Athanasius' manifesto

Athanasius' 39th Festal Letter is famous among Bible-believers, as a seminal text for their support of the present canon. It stands with the "Muratorian Fragment" here. Unfortunately like that fragment, our letter is also a fragment.

In 2015, David Brakke presented the [Sahidic] Coptic to fill in one of the missing pieces. He also published all he could find of the whole thing. More context is thereby provided. Brakke further takes time to revisit an earlier dispute against Alberto Camplani.

Athanasius' opponents are the small-g gnostics. These aren't necessarily the mystics of future Nag Hammadi. These are anyone who thought it groovy to add to the canon apocryphal - as in, supposedly secret but nonetheless true - traditions. This has been a bad habit among the Jews in particular (see here) but Christians too had inherited (among others) the Dream Visions in 1 Enoch, all 1 Enoch 1-36, and some version of Jubilees. Clement of Alexandria knew "Thomas" didn't deserve to be in the Four but cited it anyway. As late as Severus of Antioch we'll be seeing Christians draw from this well. Don't get me started on Cave of Treasures.

Athanasius raises the devastating point that the forgers knew just as well as we know that if (say) 1 Enoch 22 existed at the time of Moses, Moses would have quoted it and mandated it as a rule from the aeons. That is why the forgers have to claim apocryphism: that everyone kept this a secret. But why wouldn't the Levites want the best law for the people at the time?

For Brakke, Athanasius might boast of his clerical standing, but not of his intellectual standing. Someone like Arius or, worse, Melitius might. If their erudition comes from heaps of Oxyrhynchite garbage, that erudition is of equal value.

It's not that Athanasius was anti-intellectual. Syrians could call him malpana with the best of the Fathers. I would go further than Brakke however. Athanasius might have inspired modern Biblical (and Quranic) fundamentalists (we may assume he was a creationist himself) but I don't see that he was closing down "debate" as such. I don't see Athanasius talking up flat-earth like, oh, Lactantius. It's that Athanasius drew a thick line between real sciences (what Beale calls "scientody"), and snowing everybody with obscure hokum (see Beale for further examples).

Suppressing Chalcedon

Under weak Zeno, the Empire made its bid to smooth over the rufflings of Chalcedon AD 451. The Henotikon takes the novel course of not mentioning it. As if it were one of those councils nobody anymore remembers like Serdica.

Philip M Forness has uploaded his thesis to academia.edu; this will become his 2018 book Preaching Christology. The Aramaic script used here is Estrangel...ó. There exists a colon to title each version. The key to the thesis is Jacob/James of Serug. Pronounced "Serugh".

Jacob is a saint of longstanding with the Maronites, presently Catholic. It is through early-modern Maronites that we have most Jacob's work, and - more importantly - how Jacob's legacy got advertised to Latin Christendom as small-o orthodox, ensuring it got copied and translated out here. But in Late Antiquity, the Maronites really weren't Catholic. They sort-of affirmed Chalcedon but more-enthusiastically affirmed the Monotheletism under Heraclius. Forness stands to explain, why they jumped onto Heraclius' project.

Like other authors of dubious orthodoxy, lookin' atchyoo Ephrem, Jacob had a ready talent for the memra' form. He was able to take Zeno's Christology and translate it for a popular audience. This ensured a party, not yet a schism, of Ephesian fanatics. Of course after AD 496 under next emperor Anastasius they were simply the only recognised Roman church.

Others in this party included Zachariah of Mytilene (not yet the Pseudo- continuator, of which Forness is aware) and Symeon of Bet-Arsham. Forness brings them to illustrate how these authors used Henotic (if I may) jargon as a marker for their acceptance of Zeno's full text. Jacob used the same tropes.

At first that party also counted Philoxenos of Mabbug (Arabic Manbij). This one confronted patriarch Flavian II of Antioch, AD 509 (or AG 820), demanding miaphysitism and acceptance of the Henotikon. Two years later, Philoxenos went further than just dismissing Chalcedon; the Antiochenes would have to denounce it (one suspects, by Imperial command), and denounce pope Leo's "Tome". His ally Severus behaved similarly.

Come AD 518, Justin the Illyrian would succeed Anastasius. Justin appointed one Paul, perhaps a convert from Judaism, to be Antioch's Patriarch - under orders to reënforce Chalcedon in Syria. Their decisions led to Severus removing his bishops out of communion with Constantinople as well as just the city Rome.

Barḥadbeshabba (inconsistently-spelled, here) will claim that Narsai wrote his homilies to rival Jacob's out east. Although Forness doesn't bring Narsai himself for this.

The new covenant became Torah

For Jews, MT Jeremiah 31:31-4 promises a new covenant. The Messiah will come to rule justly and install it. In a world where "sin" as we know it simply has no meaning, this Dispensationalism must apply.

The various "documentary hypotheses" problematise this notion.

