Scientody versus academia

Here - h/t hbdchick - is a powerpoint of the incentives involved in "science" and professional academia.

For my part I agree with the dissidents that "science" has been so polluted - mostly by academia - that a new word for "practice of the Popperian method" (or even Bayes') is required. "Scientody" it is.

I like to think I am a "good scientist" but I do have some academic tendencies. That's why I self-publish for the most part.

Be skeptical of your results v. "Sell" your results - I do sell my results. And then I sometimes have to go back on them, which is why Throne of Glass was such a moving target 2015-16: the closest it's got to a review was Dr Fred Donner 2017, in a footnote, complaining about it changing so much up to then. On the other hand: nobody else, not even Donner, gave me that feedback that its last chapter was crap and had to be shorn of, what, nine pages. tl;dr: I do practice self-skepticism, even if it's belated.

Interpret conclusions carefully v. Highlight/exaggerate importance - My problem is the Interesting If True meme. I think I give my own work all the respect its findings ask for. The issue is, what if I got it wrong? I've been insufficiently careful in the past. No surprise to my readers.

Publish negative results v. Publish "strategically" - This comes with a comic on a large stack of The Daily Journal of Negative Results next to small stacks of Nature and Science. I still don't know what it means unless we're saying, "academics don't like to debunk a bunk article". I'm clearly on the pro-scientody side here.

Ignore social prestige v. Use impact factors to make writing decisions - Yeah, I suppose my focus on the early Umayyad-era literature has been more controversial than if I had kept myself to the later years and the 'Abbasids.

Challenge authority v. Cite authority. Make friends - I stink at making friends anyway. I'm interested only in authorities who get it right. Or in those (I'll even name one: Ruqayya Khan) who get it most amusingly wrong.

Replicate. Replicate. v. Replicate... if you must - In the Islamic work, I'm always going back on the document cross-connections. The way "replicate" works here is: if I think 28 < 7, I'm off to see if, say, 27 < 26, 27 < 25; and then 25-26 < 7. They all have to line up. If they do: replication has happened.

As scientody, I'd say my work on Islam is classed as "headstrong". Which is why I rarely dare to publish on an outside platform.

Another review of a poor paint-job

Laurent Guyénot has a long post over at Unz - home of overly long posts - to discuss Holocaust revisionism. I'm restricting myself here to extracting what, there, is said about the German government's part in events relating to 1930s German Jewry. Consider it another review.

Spoiler: the Austrian painter doesn't come off well.

First - for background - Germany perceived three sorts of Jew: the Diaspora Jew abroad, mainly eastern (like me); the German shopkeeper at home; and the Zionist, with his heart in Jerusalem. Hitler was anti-Zionist from the start, from Mein Kampf. That book didn't approve any other sort of Jew, either. When the German elites saw fit to elevate this man to Chancellor, on 24 March 1933 Judea Declared War On Germany.

Hitler's response was to proclaim to the world that he was holding Germany's Jewish population hostage : Jewry must recognize that a Jewish war against Germany will lead to sharp measures against Jewry in Germany. Bad things happen in the passive voice, as Loewen would say. And so by the end of the month Hitler proclaimed a boycott against Jewish businesses.

This was of a piece with that infamous "annihilation" speech in 1939. Again, Hitler made a "prophecy" in the passive and third-person style; if there was a world war, the Jews of Europe would face Vernichtung. But who'd have the authority to do it? There was only one power on the planet whose Führer had made a platform out of Judenhass.

Guyénot and others here raise other facts, admittedly inconvenient to the "Holocaust" topos. For instance: that Hitler and the Zionists had at first made an alliance of convenience, for the "racial hygiene" of both German and Semite alike. Guyénot is probably even right. But Hitler's heart - as noted - was never in Zionism. When the German imperial interest pointed to an alliance with the Arabs, Hitler gladly took the Mufti's side over the nascent Israelis'. I submit that Hitler did not need much prompting. A radical thought in these circles, I know . . .

Said circles can dress it all up as they will. Guyénot can complain about the term "Holocaust" for the Jews' share in the Bloodlands. Their allied "Groypers" can snark about the body-count, and about the means by which the Vernichtung took place. But they keep letting slip the base facts.

The facts are: that Hitler kept promising to punish the Jews, his men punished the Jews, and Europe in 1945 exited the war with MANY fewer admitted Jews than when she entered it in 1939.

Malaria jumps ship

Last October (h/t CBD @ace), was published a history of malaria's jump to African humankind. This happened 50kBC. It jumped from the gorilla and not from the Asian apes, which trend more orange.

By that time, human huntergatherers were already roaming Eurasia and even, I think, Australia.

The main genetic resistance to malaria was the Sickle Cell. This gene, Rosie McCall reported last year, first appeared 259 generations ago - estimated, 5300 BC - in the Moist Sahara. It had got to the Scorpion Kingdoms by the time they could first do pictograph, 3200 BC.

McCall thinks the gene traveled to India with the major trade-routes. She dates that as late as the "Bantu migrations". At a guess, so did malarial mosquitoes, perhaps in the rain-buckets carried on board. Sasanian era?

