Before al-Kindi, Porphyry

TheTorah [h/t Davila] has an excellent summary of the Ezra legend in Late Antique Judaism. By tradition, the Jews on return from Babylon didn't have proper and/or legible Torah. Ezra either restored this by Divine Inspiration, or translated it to Aramaic by same. There exist some parallels with the Septuagint legend over in Egypt.

Porphyry's work against the Christians, we are informed, grabbed hold of this legend to prove that Moses had not composed Torah. More: that under the Monarchy was no Torah. These days this standpoint is considered extreme; for instance we may have Deuteronomy from Josiah, and the four Reigns books plus Judges always looked ancient.

But Porphyry had his lore from legitimate Judaeo-Christian tradition. I am reminded of nothing so much as the earliest Christian hits against the jam' al-Qurâni. Here too, AbdalMasih Kindi and even Emperor Leo were able to confront the "furqân" by means of Islamic tradition, at least as it existed under the last Umayyads.

Gliese 9827 d, and e

Gliese 9827 at about 30 parsecs had its planetary system found in 2017ish, in that K2 extension of the then-ailing Kepler. It is K6V, cooler and lower-mass than our Sun. The outer one is "d".

Their periods are 1.2, 3.6, 6.20186; so, yeah, the inner b:c are nigh a 3:1 resonance. c:d is, what, 31:18? 16:9? - maybe even 3:2. The authors did not want to call it all a resonance. Still: the star is over five Gy old, so cannot be exerting all that much saecular drift anymore. (The authors use an older estimate, to approximate six Gy; for our purpose, that's unimportant.) Laplacians seem to form early, like HD 110067. If GJ 9827 isn't a 9:3:2 Laplacian how else could it survive? - "read on", I suppose.

The system is close to us and, of course, a transit. The outermost GJ 9827 d is a 3.42 M_⊕ superVenus, or subNeptune. It might still have an atmosphere, so was marked as a candidate for spectrography. Now Pierre-Alexis Roy and Björn Benneke (et-al.) reveal: there's hydrogen on it.

Now: the constraints aren't great after only eleven passes (besides assuming tidal-lock). No reflected infrared has been measured, at all. The temperature estimate assumes black planet, which is laughable - 680 ±25 K, for all we care. The paper instead finds transit depth variability. Eleven of d's years is, what, seventy Earth days; enough to observe a ∼30 day fluctuation in the starlight. This may reflect another planet but they're not willing to say that yet. They ponder, rather, starspots. The fact of a 1.2 day "b" planet, to my view, has to be doing stuff to this star's innards. A starspot map would help.

In advance of fine-tuning d's atmosphere even temperature, two theories are possible, hydrogen or water. After 5-6 Gy no Venus-zone planetary mass should have held its primordial hydrogen. It might have tacked into this tight orbit recently but, why now? Otherwise: water vapour, above whatever clouds it has. Benneke tells the media of both scenarios, but his coauthors in the paper agree upon free hydrogen as unlikely.

Although at that mass it could keep what volatile gases it formed with: the water is hard to square with a rock-layer formation. So either way, they think, this thing formed further out - 2 AU should probably do it, for ices in this system - and tacked in. Also might explain its nonLaplacian orbit.

Tacking-in suggests that d passed its orbital momentum to something else. I suspect the system sports at least one larger planet out there, but not 30 days: instead sailing further than 2 AU from the inner three.

The Soros boost to red-state economies

Say you have a state where criminals go to jail whether or not its municipalities like it. Posit another state too weak to overrule a Soros-funded district-attorney. And then posit that there's no Federal bureau investigating cross-state criminal movements.

Effectively, the Soros family has allowed DeSantis and allies to impose a tax upon New York City and DC. You can carjack all day long in DC, even do some murderin'; and then go to Florida to spend yer gainz. Florida cops might nab you and extradite you but - why bother, it's a lot of paperwork and it's not like DC will do anything. Just keep your nose clean in Florida, and enjoy your vay-cay, because Floridians won't let you do crimes down there.

Do you see this ending well? Because I don't.

A good Sierra fangame!

A pleasant surprise here: I downloaded Son Of Xenon last Sunday. I didn't have a car so I needed to do something... anyway. This Saturday afternoon, snowed in here, I finished this game.

The main critique I have involves the pixel-hunting "puzzles", especially toward the end. Also we must consider continuity. But if we get past all that, this was a fair game on an approximate level of difficulty and humour as the first game, to which SQ:SoX serves as prequel. And canon SQ had the exact problems I've noted here, including continuity as the games progress.

All this makes SQ:SoX better than several 1990s-era published Sierra outings, frankly. SQ6, KQ5, KQ7-8... lookin' at you.

The game is on GameJolt. I do not know much about them, be warned. Although the download was safe as far as I know; they only make you log in, if you want to make a comment / join the community (I wanted the former not the latter).

I am pondering the SQ3 fan remake next. Admittedly fan remakes' record is slightly chequered. "Tierra" (not called that anymore) did well with KQ1, yes. I do not approve the KQ2 remake. Also the SQ3 exe is on Dropbox; I don't know we want an account with them.

