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, 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 and 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.

The mobile tunnel

Last week one Matthew Williams posted Retractable, Pressurized Tunnels (h/t Zim). This is to connect surface assets 'pon an airless surface. One solution is called the TREAD; the other (which nobody is linking right) is the LATCH.

Sure: longish-term d00dz (between returns to Earth or at least to the Spaceline's appendix-C-2) will layover in a lavatube or, later, a kilometers-high Eiffel. But workers will be going out on the surface. Also someone's got to fix up that lavatube in the first place. Problem: EVA sucks.

The projects assume that the initial settlement of, say, the Lunar South Pole colony will be shambolic. Various Earth companies are each sending their own Quonset huts or bare Starship husks, and scattering them all over the surface. They may or mayn't send the covered hallways between them; astronauts will prefer covered hallways over EVA.

NASA are telling the Quonset vendors not to bother hooking up those huts. This TREAD is a single habitable hallway on wheels as can attach two huts. Temporarily: before disconnecting from one hut and attaching another one. Some huts will simply be abandoned or dismantled, or moved, in the process of just-in-time colony planning and construction. The LATCH is similar: less mass per meter, but the corridor can't snake around. The TREAD I think wins this one.

For TREAD anyway they're folding the hallway back when not in use. To let the dust fall to the floor and to protect it from micrometeors and whatever else is kicked up around the surface. As such - and because static-electric dust exists - more wear and tear is expected than on, say, that old inflatable Bigelow on the ISS.

Net or chopstick

Great SpaceX and Zimmerman are onto China's Long March to a reusable booster. The Chinese caught this in a net.

The booster was designed about the same: upright, with prongs. The net, or chopstick for Elon, catches the prongs.

China's difference is that it is on a floating platform, like what catches the Falcon 9 boosters. This allows the landing platform to follow the falling booster, and the net itself might allow for more margin for deviance than a static tower. Great SpaceX (not Elon-affiliated) adds that the net is better-maintainable.

One snag (heh) we have that China might not is coastal law. The Gulf of America (eff yea!) is an international water; also, we have oil platforms out there, and fisheries. Although: that might be clearing up. Another issue - for both of us - is that a booster caught out there in some ocean is not available for relaunch or even refit until it is towed back and moved back, which takes - probably days. If caught on the pad it's right there already.

The net idea still might not even work for a mammoth like the Super Heavy. If it did work (I don't know what kind of cable would do it) it could at least be a plan B for a booster unable to reach the proper pad.

We should update recovery table 2 here, such that arresting-cable is now a Medium tech maturity. Such commends the net for, say, Rocket Lab.

The Heisenberg Compensator

'Tis rare (outside politics) that Sabine Hossfelder produces a video with higher B.S. content than what she's reviewing, but here's the title: Physicists Just Broke One Of Quantum Physics’ Biggest Restraints. That restraint is on cloning quantum information, which goes on to hamper error-checking in qubits.

The key constraint is, rather was, a theoretical result of the Quantum Mechanical equations around big-Φ and big-Ψ. In 1970 James Park proved the no-go theorem; the no-cloning = no-delete theorem followed in 1982. Pace Sabine this result stands; if it did not, it could well refute the whole thing. Lately instead it is compensated, as Trek would say (in the 1960s). At least in high-qubit quantum computers.

The compensation happens if the cloning also encrypts. Thence, among the encrypted clones, one can freely choose any one to decrypt and thereby recovers the original state with fidelity up to 1.

What I did not know is that BM Heron-R2 superconducting processors using up to 154 qubits existed. But then - Current Year is indeed 2026.

Qubit-cloning will likely lead to better error correction. We were already well on our way to Q Day.

Gliese 3378

GJ 3378 is a red dwarf and plantary system 7.73 parsecs from us, toward the "Camelopard" north-polar orthogonal to the galactic plane. Two years ago was floated that this was a system. This planet is now recovered - rather, a different planet is recovered. Hat-tip to Pixy Misa.

