Soft landings

LANTR seems to stop short of landing a craft upon the Martian surface. As to that L1 Kevlar rope, as it is under construction it might leave a megameter or two over the landing spot. Bouncing cargo onto bare regolith is going to kick up some dust. Launching off again will kick up still more, especially if they use the Al-LOX mix.

A week ago Space Startup News pointed to xARC, on the southwest edge of the Texas Triangle, concerning Lunar mission architecture. They were going to drop off some 'bots to roam the regolith and cook up hexagonal bricks, to ensure dust-free landing pads, roads, other pavements. (Lunar Forge is on that tech.) Also supplied would be berms to keep dust from drifting back in, from all the industry hopefully happening around the site.

Meanwhile in June, Anderson, Saxena, Metzger [ht Toughsf 31 August] came up with another idea. The Solar-System has already built some berms for us, in the form of small craters. Land craft with the fragile cargo in one of those. Schlep cargo over rim with Lunar Terrain Vehicle. Assemble base around crater (some material here could have been dropped less-gently in other missions).

Zubrin has long noted is that bricks are good for pushing down, but not for pushing out. We are here talking about the base camp, even its airless robot-only stage. It might be a trick to find a suitable berm-crater reasonably close to a human-friendly environment, like a lava cave.

LANTR

Whilst we await Firestar's nuclear afterburner, Borowski et al. a decade ago had proposed a chemical one. The subtext, best I gather, was that old solid-core NERVA for all its 900s I_sp wasn't all that great for thrust. Most Mars missions assume NERVAlike NΘP. Or big punches to orbital trajectories, like The Martian to Hohmann.

Borowski's crew was pondering a high-thrust solution as may ignore much I_sp and Earth won't care what is burnt near us. This has a use-case in delta-V punches: a mission to the Lunar poles. I'll bite; even that spaceline only got to equatorial Sinus Medii.

The promise is to achieve liquid-core-temp exhaust whilst still keeping the (fissile) heat-source, solid. That'd be a safer reactor in HEO, might even allow lower-grade fuel. In 2024 the plasma-core was still SDI scy-fy (and in 2026; also none of us knew or know what Howe is doing).

NERVA, it happens, assumes hydrogen for propellant. As the Hindenburg passengers can tell you, it reacts with oxygen. (This blog takes no sides on the cause of that one's initial blowup.) The paper suggests to bring along liquid oxygen - LOX - with that superheated hydrogen. The LOX is introduced after the burn which raises the exhaust velocity. This is thereby an "LANTR". Oxygen is cheap on our moon, maybe the only cheap volatile.

As to why to do this: that is because the N part of NΘP is a nuclear reaction, and not - like Orion - a bomb. As a reaction, it is supposed to run for longer. NERVA hasn't been tested for many hours in, what amounts, a thermos the size of the Universe. Earth might not want a reaction running long in our shared well.

For short bursts of heat one might even swap those nucular roggets for enthalpy. Which segues...

The antiquity of Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum

If you had read (ye) "Old(e) Testament Pseudepigrapha": one of the texts herein was a pseud' on Philo. Of course Philo had nothing to do with the Antiquitatum Biblicarum. Western Christians, who copied and have edited this work, have rated it a "Pharisaic" document: close to Josephus' halakha against, say, Judith's (or anything else of the pre-Revolt Diaspora). Zeev Safrai posted an essay on "LAB" in 2018. Safrai puts this in the Jamnia / Javneh era after 70 CE, when the priests didn't matter.

As far as I know a post-Qumran date wouldn't have ruffled feathers at any point since the late 19th century relieved it from Philo. LAB was composed in Hebrew but Qumran shows no awareness of it (we'd be looking to Jubilees, which relation is reversed). It hasn't been picked up by Septuagintal literature the way Judith, say, was picked up in the Greek Esther. As noted Philo didn't know it. It is antiSamaritan, inasmuch as the old shrines at Gerizim / Shechem are condemned. The mutual relationships with 2 Baruch and 4 Ezra / 2 Esdras are famous.