BACKDATING 11/17

Hercules

Hēraklewês was the great hero of the Dorians as they entered the Peloponnese.

We can roughly trace the path Heraclewes made into Latin. In Linear B, we have -ke-le-we (and not -wa) ending several names: e-te-wo-ke-le-we (most famously), ni-ko-ke-le-we, ke-ro-ke-le-we, a-ri-si-to-ke-le-we. Hēra was already a goddess but we have yet no Hēra-klewês in Linear B.

Hera was, of course, no Italian diety. The cult of Heraklewes entered southern Italy by way of Tarentum, which associated itself with Sparta; in their Doric dialect the "digamma" w fell out, leaving a long "e" at the end. HGG Payne, "A Bronze Herakles in the Benaki Museum at Athens", The Journal of Hellenic Studies 54 (1934), 163f; 170 verifies that even in (authentic) Doric we never see "Heraklas"; although, certain Dorian patriots occasionally hypercorrected that name.

Further up the peninsula the Etruscan language accented the first syllable and contracted the vowels on the rest. Hera-cles, there, became HER-cle (more rarely "Hercla"). It happens "l" is a voiced liquid consonant, almost a vowel. So when the Latins came along to stick that masculine -s back onto those nouns: "Hercules", it was.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus, by then likewise at least a pro-Doric city, associated him with Eudoxos' Kneeling constellation adjacent to Alpha Lyrae, Arabic Vega (Eudoxos as versified Aratos ll. 63-70). The Odyssey, composed by Ionians, meanwhile was pleased to lock Hēraklewês in Hell.

But the celestial letter H was already in the man's name, in all the alphabets. And the cult of "Hercules" proved too popular outside the Greek cities; the Romans and very probably the Etruscans considered the hero a demigod. Eventually Ptolemy the astronomer canonised this name for the constellation, where it remains to our days; and our Odyssey was altered to mute Heracles' presence. Here we are directed to Friedrich Solmsen, "The Sacrifice of Agamemnon's Daughter in Hesiod's' Ehoeae", The American Journal of Philology 102.4 (1981), 353-8; 355.

BACKDATING 11/17 Noon MST. Raised from a long aside in September's "Proserpina" post, inserted here in a gap in this week's output to lead up to the celestial "H" post I'm planning. VECTOR 11/3/23: Just found out that the solar apex is in here.

'Tis the season

What would it be like to live on – rather, over – Venus? One notion to start, is how the diurnal and annual cycles would work.

Mars is easy because it’s got a 24:40 hour “sol”; it also has clearly-defined seasons. Venus cloud citizens will likely force its day to be as much like ours as possible – because of the human body’s rhythms. The cities will be subject to the wind, which make one circuit of this planet over four of our days. If drifting with that wind, so to limit the gusts on people working outside, each city will want to force one artificial “day” and one artificial “night” over the four days.

Over the poles and in whatever 30-mile mountains, the inhabitants will be seeing eternal twilight and eternal darkness, respectively. Those can work with artificial day and night, like in space.

The yearly cycle on Venus doesn’t matter for the seasons. There’s another cycle that matters more, especially at first: the Synodic Year, that road shared with Earth. Other routes exist; but all the mainline planetary routes will sync up on the same schedule, and Venus-Earth matters most to Venus. Of the synodic transfers the Hollister Cycler might be how Venus gets passengers. But most important, Hohmann Transfer is how the planets get regular interplanetary trade.

Earth>Mars is on a 25 calendar month synodic cycle. By Hohmann it takes 9 months to get places; overall here's their schedule.

For Earth-to/from-Venus these launch windows occur about every nineteen calendar months (plus maybe five days). Absent any other seasonal markers, Hohmann takeoff from Earth orbit is celebrated on Venus: as I see it, as a "Carnivale" over the next four weeks, before the corresponding Venus caravan takes off back to Earth. OFFSET 11/5/2020: Mostly heavy and fragile objects, with a skeleton crew. Supplies and passengers blast off by shuttle later, say two weeks, meeting the caravan maybe a couple days in microG. AND 11/29: Much depends on which synod of the five in the [eight Earth year] meton; reset [1/9/2021] every circa 245 years. MARS 1/1/2021: In some centuries - like the next one! - there's a Martian angle.

There is, lower-key, also a takeoff from twelve degrees behind the STL5 focus. This station runs a slow orbit in its halo, to match the calendar mooted here. Its main day is 146 days before Venus departure - because some of these travelers are to join Venus', finally to come to Earth. They might even include Terrans from six years ago.

Then follows Conjunction, eight weeks after Hohmann exits Venus. This kicks off an Advent season, of another eight weeks. The next Earth-origin arrival at Venus-orbit after that, is Christmas. Venus' gravity well is wide enough that some will be trickling in a few days before and after the central day itself.

Earth on occasion may send a "Pioneer 12" earlier, to arrive around the same time as the corresponding "P13" meaning, vanilla Hohmann. Those aren't for main freight; they're for orbits.

