Cracked rock is a poor insulator

In more thermodynamic news, as of last March we know why Bennu (and Ryugu) don't hold heat well - has low thermal inertia. It's because Bennu's bigger rocks are cracked. Similar should hold for Ryugu and maybe Polana.

Apparently cracked geometry conducts heat more than just being porous. Porous rock would be analogous to cement, or to... C type meteorites, fused by the process of landing upon us.

The new cements we hope to make on Lunar bases will of course be more like S type meteorites, but the same porosity should apply. So, better sift out pebbles when making the cement.

Keyhole news

That conference last week further proposed bringing asteroid-bits into cislunar orbit. Joel Sercel has a map. I think the idea is to pull it to STL2, then yank it at the moon, which - by the Jacobi keyhole - ends up flung into a high Lunar orbit. That can touch upon various Earth-Lunar cyclers, the 3:1 being illustrated here.

This fits well with another thesis mooted a few days ago, on Galactic-Solar Lagrange; from the "space journal of Asgardia" page 72. I vaguely recall some skiffy about that maybe ten years ago. Assuming no nearby other heavy stars, our gravity meets the Galactic Core's gravity at 3.8 ly. During those periods, a slow moving body even up to Jupiter mass should be able to slide into a long-period Solar orbit. Which, if eccentric, will pose Problems.

To be sure, this is not one of those times. The Alpha Centauri system is something like twice our system's mass which means our mutual balance is a good deal within 2 ly of us, which should swamp our L's. But - stars move around all the time. Between the Scholz flyby 60skBC and 20kBC, we didn't have anything special near to us. Anything nabbed in L1 or L2 could be on its way toward us, still.

Tint

Me mum sent me this last week: Mark A Hollands, Boris T Gänsicke, Pier-Emmanuel Tremblay, Detlev Koester "Any colour you like: the diverse chromaticities of white dwarfs". This alludes to, and reverses, the famous Model T quote: most of these stars-in-retirement are white, median #F9F5FF to be precise. That would correspond to 6504 K / D65 white point.

That #FF is indeed in the B part of RGB, but they deem the blue negligible, correcting most textbooks. I take it that the blue stars are simply the brighter ones we've historically seen from further away.

Most white dwarf stars fall on a boring logarithmic-like curve by temperature, as one might expect. Sabine is saying our own Sun would be on the green side but all that yellow-to-red swamps it out.

However: outliers exist. These are metal-polluted. I don't find overlap between the two papers. Something like 080843.15 + 464028.64 should be WD J0808+4640, la?

Which is a pity. The "metals" here seem to skew toward lithium and stellar gas, not rocky planet mantles.

WD J1330+6435 is the one making the news at #DDFFB8. That #FF is in the G part of RGB. When I was a kid I asked my dad if green was possible in stars and he said that some elements look green in a fire.

Since then, uh. The Starflight game had some green stars but, by that age, I knew better. There was also Alastair Reynolds with his "green-fly" Dyson swarm, turning some stars green. Mind, both were main-sequence.

So, at last, this paper illustrates what my dad was trying to say, with an example he didn't have on-hand, because none of us did. (Green stars'd make more sense in the Starflight sequel which happens where the solar flares already happened.)

Other outliers are such as might look blue but are cooler than 6000 K. WD J2356–2054 in Draco shines only 4000 K. Here is strong Na[trium] (sodium) pollution.

Don't vote for Vivek

Mr Vivek Ramaswamy (hence, "Vivek" - because it's shorter) has mooted an advert although as far as I know not yet in television syndication, bringing Dr/Mrs Amy née-Stearns Acton's mother Donna Stearns-then-Arthur to testify against Amy.

Yeah. Her own daughter. This gon' get ugly.

Ms Laura Loomer is gung-ho on Vivek's side. Loomer is generally pro-Indian and pro-Republican, in this year's races anyway. I can understand being pro-both: seriously, despite this guy and his razixweeterz. I have long been unsure that Vivek is the right Indian or the right Republican to be daring a statewide race - anywhere, in the US or in India. But here we are discussing his opponent. Whom Vivek through surrogates down to mommy-dearest is accusing of dishonesty.