Safrai dates LAB rather after Bar Kochba. It seems of interest LAB sides with Shammai on whether children should fast, where the Mishnah gives to Hillel the last word against Shammai. LAB also retains Jubilees' interest in maintaining the names of Israel's matriarchs, although I cannot call that "feminist" (this reflects a tradition of matrilinealism). These intra-Jewish disputes seem early to me. So far I admit this is a matter of taste.

I don't see where Safrai's essay has raised skub in the past eight years. So... I'll do it:

Within the earlier decades, came the Judaeans' Tumult in Cyrene, Cyprus, and Alexandria. Vridar, when he was poasting, deemed this revolt an important event. LAB - as Safrai knows - argues for the general eretz-Israel as holy and under G-d's protection. Perhaps this nods to a time when Jews were persecuted everywhere but in the Judaea proper, where peace maintained. I don't think that Jews could honestly say this after Bar Kochba and Hadrian.

Broken cross

A couple years ago David Woods (not this D.W.) submitted On the Origin of the Seventh-Century Solidi with Mutilated Crosses Conventionally Attributed to the Caliphate. Woods thinks it happened "639" (AG 950), Heraclius' years of ash.

All scholarship has put this mint before 'Abd al-Malik's Standing Caliph, itself preceding the aniconics. Woods agrees. It's just that most of that scholarship has put the un-cross coinage with Mu'awiya. Woods finds this evidence wanting.

Mu'âwiya preferred images of John's head, as I recall, ruling Damascus as he did; sometimes references to "Zion" in the Jerusalem area. Out east, we still see imitations of Sasanian tropes. These don't overlap the sceptre-on-steps.

Woods instead credits provincial Christian mints hurriedly minting something as won't offend a cross hater. He points to John Cataeus of Edessa, "Osrhoëne" as the Romans were naming that province. Also maybe the hapless Cyrus in Alexandria.

If Catholics are not for Catholicism

The Catholic Biblical Association of America is now headed up by a Levine. I'd not have said anything but Davila is congratulating this appointment. As Ron Unz might congratulate Yad Veshem if they'd hired David Irving . . .

Look. I've no objection to the CBA(A) calling in observant Jews to 'splain to us (can I still say "us"?) the language or mindset of Biblical-era Jews, perhaps before they were "Jews". Nor would I complain if Levine were delivering modern Jewish readings of those texts, up to Christian texts. I've been relaying TheTorah commentary on this 'ere Catholic (if perhaps cryptoNestorian) blog for years.

But President? Really?

Hey. Maybe the Catholic canon is imperfect. This is also a discussion being entertained 'ere. RETVRN to the old Greek for Jeremiah? Chuck Tobit back into the Dead Sea whence it came? Let's go! - but either way, these are Catholic decisions to be held by Catholics in a Catholic forum. These are not decisions for the levides, unless and until they've done RCIA.

Catholics need to have the fortitude to defend a Catholic reading of the Bible. If a Catholic organization cannot do this, that organisation needs to disband.

UPDATE 9/1: And this groomer apologetic is what he links, out of all posted at TheTorah last week on the theme. Predic'able.

A canon is not a law

A few days ago (h/t Jihadwatch), Todd Aglialoro 'splained how canon law is not shari'a. He's right.

Jews own a religious law, some say (or joke) several; Christianity claimed to have overthrown this. Some modern scholars (Patheos*koff*) argue that Luke's project went toward an anarcho-syndicalist set of Christian communes. That might run at odds with Luke's overall structure of the Spirit exiting Jerusalem and settling upon Rome, not (then) Christian in any way. Much as this particular blog might look askance at Luke's work - and at his interpreters; we are addressing Aglialoro who inherits Luke's Christendom. This post follows them to address the Roman church; not that in the Greek or Slavic worlds and certainly not in Syriac.

