LHS 1903

Thomas Wilson and-Co. published DOI 10.1126/science.adl2348 last February. Science Daily, late as ever, has delivered the ESA' press release. Adam Mann at Science News might have the better summary.

The LHS 1903 system is 116 ly away, a red dwarf half Solar mass. Its four planets are all too hot as well as tidally-locked. The outer planet e is raising the hype because it is 1.7 Earth radii. Up to now, we tend to get Earthlikes up to 1.6 and then the "superEarths" from 1.8 up, more like miniNeptunes.

LHS 1903 e turns out to be Earthlike in density, not a Neptunian at all. It could have held onto a Venereal cloudy Sudarsky II layer but, it seems, not.

Wilson posits that the system simply ran out of gas, if I may: the "Gas Depleted Formation" / G-DF. The planets formed from the inside, outward. The fourth, and whatever might exist in the habitable zone on out, did not have anything left.

That G-DF model assumes planetary migrations at least for e. And yeah: no migrations for systems like this tend, I think, to produce orbital resonances. The periods are 2.2, 6.2, 12.6, and 29.3 days. Perhaps for b:c:d, 6:2:1 be close-enough (libration?). Planet e as the literal outlier, like Callisto outside Jupiter, demands a different theory. They ponder if it got smashed up early, such that on its final formation out there the ices weren't available.

Jeroboam the Great

The younger but not the lesser Jeroboam is known to have extended his writ over the Negev. Meanwhile an Assyrian fort at Kheleifeh was excavated. This is a fort on the vale between the Dead Sea and Eilat / Aqaba. It's being rethought, in light of 'Ayn-Hatzeba on the Israeli side, closer the salt sea. Some trash there now has a carbon-date.

This blog is on record as holding carbon dating at about the same level of credibility as the Bible, which is - let us say - conditional. Dendrochronology, which I like better, is hard in a region where trees barely exist. Luckily the Israel Antiquities Authority brings additional evidence.

A third site exists, known to be Israelite: Kuntillet Ajrud, which is more famous than those other two, bearing as it does some local artwork. The only reason to venture this desert is to stop over on a trade-route (or to prey on the traders).

The article points out: Israel, not Judah - and not Damascus. By this time Gath was long gone and so was its destructor Hazael. Israel was returning from its torpor.

Scores had been settled with breakaway Jerusalem also. Its rulers identified with the House of David. To Jeroboam II, Jerusalem's boy king probably mattered about as much as neo-Gath or maybe even Damascus itself: don't raid our caravans and we'll get along. As to why Jeroboam permitted a Davidide identity for that city: the alternative would be Omride, possible through Athaliah of recent memory. David had dubious currency up north where the Omrides had ruled, more recently and more credibly. David, to Jeroboam, was less of a threat where it mattered.

We might hope to see some merchant ostraca. The hope to see some Jeroboam-era literary texts is more like a pipe dream, but we can hope for that too.

SIDENOTE: hat to be tipped to Dr Davila at Paläojudaïca. A lot of my links on this topic come from there. Sometimes he links to something I'd already found on (say) Archaeology or ScienceDaily or TheTorah; sometimes he links over there and I'd have likely found it myself eventually. Not always however, as in this case. Blogspotter to blogspotter: thank you for what you do.

Right vote, wrong man

Newly-lamed quackie Senator Bill has had a change of heart over the Iran !War. Wholly unrelated to the wooden spoon which his Acadiens voters recently delivered to him (not even 1/4!)... or so he'll claim.

Personally I rather liked Cassidy as a Senator. He was holding the line against the execrable Robert Kennedy and his "MAHA" Mansongirls. I can only assume he wanted to hold other lines. Does anyone really think that "fellow RINO" Lindsey Graham would have flipped like this?

Or maybe he is acting out of spite now.

Still... we'll take it.

Which way, young autist?

Cell Genomics does what the magazine does. Journal of Independent Medicine does... one thing.

Like how the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs only does one thing. And I do believe they are connected, as Dr Offit might be able to tell a goy.