We argue for the rearrangement of the Jewish Scriptures - plural - into the five books "of Moses", the epilogue to Deuteronomy (which Moses didn't write) and the book Joshua. Anchoring it all is Leviticus 19-25. This happened after the return from exile - after Jeremiah. Might Jeremiah have been laying out a programme for this, our Torah...?

Jeremiah as an oral preacher might not have intended any written law at all. (I am fairly sure of similar for Ezek 36:26-8.) One problem here, as ever for Jeremiah, is that the Greek differs. Joachim Krause (pdf) has pointed especially to v. 33. Here, is it "my torah" (Hebrew, singular) or "my nomoi" (Greek, plural)? The former implies God is going to abandon the One Torah which, in modern Judaeo-Christian agreement, equals the Masoretic edition of the Five Books (thereby assumed known to Jeremiah). The latter implies laws in these scriptures. Krause notes that the translator was loose with singular/plural elsewhere such that it might translate the singular in the basis.

I suggest that the translator, here, understood how his (yes, male) contemporaries understood tôrati here. He would have been reading this alongside Ezekiel 20:25 and Jeremiah 7:22. The former has God dismiss his own laws (explicitly plural); the latter denies that He ever sent anything during the desert wanderings (which wanderings, by Jewish consensus, did happen).

In that light, where to find these new Prophetic laws which weren't in the scribal schools? For Krause, Jeremiah is saying to trash all that stuff as to stick with Prophecy.

Long-term, that didn't happen. Maybe it couldn't. Baruch came along as Jeremiah's scribe and delivered the only version of his work we got. (And then later Jews botched the transmission but never mind all that.) And the Holiness Code scribes arranged the Hexateuch and following books into near-exactly what we got today. They could, somewhat honestly, tell us all that this is the New Covenant. It certainly has turned out to differ from the old Deuteronomic- or Priestly- content. Jeremiah had refuted the former and Ezekiel, the latter.

Jews sometimes interpret things, as I've noted, in whatever language. They sometimes say that by "new", Jeremiah meant "renewed". I'll let others answer that. I'll concede that as a rule, interpretations may be early.

I suspect some Jews continued to chafe against that their now-rewritten Bible was much improvement upon the earlier stuff but, unfortunately, we no longer have any of that earlier stuff in its own form. Thus, Paul. Thus, Muhammad.

q_rsqrt comes to the Jerk Store

Almost four years ago, I asked: how come q_rsqrt didn't force ufloat or udouble or whatever in her input. The Quake games never used this func for a negative input; this might raise a nasty native CPU error. Why not - I asked - force the positive input and crash gracefully?

Today I was watching some video on Youtube - I won't link it, it was AI - about the Year 2038 Bug. That's when the 31 bits, counting from the new year 1970, overflow. It's not 32 bits because it's a signed integer and they wanted to allow negative years, back to some time in 1901. I'm told December. Most people they cared about were born after then.

Another issue is that ye olde compilers from the earliest years of C, Ada, and Pascal were "type safe". If you had a big uint, they didn't like it when you made it an int. There was a chance you'd lop off the highest bit and make the whole thing meaningless. The compiler is your friend!

No really, he was written to be your friend. Programmers need to work with the compiler, not against him. Leave aside 2038. What could the Id Software doodz have done in the 1990s?

I'm thinking that before calling q_rsqrt, they could have sent their vectors into another function: which takes a float and squares it. "Pffft they probably did that already, x^2 or, better, x*x." Yeah, sure. And the base multiplication left the float as a float. We need a function that knows when x^[even uint] happens it sends back an unsigned value.

The problem is with the type of x. IEEE 754 didn't bother with "ufloat". There was no such thing in the 1990s. Why not? Because what "floats" is where the "point" is at, and sign is just one bit. They'd have to decide whether to add that bit to the top, or to the decimals. For the purpose of normalisation, which be taking the sum of three squares (so could be large), let's say we agreed to put it on the topside.

Now that we've decided to monkey with the structure of a hardwired type, which we can't do in software; we go to Intel HQ and we ring the doorbell with our proposal to alter their processor. It's 1994; maybe 1985 (Elite). Who's got space for that? And why does it matter so bad in, you know, a shmup game.

Blah blah blah, not worth the bother, never has been worth the bother. You know it, I (now) know it... everyone knows it (except apparently me). So why write alla'that. It's because here:

long i  = * ( long * ) &y;

This type could be unsigned. (It also happens that "long" then meant 32-bit.) I just ran this by Google AI and...

uint32_t i;
memcpy(&i, &y, sizeof(i));
i = 0x5f3759df - (i >> 1);
memcpy(&y, &i, sizeof(y));

Chew on that, Kasper Nielsen!

Early writings of Jacob in Edessa

Paul Ulishney a couple years ago got Correspondence of Jacob of Edessa and Eustathius of Dara into print. Jacob, per Ulishney, was then a forty-something monk esteemed as a theologian and an interpreter of Greek work.

