Dating young dwarfs

If we can see a brown dwarf, it's probably (1) high-parallax as seen here = close (2) also high-parallax from the star(s) = far (3) which lightsource be dim and at least the dwarf (3) young. This combination allows our non-JWST telescopes to separate its light from its star's. Like this batch.

JWST isn't the survey-'scope. It's the 'scope we point at objects we're already interested in. VHS 1256 b was one of our earlier objects-of-interest, ascertained 2016 on account it's "only" 74 light years out so with high parallax. Now the Webb is in.

The press-release claims 360 AU and 17,000 years, elliptic orbit. I assume they got that year-length from an estimation of the main stars' mass, rounding the browndwarf's mass to zero. Indeed VHS 1256 (sans dwarf) is a binary, so its mutual dance and the two bodies' parallax have been measured for some time, constraining the barycentre mass nicely. It's all much like the Centauri triplet although much much less massive - the dwarf is constrained under 20 Jupiters.

I do not find in the paper how the press-release has ascertained eccentricity - the third body has only been measured since 2016 nu? Maybe it's too near (or too far) to match the ∼8" parallax. In this case, too near, given the paper's 150 AU.

We learn that the dwarf's composition is variable. All the elements in there, it seems, churn about. In fact they might even be combining and disintegrating into new compounds as they rise and fall in the "atmosphere" - which we should probably keep calling a Convective Zone as we call such on our own Sun. Although they don't know yet if this one is still burning deuterium.

As a young browndwarf as orbits beyond the snow-line it is a proxy for the dozens of other objects like it, including the 34 new ones. Which means if we find similar convection in other dwarfs, given allowances for mass, we should be able to guess at their age. Especially if it's a steal so not part of the original.

BACKDATE 9/10 9:20 AM MST - well poop, I had to drop the 6 September poast. Ah well.

Venus is dangerous

Carrington hit Venus today. The STEREO-A caught it like they caught a similar event end of last month. (Wednesday or 31 August? Pick one, media.)

Venus has little protection from this. Hence why I recommend SVL2 and the upper-atmosphere; and not so much satellites. Until we get an orbital-ring with a magnet up there.

Tilted kilt

Per Keith Cooper: 3D Orbital Architecture of a Dwarf Binary System and Its Planetary Companion. The binary is EQ Pegasi alias GJ 896; the planet orbits A. Both are red dwarfs. So the planet orbiting 284.4 days is COLD. You hardly need ask Kepler to know this.

It has helped that the system is near us - 20.3 lightyears - so has been observed for some time, since 1941. Long observations and a big mass mean good constraints. Even without JWST.

More concerning is Newton. How can a planet in the M_j range even... form, here? Without the B star stealing all the planet's gas, before yeeting its core into deep space. It seems that here the planet is best modeled if it tilts at 148°. Incidentally yielding that exact mass: 2.3 M_j.

SYFY 9/15: How it was found. That might be the most-interesting part of the story - radio-astronomy from all over this Earth.

Halo Evolutions

Noonish today I was in Breckenridge (or Breckinridge, spelling varies). There at the Ole Man / Old Man bookstore, which hosts many many used books, I found Halo Evolutions.

Only eight dollars! Plus the eight dollars spent parking there, on account of the Duck Race. And the five gallons of petrol to get up there and back which set me back $15-20. Well at least I got to see some scenery and be out of the heat. ANYWAY.

I have played Combat Evolved but not very far into it, just so far as to hear of the Cole Protocol and to enter the eponymous Halo, also to see some of the Covenant - the setting's Dominion, for Trekkies. So I was looking for lore but avoiding spoilers, best I can.

I got as far as "Headhunters" before I found the Lutheran Column. As usual with such writers I find their views intriguing but will not necessarily subscribe to all their theses. Here I learn that "Headhunters", involving the "Spartan III" as it does, constitutes - technically, to me - a Spoiler. Although: not much of a spoiler. The story would work about as well with earlier models.

The Lutheran (who does his best to avoid spoilers of his own) did warn me sufficiently to beware mention of "Cortana" and "High Charity". That means I don't yet get to read "The Mona Lisa", which is as he points out 120 pages: almost a book in itself and 20% of the content here. So I skipped from "Blunt Instruments" right to "Cole". Which unfortunately had some MAJOR spoilers at the end.

As to overall quality these stories are good, rated by military SF standards. They stack up well against Warhammer 40k literature; more Abnett than Mitchell. Personally I'd rather read a Mitchell book over an Abnett book, but for the shortstory form I can take some grimdark grit. The main theme in such stories as precede the Halo games is that the grit is grimdark: the hoomies are losing. That sets up the stakes of that first game (which I haven't finished).

Standouts are Nylund's "Cole", which uses the scattered-document frame of Bram Stoker and HP Lovecraft; and O'Connor's "The Heart of Midlothian", which Isaac Asimov himself must now be wishing he'd written first. Evenson's "Pariah" gets us started with a look at the Traag Draconian of the Spartan project - also at Mendez and Halsey. I also appreciated Buckell's "Dirt" as a take on how Starship Troopers might end up Firefly to the extent that Minear and Whedon hadn't done that already.