Anyway, Laura Loomer seems to understand the Massie coalition of "OG MAGA": MTG and Boebert. The abusers of X's community-note feature; the Paul family. The American Reich; Cenk and Bilzerian. Pence's henchies have likewise slithered in.

They are on the side of disease. Of the demons, in MAHA's case. What, indeed, is to be done?

Ibn Barrajân (and al-Biqâ'î)

Waaay long ago in a library a thousand miles away, I picked up a published tafsîr by al-Biqâ'î. It made several Biblical references as I'd not seen in any other tafâsir. Many of these were referred, or deferred, to an Ibn BRGAN. Later I found out about Ibn Barrajân but, as of 2013, you could download a raw manuscript but not an edition.

Live long enough, and sometimes things change for the better. I am not the only one to travel down the same path; nor, I suspect, the first. Roy McCoy III, or Roy Michael McCoy, has a few articles and a full dissertation. It's not so easy to read the articles but the University of Oxford has generously allowed all to download the dissertation. I assume it's earned for him a PhD now.

Ibn Barrajân was an Andalusian. He was born in Tunis and made his way to Seville. Unfortunately this, and he, ended up under the Almoravids. On AH 536, which is AD 1146, their emir in Marrakesh summoned him and clapped him in irons, where he died.

Yousef Casewit in 2016 floated a summary of Ibn Barrajân's interface with the Bible. By his time, also the time of Ibn Hazm the Zahirite, a Catholic population existed in the Arabophone community. One may compare the Melkites in Jerusalem and Cairo. Outsiders in Spain called them the Musta'rabs, "Mozarab" for those still speaking Iberian Romance. As Arab-speakers, they needed a lection... and, perhaps, a Bible. Local traditions insist they had a Bible although such does not survive.

I am not willing, yet, to credit all this. Assuredly lections, at least, existed. Popular bases for the day's Lesson came from the Creation, from the Abraham/Isaac/Lot cycle, and from Matthew's Gospel. Casewit finds Ibn Barrajân quoting extensively such passages. Enough to finger the source as the Latin Bible; mostly Jerome's, but with a touch of Vetus-Latina as well. I assume Matthew has come from the Byzantine text of emperor Theodosius which Jerome promoted against the Alexandrine.

It is of high interest that Ibn Barrajân considers Matthew the Gospel against Luke. John the high-Christologer offers little of interest for the Moslem, and Mark - although eminently low-christologic - simply doesn't contain all the material one wants. Suras 3 and 19, I had thought, were more tied with Luke or at least with the harmonies. Harmonies existed in Latin and even in Arabic, which we tend to ascribe to relics of the Diatesseron. But not here: only Matthew is here.

Perhaps the Mozarabs were insisting on Matthew-alone so they didn't have to get sura 3 preached at them. Also famous, I must note, is an ancient translation of Matthew into Hebrew which was making the rounds among the Jews, of course not that many of them were much preaching from that book.

Zahirites like Ibn Hazm believed that the Bible was near-worthless, read only to be debunked. Ibn Barrajân by contrast loved the Torah (in Vulgate/MT form) and even defended it. He was accused of more of Christianising than of anything else, though. Perhaps because he did, in fact, use a Latin basis over Hebrew (plenty of Arab-speaking Jews existed, using their own translations). But also he may have accepted Original Sin from Adam, which other Muslim Sunnis deny.

Another Phaethon

One Patrick M. Shober has reported a cluster of meteors. He argues the same clustering-effect happens with the Geminids. The Geminids have a source: 3200 Phaéthon. So a different - but similar - nearEarth asteroid has delivered this set of meteors.

This sort of rock behaves more like a comet. Shober's parent body is probably a C like Phaéthon, or Bennu.

The next project, Shober leaves to others: to get 'scope time for the hunt for this now-invisible asteroid.