As usual, more data refines the estimate. I am somewhat intrigued by a planet which is refined to such a statistically-different orbit. Moutou et al. supposed over five Earth masses and orbiting 24.7 days, with a high eccentricity. This new solution from Paul Robertson et al. has two(-plus) masses, at 21.5 days and orbiting possibly circular.

We are dealing here with a spectrograph, not a transit. At this potential angle of separation, transits can be too much for to hope. Thus, above, the language of minima: masses are calculated in m sini, i being rather less than ninety degrees. I also don't know the inclination of the star. Nobody has detected additional planets here, either. Robertson's crew did manage to duplicate Moutou's result with the SPIRou - alone; blaming this instrument for leading them agley.

Will say this: a brown dwarf can be ruled out. For the star, it doesn't flare like a young 'un. Copilot is further asking me about metallicity and rotation. It's slightly less metallic than our own Sun - the latter (circumstantially) suggesting it formed around when our Sun formed. We are not told of a moving-group for this system; suggesting, further, gigayear drift from origin. Rotation is consistent with a stellarish age of five billion or more years. Assuredly a brown dwarf won't have cooled enough for nondetection in Gaia at this distance.

As for other planets, if this star formed in its own nebula as it probably did, larger planets might not have formed at all. Given maybe three years to find other planetary signatures, I assume anything important up to 2 Earth masses and up to one year period should show up. Unless it... has? That "24.7 day" false-positive could signal a 49.4 day true periodicity. It would be too small to do the Von Zeipel.

Timothy's counter to Pope Leo III

Leo III crowned Karl emperor of Rome, and by it claimed the headship of all Christian bishops - as their Papa, they would say now. Naturally the kings in Constantine's City did not like this, deeming themselves as the Empire's heirs. Rome the city could claim that Peter had set them up. Constantinople couldn't claim New Testament sanction, so they went with a theory of the Rhomania.

Nobody over here out West noticed, but the East already had its own Christendom. Under the Mutazila, the "new Jews" at al-Raqqa / Callinicum permitted Christians to state their case more freely than since. The Oriental Church under Timothy issued this letter which we'll look at today.

Timothy states adamantly from the Gospel of Matthew that Mary gave birth to Jesus called the Christ (in his translation). Not to "God"- and not really to a little boy either. Timothy's Christ is something subtly different. Timothy may or may not be lifting from Nestorius, who taught that "Christ" here means a blend; John Chrysostom likely would have agreed, maybe even Jerome. This need not detain a filioque believer.

Timothy accepts four Gospels, but he's really only using one: Matthew. Mark is ignored. Timothy does, yes, make one diversion to the Prodigal Son. This is now found in Luke; it perhaps originated from Peter, but anyway Timothy treats it more as a nod to shared lore than as a prooftext - the Diatesseron would do. John ... I don't see John. Timothy nonetheless claims four and moots a fifth gospel in the message of Paul.

Timothy knows from Matthew (and Mark, and John 21) that Peter matters. This exposes him to the apostolic claims of the various Romes. To them, he lumps them all in as "Rome". He implicitly dismisses the other Petrine sees of Alexandria and Antioch, now under Islam. Timothy as an Aramaean Semite would rather lay claim to Christ. Not for him is Luke-Acts dragging the Spirit to the Seven Hills. Instead he appeals to Abraham's birthplace and to Eden.

That's where Timothy brings the number five - as something of a quincunx with a nexus in the centre. Eden had four rivers, flowing from one source. In Oriental theology Eden was a real place, a now-occulted mountain reaching to heaven. Timothy would have Babylon as the Edenic river, from which all the Petrine churches flow.

As to, what to make of this argument: unfortunately the letter breaks off, so I might have to fill in for this pope.

Like Babylon, Jerusalem can't claim Peter - but it is Jerusalem, so doesn't need to. It may be that the quincunx should be most like a tripod with the Spirit showering from Babylon to Jerusalem, and thence the three Petrines. Also, perhaps, as the Spirit went to Rome in the past, it is now in Babylon.