Complicating matters, many of these names have other names. Jacob is (in English) sometimes called James. Edessa was usually Callirhoë in those days, which somewhat has a memory today as "Şanlı'Urfa". And Eustathius seems to have been in charge of saecular affairs in Dara to Ruha's east. Because, per Ulishney, Jacob addressed him as "the petty lord (kyriosuna)". But affectionately!

Also complicating is that little Jimmy whilst in Edessa veered off-and-on between being a monk and full bishop. We do know he wrote one of our letters at the age of 42 (bald, by then) but that one ain't dated and lacks any other real markers so, maddeningly, we still don't know when our man was born.

Wikipedia still thinks AD 672 was a possible year for Jacob's installation as bishop. Ulishney's rearrangement and interpretation agrees more with (early-)684 / 995. Such is the majority view since Omert J Shrier 1991 and is so assumed in Hoyland 1997-8. Ulishney doesn't defend Best O.J. against freakin' Wiki since, why should he condescend. So I'll do it.

In the earlier 680s - AG 990s to nonbarbarians - a small schism broke out cutting the "east" from the Antioch-Edessa mainline. These will be the now-historic sees of Tikrit, Singara, and mount Alpap. The patriarch Severus wanted to be a Syrian pope like his contemporary in Egypt acted as pope, appointing bishops or at least demanding a veto. (Investiture was always a problem for churches.) Severus enlisted Jacob as secretary. Ulishney reasonably assumes they'd not force this upon a bishop, but the bishops may well call in the smartest monk in the area. And Jacob, much as it pains us dyotheletes, was a genius. His contemporary Athanasius of Balad agreed; as Athanasius II he'll get Jacob that episcopacy as one of his first acts in office. I don't hear that anyone in Edessa complained... at the time. (Read on.)

All this stuff is in the British Library, still in manuscript: "Add. 12,172". Still unedited. On the other hand, now that Ulishney has organised it better, maybe we'll get to read it soon. Put Alison Salvesen on it. Is there some Copt who can send a grant?

Eustathius will enjoy a career after these letters, as well. He was the Nicodemus of the north Christian Arabs, founding a martyrion for Muʿâdh of the Taghlib. Michael the Syrian will post that to AG 1020 which we call 708-9 (against some "Muhammad" but assuredly under al-Walîd's command), I assume based on that church's records and plaques.

In these letters Jacob also dealt with the Romans and the Nestorians, as well a Syrian Miaphysite might. Jacob as an intellectual was no enemy to Greeks as such; but he might have grown disenchanted with the imperial Romans, Latin-speaking or otherwise. Constantine IV was asserting his primacy in Constantinople (681/993-on), and preparing to throw off the Monotheletism which his father had tolerated. As for the Nestorians: Jacob and Athanasius would have to worry their rivals might be eager to embrace their wayward brethren. There's also the issue that Jacob knew the earth was round unlike some idiots over there.

Jacob will outlast his pope, but not long outlast him. Athanasius was known in his (meagre) correspondence to be a stickler for, basically, Christian halakha. For instance he forbade to consume halal (Holger Zellentin has a good book on this). The next patriarch Julian - contemporary with Justinian II - proved more lax in such ordinances. By then and for this, the Edessenes preferred Julian over their own neoRabboula. Jacob resigned in a huff and retvrned to monk-ing. And to writing manifesti.

Per Salvesen's translation, Jacob's frustrations spilled into the scholion on the edition of 1 Kings / 3 Reigns 14 he was compiling there. Also extant is a "Testamentum Domini" from this circle which may well be by Jacob himself. Dunno about that Pseudo-Methodius tho', that Sinjari seems more oecumenical.

Hot shot, part deuce

So I kinda/sorta trusted VAERS when deciding on the booster in fall 2021. I rolled those dice having taken Pfizer's original schedule that spring and then catching some yuck in June. Stayed un-boosted.

That RS means it is a reporting system for the V.A. Events. That database accumulated a lot of such reportage. Less from Pfizer than from Moderna I think, but the second jab I took had some statistical problems. And people were freaking out over - all of them, as the same "Clot Shot". Which might skew the results, like all those geezers and morons freaked out over sudden acceleration in the late-1980s Audi.

There could have been some signal-to-noise correction in how various agencies read the VAEs from the RS. The British Medical Journal est. 1840 must report on what happened.

This journal is not some Slay News fly-by-night; they are generally pro-vax, like for shingles.

The journal notes that by mid-2021 the FDA knew there was a noise problem in VAERS. It further uncovers a letter which, in September 2022, then-CDC-director Rochelle Walensky sent: Walensky was worried that it was all getting stupid over at the FDA. The FDA meanwhile was muzzling the people raising the concerns the prior year.

By noise, BMJ means the FDA simply ignored myocarditis, pericarditis, or tinnitus as not-counting as a real vaccine adverse event. The "-card-" root means cardio - the heart.