Enamel

Denisova 3 - and Harbin / longi - has been called out as containing a "super archaic" introgression. It had been suspected from Erectus if circumstantially. More circumstantial evidence came in a couple days back. Here's a release mostly from Kirsty Penkman of York; here's the article from China.

This is from proteins, such as Linus Pauling might have approved; not full DNA. These teeth are simply too old and rare to risk mulching for DNA, as we might for Neanders and Denisovans which are everywhere now. One protein is AMBN-M273V found in the tooth-enamel. And in some (mostly later) Denisovan DNA; but not in the rest of us. Another is AMBN-253G which isn't anywhere else, so is now available to tag a tooth as specific to Erectus.

The Neanders perhaps never met any Erectus, as the post-split Denisovans met-n'-matched them. Erectus seems met in southeast Asia, preEemian, maybe when it was Sundaland.

As a humble protein-set rather than DNA, this thesis remains circumstantial: evidence, but not "proof". One reviewer, Massilani, points out that parallel mutations be possible. But: how come these mutations outside Erectus be so rare (M273V) or nonexistent (253G)? Penkman asks similar questions.

The Beja of old

I saw this one yesterday but was flat too exhausted - I blame altitude sickness - to post anything of it. So I'll try tonight.

These are mass graves in the strip of Sahara east of the Nile, 4000-3000 BCE extending into the third millennium, so overlapping the upper-Egyptian kingdom... in time (we'll get to space and people). The report comes from Atbai in modern Sudan. This abuts the southeast Egyptian coast. I expect similar ruins exist in that side of Egypt as well.

That region was Blemmyes in antiquity; the reaches of the Cushitic language Beja today. Since Browne in 2003 most scholars believe Beja - which is simply "Beduin" adapted to the language - evolved from Blemmyan. The Nubians seem not to have mingled with them much by contrast with Egyptians and, lately, Arabs.

The Red/Erythraean sea maintained links with the Egypt of the Pyramids, of "Red Sea Scrolls" fame. I don't know that any Beja vocabulary appears in those scrolls. It may be too far north for our purpose. There's talk the Egyptians first took note of the Blemmyes in the later Ramesside era or under Sheshonq, because - as with Qeheq - someone then uses a Beja word to open a prayer. The earlier Egyptian pharaohs cared about Nubia, who owned a viable state of their own; but ignored the nomads, who did not and do not.

The article notes that the old desert herdsmen, who assuredly behaved there like the Beja behave today, evolved an elite class. But was it a Cushitic or a Nubian class?

Local Bubble: Origins

A few years back we looked into iron-60 from recent supernovae. I pondered if such were connected to our local bubble. Today we heard that the local bubble indeed has something to do with Fe-60 in Antarctic ice... but this iron's a lot younger. It arrived between 40,000 and 124,000 years ago, say Catherine Zucker, Seth Redfield, Sara Starecheski, Ralf Konietzka, and Jeffrey L. Linsky.

This is about as low as, perhaps, a consistent Antarctic ice core can go, since 122kBC is MIS-5e/Eemian. At least easily.

The explosion which hollowed out this gap, and created the iron, out in space; has been dated 1.2Mya in Upper Centaurus Lupus. Joshua Peek offered some help, whom we remember from 2024 (with Opher and, sigh, Loeb). The paper does not rule out earlier excursions into other iron-poor bubbles, as Zucker's crew point out.

Anti-abecedaries

"Abecedary" refers to the ABCD order of the present common European alphabet, coming as it does from Imperial Latin. Earlier Latin had the "element", which I recall referred to an earlier LMN start to the sequence. Also in use - and perhaps influencing Latin's decision for ABCD - is "abgad". This applies to Arabic (where it's usually "abjad") and Hebrew - also Greek.

Al-Jallad with Prioletta is discussing the wider Semitica where they used a consonantal system as against, like, cuneiform or whatever the Ethiopians are doing. It's been known that the Yemenis preferred a HLHMQ order. These two argue that the Yemenis, too, used a mnemonic to fill in the letters: "halham[aq]".