Scouting around the place, the accusation against Amy Acton's stepfather came from Amy Acton's biologic father. He leveled a charge of molestation against Mr Cledith Arthur, the non-biologic. Arthur got arrested and a grand jury found this to be credible. Arthur then fled Ohio taking the missus in tow, alighting in Pennsylvania. Ohio's legal system subsequently put Amy into the custody of her biologic father.

This brouhaha has, as of poasting, united both National Review (which at heart has been a pro-immigration rag, so aligned with V.R.) and the Huffington Post.

Ohio didn't forget the Arthur family and attempted to toss some warrants into Pennsylvania in 1981 and even in 1987, they say. That Arthur remained - per Ms Loomer - never convicted and never stood trial is indeed the best kind of correct... for Arthur.

Amy Acton's brother Mr Philip Stearns (note: no "Mr Arthur") is siding with Dr Acton. Other snippets of evidence include that Acton has suffered some slips into drunkenness and anger, which most healthy women might not suffer.

This all smells like Philip and Amy have honest memories of what happened, at least that Amy suffered something horrid at a too-young age from someone. Donna failed to protect from this to the extent she lost custody. What directly caused the damage? - at the time, Mr Arthur had a low estimation of his abilities to win his case in court. Also nobody was questioning Amy's story in 2019. It follows that Philip and Amy are honestly pinpointing the culprit, specifically.

At the very least Vivek's team was extremely unwise to dig this dirt into the media. So's Loomer. Stephen "Vodkapundit" Green is simply exercising tactical cowardice, like Vivek himself. Can't speak highly of Ace. And as of now I'm seeing at least seven Instacommenters raising the false-flag (as usual, it's not, if it were, Vivek would have disavowed this by now).

If you are an Ohio conservative, and we know from election results many of these exist, I suggest going downballot but putting the Constitution candidate for governor. Like I did here in Colorado, stuck with another terrible Republican who doesn't deserve a political career.

Joel's Zionism

This blog hasn't much looked in on the prophetic oracles of Joel - directly. It is in CBH excepting six examples of the "LBH" second-Temple cant of the Chronicler. It may or may not cite 'Abd-JehovahObadiah. To this end, John Dunne may offer a helpful project, looking in on the synopsis with Amos (pdf).

Joel looks forward to a new Eden, flowing with wine, focused upon Zion and her Temple. Amos, which is an elder text, has about the same except here the focus is on David's tent. Now: Amos is assuredly a northern text with Amos 6 being in dialect. But "David" as totem shows up in the words of outside opponents: in the north (Dan stele, of Hazael) and against the north (Moab stele, of Mesha). Tents, we should note, are mobile. Also Dunne argues that Amos bears real eyewitness reports of the earthquake in Jeroboam II's time.

We're not really here for Amos. We're just placing him early. He was a popular prophet in the CBH-speaking world, Isaiah and Jeremiah both using his work as to apply to the Jerusalem area. Dunne would add to that list, Joel; as another citer of Amos.

The Old Greek order of Prophets follows that scheme, where Joel "reflects" back on Amos. The MT has rather the order Joel-Amos; so promoting Joel as the prequel, if you like. (Also the Greek merges MT Joel 2+3.) For those who deem 4 Ezra to be originally Hebrew (and based on its connexion with the Pseudo-Philo, I'm one of those): the MT order seems debatable up to Bar Kokhba.

In Old Greek also, Amos himself was interpreted, where David's tent is David's σκηνή which is "built", comparable to Moloch's σκηνή earlier in that book and also to the LXX-Torah tabernacle. In the Greek Tobit 13:10/11 also-also, the Lord has a σκηνή to be "built". I've suspected the Greek project to translate the Prophets was generally a priestly project, in Isaiah's case by exiled dissidents and in Ezekiel's case by Zadokites. Tobit had been composed in the first place by the "Aramaic Levi" crew, which stands to reason would be translated by sympathisers.