The FDA honcho during this time was Peter Marks. He'd been a big force in "Operation Warp Speed" in May 2020. Robert Kennedy demanded Marks' resignation 28 March 2025. You can now find Marks at Eli Lilly in DC.

Starshot v Starfire: the race to Sedna

Given the ongoing investments into sunsail and Direct Fusion, outer system missions are coming into view. In one case, the outer system is coming to us: Sedna. We have until 2075 when this visitor from the Oort gets into perihelion (76 AU). Last year, Elena Ancona, Roman Ya. Kezerashvili, Savino Longo compared the two methods.

Other methods had earlier been mooted such as VASIMR (perhaps-foremost), but these run in the timeframes of decades. Democracies don't build cathedrals.

Other important constraints include that the mission requires a power source that isn't solar, that far away. It also needs communication with Earth. These techs were last refined in New Horizons - a flyby.

This DFD, which is assumed Princeton's Starfire, would be running 1.6 MW under its own power. This is to extend the lifetime of the superconductor over ten years; the ceiling would be thirteen.

With as much time as they have, either could (and should) borrow Jupiter for gravity-assist, probably Venus too. Dunno about outer planets. The DFD would further be able to flip-n'-burn and inject into the planetoid's orbit. That would however add some years onto the trip.

One-way sunsail would get out there in seven years; the Starfire in ten. There is no reason that exploration-agencies cannot do both, given that a sunsail might be cheaper. Especially given that other missions will be bidding against Princeton for its 300g of He-3.

On-board variable propulsion

Ion drives like VASIMR, and adjustable NERVA like the shockwave rotor, can squeeze more efficiency from their drives by feeding in energy and/or adjusting the exhaust throat. It occurs to me that this means recalculating the rocket equation in real time. As in: on the rocket, not outsourced to orbital data. That drinks more energy for compute, which then must be controlled somehow; probably by radiating out.

These are exponent and logarithm equations. If we were using a TSR-80 extended BASIC processor, welcome to Taylor series.

Needless to say, that is some bull-tish. Don't we have some tricks to turn a float into a 32?bit long(ish)int? Just shift the integer over bro. *(long*), subtract some magic number, then <<= bro. Like when the exponent was -1/2.

That'd be great if the ratios were all integers. They... probably aren't. Because they aren't, this method requires to poll the ratio until it reaches an integer and then run the calc.

We'd hope to force integers on all four values of the Tsiolkovsky to some cromulent unit-length, like millimeters and grams. We'll see. Instead of exp(dv/ve) it's exp(dv) × root-ve(e). One multiplication operation. Gotta be better than Taylor(8). Ln(m0/mf) meanwhile is [lb(m0) - lb(mf)] × ln(2). Now we have to ponder overflow: 32-bit integers go only to 2³¹. So, no; these are going to be km/s maybe even Mm/s which we have to rescale after the calc.

Depending on the unit-lengths I might even consider storing the exponent-powers and the e-roots in tables. Data got corrupted on Voyager but I suspect our triage is better today; so's our shielding. On arrival at the destination our need to punch the engine shouldn't be as dire, so the memory used in the tables can be wiped, for reüse in the actual mission.

This was imprecise for q_rsqrt and will be imprecise now. Those 1990s gamers applied Newton's method upon that approx "y", thus: y * ( 1.5F - ( x * 0.5F * y * y ) ). Lotsa multiplications, here. And that's second-order because this was just a square. And, to remind: we're talking about high exponents and high roots. May as well devolve to Taylor.

Kasper Nielsen's cheat-sheet of "float tricks" may offer an out. We have NVIDIA's "piecewise linear approximation" which shouldn't overflow. Ian Stephenson does one better for Pow2 which "approximates the error with a quadratic".

There are other unsafe-code solutions in the roster, some just straight assembler with no overflow checks. Good news: I doubt we need 'em for the floating fractions. The mass ratio as wet/dry[-er] even at some Apolloesque 96 isn't going to have ln(x) all that high (4.6ish here), and this is going down as we drive. The velocity ratio working with inner-system delta-V and as-good exhaust as they'll allow us (like, 14 km/s) should also be low, enough for exp[x] anyway.

MEMORY COPY 9/19: If you know we're on positives.

Types... deletes... and stuff

Sydney Sweeney should not be supporting gambling in sports. This support is a failure of character on her part.

I recall when Instapundit lambasted Busey for appearing in the Turkish film Valley of the Wolves. I recall he called Busey a "whore". Euphoria, I propose, was just as disgusting a project. So it is not like Sweeney hasn't already telegraphed that she, like Busey, was willing to appear in whatever paid.

If you think I am being cheap: some of the shots which Insta is levelling at her detractors are cheap. (And if we must Go There, the lady northwest would probably look about as good as 30-year-old Sweeney sans makeup and airbrush. I've personally dated northeast.)

I might further ask, from the support of Instapundit and others, to what degree they have been bought off too.