Here Christendom and Romanitas had fused sufficiently in the fourth century AD that Theodosius, and over a century later (and more-so) Justinian, were able to create Roman laws which were also Christian laws. Full circle - right?

Well, no. Justinian may be a saint for some (I understand he remains popular in Russia) but out here West, he's considered a tyrant. Because he was. This before we get to Rabbûla or to Shenûte. (Leaving Donatus aside.) Rome has always refused Byzantium's claim to be a "new Rome". We never lost our own Rome.

Also, in the west, and more so among the eastern Syrian "Nestorians": we have Dyotheletism. Religious law does not exist. We have religious canon. That is an old word - Akkadian, I hear - which means "standard". A canon defines what is a Christian and how the Church is to conduct itself. A nation may embrace Christianity and govern according to its ethic. That nation would form its own laws - in accordance. Not in extrapolation.

Future Failed Senatorial Candidate El-Sayed gets one cheer (as an Egyptian, he might even know Shenoute, although I'd be surprised if he knew Rabboula) for reminding us that Christians - at times - have imposed [monastic] canons as laws upon dubiously-willing citizens. Thing is, Catholics don't do this. "Muh Inquisition". No, dude; that was a state, and the Church tried to temper those excesses.

Where is the Dyotheletism in the Egyptian Sunni tradition? - more to the point, where is the notion that law exists outside the clerisy?

The bilateral log

Following sex - and predation; Kimberella (a mollusc) evolved bilateralism 558 Mya, also we hear of tubeworm Calyptrina. That is when different organs handle food intake and postfood exhaust. Petrov is on it, relating Julien Kimmig and Russell Bicknell.

(Some actual crap is involved in Kimmig-Bicknell being behind a paywall.)

The first Vendian/Ediacaran bilaterals did not drop deuces as the fossilisation process has (yet) preserved. These deuces get to the record in the Cambrian 538.8 Mya: microscopic at first, then growing to make the log. As it were.

Turns out that smaller animals produce smaller doodoo, such that these nutrients simply got BACTERIA'D. As noted I cannot read K-B but Petrov would imply that the first bilaterals weren't so different from the anemonai on this much. A mat of slime was laid down, by all. This didn't sequester all that much carbon, so the seas were still CO₂-rich and poor in oxygen.

Over the Cambrian, a feedback loop kicked in whereby larger animals dropped deuces that sequestered more carbon at a time. Oxygen increased, allowing for larger animals with their longer guts. The elder mats were meanwhile churned up by bottom feeders like the trilobites.

So far this just looks like more evidence for the Cambrian Explosion as explosion. We can still use that old just-so story Blink of an Eye to explain how certain animals suddenly were able to feast, and for their descendents to grow. To predationmaxx, said the book.

The DIRT ROCKET

ToughSF pointed Thursday the 27th to 2007's DOI 10.1063/1.2722266. No link b/c X. 50V for 50-100 I_sp.

I'd consider it for docking a smol robot with some regolith of low G (like you-know-where), then moving on. Meh. Hope it's cheap anyway.

Really we should be making colonies from the dust on this rubble. The colonies refine the dust into oxygen, and into something that can react with oxygen. That offers a lot more impulse and, also, thrust. They say this might work even on our Moon. As for Bennu et al. I'd just scoop it all and move it somewhere less dangerous.

Warp drive roundup

Poring through a random month of this 'ere blog, I ran across Erik Lentz then Alexey Bobrick and Gianni Martire. Most of this got trashed by Santiago, Schuster, and Visser (SSV) the following year. So, five years on - last May - Caroline Delbert ran a pulse-check. Seems there's been some activity in what has become, uggh, a "community".

We are here interested primarily in the warp-bubble, where the prospective colonists don't age as the colony ship travels at a sedate subrelativistic pace. Interstellar space operatics may refer to José Rodal last year for Alcubierre's negative-energy (see below). The bubble remains attractive if only because relativistic risks all what we saw in Passengers (this went by red giant Arcturus 33.78 ly, which implies something like .76C). Such theories also claim not to require negative energy.