That's about the only way I can make an argument for Babylon's right to a nonPetrine see. This incidentally tracks Ezekiel's argument, that his flock in Babylon was now superior to the remnant in Zion. Maybe Timothy is going to try it.

Two Venus statites

When I was looking at Venus floaters and airships six years ago, I was unaware that the professionals had already been at it. The most prominent 2000s-era pro was Geoff Landis; in 2004 he got Tony Colozza on the case.

As of then Colozza knew that at the 53-5 km tier, temperatures and air-pressures reach Earth life standards. At 55 km, 302.3 K = 29.3° C and we're well above the clouds. That pressure happens to be 0.5314 bar, so he's not really talking about humans. (Yeah I know, just use 40% O₂ bro; let's hold off on all that today.) Colozza is pondering if unmanned aircraft can be kept in eternal daylight up there. The mission is for 50 days consecutive. Earth-sent probes.

I had trouble understanding Colozza's conclusion in part due, unfortunately, to typographic mistakes (see below). So I'll do my best.

The main body recommended the perma-airship for altitudes below 10 km. This is also not near the clouds. It is however hell down there. Moreover, much of the incoming light is blocked. Solar panels, in his day, degraded in high temperatures and pressures, and were only 20% efficient at peak. The paper also thought solar panels were skewed to absorb blue where, for silicon anyway, it's more the opposite.

The other option is a non-airship, more like a Reaper drone. That can fly 71-76 km, for 9-12 m wingspans. There the temperature is around 220 K which is -53° C (the paper lost the minus sign here). It can if needed dip down to lower altitudes as long as it returns. Perovskite is coming on-deck for near-vacuum these days; for Earthlike atmo this is rated for 350 K so 50+ km altitude, especially if we don't worry about oxygen. This could well lower the wingspan.

As far as the purpose of either, that would have to be for mapping the surface and/or surveying the atmosphere across latitudes. Radar for the drone; slow photography for the airship. (If we wanted aloft over a fixed position for 50 days, I'd tether a kite to Maxwell and power it by windmill. But this assumes a space-economy good for shipping dozens-kilometers of thick steel wire to Venus, which we might not yet have.)

From LEO to HEO

Fifteen Starship flights to fill up a fuel depot in LEO. 3-4 flights a month. And then you have to keep methane and oxygen cold for months. At 1 Solar luminosity.

A darkhorse alternative has been on various drawingboards for some time, as ToughSF notes: the tether. Looking around, a Tamil, name of Nagaraj Arjun Raja, suggests the Rotating Skyhook.

The idea is to get something to "space" but not yet to orbit. For orbit Raja expects 9.4 kilometers per second δV; BraveAI confirms this figure accounts for the 7.8 km/s orbital velocity needed to maintain orbit, plus 1.5–2.0 km/s lost to atmospheric drag and gravity drag during ascent. I assume Raja assumes this to be launched from Sri Lanka so he's already using the equatorial surface daily velocity.

Raja notes that drag becomes negligible in the short term at 300 km altitude. We don't orbit sats there because sats are supposed to run for the long term. So if Raja's customers can just get something parabolic at apogee 300 km, Raja can catch it before drag and gravity matter. That δV is more like 7.

The skyhook's nexus orbits ~500 km going 7.612 km/s. The tether spins around such that, such that at 200 km below, the velocity is -3 km/s. That leaves 4.612 km/s to pick up the cargo. At the top of the tether, which is 800 km altitude, is +3 km/s. 10.612 km/s around that altitude is a trajectory to almost wherever you want, mate. Cargo will still need to correct that trajectory toward the mission parameter. Although that is Someone Else's Problem; Raja does suggest solutions to that Someone Else in section 7.

This costs up to 4.55 × 10⁷ J per tonne, going back down to Earth; so 4.55 × 10¹⁰ J per kilotonne. Raja believes that can be countered with a honkin' magnet on the nexus, gradually pushing Earth's 25 μT at that altitude. The magnet is in part powered by the current along the tether, presumably conductive along with its other magic properties. That conductive (silver?) wire is not load-bearing; it's just along for the ride. Also various radiators and solar-panels can be attached to the nexus. The more massive the nexus, the less it dips down per cargo load. The skyhook can also catch cargo from outer orbits to bring them down to Earth-capture. That boosts the nexus' orbit for free.