So you want 70 tonnes in Venus-Earth Hohmann

The Superheavy has pushed a 75 tonne load into LEO; maybe some krauts have pushed 70 t. This load is headed for Venus. v_inf, for that, is 2.5 km/s. Leviathan expect to pay Elon Musk MONEY to send it all in a 160 tonne Starship; and MO' MONEY, for the fuel top-up in LEO. Presently the paper hasn't stated how much fuel they need but Google has told me, 400 t (megagrams). In this poast, I compete for that blank cheque. We are all about branching paths here.

An interplanetary Hohmann operates by regular launch windows, Earth/Venus on that pentagram synod of 583.92 days. In this case we're not sending any time-sensitive cargo (like monkeys): Leviathan is supposed to work for a year, so what's a coupla'more months. This means I don't have to blast immediately after getting to LEO and topping up. I can afford to wait; to adjust my cargo's trajectory from LEO to something better nudged into.

We start by renting the Tamil Tether. This yanks my cargo into HEO, here standing for high eccentric orbit. Apogee 200-300 megameters well over GEO. Weee!

That is delta-v 2.83 km/s; if I'm shifting only 75t, momentum 2.1e8 kgm/s. This can be spread over a minute or two so most tether materials would work. The 2.3 terajoules of total energy will, however, lower the tether's altitude. Raja's tax must be paid.

From this apogee, I'm in range of a possible second tether which promises up to 100 t - although here the tether material must be ... stiff. In this case I must spend the remnant 25 t budget on a dedicated Venus-entry vessel because I'll not fit a full Starship on that poor thing. Copilot didn't even suggest the idea.

Instead Copilot adds solar-electric tugs operating for several weeks in that 200-300 Mm domain. I could even have a near-empty spare 160 t Starship hanging around up there (which is why we discussed only the 75 t above). We don't need to park them on the spaceline although that will be nice too.

Above all (heh) the tugs can push my 235 tonnes into a Molniya trajectory, that almost hits Earth. It is at perigee, the velocity is highest, yay Kepler, at 10.8-11 km/s. At the right moment, we do the Crazy Hermann off to Hohmann. This delta-V is 248 m/s. For this push, propellant mass runs just 16.1 metric tons. With 16.5 MN thrust allowed by six Raptors, it is burned in 3.65 s.

Leviathan conceded a multiple-launch mission, the moment they mooted refueling. My mission architecture reduces the launches to two. One sends the load, which competitors can bid for; tethers hurl this into HEO. The other sends a whole Starship (under)laden, which... tethers hurl into HEO. The 16.1 t (plus) of fuel is probably in the latter, for simplicity. The load and the 'ship, they dock (because Leviathan assumes docking is possible) in HEO. At some point, I send my mission via Oberth with much less fuel than that for which SpaceX will charge them. I do assume infrastructure, but that infrastructure is available for future missions. Like for that Sunbird > Saturn mission.

I might add that Elon could use something like this architecture to get his 'ships back. Could be he's loaded enough propellant for a cycler-trajectory, to drop off the cargo and keep goin', so Earth gets it back... whenever. 3-0-2-9 promises 4.8 sidereal years; Hop David's scheme awaits the whole eight year metonic. Maybe Elon doesn't want to let his 'ship rot in the Solar well for years so sends over propellant, to load onto the 'ship, which waits in high Venus ellipse-orbit for the next direct Hohmann.

Either way there's likely to be additional burn, for 3-0-2-9 probably on its next return at Venus, to adjust the angle as to intersect Earth. I say likely because over eight years, cap'n Hop David might be able to trim thar sails.

Coxon was an op

I don't desire to speak much on the topic of AI dangers, so I'll just flag a few people not to heed. Not ever.

First up is the oh-so-principled Coxon whose resignation was coördinated with news announcements all over the Google-approved outlets. All this doomerism is being Dustin Moskovitz funded. It is all an op.

It turns out that the whole "Hugging Face" hack was, likewise, an op; driven by nefarious (human) agents. For those who still think "effective altruists" are human.

Anthropic, we learn elsewhere, may be trying to get AI nationalised, or - more likely - attain a state-ordered monopoly. The latter has an ideology and the ideology has a name. It is not such a name as online fora much allow to use.

So I'll keep watching my slop kthxbai.

The Median myth

Two decades ago Karen Radner floated a key thesis about the "Medes" - Madayë in Aramaic - down to the late 600s BC. The Assyrians never quite could tell that the hillfolk were coalescing into some "Median Empire". Skip ahead a few centuries and Herodotus has all manner of lore to relate about these "great kings". Most of these Medes overlap the Babylonians, starting with breakaway king Nabopolassar. But the Babylonians say much less of these hillmen than will the Greeks. They do know some latter leaders: Kashtariti, Umakištar, finally Ištumegu.

