that Jupiter captured the Hilda asteroids (those 3:2's) on a tack of 0.45 AU inward. This is a problem for the Grand Tack which predicts a much longer inward migration, pulled back by Saturn. Zheng et al. also dispute the grandness of any tack. D'Angelo and Marzari in 2012 questioned if Saturn had that force if Jupiter ever wandered within 4 AU of the nascent Sun.

At least Franklin as a 2004 paper is vulnerable to later data, especially since we've now been visiting the Jovian-region 'stroids. Vokrouhlický et al. want to know how the slow-short-tack theory of Franklin's team can account for the dispersed ...distribution of Hilda inclinations. Overall that 2004 paper is treated as a minority-report (although not yet refuted).

More trouble for Grand Tack might be that it doesn't actually explain what it was supposed to explain, namely Mars' tiny mass. Other constraints we don't got include whatever other large bodies were in this system and might have been yeeted.

The great freeze

This March I noted the great swamping of Europe from an Iberian refug(ium). At the time I'd figured it as violent... and then I found that the original Neanders didn't totally die out. Today is served a second helping of crow.

I had collapsed the earlier Neanders' fall with the demic diffusion of 63kBC - ah hell, this long ago, "65 thousand years ago" might be better. But populations of (presumably) similar tech are rarely simply stomped on; more likely, something had slashed the general Neander population before the Iberian diffusion. Tübingen brings the archaeology. The population outside Iberia had been (too) low for ten thousand years.

We may compare the Neanders from 45k-42kya (43-40kBC) who got replaced by, well, us.

So what was going on in Europe 75-65kya? This is about when most would place Toba but I don't think Toba could have dumped on 'em for ten millennia. What GoogleAI does find is MIS 4, 71-57kya. That is also incidentally about when humans (with quite a bit of Denny DNA) crossed the great Sunda into the island continent Sahul, and the hobbits died out also.

Who owns the Decalogue?

This may as well be theology-day.

The ten axioms ('Asherat ha-Debarîm) of the religions from Torah, often mistaken for "commandments", are now back on X because Jordan Peterson pointed out that they are Jewish; Joel Berry is saying similar. Theodore Beale says no: they were divine. Also Moses was a Levite, thus bypassing Judah which was not the best of tribes at the time.

All that stuff about God nonetheless fronting the Messianic Kingdom from Judah, which line the Gospel of Matthew will trace through Joseph of Nazareth... isn't for Beale. For Beale, the truly Messianic line goes through Mary. Judah is quite literally cucked, via Saint Joseph. As Mary replaced their Messiah; so Luke's Roman Christendom has replaced Judaism. And Luke's two books replace Matthew and Mark; Matthew is just there to illustrate the extent of mah boi Joe's cuckoldry.

I assume Beale by the satanic Babylonian religious group intends the Talmud and not, oh, Ezekiel or MT Psalm 137 or the seven day week. As for Mary, Beale doesn't venture, although her relation to the Temple points to one of those non-Judah families. (Akyol thinks it was Levi but he has to wave off Luke to get there.)

So let's look at what Biblical scholars say about whether Judah deserved this cucking. Besides Ezekiel's ancient rants; he wouldn't want Levi either.

Luke (famously) knew much less about the Judaea than about the Greek-speaking northeastern Med, from Syracuse to Antioch. That excepts where he's relaying Mark (and, Catholics add, Matthew; I'd add Peter). So I deem of interest Luke brings the Temple tradition around Mary, which you'd think would be obscure to a goy like him. It might precede Luke.

So now we're on the case of the Decalogue(s) and its/their relation to the Jewish people. Despite high regard for Moses and the arrival to Horeb, the psalmists didn't say a lot of the Law there. The Bible does of course consider the Ark of importance. The Chronicler makes a to-do about the Ark being transferred to Jerusalem. But the contemporary Samaritans rejected Chronicles but hard; still do.

As I noted here, the earlier-composed parts of the Bible rely upon a tradition in which Moses summons what one might call YHWH's Glory. The people cannot bear the fullness of this theophany; however later Moses receives... the Covenant Code (surprise!). Subsequently Deuteronomy develops this, in the course of Moses' parting testament. This is where Deuteronomy 4:13 introduces the 'Asherat ha-Debarîm, some form thereof anyway.

Overall: the Covenant-Code and Deuteronomy are both early and present a case for pan-Israelite shared lore even when the Davidide kings still reigned. But.