Last February, Hamed Barzegar, Thomas Buchert, and Quentin Vigneron got on all warp cases (BBV). SSV had a few errors, but not such as vindicated the warp core Doors.

The BBV classification under which Bobrick-Martire falls is the R-Warp model, definition III.3. These satisfy the "restrictions" R1+R2+R3b+R4(+R6); developing Barzegar and Buchert last year. R4 is new here: asymptotic flatness. The Natário metric is a subset; here to assure a globally hyperbolic spacetime. That had been an assumption of Alcubierre 1994; so a rule had to be thought up where this could be assured, done in Choquet-Bruhat–Cotsakis 2002 BBV's "theorem IV.3". BBV have their own theorem IV.7 such that superluminal R-warp models can never be hyperbolic.

But hey. I remind my readers I wasn't asking for tachyon beams. We just wanted a bubble that got to Arcturus in however-many-external-decades without the hibernation-poddery. José Natário has been saying all year his bubble - hyperbolic - is subluminal. (The BBV paper reports he was arguing differently in earlier years, but maybe those weren't R-Warp.)

Nah. SSV's big stinkbomb to the R-Warp, even the slow one, was that it violates the null energy condition. BBV can only affirm SSV here, as "theorem IV.34". As asymptotically flat (R4), theorem IV.20 says they violate the dominant energy condition too; that is, that the energy can't be negative.

BBV point out that some of these R's in the R-Warp models may be lifted, as long as we are in Gedankenexperimentland; but engineers, not such Landsers, will find difficult to explain how they can. Same problem has afflicted Alcubierre when he said "just use negative energy bro".

An T. Le follows up, providing the service of explaining the four energy conditions, not just "null" and "dominant". These are pointwise inequalities on the stress-energy tensor contracted with timelike or null vectors. Any vio represents an exotic fuel (or, per BBV - "fantastical") like the negative energy - which we don't have. He also submits the WARPAX, eigenvalue tests on the various tensors. Sure, per SSV the fuels all suck; but how bad do they suck? Oddly Rodal's drive seems to suck least, considering it remains superluminal. But that might be because Rodal was willing to clarify his model to Le, in personal communications.

Since May, An Le has gone on to evaluate several fuels' "source consistency"; all subluminal [and] positive-energy. They all suck in newly found ways, not so much interior as on the boundary with our nonfantastical universe.

Maybe call it "the Lewinsky Drive".

Barnard's Rossby

Barnard's classical habitable-zone estimation relies, I think, on this 2013 paper. But a couple years ago, we were looking into Alfvén systems. This is before we even had planets around Barnard's star, Gliese's #699. It turns out this star - as "GJ 699" - had convection calculations in 2018. For its colour V − Kₛ ≈ 4.99 (thank you copilot), logτ=2.07. Convective turnover should be 124 days based just on their own calc of 130.4/1.05.

We do have to correct the Rossby, given rotation period has since 2018 been updated from 130 to 140 days. That pushes Rossby to 1.13.

Plugging into Equation 5, 17.46 * (1.13^0.41) = 18.36 Sol radius maximum; 17.46 * (1.13^0.03) = 17.5 Sol radius minimum. In terms of semimajor, 0.08-0.085 AU. Barnard e - outer, 0.0382 AU - rolls well inside the minimum.

Like Barnard's inner worlds didn't have enough problems. A ten-day "HZ" planet would still be fried. 22.6-to-42-day on the other hand standeth a chance out to 0.13 AU.

Barnard's inclination

Copilot is telling me we don't have Barnard's inclination. It rotates too slowly and it doesn't offer sunspots. What we do have are constraints on the inner four planets. They are resonant and seem to have been there for - well, ever, as far as Earthlings can tell. This suggests they formed there.

