When the seas boiled

The Earth's magnetic history last month was pulled back to 3.7Gya - like, 760My after 4.46 Gy; before even the cratons. This field removed xenon from our atmosphere. Now Prof. Tarduno at Rochester have the Vendian magnetism, which coincides with the Ediacara menagerie.

The Vendian started 635Mya. For 26My in this span the field was weaker than it has ever been.

This would have held whatever xenon was left (most was already gone by 2.5Gy) but stripped away hydrogen - just like over Venus. There would have been an oxygen pulse, so strong this injected into the (evaporating) oceans.

It follows that landmass was less before the Vendian, than after. Which I think might actually check out. Although "land" in those days probably also meant "snow".

Luckily the field spun up again, saving us from Venus' fate. Tarduno elsewhere says this started 565Mya. Cambrian won't start until 541Mya.

Anyone seeking to check further on Tarduno's thesis should ponder... deuterium. Did we have a lower deuterium-ratio, before the Vendian than afterward? Compare hydrates laid down during "Cryogenian", versus now...?

I still don't know why the dynamo abruptly cranked into a standstill and why it started again; nor, why then. I'm not seeing any abrupt Velikovskyian tacks in other planets. Unless... it's Theia. Chunks interfering?

The logothete, reworked

Two years ago Juan Signes Codoñer and Michael Featherstone published ten episodes in "Pseudo-Symeon", now on academia.edu. This concerns manuscript Paris BnF greek 1712. The essay argues that this reworks the end of a "Logothete Chronicle"; with aims to create a "new" chronicle, from the beginning of the Cosmos, and Adam.

So far, so much like the AD-846's rework of Syriac chronicle AD-819. Except that AD-846 was, I think, finished; #1712 looks like "Pseudo-Symeon" wasn't. There it's more like the Zuqnîn.

Also, #1712 is synoptic with Theophilus Continuatus, but here - the authors argue - neither used the other. They both took, independently, anecdotes from a (thriving) Palace.

So: what did #1712 use, before the Macedonian period - which it summarises, to add more lore? I, uh... don't know directly. Few of us know. Not only wasn't #1712 finished at the time, but it's not edited now. Far as I know, it's only used as a witness to the state of the texts before it. I'm reliant on Wiki.

As to these precurrent texts, besides the Logothete: Theophanes, George Hamartolos ["sinner"; i.e. the monk], John Malalas and John of Antioch. Students of Late Antiquity will observe we already own all the above excepting maybe John Antiochene. So if anyone ever does bother publishing this (I suspect AI will be doing this job) it won't help Dark-Age bros like myself.

It may however tell us something about the Macedonians' presentation of antiquity. The paper argues for Nicephorus II Phocas, who could pretend to be the new Justinian.

Jewish blasphemy-code as Federal law

Legislation is making its way through Capitol Hill, to bestow that Ring of Power we call "the 1964 Civil Rights Act" unto the rabbis.

Andrew Torba holds that this would render illegal much Christian scripture; Eugene Volokh agrees. David Bernstein would suggest the controversy is overblown. He's not here to take your Bibles away ("we're not going to take your guns away, we're just...").

The Baghistan's stance toward Islam, meanwhile, is that the Quran is malformed and that Muslims need to reconsider certain suwar, particularly the ninth. So it is with the Jewish position toward Christianity: Christians have had almost two thousand years to reconsider verses like 1 Thessalonians 2:15, and perhaps entire Gospels like Luke's. The hour, one might say, is close to hand.

Richard Hanania would prefer we just throw the whole Civil Rights Act into a volcano. That might be easier. Or it might not.

The leper's wall

The wall in the (real) Old City of Jerusalem, which is south of the mediaeval square, is radiocarbon-dated "First-Temple". It has been assumed from Hezeqiah. Hezeqiah was Jerusalem's most celebrated builder of the post-Rehoboam Kingdom; Hezeqiah was he who drilled the cistern and repelled Sennacherib (with Nubian help). Problem: radiocarbon is a highly blunt instrument.

The dendrochronology is in - it was rebuilt after Amos' quake. So Hezeqiah's predecessor(s) had built it already. The Daily Mail names the rebuilder: Uzziah. Let's look into Uzziah's reign and legacy.

The paraleipomenic Chronicles paint Uzziah as a near-ideal... until he crossed the Sanctum in the Temple. The Chronicler makes much of Uzziah's (supposed) military might. Gluska and Lipshits read the Chronicler as painting Uzziah in Nehemiah's image. (The Book of Nehemiah is not directly in what we found at Qumran, but the Temple Scroll cites it and its version of Ezra is ours.)