Safaitic and Hismaic transcribe old dialects of Jordanian and north-Hijazi (respectively) Arabic, like that of the urban Nabatis. The two authors note that they eschewed-or-abandoned halham. When they write their spots in order, the order is that of the Jews. Abgad.

BACKDATE 5/15

Yet another PseudoMethodius book

Ancient Jew Review, which is not the Internet's best site for that - nor is it always Jewish - is hosting Evan Schafer's 23 March(?) review of Christopher Bonura's A Prophecy of Empire. According to the review, the book lifts the prophecy of the title, which it claimed for Mar Methodius, from the Shingar(a) / Sinjar highland. From that, the book transfers this prophecy to the "East Syriac" world.

Pseudo-Methodius famously skipped over John's Revelation. That omission may count as evidence for not being au-courant with such Miaphysitism as held sway among, for one, the Copts. Its main prophetic source instead was Aphrahat's fifth memra (not "memro") on Daniel. I must say here that Aphrahat is evidence for nothing inasmuch as his career preceded the Ephesian councils.

I took the liberty of searching for "Treasures" in the book. I don't find the word. I had the notion that everyone knew the apocalypse relied upon the Cave of Treasures but, it seems, not Bonura - nor Schafer. It is this, not the manuscript-tradition, which scholars use to place this text for the Miaphysite world. I must say that Singara will do as well as any other monastic environment for an east-Syrian Miaphysite origin.

As to why the text itself prefers "Qardu" and does not mention Shingar, I look at a map of old Corduene and I'm ... not seeing much difference. Qardu might be a little up and northeast. One can still find Miaphysite monasteries over there like Elpap / Alfaf / Mar-Mattai though, so even if that MS is wrong about Shingar it still doesn't matter.

Where were the University of California's internal reviewers?

The Bronze Age selection-crisis, I

This will likely be a series of poasts. I hadn't listened to the whole Dwarkesh-from-Reich interview but we do have a transcript. I was always more a reader than a listener anyway.

Among the other bombshells, and the refusal to acknowledge Piffer or Harpending or Cochran or Murray; I'm here to comment on this: The TYK2 variant for tuberculosis risk, a multiple sclerosis risk variant, inflected and increased in frequency before the Bronze Age, and then 2,000 or 3,000 years ago reversed in that period. My boldface.

MS is, I think, associated with a herpes virus: here the Epstein-Barr mononucleosis / glandular-fever. This maybe inspired Aldiss' bone-fever (later, fat-death). The herpes baseline goes waaaayyy back; I think even alligators get it.

"TYK2" refers to on-receptor tyrosine-protein kinase. Wiki relates it not to MS but to arterio-sclerosis.

I wonder if Reich or at least the transcription has suffered his/its own "mis-sense". Dwarkesh's chart seems irrelevant to that part of the interview.

BACKDATE 5/14

Cosmic-ray rule #1

This blog had noted a rule such as cosmic rays may break. The assumption had been that ambient light imposes a speedlimit upon relativistic protons, 5 × 10¹⁹. Since some rays show up with more energy than allowed by this mass and velocity, those rays must not be protonic. Iron ions, for instance.

So here's another rule, which rays of all masses follow. This is an energy limit of 15 tera-electronvolts (trillion 10¹²; TeV). Implicitly rather a steep dropoff than an absolute limit.

- or "TV", in our article. The Swiss - specifically the Geneva Francophobes - here piggybacked upon a project "meant" for dark-matter. The DAMPE space-telescope. Maybe they just used that name so as to get the funds.

BACKDATE 5/14

Lithium-propellant thruster

Been a bit since this blog has last looked in on new thruster tech. JPL have dredged up another 1960s concept. This is a nuclear-fueled, "magnetoplasmadynamic" lithium ejector.

Its chief engineer James Polk has focused on other ions thus far, like xenon. The article implies Polk has always dreamt of lithium for this.

It's high-impulse, not a one-time kick to a new trajectory. It promises 120 kW, 25 times the Psyche power. The problem then shifts to, what dynamo can deliver 120 kW in deep space consistently. Hence, nukes.