There are also ranges of dates to get into Venus' long kidneybean Libration orbits. These foci are a sixth of a circle fore and aft so, as part of a synod, 97.3 days. Key here is the Last Chance day, to get out of Venus' gravity-well into its leading L4 (and Earth). Because after that, Earthlings are truly stuck: it's another 389 days before Venus' trailing L5 gets within a Hohmann of Earth. For the spacers, L4->L5 and then L5->L4 do open up in between; so their long wait is "only" a third of the synodic, 195 days.

[METON 11/28/2020] Each synod is not created equal. Earth's orbit is elliptical. Also (Mercury aside) Earth is the planet tilted most against the Sun's equator; Venus the least, at 3.39° between them. Planet-pair synods get grouped by their metonic cycle. For Venus-Earth, it's five. That is the famed Octaeteris on Earth, which - if Venereans cared - would be treiscaedecaeteris over there. This matches the cycle of Hohmann: where materiel not parked first-run, repeats.

DIVISION 1/3/2021: Because each synod per meton is so different, I expect Venereans will be back to thinking like Imperials. Remember £sd? Or stones-and-pounds-and-ounces? Gallons-pints-cups? The natural Venerean long-count, taking the place of decade / year / season (1/10/4), will be meton/synod/quarter: 1/5/4. Shorter "decade"; longer "year" and "season". Above, Venus will observe the Transit Cycle every 243 Earth sidereal years, more Julian than Gregory. That's 30 metons plus a synod, usually two - I expect intercalation will be needed, above that. Below I don't know if they cut the season into three pseudomonths or into four.

BACKDATING 11/15/2019

UPDATE 12/8 - the Maya will love this place.

UPDATE 12/9 - I'm ruling out the Aldrin Cycler for this planet. Back to 1969-70, we go; back to Hollister.

Venus, capital of the Solar System

Let’s talk about life on Venus.

There are some pretty-good models in speculative fiction about how life on other planets might work. Mars is best-modeled; Robert Zubrin’s How To Live On Mars is pretty much the foundation for anyone who’d write a story on the Red Planet. The Expanse, meanwhile, has looked at mining-colonies especially in Ceres. Venus has - historically - had the science-fictional disadvantage that nobody knew what was under the clouds until my father's generation. Once Venus was discovered to be a high-pressure hellscape, serious authors (i.e., not Pohl) abandoned that planet until, I think, the late 1990s when was mooted that its cities could float.

Books on travel among our planets have also lagged concerning Venus. The 2007 Traveler’s Guide to the Solar System guide dealt, again, with the planets’ surface, which for Venus nobody sane will be walking on (at least not for long). In 2017 we got a more-reasoned Vacation Guide to the Solar System which did discuss the cloud cities.

As for, why come here: Venus is the most-centrally located Earthlike planet. It is easy, relative to other planets, to send materiel here, or past here. It will host orbital platforms suitable as a hub for visits to the rest of the System. Geoffrey "Mars Crossing" Landis in 2003 argued Venus' case for shifting asteroid ore. (I don't know if Landis' PDF has been lost, but "PAT" made a copy and posted that at The Space Monitor in 2007 - before PAT, too, quit blogging.) In 2015 NASA pointed out that Venus serves as a step toward Mars as well. In terms of central location a stone Rama station at SV-Hilda spinning for high-G is more ideal; even here, we'd supply it from Venus.

If you worry about a place to store water, I will personally host you at the L2 Station to assuage those worries.

One advantage of Venus herself here, is that her own cloudbank is a planetwide refinery for all the ores basic to technological man. And once Venus' mines are running, and have done supplying their own cities and orbitals: Venus can send some Hohmann traffic back to Earth. Also, Venus' nightside coma, blowing away from the Sun, is a free resource for moving craft away from Venus, or decelerating incoming traffic (excepting the fry-by returnees, from sunward).

Venus should be the capital of the System, with Earth as its (initial) breadbasket and holiday destination. [SPECIFICATION 12/4: the Venus orbit holds that capitol.] I have made a directory of Venus' top spots for colonisation.

BACKDATING 11/15

RETHINKING 12/14 9:35 AM MST - relocated the farm floaters to 50s° ecliptic north and south.

Two Jeromes

Istarelle (as of AD 1315) knows two men named after Saint Jerome: a Jérôme and a Hiérome. Clark Ashton Smith liked to do this in his Vyônes stories; elsewhere I've seen a Guillaume and a Villom juxtaposed. There we could credit dialect: Guillaume is post-Occitan and Villom, more Norman.

The two Jeromes imply another dialect, here between Vyônes and "the Lierres" - whatever the latter is. I am told that the "J" appears with the printing-press. But the "I" before the "J", without the "H", is older. I expect the "J'ai" contraction assumes the "J" as the modern French /ʒ/. Before that, as you can see in Old Occitan, and for that matter in Latin, people would just leave off the pronoun. But I am also told that the "J" consonant is Early Old French. Maybe it is not dialect.

Maybe it is class distinction... but it is strange that the hedge-knight Hiérome has the more classical name, over our man from the cathedral-city.