Dunne contrasts Joel, Greek-Amos, and Greek-Tobit on the one side; with the late-antique Targum on the other. On the latter side, Amos was still read as referring to David's dynasty. The Damascus Document, in the same lineage as Aramaic Levi and the Zadokite version of Ezekiel, and a citer of Joel 2, takes a third path: that David's tent is now the qahal - soon to become the Qumran yahad community. (On this much, I'll ding Dunne, because his footnote does not support that this be regal, especially given how equivocally Qumran understands "messianism".)

For Dunne, Joel should be read alongside this Greek priestly translation project before the Damascus Document. Dunne would stick this composition before all of that. Since here he doesn't argue the point, I'll give it a go: it was not "back-"translated from Greek to Hebrew, and it's low in the "LBH". Early second-Temple seems safest, like 2 Isaiah.

Queerying Harry Tanner's book

Dr Harry Tanner published something in a London press, on hate versus love. Tanner is on the side of love (just ask him); if you disagree that homosexuality counts, you are hate.

Lest you think I am being harsh: here is (or, yesterday... was) a published review, from one Eleni Avdoulou at the University of Pisa. That reviewer is on Tanner's side such that I really can't see her misinterpreting Tanner's point. Avdoulou's publisher? - Bryn Mawr, an semi-femme university in the US (they bundle up with Haverford). I see today the whole site is down, so uh. I'll be adding links to other reviews.

I find failures up and down this entire asânid chain. Tanner has a bias, against basic biology and the need for a society - British in his case - to propagate itself. His publisher Bloomsbury did not call him on this bias. His reviewer Avdoulou didn't either; and by extension neither did Bryn Mawr. So now we gotta do it.

Just look at all this cant from the review: The chapter concludes by arguing that Cleon’s anti-gay agenda and the increasingly homophobic climate in Athens prompted prominent queers such as Euripides and Agathon to seek refuge.... We can accept this from, oh, Bent Spines (or from Lobo or whatever). From a purported university press all three words need flagging as ingroup-jargon. Especially since Tanner trades on his PhD.

More: 'phobia medicalises an opposition likely political in nature (even then). As Donald Kagan reports, Cleon was a leader of Athens (we'll leave aside how effective for now). It is likely that Cleon from 450 BC to his death in battle had specific targets in mind. And Cleon wasn't acting alone, given that Pericles was hardly a "queer" (Tanner and Avdoulou demand we use this term) himself.

Tanner is a midwit who does not understand, say, Judaism outside his Christian filter. I suspect his dim view of Cleon likewise depends upon university (read: midwit) acceptance of Thucydides in the canon. Thucydides - writing after the war, as something of a revisionist - made Cleon out as the great villain. It happens that after Pericles' death, Thucydides and Cleon fell into rival factions. Even then I don't see Thucydides objecting to Cleon's social programme; only to his military grand-strategy (Kagan would interject here, Cleon was winning until his death). Neither, I think, did Pericles object.

Tanner and Avdoulou read like Christian apologists finding a figure that their caste hates because their professor told them they need to be hated. For Tapscott it's Darwin; for Ravi Zacharias it was Nietzsche. This makes further difficult to take Tanner seriously that opposition to homosexuality be an outgrowth of the Gini Coëfficient. Tanner doesn't buck the midwit wisdom that Greek homosexuality was an aristocratic pastime with clear Top and Bottom roles - rather undercutting that chapter of his thesis. I doubt that Tanner even knows what Gini is.

Tanner, I get. He wants to keep chasing after cute young boys like when he was a young boy (the Kirkus reviewer makes this clear... citing Tanner's own book). Avdoulou seems less like a natural ally than like a university drone. Can't risk tenure.

Offworld Resources Workshop, 4

Space Twitter is dribbling out the results of a "workshop" last week at the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, CA. The fourth such held by that Agency.

Some releases are out, like this one from Pulsar Helium (perhaps distinct from the Sunbird guys). It's restricted, although I don't know how. Nor - since the interdicted regions include Australia and Japan - why. (South Africa, I could grok.)

The report notes the supply / demand curve for Helium-3. Demand is set to spike due to quantum computing, operating at the centiKelvins; even leaving aside the Sunbird roggets. Presently the supply is decay of tritium which is had at the DoE's Savannah River. It turns out He-3 can also be extracted from certain natural-gas deposits. Most-accessible to Americans is one "Topaz" field in rocky Minnesota, the "Jetstream #1" well. We just haven't much tried said extraxion, by this point. I expect the Australians and South Africans, owning Minnesota-like geology, would love so to try.