Raja has one more contigency: an ion thruster running 1-5 kW delivering 3000 s of specific-impulse. Of course then you have to deliver ions.

The 200 km of cable can be Zylon worth 7-14 T. "Carbon nanotubes" are also on the table like they always are in articles like this, which would cut down a lot of this mass, if and when we can spin 200 km worth of it (hey at least it's not GEO-length). Likewise I'm not requesting anhydrous silica... yet. Raja is optimistic we can in fact get a good-enough CNT rope in 5-10 years, at the 13.8 GPa which competes with Jensen's anhydrous.

Zylon at this scale would be delivered by the Falcon Heavy. CNT, lighter for the requirements, could go to Rocket Lab. The overall timeframe is maybe 13 years from now.

As for section 7: that is where Raja suggests next-steps. One example is to put more tether-systems in higher orbits to catch and correct those Molniya orbits which the main tether will create. #7.3 handles trash removal. #7.4, most gonzo of all, would pick Mach 10-15 scramjet loads from the 30-50 km upper atmosphere. We would here need to dangle the rope so its velocity is -5 km/s (2.612 km/s in atmo). Drag would start getting serious so this length cannot be permanent. The cable dips down and pulls back I guess.

PUSH 7/9: That "honkin' magnet".

The War Scroll's Ezekiel

Among the first surviving witnesses to Ezekiel's oracles is 1QM, the "war of the sons of light against the sons of darkness" or War Scroll for short. Ingrid Lilly, who perhaps more than anyone has raised 𝔊967 and parallel Wirceburger Latin to scholarly seriousness, on 2015 presented a paper on how, exactly, 1QM was citing the oracles. I don't know how the paper was received, but she posted her notes. Where the Scroll deals with Gog is column 11, lines 14-16.

(Lilly ignores 4Q491. Phillip Lebsack likewise calls 4Q491 out as a summary, intended for the outer circle of the Yahad. But more to the point 4Q491 and others simply don't cover this column.)

Mostly ll. 14-15 parallels Ezekiel 36:23. The narrator (the people) is addressing an Entity. This One is to make a name through the ensuing wars; to show Thyself great and holy among what's left of the nations (okay; goys) that they know. What they will know is not preserved (Ezekiel would have it I am YHWH). What is preserved shows (already!) an identification with the object of supplication, with Hash-Shem. But wait! - there's more! Line 16 immediately refers to the judgements against Gog.

1QM col. 11 skips over the whole chapter 37 about those dry bones. Lilly here points out that so does P967. For the Greek (and Latin), the bone chapter comes after the Gog oracle to introduce that great new Temple to come.

Texas doesn't need our Ogallala

I'm keeping tabs on the water we ain't got in the Rockies' foothills. Estes Park and the Thompson down to Loveland and Greeley drink it from Grand Lake, whether or not they should (the Colorado watershed thinks we shouldn't). Much of the Platte basin / watershed is instead pulled up from the Ogallala (map). That sunless freshwater sea is running dangerously low.

Hydraulic fracking involves hydro, sure; but that imported water goes even further down than the aquifer. More on that, anon...

Townhall, of all places, is ringing the alarm. This may represent that intersection between farmers and conservatives. Flanakin has an aside on the desal which Corpus Christi isn't doing. That on its face is a Texas problem downstream of us - so, I'll try mainlining Flanakin's aside.

Five years back I'd pondered drilling into the aquifer to channel the north, with more water; to the south, with more sunlight. Mind: my side of the Front Range will suffer even more. Such puts more pressure on the Thompson therefore on the Colorado. It also gives south-coastal cities like Corpus an excuse not to do infrastructure (Jevons' Paradox again).