From Table 3 in that paper I see minimum sini≈0.4 across the board. That is 0.4115 rad; or 23.6° up to not quite 90 (90 is edge-on which means transits as we don't see).

Going to the Basant paper which confirmed the four, the Msini limit on a HZ (then-calc'ed 10-42 days) planet is a paltry 0.57 M_⊕. But. sini of 0.4 would allow up to 1.425 M_⊕ out there.

We cannot yet rule out an Earthlike in the HZ. Well, as earthlike as an airless tidally-locked rock can be.

Skyhooks of silica

I suspect these two goofs felt comfy with CNTs only because they already knew all this stuff was (literally) not going to fly in the 2000s. In these the 2020s, Jensen instead has figured upon anhydrous silica with no "Griffith flaws" (per Copilot). This is a cable we should be able to spin from Lunar regolith and ship up to space for cheaper. Let's see what this buys us.

Jensen was targeting 13.8 GPa of pure laboratory SiO₂ so ρ = 2.2. The deltaV equation √(13.8*2/2.2) = 3.54 km/s. That'll get you to Hohmann for any porkchop of Mars - or for Venus (2.8 km/s); but the next-good Byrnes-Longuski cycler to Mars is "6S9" which is terrible.

If we could stationkeep a tether-hook at STL1, this would work for a faster cycler to/from Venus: the 2L4. Venus herself could not use a 13.8 GPa cable. Both of us can however run the 3-0-2-9 cycler - in the 3.4+ km/s range on either side - and then we can keep both tethers in high-orbit.

The Nuclear-Inertial skyhook

On topic of ideas from the Shuttle era, ToughSF links the Nuclear Inertial rotational-tether. doi 10.2514/6.2000-3611 by Allan Goff and (Dr.) Joel Siegel. I don't think many picked up on this as opposed to other tether plans.

What disassociates this from the others: the counterweight is a moving crawler that also doubles an an electric thruster for reboosting the tether, all kept powered by a nuclear reactor.

They recommended it for yeeting cargo to... Mars. No seriously. From here the bestcase (Hohmann) injection burn requires 2.95 km/s; another 2.65 km/s is required to push from Hohmann to match Mars'. To take the strain, they moot *sigh* Carbon Naynoe Toobz of 20 gigapascals ("GP") breaking-stress over that ρ = 1.3 g/cm. Equation #6 told them up to 5.5 km/s of deltaV out of this setup, on the Earth side. 8.8 GPa for 50 GPa.

That's a lot to play with. Say we have already injected something into the 100 Mm orbit. We have a chart for several cycler orbits in Longuski-Byrnes 2002 (remember that?), with their outgoing v_∞. For Aldrin's 6.54 km/s, which is a Martian flyby to return our chassis, Copilot recommends 5.2 km/s. The bespoke "S1L1" is also in reach.

The mission profile at the end, even for the Earth side, relies on a relay of two skyhooks: Earth supplies the lower 'hook from a "spaceplane" (in 2000, considered more workable than a reusable rocket), which LEO hook flings cargo up to the HEO 'hook. We'll wholly ignore the Mars side for now (likely forever).

They thought the cargo could go up to 100 "tons" at a time, implicitly metric. Equations #9-11 say more tonnes means increasing the thickness (in cm₂) of the cable whatever-it-is, which tapers.

For this poast we'll leave aside the CNT hardcore. We assume such GPa as can do Mars' or Venus' Hohmann - only; like Jensen's SiO₂. Which is itself a reach.

Here we'll talk about those nuclear reactors. Per 'hook, such is to transfer momentum between payload and tether. HEO as in, past GEO: maybe; LEO, I doubt. Nuclear is chosen over solar for a few (good) reasons: brute force, and infrequency of resupply. The paper assures that that each pull to another orbit is minor. This may allow some enthalpic solution as doesn't have to stay in LEO for long. But that would have to be supplied.