Another company, Lunar He-3 Mining, has a technology for extracting this gas. Despite the name, the tech isn't just for the moon.

The Inca started earlier

The Quechua-speaking Huari had an empire, and Tiahuanaco a kingdom; both failed. From these ashes, new kingdoms arose. One came from Cuzco, near the Titicaca. Their incas became emperors. We're mainly quibbling over dates, also spelling because nowadays the sorts of idiot talking about ancestral-wisdom make a point of rejecting Spain's spelling.

We owe our account of events to Miguel Cabello de Balboa. By "we" I mean John Rowe in the 1940s. Radiocarbon wasn't a thing then; and, as we all know, radio-all-of-it got (badly) adulterated after those late 1940s - 1960s radiation bursts. Rowe was still adamantly pro-de-Balboa up to 1997, when radiocarbon recalibration started to work against him.

Frankly I don't consider Rowe to be in the same rank, in archaeological hell, as Thompson for the Maya. Rowe had every right to question radiocarbon. I do that here on this blog all'a-time.

"Lizzie" Wade is relaying that our calibrations have been getting better, even for the understudied Southern Hemisphere. Dendrochronology is coming online. It can peg New Zealand eruptions with world-spanning Carrington events. The Incas had access to vast quantities of wood from the upper Amazon and their northern and southern trade-partners.

Also, I'll have to concede here, de Balboa's account of events reads a lot like Livy. Rah-rah, our people fought these people, we won; on to the next battle. Also it is north-focused. The Spaniards could appreciate this on account those are the provinces they reached, first; also those regions had the most-recent experience with the Inca. The main languages up there were Quechua dialects. Cuzco - the Inca hometown - is about where begins another language, of the Aymara.

One large difference here is that South America didn't really have a Tlaxcala, or even a Texcoco, to record rival versions of events. Also - as Wade notes - nobody could write over there (can't really say "down there" for an Andean society); Mesoamerica was intensely literate.

Rowe, I think, could have stood to shown (if that's grammatic) more humility. He had no reason to defend the honour of de Balboa, which was really the honour of the Inca court; save inertia. If anything Rowe was too solicitous of ancestral-wisdom. Wade is pointing out that the incas were colonialists too, just like the Mexica "Aztec" hoped to be.

The new map has the Inca concentrating south of Titicaca. A rampage occurred in the south over the last decades AD 1300s: the far south, as in present Santiago. Then, the Inca turned north: around ~1400 (same time as Chincha), they hit Saqsaywaman. They did major construction at an exact date 1418 (dendro?). That's about when serious Inca remains also make serious inroads into the old Tiahuanaco environs. Over the ensuing 1400s the Inca faced a stubborn resistance at (southern) Copiapó, which - Wade says - got resolved when the Inca took the copper-mines and left alone the villages. The northern push against old Huari / Quechua homelands did happen, but (to me) that looks like it happened over the 1440s.

From 1450 on, I suppose the Tahuantinsuyu was being consolidated, in particular a new focus on Quito. Perhaps, as Bayes might suggest, the Spaniards found peoples who indeed had only recently joined the Inca Empire. That made easier to peel them off.

I have to admit, I find the new map difficult to interpret. Warrior-caste of Aymara hardened at the Mapuche frontier? Summoning the old Tiahuanacis out of caves?

Out Of Israel

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

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

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

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

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

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

Habakkuk's song

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More Neolithic maths

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blogger takes sides

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

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

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

The multi-aperture telescope

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

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

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

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

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

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

Precedence

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

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

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

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

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

Amateur thermodynamics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Berber revolt!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rapa Nui and Hawaii

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

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

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

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

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

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

R-M12205

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How the Persians failed to make their case

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

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

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

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

A linguistic history of Persian

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

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

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

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

Looks fun. Will read.

Fake myths

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

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

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

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

Your gold is safe a month after H-Day

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

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

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

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

T-FINER, the alpha dog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Going bananas

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

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

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

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

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

A spirit-haunted church

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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