Theories of "secondary state formation" may apply here. Alongside the Romans, "tribal confederations" along the Rhine and Danube limes start taking on the character of kingdoms; we may say the same for the later Arabs between Iran and the Rhomania. I'm thinking here especially of the Libyans who enlisted "Sea Peoples" against the house of Ptah at Memphis. Nabopolassar, here, struck a deal with "Medes". These weren't his granddaddy's dirty hill bandits anymore. Copilot leans toward a real kingdom at Ecbatana/Hamadan.

We last hear from these Iranian plateaux in the "Nabonidus chronicle", recording a war between an "Ištumegu" (Iranic v->m in this script) and a Cyrus. Cyrus won, so got to relay his genealogy, that he was the grandson of a man with an Elamite name - which name he also took. Cyrus' ancestral lands were important, but not the heartland of the Medes. So who was *R̥štivaigah? - apart from a man perhaps more Iranian than the Cyruses.

The Greeks record elsewhere that "Astyages" also came from a dynasty of sorts. His father Cyaxares fought the Lydians until "the eclipse of Thales" today marked 28 May 585 BC (usually). This name is widely distributed, showing up even in Phrygian, albeit a common name for Medes. Nabopolassar commanded his Medes under their headman "Umakištar" who must correspond to Herodotus' Cyaxares.

Later Darius must contend with the family of Cyaxares, rebelling against him from the east. One was Fravartish "Phraortes" the Mede, who took the name Khshathrita when he got crowned; this regal name is known in Babylon ("Kashtariti") where, interestingly, Herodotus' Fravartish is not. Another pretended Cyaxarid was one Tritantaechmes of Sagartia; we should take him less seriously.

Herodotus got his data from Darius' successors, mainly Artaxerxes Longhand. Of course these successors were steeped in Darius' lore; Artaxerxes is going to be succeeded by Ochus who'll call himself the new Darius.

I propose here that Fravartish remembered that Cyrus had posed as the Assyrians' heir. Fravartish invented a legendary past around Kashtariti and Cyaxares, those great liberators of the Medes therefrom. Darius, reconquering his usurping lying ass, left-alone that particular fib. Darius would give them the Cyrus they deserved, putting down this upstart neoAstyages "this time as farce". Meanwhile the Persians as a whole could inherit the glory of the Medes, again; which Fravartish had lately made more glorious.

As evidence for Herodotus taking his Median lore from this filter, I bring his name for Cyaxares' father. He relates nothing like "Kastrites" but instead delivers "Phraortes" - close the truename of the late Kashtariti usurper, but a false name for the history-book.

Hand, shown

Beale:

Intelligent Genetic Manipulation. We have no idea by whom. But I suspect all the recent alien disclosure stuff is because it is fairly obvious that the genetic record is going to prove that the human species, at the very least, was constructed. With a few more advancements in genetic science, we may even be able to figure out more or less when it happened.

I've unbolded the silly. We've more-or-less been over this. But in light of new findings let's return to this vomit:

When humans emerged from Africa, and for that matter when contemporary humans in Africa emerged into other African environments, the environment hit us but hard. We couldn't control how to handle the coronavirus, nor the malarial parasite. So it was, until came the Late Glacial Maximum, or "Mesolithic", or whatever you call the slip from the general suck of the Pleistocene into 24kBC's full-on Ice Age. Selection was natural. Over hundreds of thousands of years, sometimes supplemented by distant relatives who had been out there for millions.

By that point humans of all sorts still hadn't domesticated any of our neighbouring animals. Well okay: so Alpha (2018). That movie hasn't much been deboonked. Maybe some coëxistence happened with scavenging wolves in the 30skBC. Don't care.

It's in the Neolithic we start seeing goats, sheep, oxen, donkeys, llamas. Again: this isn't the poast to pick apart millennia. Just to point out that, after the Ice Age, a slew of animals got selected - by intelligence. Our intelligence.

It would be a surprise if we hadn't intelligently designed ourselves as well. We had the smarts to pick friendly sheep; why not friendly farmers. To a Sumerian king, a farmer is just another beast of burden.

Or, for Beale... a Cahokian or Chaco Canyon king.

Ebrahimi progress

A subset of the VASIMR process is the Ebrahimi, alfvén recombination. This is being evaluated in the lab. I'd not say "tested" yet.

They can get 10-20 km/s upstream. This scales with the strength of the magnetic field, for which they got good tests up to 9 kV. Thrust in turn correlates with plasma density which their equipment kept low, 1-3e-6 kg/m³; and with the velocity-squared of the exhaust; and with the area of the plasma column cross section. It has so far transpired that their speedy upstream velocities suffer interference, and that they want a bigger lab but they would say that.

Keep in mind the very physics are still young and may involve Navier-Stokes.

VASIMR update

As long as we are looking in on orbital manoeuvres for low-mass craft, and/or entheppy drives: let's check in on VASIMR. Especially if we are getting space actuators.