It was the Davidide king Josiah who raised these texts to a national canon. Thirty years ago people were talking about a "Deuteronomist Historian" who'd laid out an admittedly-whiggish theory of how their kingdom came to be and what made it work. Ezekiel himself, Babylonian enemy of the average Jew as he was, had to accept some Deuteronomic precepts.

Frankly the Samaritans owe a debt to the Jews for assembling the overall Five Books of Torah and installing that in their Temple, a task the Samaritans hadn't done at Gerizim as far as we know (their Torah is, like the Greeks', secondary). The Christians owe even more a debt, since they've canonised everything else which the Jews kept from before the Babylonians (and much else afterward).

As far as politics goes, the Trump side of the Right - and I suspect even the Vance side - sees the likes of Beale as needlessly-divisive grifters. On the Jewish side, Laura Loomer is reporting it's not helping (although Joel Berry isn't helping either).

John Esposito, antischolar

Jonathan AC Brown offers an eulogy for his mentor at Georgetown, John Esposito (not this guy). Let us venture down Memory Lane on our way to see off his skiff.

A look through the man's Wikipedia page uncovers little in the way of true research, in the way Bernard Lewis had done. His ouevre was to explain Islam to western seculars. This, the Saudis paid for, through Georgetown's "center" for Muslim-Christian Understanding.

If this dancing macaque was compromised as a scholar, he did venture to opine upon other scholars outside the prince's payroll. He ranked Lewis among the Darth Vaders of the world, and then among the devils of the netherworld. Lewis shared this distinction with Daniel Pipes (or Piepes), author of what should have been a classic work on the mawali.

If Pipes perhaps has been damned to the "Islamophobe" corner - a corner Esposito had set up - such could not be done to Lewis. Agree or disagree with Lewis overall, Lewis' work on mediaeval Islamic politics and history will live for generations to come. Esposito's memory will be for a curse.

Inasmuch as Georgetown is (still) a Catholic institution, the Church should have paid for that center instead, and called that tune.

The record from the seafloor

Anton Petrov points to an r-process event. That's neutron capture associated with the "kilonova" merger of neutron-stars. Some of the physics was fine-tuned last month.

Kilonovae be rare these days. This one happened 100-90 Mya. They can tell from the decay of Plutonium-244, actually fairly long lived, but rare here because most of our plutonium is made: for critical-mass. Kilonova should also create Curium-247 but this one has run out already.

As a side note, the Iron-60 spikes from 7 and 2 Mya are also found. And better-constrained, they say.

Toward the third place ribbon

Europe has figured out that Starship is a generation ahead in cargo-to-orbit. Everyone else, including China, is working to catch up... to Falcon 9. On May 2025, Europe mooted something they can do in the interim: a winged booster, which Reusable Launch Vehicle the paper dubbs "RLV C5".

The C5 at least uses tech which Europe has been working on, so there's a base there. Specifically Deutsch: the DLR's SpaceLiner. This paper got to Universetoday last March and it's on ScienceDaily now. Meanwhile all four authors have revisited the theme here (for "RLVC-5").

The Germans independently checked Elon Musk's boasts and, yeah, they confirmed that the 2024-5 Starship was for real. 59 tonnes; and they further predicted that this year's Raptor 3 based booster-and-starship can push this to 115 tonnes. If they don't reuse the booster that goes to a Saturn V tier 188 tonnes. (Once again, that's the SLS ideal of Just Get It Outta Here.)

Since the German booster "SpaceLiner SLB8" is now supporting wings too it is bearing more useless mass toward orbit. This reduces the available cargo on the second-stage. The SpaceLiner would just let that one float for the mission duration. Also the first stage with the wings must burn hydrogen, not methane. Also also the gliding booster gets caught by another aircraft before gently returned to Dusseldorf. Lastly, as of last April the SLB8 was still on the drawing-board; and wings for recovery generally is in low maturity, comparatively.

All that will get their cargo to 70 tonnes. If the second stage chassis counts as cargo that might help.

The RLV C5 does get more "efficiency" however. 74% of mass once-in-orbit is payload; as opposed to the Starship which "is" - meaning, in 2025 was - 40%.

DLR is, I darkly suspect, banking on international agreements sandbagging SpaceX. The pretext will be that methane (and kerosene) expel/s carbon in high atmo.

NERVA on the SLS

As General Atomics was testing their NTP (better, NΘP) engine, and various HALEU-driven tugs were exiled from Earth's gravity well, DRACO got canceled. Anyway here is something I missed that (2025) January: deep-space missions.

The idea best-I-can-tell was to give the SLS something to do besides pay off Senators and prance around on the Moon one more (and last) time. The whole design behind that was to inject something serious past Earth L1, directly, without any infrastructure up there. Starship as you (should) know was never meant for this; it is meant for creating that infrastructure - in LEO, namely a fuel and supply depot.