Flanakin is mainly summarising Scott Tinker and Andrew Coppin. Tinker is focusing on the Permian - the Texas side. Flanakin doesn't say, but drillers know: the oil in the Permian comes with water of its own, beneath the Ogallala. Problem: that fossil water is in-situ with the... fossils. Which were ocean fossils. So it's all seawater - saltwater. Tinker believes that the wastewater could be desalinated and sent to the farmers. The Permian farmers, then, won't need the aquifer.

Luckily energy is cheap out there on the Permian, like it used to be along the Columbia River. I just mentioned the south gets more sun. And they're using it!

Meanwhile aquifers and the deeper salt seas might consider monitoring the stale air.

Beryllium everything

As Elon Musk loves stainless steel, and Jensen adores anhydrous glass; in the 1950s Isaac Asimov had a crush on beryllium. He thought in 1953 the asteroids would host a beryllium economy. The only catch was that the dust is toxic inducing the condition berylliosis. Asimov had to address this in another story the following year, "Sucker Bait".

As to, why the fourth element: the Young modulus against density. Such has kind of been a thing around these here parts. This is why anhydrous glass elsewhere - one reason. For smaller chassis-es Delta prefers Be-alloys to titanium. I mean, why not, for unmanned craft; frankly all metals will get our monkeys nuked outside our magnetic shield.

Beryllium also promises heat capacity. After storing the heat, a sat can expel the heat for short bursts of high I_sp. No nukes! (Just the, uh, beryllium.) Also no radiators, since this whole setup is the radiator.

This would seem excellent for station-keeping an unmanned sat. Assuming you couldn't use a sail and the sat didn't need to be cooled unreasonably low. Lunar-orbital course-corrections? Solar flybys with Oberth?

Now: I've had trouble lately with Google AI. Lately it has hallucinated D&D modules HWA4-7 which never existed (nor should they). Here, take the following with grains of the sodium chloride.

Beryllium is Toray-esque brittle under 300° C (2-4% elasticity) but above that gets more "ductile". Melts at 1284°. Compare silica 1713°. I think the deal with "heat capacity" is that the metal will take a long ass time to push over that limit before it finally gives up and melts.

As far as, where to mine it: I think Asimov was under the (correct) impression that it would accumulate in the asteroids. For the smaller C types it does not concentrate in veins; but the larger ones might differentiate. Asimov didn't know, so projected the beryllium mines for Pallas. Ceres too, I'd recalled; maybe in the first edition of his book, which he subsequently quietly edited out.

Beryllium happens to be lithophilic. That means it should be gathered from regolith in subplanetary crusts. Our own Moon is that; also Vesta. If we were looking for siderophiles like tungsten we'd get that from Psyche or scout out craters.

Leadup to Boomer Day

As Murrka prepares to celebrate 250 years since perhaps the second-worst founding document in world history, the Dickinson-Barclay documents are up. The William and Mary Quarterly is examining them.

John Dickinson sent these to David Barclay Jr in London, the latter being perhaps best known for Barclay's Bank. John Dickinson was trying to alert Parliament - through London finance! - that New England's problems were serious.

From New England, we know better Hutchinson's Strictures (pdf). By then - 1776 - the disease had already spread as far south as Virginia and parts of the Carolinas. It could perhaps have been stanched at least before New York City and Long Island.

When the cable is disconnected

Suppose there's a problem somewhere around L1. If there's a space station, it cuts its losses likely starting with the counterweight, dominated by rope. The elastic cables fall. Let's look at Sinus Medii's side first.

Up to 60 Mm of Kevlar or Dyneema collapses upon the base. Coil it, box it, unscroll it - what is the base supposed to do with all this?

Also involved: potential-energy, by the integral mg(h)dh. The base must prepare for terajoules. The drop of this cable is a force, perhaps accelerating as more falls; like a slow motion explosion, more Chernobyl than Nagasaki. Loonies can harness this, but maybe not by design.

Under that; I want some structure as can funnel the thousands of m³ to some convenient depository away from useful work. We need to place it somehow/-where so we don't knot it and doesn't get METEORED. The depo would be large and/or deep: a fair purpose for a kilotower. Assume the depo is dustfree anyway. (If we're banning lander-rockets, that should help.)