The main practical uses thus-far have been high-isp high-efficiency trips. That's the outer system. Like far out: Eris, for one. This blog was considering gradual spin-up of space stations before humans set foot in them; heaven knows we all have time before they get there. Teased was (elsewhere) a human Martian visit in 39 days, which demands 200 MW[e] (if they want that cargo, I'd add: several roggets). I don't think such missions rate high on the priority-lists, given that what I'd linked came out 2011.

The company testing VASIMR is Ad Astra. Looking around the news, reporters are aware of Ad Astra's existence to itself and to the space community at large. Because the power they need is high, they need nukes. If we go back to 2024 they had a deal with SpaceNukes. At higher voltages in megawatt realms, Ebrahimi will surely follow. I think at that point, a thruster-customer may as well use fusion. Although, if either's customers stick to stationkeeping Venus in the hectawatt range, they might all get by with solar.

From Ad Astra I smell the scent of Howe. Company going quiet 2025-6.

VASIMR is clearly not a bad tech. I suspect it might have been a premature tech.

Leviathan evaluation

Some people earlier this decade assembled to propose Leviathan to NASA: Venus Aerobot for Low-altitude and Surface Explorations. Surprised they didn't call it the "valasé"; "vaflasé" might have sounded too Welsh. 22 pages, 50+ appendices.

They've figured that the tech mostly already existed 2021-5, excepting the one-way Starship for chassis. The stats on th'ship matter, so they've had to leave those parameters blank. SpaceX has had a working model of the one-way since late last July (with heat shield!), so Leviathan might want to run one more pass through the text.

This is wholly different from the Landis-Colozza statites, although those might tag along for the ride.

The aerobot alone is 30 tonnes. They want also 17 tonnes of methane and a 20 t drop-tank. With the other material, all rounds up to 75 t. For propulsion purposes, Leviathan adds the standard Starship fuel tank, all six Raptor 3 Vacs, and all the other equipment once in orbit. Google AI estimates 120-160 tonnes here. I've told it to use the high end because Venus needs heat shields.

The Levvies expect refueling in LEO. Google thinks 400 t should do it; if so, that means four additional Starship there-and-backs. SpaceX hasn't yet offered that service. As long as we are dreaming of nice-to-have space infrastructure: someone else can compete here. The delta-V to get into a Venus Hohmann is the expensive part of the trip, because Venus can aerobrake. Starship, remember, comes with excellent heat-shield.

Over our sister planet the aerobot floats between "-2 km and 4 km". The -2, I think, means they can dip over the plains and not just over Alpha / Beta Regiones. Dunno about Maxwell, which rises, what, 10 km; nor even "continent" Aphrodite. So they're swimming through not just hot high-pressure CO₂ but supercritical.

As to how it floats, they've picked Project Loon's architecture with an internal titanium-foil "bladder". Methane is the lifting gas.

They need 6-7 kWe power, so are requesting a 10 kWe reactor. For that they're begging NASA - and not, say, SpaceNukes. Mostly because this has been a focus of NASA research over the five years the Leviathan project wrote the paper. If they won't let explorers raise a reactor into LEO, I'd hook a wind farm to the lee side of Maxwell, to charge any surface missions thence. And charge the Leviathan... to use it. Heh heh heh.

Two other essential pieces of tech: a lander, also NASA which in this case it may have to be; and Ingenium's refrigerator.

Unlike LEO or our moon, or asteroids, or even maybe Deimos: we cannot expect this planet to return treasures for investors. This project is for exploration. So they want a grant: NIAC-1. They justify it by comparison with the Martian rovers and Ingenuity-soon-Skyfall. Nerds tune in to watch this stuff, they say.

It should be permitted to say that Charlie Kirk sucked

This blog has never argued for the assassination of Charles Kirk, and certainly not for celebrating the "Kirkversary". The culprit - and Tyler Robinson's trial is I think pointing to the correct culprit - deserves justice. Those online pundits muddying the waters deserve... banning (Beale is right about one thing, that "free speech" is unworkable; I'd ban him too). I will further remind that I left the Catholic Church over their preference for Gaza over Kirk.

This is where readers can smell a "but" incoming. I don't want to say "but". So, I'll say - "that said":

I didn't ever think much of the man. I thought TPUSA was malign from the start, like Campus Crusade back in the day. I pegged Kirk as a Quaker Nationalist, which half-baked ideology (which it is - both) I disapprove. If you pressed 2009ish Yarvin on it, he'd disapprove too. Mencius Moldbug would dig him out and hang him, with ... Locke, to paraphrase; Cromwell on the rope next-over.

As to Kirk in life, Richard Hanania has lately poasted a dossier of various stances he'd took, which, he Considers, Harmful - to the body politic. As is well known, you cannot cancel Herr Hoste. So they're trying to cancel Sohrab Ahmari, for agreeing with Hanania.