The hype is, "it goes to Mars!" - as usual. Really it's for probes to the far-parts of the Solar System. Which also aren't to be scoffed at; so, I'd rather such press releases focus on that.

A Weinersmithian epilogue

I got Scott Solomon's Becoming Martian and read it today. It's a kinder, gentler version of A City on Mars - less egregiously reddity. It may have been plotted out before Solomon actually read the Weinersmiths, given the overlap in subject.

This is a good thing. It means Solomon doesn't descend into complaining about "colonialism" until the last Becoming Martian chapter - which is in fact the "Epilogue". That's also where is cited Savannah Mandel's execrable Ground Control. I suspect Solomon would have cast stones at the great satan James Watson, too, had he more time; you know Mandel and the Weinersmiths would. I have to suspect Solomon would have cast more shade upon even Musk, whom I can tell he otherwise admires.

I suppose I am saying that the epilogic chapter is out of place. In addition this author still cannot find space to discuss asteroidal coloniessettlements. Maybe it's to be filed with our Moon as temporary housing?

I am of half a mind to rip those last pages off my copy entirely.

Shultanutha

Historians of Islam and, if they are any good, of the Syriac world know šlṭ. Also the esteemed New Republic author Ruth Shalit bore this name, as the sultana of steal. It had been thought that Ruth's (perhaps ashamed) ancestors had the root from Achaemenid Aramaic.

Its first appearance in Canaani thus-far has been in the Joseph narrative in Genesis. This is sus(pected) as informed by Ḥananiah of Yeb (ꜣbw, the elephantine isle). Our scholarship has agreed upon a Persian-era neologism.

šlṭ now appears in an theophoric of Baʻal: Bʻlšlṭ.

This is a reminder of how beholden Canaani/Aramaic scholars are to fragments. Clay tablets don't hold these languages well. Mostly these authors used ostraca and papyrus (or monuments) and if they didn't stumble onto šlṭ as a regular title, the word didn't get writ.

Lecker challenged

Michael Lecker is one of the higher-status scholars in the field of early Islam, to be classed perhaps with later Patricia Crone (or "Cronuh", for the IQSA crew). Like the Danish savant for Mecca, Lecker attempted to salvage the Madinan Era of the Prophet's sira - rather, maghazi - by positing a means it might have happened. Croné had the leather-trade on the north edge of the Hudhayl/Kinana cattle-ranches. Lecker had the [neo]Ghassân.

[Neo]Croné has not been rebutted, I don't think. Lecker on the other hand now has Ehsan Roohi.

I'll admit up-front Yathrib is a tough nut. Mecca has never sat right with us Wansbroughians or, lately, Gibsonites. To me Mecca looks like the Hudhayl poets' annual sanctuary at a time most Arabs preferred the cities of Iraq (being, uh, Christians). Think, how our Christians decorate evergreen trees once a year and sing about the Tannenbaum. But the Madina held more verisimilitude - for 'phobes. Pro-Muhammadan revisionists there tend rather to excuse what the Prophet did there.

As for Ehsan Roohi's argument, this points out that the Madinese clans were intermingled. Here weren't Hudhayl so much as Khazraj. These tribes had Jews as much as "Arabs"; somewhat like recent Abkhazia, where Jews, Christians, and Muslims identify mainly by family tradition. Also - Roohi reminds Lecker - the Constitution of Madina allows for Jews. Roohi doesn't use MacMaster's essay on Heraclius' antiJewish edict, but he well could; this came out in our AD 632 which is well after Year One in Islam. I am unaware of specific antiJewish pushes by Heraclius or by his father in North Africa, during the time of the Prophet.

So it is interesting to see even Lecker being dismantled. Uh, sorry!

The coming of the Shqipe

The mountain men of the Balkans - their "Albanians" - are now genetically-profiled. Nature isn't letting plebs read it but Nrken19 has everything you're going to read anyway, namely the Results.