Anyway last year Arthur Beckman et al. figured that a NERVA engine, once delivered far-enough up that the anti-nuke guys wouldn't bother you, could break the (now-meagre) bonds of Earth and spew out some serious I_sp. This particular design promises 900s. That adds 17% payload to a one-way Deimos trip (relative to Hohmann by hydrox' ~500 I_sp, one assumes). Some of this load is the engine itself of course but they're assuming no difference from the chemical engines we've had. Which is quite the assumption given the need for shielding.

Once at Deimos the passengers do the thing where hopefully they establish a base, unspool cable, kick up local spingrav, make more cable out of anhydrous glass, and generally prepare for a gentle landing on the red planet. (More likely they skip Deimos and fool around in the planet itself which this blog has never recommended.) I mean, they might have the extra space for it . . .

Much more savings can be had from visiting further-away planets. Uranus is noted here in this context because we haven't orbited that one yet. For a seven-year trajectory a chemical rocket could hold "6.8-mt" payload. NTP for the same time boosts payload to 14.3: 210% increase! -mind, here the chemical system was egregiously wasteful (Starship can at least aerobrake) and, again, they haven't loaded up the payload at the depot b/c SLS. This goes up and up as we deal with Pluto (read: Kuiper) or interstellar... but I'm ignoring all that, because interstellar might end up with electrons from a solar statite.

Temematic

Last year I caught wind of something called "Temematic". This was a language somewhere in the hazy region between Old Prussian, German, and Celtic that was not any of the above. Then the Slavs came and the place enters actual history after all the damage had been done. Alexei Kassian is now on Temematic's case.

Holzer in 1989 had defined "Temematic" from the shift of obstruents: tenues > mediae, mediae aspiratae > tenues. Overall IE *p *t *k > bdg, IE *bʰ *dʰ *gʰ > ptk, but IE (*b)*d *g were retained intact as bdg. That shift did not apply to the Balto-Slavic mainline; only to 45 words he'd found within Balto-Slavic. These then would be loans. Maybe it happened in Pomerania.

Most scholars shrugged and went along, it seems, until Matasović in 2013. This one could not find any substrate loans in Balto-Slavic; which - however annoying for Holzer - turns out a boon for students of Indo-European who can now work with Balto-Slavic as a pure offshoot from the baseline of (no less than) Indo-Iranian.

Kassian revives the Temematic hypothesis by allowing for 17 of its words which he can, still, find in protoSlavic. Baltic as well, but independently.

Kassian is elsewhere something of a dissident in Slavic linguistics since he'd date the Slavic breakup to the early first millennium AD, as against the consensus who date it to the middle. But that isn't important here.

What matters here is that Kassian sees the protoSlavs - the first unified Slavs - leaving the Baltic Heimat sometime 1500-1000 BC. They then met up with total strangers. For these 17 words, those indigenes were the Temematic people.

Kassian's Temematic-speakers moreover were not even IndoEuropean. So this looks like a different signal more than a refinement of the signal. They'd be West European Substrates, usually associated with the Neolithic farmers who preceded all those other "Sons of Aryas". Most today associate them with the Funnel-Beaker peoples. Some of their other words entered Greek.

Also: the mix happened in two pulses. One was just the Funnel-Beaker substrate. The later pulse was the pulse we can (still) honestly call Temematic, having undergone the sound-shift; this happened in the first millennium BC or theoretically somewhat later.

The scouring of Flores

There are at least two Portuguese-named Flores islands; we're dealing with the one with hobbits. We now have a record of its climate and of its elephant population.

The Liang Bua clock starts 190kya, for humans anyway (I don't know about before that). After the MIS 5e which we used to call Eemian, this release offers more detail:

We found three key climate phases. It was wetter than today year-round between 91,000 and 76,000 years ago. Between 76,000 and 61,000 years ago, the monsoon was highly seasonal, with wetter summers and drier winters. Then, between 61,000 and 47,000 years ago, the climate turned much drier in summer

After that it gets silly by talking "southern Queensland", as if that part of Australia had the same climate over that stretch. Weak sauce, mates. Maybe instead relate this to Timor.

The Floresian parahumanity limped along as scavengers. Until 48kBC sometime around which, one of Indonesia's volcanoes went boom - and that was it. It wasn't Toba 72kBC; but whatever it was, Flores now went under new management. That first human population might have been like Timor's then; nowadays the "central Malay/Polynesian" cluster has pretty much swamped all those islands.