"Azariah", as Uzziah is also called, was anointed king as a sixteen-year-old subservient to mighty Jeroboam II to the north. On Jeroboam's death, Uzziah was able to branch out more on his own, building - per Reigns, not just Chronicles - the Red Sea port Eilat. He did at least maintain good economic ties with the north. Around 750 BC Uzziah had to rule through his son Jotham; 4 Reigns 15:35 names Jotham as building the "higher gate" of the Temple (bet-YHWH).

Notable is that Reigns also notes "Azariah" (Uzziah) as entering the Temple, contracting leprosy in the process. Graham Hancock famously saw this event as a witness to the Ark.

I suspect that Uzziah didn't build much monumental nor protective in Jerusalem as long as Jeroboam II was issuing policy. Uzziah could, however, rebuild; and Uzziah and Jotham together could have collaborated on projects. One project was to unite the Temple with the Throne; I suspect Uzziah's queen Jerusha bint Zadok was in fact a Zadokite. Clearly that didn't work, but the Temple did get some improvements as byproduct.

VEL13:10:8 isn't a bus station

For giggles I ran the maths on station VEL13:10:8, on cyclers it might run from Venus, to Earth, and to Mars.

Laplacians didn't bother with cyclers in the Jovian planets, and the same seems to hold here. Venus to this station (approximating nine Venus years to two synods, but I suppose I could try 13-to-1) incurred a nasty offset of 13.49° on return; and there just weren't cyclers from the station to Earth (five orbits to one synod). Permacyclers tend to assume higher-order resonances between planets, like Earth:Mars; even Venus:Earth was a bit of a stretch.

The station kind of is a cycler, being the Venus-Earth Hohmann without the "transfer" part. Everything here is one-way; if someone is stuck here, s/he's there until the next Hohmann window out.

So: how's the cycling from the station to Mars?

I got 7 interior orbits to 4 synods. 2.04° internal offset is twice Earth-Mars-Earth's but arguably not so bad with a shorter orbital circle. Problem here was the angle: the Aldrin alone has insane angles to both planets and is a fryby in order to get to Mars in the first place. Four synods does offer wiggle-room for permacycles but it turned out, not enough.

Neptune's tongue

An old theory from 1972 is that those -ssa suffixes in Greek are non-IndoEuropean; but "preGreek" like Basque is preCastilian. Alternatively they could be from the Luwian adjectival suffix. In the late 2000s, one Robert Beekes revived 1972 in attempts to debooonk the Luwianism. In 2010 Robert Beekes with Lucien van Beek got published an Etymological Dictionary of Greek through Brill, no less. This hypothesis has, via a map, trickled over to the Turtle: in keeping with perturbant planet Neptune, famous thalassa came from *talakya. So: let's read modern reactions to the Beekses.

Stella Merlin has done a dive into the Dictionary and finds several examples of words as can be explained by means other than loans from a single preGreek substrate. Some might be IndoEuropean, like Greek, but variously distorted by other IndoEuropean languages (like Phrygian) or close-enough (Lydian or Luwian).

I don't know that Brill made the right call in publishing so strident an argument as the Beekses'. Merlin seems right.

The poisonous Hettangian

As we work our way back through extinction-cycles, before Chicxulub wasn't P/T - but T/J. P/T gets the press; to solve that mystery, we should get better data on later events (so better-preserved). Tonight let's look at the Triassic's closing bracket.

Triassic's last good epoch is called "Rhaetian". The post T/J epoch is called "Hettangian"; the Jurassic-proper gets going in the next epoch the "Sinemurian".

Bas van de Schootbrugge at Utrecht University is pointing to mercury (Hg) in Hettangian plants (Copenhagen, Aarhus, and Tianjin are also represented; but ScienceDaily pointed me to Utrecht). Northern Germany was then a coastal lagoon. It was full of... ferns, sucking up the carbon-dioxide of which the Hettangian had much. We read that ferns are a colonising plant, like conifers; they take root first in disturbed and mildly toxic soil. I suppose they always were; when vascular plants first took to the land, the soil there wasn't much better than it was under the Proterozoic (yaaayyy lichens).

First up, the T/J Hettangian rocked this planet back to the Proterozoic - again. Even the conifers weren't doing well. Of especial interest to the researchers is that the ferns were mutated. Something was trying to kill them too and it certainly wasn't CO₂. That something was the Mad Hatter.

The paper pins the toxic Hettangian to a ~1.2My span, in which they fit four pulses of quicksilver enrichment with a fifth after that (+1.62My?). The pulses match the 405ky eccentricity-cycle (thereby itself verified for the late Triassic). The paper notes that the isotopes of new mercury taper out such that they waver over counting the expected fifth pulse in the Hettangian (they'd extend the bad times to 2My!). It concludes that these pulses, therefore, are simply pulses of atmospheric intake, not additional spewings of poison.

The initial dose must have injected a megayear's supply of horror into Triassic air. It is certainly volcanic.

So yeah: let's not use mercury in low-orbit plz.