I cannot read all of Hanani-Hoste's paywalled article like Ahmari can. Here and there one can read the odd snippet. Like that Kirk supported Carlson past the point Carlson was worthy of this (which is how Carlson got to speak at the funeral, which funeral I virtually-attended instead of Communion With Gaza). Or like that Kirk supported "Stop the Steal". This blog did not support StS. I thought some states were stole, in fact, but not such as would have made the difference, and that Team Trump had lost the room by the end of the week.

Because I haven't (because: can't) read Hanania, I can't judge all he wrote. I can judge only what I can read, which here range from "true" to "honest arguments can be brought". There also exist Kirk's vaccine comments.

So whatever. Ahmari can say what he wants, and shouldn't apologise. As to "Captive Dreamer", Yarvin, whoever else: if you want us to treat Kirk as some icon like Steinem or King, then I'll start mocking Kirk like I've mocked those eminently mockable American Saints.

Some opinions on early Islam

Joel Hayward, who had joined the jund, in 2022 put his book Warrior Prophet through "Claritas" Press. For some reason Catholic-coded institutions seem to love supporting apostates. Anyway I haven't read it; it isn't apologetic like Esposito's, it seems more honest like the works of Juan Cole and Jonathan Rape-Rape Brown. In 2021 I'd poasted a roundup of modern consensus around the maghazi; maybe some of that is in Hayward's book.

From late 2023 as you know I'd moved more toward the preMuhammadan era of Near Eastern Araby. So I might not get to Hayward's work anytime soon. That much isn't a reflection of my views on Hayward, who for all I know has good reason for embracing the faith of the surat al-anfal and of its supposed author. He can try convincing me later.

For more evenhanded takes, rather than "Hellz ya he kilt 'em Khaibar JAHOODS!": Razib is recommending Kyle Orton who runs a 'stack of his own. Adomnán's hadith from Arculf, the Islamic understanding of religio... basic Ibn Warraq stuff from circa 2000 before the towering day.

Relevant to this blog might be the milieu of Late Antiquity. That would track more with IQSA 2015. I was writing Tidings of Flame around the time of Orton's poast.

PS. Happy New Year.

Passive shielding

This isn't really the magnet blog, so I'll relay Space Startup News who knows better. He's talking radiation-shields. To replace his overview, here is one from 2025.

What appears to have inspired our boy is Zenno. They announced a few weeks ago they'd loaded Supertorquer on "Starburst-1". The latter is Portal Space, which rideshares Transporter-18. Present plan: Falcon-9 next month. Portal are trying to shift sats between MEO and GEO, which engine they grandiosely term "Supernova".

Zenno's Supertorquer in this, confusingly termed a "flagship", is the actuator for this ship. It's a superconductor: a passive magnet at 3,500 A·m. Contrast, the usual passive shielding of lithium-hydrates which then add to the dry mass. SSN points out that superconductors are now a commodity, made more-or-less cheaply. (This is because of the work done in the fusion field. If those customers go away, as they well might, this application will keep superconductors in business.)

Although the Zenno magnet be passive it must be kept below 100 K or so. The mission is going to use power (by solar), if nothing else for the "TRL11" diagnostics also on board. It is in fact sun-sync so will be in daylight for a full year. Basic thermodynamics will heat up the chassis, and that heat is not going to be blowing propellant all the time. One assumes radiators will be brought.

Portal's aim is to use Earth's magnetic field for control authority. That's the "torque" part, to turn itself about. This leaves, for propellant, only shifting orbits. I imagine it also simplifies the design as the engine(s) shouldn't need gimbals (the solar and radiators get their own torque). In a future when sats might use the spicy-meatball for higher I_sp, any improvement on shifting cargo about is good.

Naturally the torque part works only over planets with dynamo. Such include the four big'uns, plus Mercury and Ganymede-why-not. We gotta start somewhere so, Earth it is.

This mission already-excellent hasn't even got to SSN's stake in it. Zenno want to test how well this magnet, which again is passive so always-on, keeps out the radiation. We can start by shielding solar cells from electromagnetic radiation, leaving them to handle only the photons. Solar sails can be so augmented as well. That can help scale to such human-rated habitats as can't bury themselves under regolith. Thinking here not so much of longterm space-stations outside Van Allen (Jensen imports regolith - and hydrates), as the shuttles to/from those stations or, perhaps, the stations-under-construction. Meanwhile all those LEO stations are likely going to stay lightweight (so micrograv) so will need the shields too. So much for those BVDs!

Cheaper syngas

Syngas is a mix of carbon-monoxide and hydrogen. I expect Martians can get the hydro' from ice; Venerians must scoop the acid clouds. I hadn't really checked how the chem would work, I'll probably ask Copilot. Where carbon and hydrogen can't be had, or they can't just loot an errant comet for its methanol, I've suggested breaking plastics. Waste Not Want Not.

Some planets by contrast are awash in methane. This study, mostly Chinese, proposes an alumina-based catalyst. This is just bauxite sent through the Bayer process (or, hell, pulverised soda cans) and should be cheap. A little pure nickel is added, like 0.8%, which at that concentration can't be expensive either.