Barnard's necropolis

So last year, and the year before that, we were talking Proxima Ophiuchi aka Barnard. It has four planets, all with minimum masses double-to-triple Mars'. Xander Byrne and crew are pondering What It All Means.

Besides irradiated Marslikes. We already knew their sunsides were too baked. Also the UV on any of them would be too low for "abiogenesis" even for inner "d" which is the most-roasted. The latter doesn't account for seeding from any other systems this ancient star had passed-through; but if I'm a spore-shooting alien fungus, I'd not bother with Barnard.

The star is ancient, so doesn't flare much, which helps in telling that these planets were for real in the first place (this had been a problem). It is enriched in magnesium by contrast with silicon and thorium. Byrne's paper extrapolates that the planets should be ferropericlase. I don't frankly know what that mineral is, but Petrov says that this doesn't hold water well.

The four are resonant like Trappist-1... and the Jovian system. The inner planets d,b,c might be in a 4:3 MMR chain but since we have less data than what we have for - say - Trappist-1; the paper whiffs on this one.

The paper is able to use the resonance to impose upper mass limits - which is great. Even if the planets aren't great; they're all subEarths. Given the resonance they likely formed about where we see 'em. That is (well) within the soot line let alone the snow line.

So these are all low-mass. And: with more space than Jupiter's moons have. So they don't pull on each other as much. Add to that, their internal radioactive elements (which are halflived well beyond Earth's): they are internally "cool". And the outermost planet e is tidally locked which people aren't anymore saying about Trappist-1.

Knock-on effects are that the planets won't have seeped out volatiles after initial formation. Barnard is quiet... now; but these stars - M dwarf - tend to be flare stars when younger.

The paper also brings "gap complexity". Barnard's four are simple, 0.131. The paper argues that this implies no giant outer planets, but we must counterargue that our system has a lower 0.126 inward of 1.5 AU and... we have four giant outers. Of course we've been looking at this one since van de Kamp so... yea, we ain't seen nuffin'.

It is not Elon's content

People subscribe to X because they want to support X. X doesn't have a great user-interface if you're not on that system, so alternatives xcancel and nitter.net have provided that service for us. I tend to get my information from those sidechannels. At least those two sidechannels are now down due to ceaseanddesist orders.

When linking from here, I do strip out those URLs and for "x.com". In the event that the site has some other form of monetisation.

I'll say this much: without the sidechannels, X is useless to me. I'll route around it. I'll not use it. This blog here has never been an income stream; I don't know if I want it to be.

I think the C&D is a bad move. I doubt X is Elon Musk's primary income stream. Much of Musk's income comes from doing launches and that depends on goodwill from Musk's allies, especially the ally in charge of the US military. In that light X.com is an advertising channel. The sidechannels have been helping Musk present himself as a free speech advocate. Without the sidechannels, X.com is just another Facebook; and Musk is just another Zuckerberg.

Ezekiel with the rabbis

Ezekiel was a proponent of the Babylonian approach to Temple; opposed in his life to the Levi family, the latter more Egyptian. At some point the "Zadoq" faction within Levi injected themselves as an exception to Ezekiel's rules, such that the book got readily spread around the Jews. Daniel and 11QT the Temple Scroll adopt it; New Jerusalem tries to work with it.

Despite Ezekiel's vision of the dry bones, which could support Daniel, rabbis seem to have appreciated the base text a good deal less. Tova Ganzel summarises the Rabbinic (prose) tradition. I find most-dramatic how Ganzel n. 6 raises the mishnaic ruling Megillah 4:10 against bringing his content into the haftorah. I suspect that the Babylonian Prophet rarely found much welcome in the tents of meeting.

A major issue giving to the rabbis headache was, indeed, that Ezekiel did not come from the same place as the mainline Bible had come. As mutually-aware rivals, contradictions between Bavli and Masri halakha were the whole point, of both. With both in the canon, people would have to reconcile their rivalry. The Zadokites had done this, sort of, but their attempts (like 11QT, New Jerusalem, Damascus Document et al.) went out with the Temple, any Temple.