Climate, and classical disease

Kyle Harper got famous by The Fate of Rome, his disease-theory of that decline. This had attracted some critiques but his theory has been buttressed, by others. Kyle is back (, back again) and he's letting us read him for free. His new study is about dinoflagellates in Italy's southern seas, like the gulf of Taras. Stopping just short of Constans II and all that.

It returns to my attention as I am reminded, from last March, how warming also helped the Epigravettian, before all this. Global warming is pro-European.

This paper claims "Cyprian's Plague" as being well-documented. It was indeed documented... but only by the Christian saint Cyprian; hence the name, since actually this plague is a bit controversial, on account hardly anyone else noticed of whom Harper knew. Cyprian worked during AD 251-266. This span overlaps the hapless emperors Valerian and Gallienus. Rome almost died then; after Valerian's capture, co-ruler Gallienus inherited sole rule of not-much. He was I think murdered and his successors, all short-lived, had to reconquer the East from an Arab dynasty, to reannex the West from a Roman upstart, and to kick various northern barbarians back out. Anyway as a result of this political clusterfun, no Romans were much paying attention to what their own (increased) poor were dying of, except for the saints running hospice.

One sidecomment is that although filoviri and (more so) bacilli swarm in moist cool conditions; southern Italy was drier. No swamps or standing-pools, no mosquitoes - no malaria (among other blood ailments). So, bright side, if you had anything to eat down there, that was one slate of disease you didn't get anymore.

The Gravettian nations

First came the Aurignacians in Europe, until the 31s-kBC. From then to 24kBC is a new culture, which we call "Gravettian"; followed by "Magdalenian". We're about to discuss what that means.

On Cinco de Mayo 2022 someone posted a long thread in Twitter about the western Frost Age. For over a year we could have this on ThreadReaderApp. Since then, Twitter has imposed one of its hare-ier-brained rules such that ThreadReaderApp no longer works on deleted "X" content, even good content from a now-disgraced [by whom?] author. Yeah by "X" I'm blaming Elon, the putz.

Another paper from last March is (still) blessedly online and inshallah shall so remain. Relevant here: the Gravettians in the west and southwest were Aurignacian-descendates. The Aurignacian demos was never replaced in the west; we just had gaps in our knowledge of the region. (Maybe the Twitter guy had figured his old posts as superceded.) They just became Gravettian by culture.

Meanwhile we now got new content, for 32kBC-22kBC - so, I guess, including the last bimillennial Gravetti holdouts in the east. The Gravettians of any race were not total nomads. (Few tribes are.) They settled their patches of land to make their own jewelry. Seashells of course, they're nonmetallic and nonceramic. Maybe some amber.

Dutiful reminder that pots aren't people, pots are language. In these lands before pots: jewelry is language. But languages do resist gene flow.

That March 2023 paper will, however, see demic turnover later - 12700 BC, the Bølling–Allerød warming before the Dryas. This gave good health to the western Epigravettian, and by now I assume to their dogs also; but less so to central Europe. The Epigravettian then, finally, replaced the Magdalenes bodily. (Pity the eastern-Magdalenes, those nonadaptables...) Thus, Epigravettian westerners formed the WHG whom, much later 6000s BC, various Baltic and East-European peoples [EHG] will meet, for trade.

Kharaf

To hat-tip Reynolds, from the elderly-dominated forum he administers: questions are raised if the Classical era knew dementia. The Greeksnromans were aware of Losing The Fastball (last weekend, I admit, I was pondering this for myself). But Oldtimer's Disease... they did not really mention. Mental decline of that severity was not worth the great doctors' efforts.

All this, despite infamous levels of heavy-metals in the water and in cinnabar-cosmetics. Which the Romanzngreks also knew was/were Bad For You.

It may be that, for those Romans and Chinese who did reach old-age (and many did; "life-expectancy" is a statistical fluke of childhood mortality): madness struck before memory.

As usual, this research is Classical, for Greeks and Romans. That's where our highschoolers learn the languages. It all got me thinking about the Semitic world, which isn't as widely taught. Where, for a start, is Syriac? Well... here, I don't really know. But the Arab-speakers in the mediaeval period did find kharaf among the Islamicate societies.

Before the 'Abbasi dawla, one might look to the Quran and, yes, it's there: in sura 16. To me, this looks like a tack-on, to general Qâric musings about the aging-process and the need to be kind to one's elders. I suspect sura 16 as a Marwânid-era forgery. But why did the Arabs choose the end of the first Islamic century, to make a nod in that direction?

If sura 16 didn't have this lore from the Arabs, then - yeah - it must have had it from the Syrians. Are we missing some Masarjawayh? maybe Egyptian pandects?

RHEUMATISM 2/2: A reminder that just because a culture doesn't mention a condition, doesn't mean they didn't grow up to suffer from it. Here: Egypt (wherein Ahrun would do those Pandects). It may be that geriatrics were simply not of interest; these were cultures which concentrated on the good health of 15-45 year olds, as being (1) able to spawn children and (2) able to do manual work including, for men, war.