The Caucasus has people they call "Albanians" too. They're Udi. Completely different.

The Shqipe men have R1b-M269 today. That DNA arrived in the Early Bronze Age, more like an arsenical copper age in that region. It then merged with the people who were there much as we western R1b'ers, from "Corded Ware", did; the first individual of this type was 70% Yamnaya and 30% local "Early European Farmer". Thought is that they came fresh off the steppe 2700 BC and spread around Çinamak. That's Gheg territory spanning the Albania / Kosovo border.

The language won't get written down until, pretty-much, our era. But it took on Doric Greek and then classical Latin (preRomance!) loanwords, so there's no real evidence of these guys living anywhere else since then. In the AD 800s quite a few Slavs dropped in, but these assimilated too (or else modern Albanian would be Macedonian Jugoslavic).

The Kabar Canal

Although I've been poasting here about - say - Ezekiel 38-39 not really belonging to that Ezekielian book, I hadn't much about the book's earlier parts. So: Zilberg and Segev.

All editions of Ezekiel note its writing on the river KBR. Problem: there was no such river under the Babylonians, who ruled when our prophet lived there. Z&S note there came, however, a canal: the Kabârû. This attached Babylon with another city, Borsippa. Documents crop up under Cambyses II of its construction; annals note its use under Darius the Great.

Ezekiel would have been prophet indeed if he predicted the name of a future canal. Z&S instead note that the KBR river shows up only at the beginning of the whole text, and in later passages as make hash of the poetry. The authors conclude: glosses.

Since, uh, blog I get to speculate further. The Bavli community of Jews, preserving Ezekiel, or at least catering to his Judaean fanclub, figured to throw up some tourist-traps why-not. Meanwhile this canal was an important throughfare for the Achaemenids (once Darius had reconquered the place); Jews as Canaanite-bilinguals could do some trade up and down stream. The point of the glosses wasn't to say that Ezekiel was at this river, which didn't then exist. The point was that he was at shrines which became (praise G-d) riverwalk attractions.

Return of the white wolf

South Sweden was Germanic throughout the Iron Age. Then, AD 450-510, it got invaded - from central European ancestry. The main fort - "Borg" - involved here was Sandby, which after a massacre was left to ruin.

In order to get there, a central European would have to have pushed through what's now Pomerania. Some today argue that a language was there once, separating Prussia from whatever was spoken in Germany at that time - which, duh, was German. I don't know if that language was still around however.

Another thought - and if I may say, a better thought - is that here we are dealing with ex-Huns. Etzel was murdered at the beginning of this timeframe. Better known to Latins as "Attila", his subjects were not Huns (last I heard the Huns were being claimed for the Yenisey). Attila's fighting class were Goths; their peasantry at this time Latinised Dacians and Pannonians. Germans call them Wallacians; they now call themselves Romanians.

Anyway the Gepids et al. weren't in wonderful position to do more invasions south or west. Other Germans were already there and didn't want the Huns' "traitors". The Roman Empire in Constantinople, now laser-focused on the Balkans, was not a nut as could be cracked. From the East whence the Huns, the Avars were coming, uniting the Slavs.

Up north however - what was there? Maybe not the riches of Byzantium; but the Baltic could be fished and amber could be sold to the far side of Denmark. Recall that the Franks were building a viable kingdom, not as grand as Rome, but not too much worse than the Gaulish province had been under, oh, its Constantine III.

Against this "return" the Danes, for their own part, put up a fence, the Danevirke.

At any rate, having taken south Sweden, they'll enter Anglosaxon legend as "Geats". Some genetics hint at that too. Note Peter Heather's name on this one.

Failed sarcasm

In a time when the online Right is touting how well we are doing controlling inbound migration, Prof. Glenn Reynolds first says other countries have the problem too and, second, that DEMOCRATS POUNCE. And third he links the the wrong thing; the actual article is hither.

Yes, Glenn; this is the fault of the MAHA Moms. And you're standing in the way of the brush.