Ezekiel's imagery proved too popular for the poets to ignore. Elʿazar's anti-Roman piyyuṭ notes the throne-chariot in all her shining glory, and Copilot tells me others bring up Ezekiel 37's dry bones. If I am reading this right, Elʿazar found a dodge around Mishnah: do it in piyyuṭ.

As to the core of how Ezekiel was nonetheless allowed to be widely read even if Jews couldn't directly utter from it at the services, this surrounds Hananiah ben Hezeqiah. He was a man of the Tannaim (up to 220 CE) who did the Mishnah. Hananiah stood forth as the one rabbi who wanted to keep Ezekiel "in circulation". The question wasn't if Ezekiel would remain canon, nor booted to join Daniel in the third-rate scribblings. Much of the tradition believes that Ezekiel owned real power - in fact, so much power it was dangerous, like Raiders of the Lost Ark dangerous. Ezekiel would instead have been locked in some secure chest like the Zohar. Christians have parallel experience with the Gnostics. Ganzel must warn that these traditions are not in Mishnah nor even Tosefta; they appear first with the Amoraim = the Talmud era, mostly complete by 540 CE. Which leads to Elʿazar's era.

A deflated idea

0II∞ has a website.

Over the late 2000s they sneered at "the odd billionaire", along with governments, having a monopoly on spaaace. Their plan was to raise a balloon and launch roggets thence. A successful test was had in 2017.

Balloon-to-orbit is the only way to retrieve a crew from Venus' 55 km altitude off that hellpit back into orbit and home. So this poast comes a little late in this blog's career. Sadly it remains ahead of any real implementations here over Earth.

0II∞'s Bloostar aimed for 70-100 kg payloads launched with methalox, like what the Raptor drinks. I'd mooted maybe something like spinlaunch for such dumb cargo although spinlaunch is a lot of overhead to "bloon" up to the strato'. A strato-runway might work for jet-to-orbit. To get real counterweight in 22 km, they'd likely need rotors wired to a modular reactor; but that's a problem for later.

It seems they shifted to tourism. For odd millionaires.

Maybe the issue was that they dreamt all this up back when the Merlin engines looked sooty and unworkable. They had quite a few high-atmo-to-orbit schemes back-when. The Merlin remains sooty, but the Falcon 9 works. Cargo-to-orbit is now a lot cheaper than was then envisioned. And the Starship is coming.

Loonybins

Paul Johnson was the great Tory historian of that great reactionary decade 1980s. Everyone read Intellectuals and Modern Times. Private Eye, which was not a Left mag, read through his work and honoured him with a nickname: Loonybins.

Johnson has now been factchecked, by Claude AI. h/t Richard Hanania; Bryan Caplan relays this, against interest he'd asked after it in 2010. (If I may, this speaks well of Caplan's humility.)

Some reviewers had already hit it for instance in this review which is floated in Caplan's old comments.

Looking over the list, several of these mistakes look like typoes (like a misplaced decimal) or like an error brought over from Johnson's own sources (the 135k toll at Dresden was all over the place, I think I saw it first in Vonnegut). But there are others and they all go in Johnson's direction. It is also a pity that Loonybins did not take the time in 1991 to correct these.

Looking around, historians of the early American era don't like Loonybins either.

But hey. The selenical binface helped win the Cold War, right? Like how PizzaGate, Vox Day, and other fakenews helped push Trump in 2016! Unfortunately Johnson left behind a time-bomb. Since he's discredited, and not in the way Cofnas and Murray be "discredited" - but on his actual ethics - all nonLeft historians have to scramble that they're not like Johnson.

The great equatorial glacier

The boring-billion ended 825-765 Mya when pancontinental Rodinia split. One daughter-craton, we call "Laurentia". North America now.