Sabbath v. Sanction

Finished it.

Hudson will quibble Crossan on Luke, where Crossan believes that Luke is a pro-Roman drone who - unlike Paul - didn't care about slavery. Luke, in Hudson's reading, holds that Old Testament thought that the ruling saecular powers should undo debt. Given Crossan's (incontroversible) argument that Luke is pro-Roman, then Luke wants a new Rome, through which the Holy Spirit will inspire the Princeps to... undo debt.

Stephen Shoemaker documented much hope throughout the ages for Hudson's project. This could mean an outside army, but it could also mean the return of a righteous Roman king - or at least a populist king, like Nero. The Macedonian kings of the Byzantine Empire, in fact, performed this act on behalf of their people.

Crossan himself gets to that theme in the last chapter comparing Sabbath Theology to Sanction Theology. Sabbath is the Jubilee restoration of debt, from Genesis One and Holiness Code; Sanction is from Deuteronomy and the Revelation. As do most Baby-Boom liberals, Crossan prefers the former without fully grasping the implications.

Gregory Cochran might be blogging again soon

Doctor Adam Rutherford, who has a PhD you know, is bravely standing up against racism. Lately on Twitter he's been talking the Norwich DNA. This proves that Jews (on average) aren't smart, or at least weren't in the late AD 1200s. Thus he leaves us with Kevin MacDonald and with Ron Unz, who impute Jewish success to tribalism and to gentile gullibility.

Er. Based?

Gregory Cochran, who alongside the late Harpending in The 10000 Year Explosion had touted the mid-2000s-era Ashkenazi genetics, has taken this as a challenge. He's looked into the genetics of the Norwich victims. He finds that the four mutations in question don't fall in the brain. So conceding the AD 1200s to Rutherford (and to MacDonald).

I'll replyguy that we are here talking direct genetics. A gene retarding puberty to (say) 14 years should force a scholarly career even upon an IQ-100. If only on account the kid can't work the farm and/or get married off.

Also (Cochran does note this much) nobody's looked for the non-deleterious mutations as affect intelligence.

Crossan's take on the Revelation

I didn't much like Jonathan Kirsch's book on John's apocalypse - or "prophecy" as John preferred you called it. In part it's because Kirsch struck me as a bit of a jerk. Now here's John Dominic Crossan to opine upon what January Six means.

As has been said before (paraphrasing): either one approaches the Revelation a madman or one leaves it so. For my part three years and a half seems a fitting waiting-period between revisits.

Crossan argues that John must be read in the context of Nero-As-Elvis. Nero was stabbed, like the Lamb was crucified. John casts the Lamb as real where Nero was fake, alive where Nero is long dead.

Like Kirsch, Crossan sees John's book as a late-first-century Turner Diaries for para-Christian local bigots. There was no persecution, says Crossan. This was only - in John's mind - paranoia, and a lust for bloody REVENGEANCE!. Crossan is probably... right, for Domitian and Nerva. His sources are Ignatius and Pliny, who between them sketch a Christian community whom Roman governors tolerate where they toe the line.

I am less certain of Crossan about Nero. The Nero-fanclub out East can be assumed pagan and anti-Jewish (and anti-Christian). Even if John be a paranoiac of the mid AD nineties his paranoia may be post-traumatic of the sixties.

As far as other takeaways, John and the Neronians agree on hoping the Parthians will swoop in to wreck the illegitimate Flavian Imperium. They differed inasmuch as the Neronians hoped for the reinstatement of Nero. John just wanted blood; for him, only Christ is legitimate. This may explain how come the Revelation (UPDATE 3/19/23 outside the Nile) never quite got its Greek audience, much less a Syriac one. Greeks and Syrians were in the way, like to be the battlefield.

It was, counterintuitively, we the Latins who kept this book alive. (Also the Copts.) Perhaps a reaction to an increasingly Oriental Empire which culminated in Arian-then-Miaphysite Constantinople. A Nestorian Shah will save us! Prester John, anyone?

An additional point is John's take on diet; he refuses meat sacrificed to idols. When you couple that with his attacks on "Jews who are not", this means he's kosher. Here John reads like the Pseudo Clementines. And like Athanasius of Balad, as Holger Zellentin pointed out. Syriac Christendom was never much for Revelation but I am now wondering if Palaestinian Christendom may have been more receptive. More Jews, further from the Mesopotamian battlefields... closer to the Coptic and Latin north-Africa. Closer to the Hijaz too whilst we're on this beat.

Also here: John's narrative of the Lamb's birth, to the woman crowned with the twelve stars, reads like the Leto myth. There was a whole temple to Leto at the time, in Damascus. Mary-as-Leto proved popular in Syro-Palaestina, where will stand the Kathisma Church. This contradicts Luke's infancy-narrative as is well known - here, Stephen Shoemaker 2003.

Overall Crossan is set to compare John with Luke-Acts (I'm not there yet). So maybe this is all an afterclap between James and Paul, which Luke will (famously) paper over. John's "Nicolas" and "Jezebel" will be in the Paul-to-Luke faction.