Thomas M. Gernon and five coauthors argue that the split caused a rift. Rifting might dip a deep valley below but it also raises a highland escarpment at the rim. They have inherited the term Cordillerian, for a rim of (later) sedimentary fallout in the Ediacaran era. That forms the northern rim of the escarpment, which escarpment they propose bent south at its western edge following the then-new continent.

Between 765 Mya and the Ediacaran, at 717 Mya came a Snowball Earth episode: the Sturtian event of "Cryogenian". The paper says the escarpment had by then risen eight kilometers. Maybe this occidental himalaya averaged "only" seven above present sealevel but that still would be a great place to collect ocean moisture (tides were higher then too). This water froze up there, glaciating just about all Laurentia and lowering the ocean. Most the uplifted rock got scoured down to the "Vishnu Supercyst" laid down long before 1.6 Gya; although some intervening rock survives in gaps. New sediment won't be laid down to stay, until the narrow Cordillerian; the Grand Canyon region must wait longer, for the "Tonto" known to Brits as Cambrian. Thus, the Unconformity. (We're not missing much, we're assured.)

For those pondering if glaciers might end up halting their flow and ceasing erosion, allow me to supplement: the Sturtian was never a uniform freeze and it formally melted 660 Mya. The paper doesn't name the Sturtian but it does know the Marinoan when the glaciers returned 650-635 Mya. These climate shifts might not have mattered in higher latitudes but they assuredly mattered near the equator.

The ghost of this super-escarpment seems to have held. The Old Rocky Mountains perhaps guarded our flank in the Permian, although we don't get a map. We do get a map of postapocalyptic 65 Mya. By that point everything here is rotated and, of course, wholly northern. Here the then-new Rocky Mountains butt up against that once-north-now-west boundary, and the Mexican Peninsula's altiplano from the now-south. (Central America, then, was an archipelago, like the Greater Antilles; both also-then-new.)

The king of Ebion

I am still on the case of the piyyuṭ genre. The Cairo Genizah unearthed hundreds of these, among them works by one Elʿazar, called haQallir or son-of-Qallir. Penguin's book of Hebrew verse translates one of them, in the form perhaps of a call-and-response.

By tradition this one contrasts the king Elyon who is, you know, G-d; with Melek Ebyon. On its face that's the poor king. But the Ebioni kings whom the poem mocks seem to fear Elyon's judgement. That could be the Persian shah - were it not for the insistence on the Semitic. Here I must note that several Gospels consider their audience to be "the poor". This title - in Hebrew - drifted over to the Ebionite sect.

In the Greek-speaking side, the official Church deemed Ebionites as a heresy or close-enough. Among the Semites however I wonder. They had a few petty despots who took the title mlk - in Aramaic or Arabic, not Hebrew - generally bowing either to the emperor or to the shah. Heraclius called himself basileus though, and how better to mock any post-476-CE emperor than to tag him as a petty rex.

Eleazar could easily have contrasted his Lord to sulṭans or Commanders (amir?) but, here, did not. Overall our man seems not to have used much Arabic. In reverse, sura 5 might react to Elʿazar elsewhere. As a result his works tend to be dated before the Arab conquests which we know as "Islam". Maybe this is why the poem gets dated to an admittedly-wide band around 600 CE (wider, if like me you view this sura as postMuhammadan). "AG 900", for postSeleucid Syrians.

So far, so the present limits of my knowledge of piyyuṭ, which as I've warned you is less than a week old. Google's AI is pointing to more-direct satires of Christian rule although I lack direct access to much of that (I'm pointed to Yosef Yahalom and Ezra Fleischer). It seems Elʿazar appreciated Obadiah 1:15 as you have done, it shall be done to you. Obadiah then intended Edom; but as we all know as of 600 CE this tagged Christendom.

A brutal retaliation was coming upon Palaestinian Christians, once the shah seized Jerusalem. In Elʿazar's life, I suspect this had not happened yet.