Manôt, queen of han

Christina Buttons has been many things over her life, as her not-a-manifesto today lays out in detail. Overall the theme is that mental illness exists, but not as a chemical imbalance. My late father was big on the chemical-imbalance theory... probably because his mother, during my infancy, contracted Alzheimer's which absolutely is a physical brain-tissue problem.

Abby-Normal's brain, like Buttons' Asperger brain, will instead induce bad decisions. Their consequences will give to Abby a sad. Fatalism - the belief that you don't have agency - encourages bad decisions over good ("I couldn't help it!"). Koreans call that feeling, han. Fortuna is a demoness; Sura 53, in our canon, is correct to ban her cult. (The CounterJihad^TM can quibble over the move to make G-d "al-Mané" instead.)

I do need to point out, with David Cole\Stein, that the Trump side of the American Right... ain't much better. Let's look at Miranda Devine yesterday: The J6 riot was not an insurrection but a protest that escalated into an out-of-control riot because then-Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund was denied intelligence about potential threats that day.

Devine here concedes that many involved in "J6" were violent. They weren't all FEDS!. Those who weren't FEDS!, should have owned the internal peace not to engage in riot. Devine is denying that they had that agency. Call it, the han-defence.

Trump won anyway. I suppose a nonfatalistic citizenry wouldn't even ask for politicians to save them. And to be fair Buttons herself used to trust in politicians, from the other side.

Late Jewish Literary Aramaic

Just as Hebrew has dialects - Classical Hebrew in 1-4 Reigns, a Temple dialect around Nehemiah and Chronicles - so does the translation of Hebrew into Aramaic. I've been looking into a term for "the poor", meskinë in Syriac. The word recurs in the Aramaic Psalter for the Jews. Edward Cook found that this Psalter shares its not-Syriac with PseudoJonathan, Job, and Chronicles; more-recently Targum Sheni. Also found is that the Psalter depends on the Midrash... but not the reverse.

Hence the L in LJLA. This means that, where Christians often translated the Psalter into their vernaculars, Jews seemed less interested in Aramaic. Jews absolutely did translate their Psalter into Greek; I will not be shocked to hear if they also did Old Latin. But for Aramaic, Jews did not create a canon Psalter until mediaeval times; the Syriac Christians beat them to it, like the Copts beat them to it up the Nile.

We can allow some ad-hoc renditions were done, but nobody quoted them. This all reminds me painfully of the Psalter in Arabic.

I suspect the whole Late Jewish Literary Aramaic project be a reaction to Syriac. LJLA would be an artificial language. Unlike Syriac, Palaestinian was never a strong Christian language; so a Palaestinian basis would work well for Jews stuck around Galilee and Lebanon, and the Nile Delta. Why not; nobody was using it.

That might, further, explain how the Aramaic Proverbs looks like a clumsy and mechanical Peshitta.

BACKDATE 12/16

Gravastar

Black holes got mass (so volume), spin (so shape), and maybe charge. Here's an alternative, in the too-heavy and simple file: the gravastar.

Best I can tell, these are bubbles, not singularity-with-eventhorizon. You'll still get torn to pieces, but the pieces will (eventually) fall upon the bubble surface. Which will increase the size of the bubble. The size and mass we're looking at, would be Middlesex (or "London") and ten suns. So a bit denser than the neutron-star.

Since there is a shell, and not a simple cutoff of "in universe" and "not in universe", it doesn't emit Hawking. It is dark.

Because the outer shell is so rigid it is also cold. It doesn't move. Shining a light on it would just add energy, to make it larger. Some EV light would bounce back but with very long wavelengths: so, blackbody curve skews to the radio, leaving little for infrared.

So far this is a theoretic entity, so it can't be distinguished from that other really small, really nonemissive heavy thing. Unless it crashes into that other thing. Which is what instruments are now looking into.

BACKDATE 12/11

Transit-timing gets a result

On topic of TTV, a habitable-zone planet was just found through its effects on Kepler 51d. The perturbator, which sounds dirtier than it is, would be "e". Year is 264 Earth days, so d:e is not-quite 2:1. e is also noneccentric, so would be Venuslike here; but for K-51-A which is a lighter star and new to the mainsequence (I'll get to this) e's Earthlike.

... but very heavy. e is a miniNeptune like the other three "cotton candies". I think TTV allows some constraint on true mass given that we do, in fact, know the masses of the b,c,d. Better now, in fact.

I didn't say superearth. Yes e doesn't transit; yes that means we don't know its volume. I can guess, though, that if the inner planets are puffy and hydrogen-rich then, so much more so this Sudarsky-II outer planet. Barring some crazy impact event but then, wouldn't its eccentricity match that?

The star is young; it spins eight days and (I learn) astrologists (heh) consider this a 500 My age. There is also noise from activity. Youth would assuredly explain why the inner worlds haven't lost their (opaque) clouds yet. Mind, this extreme youth further suggests a coming expansion of the HZ leaving e too hot. Well, e's moons, that is; although if it's got any I expect them to look like Ariel over around Uranus.

It took fourteen Earth years to spot d floating into transit so early. The virtues of patience. Maybe the improved maths we're promised will help find these things faster.

Venus' interior

New readings of Venus' atmosphere are telling us that its volcanoes are not exjecting more water into it. Volcanic gas is at most 6% water.

Mars has ice under the surface (and sometimes on it). Earth has enough underground for a true Noachian Flood. Our volcanoes blast much water upward. Some of this is mediated through tectonics which push the ocean's water back underneath; Venus doesn't have tectonics (supercritical carbondioxide apparently not being much of a lubricant).

Venus is looking like, not only has it lost much atmospheric water, it never had much on the surface either.

The 2000-1200 BC Armenian silence

Okay, last month I had VERY little to work with, but here we have bioarxiv for Indoeuropean populations. Big fez-tip to Razib Khan for 'splaining this to us genecels.

Italo-Celtic[-Lusitanian] is Corded Ware, aligned with Battle Axe in the German forests and, by male genes, R1b. This paper is saying Greek and Armenian came str8 outta da steppe. I assume that for Armenian, whose attestation is poor before their Grabar Bible, the paper has strained out all that Parthian and, before them, Cimmerian which meanwhile supplanted their whole ruling class. Greece, especially the islands, didn't have that little problem.

One surprise: the linguistic precursor of Armenian was introduced to the Caucasus by the end of the 5th millennium BP. That's 2050 BC. That might agree with the earlier, less-documented collapse of the Ur III and Fifth Dynasty Egypt, known to be a difficult time. What 2050 BC is not is the collapse of the earliest twelfth century BC. So the Armenians were already living in the Caucasus, presumably around Trabzon and what's now the southern Georgia coast, where we now find the Mingrelians.

Quite a claim. Why isn't Armenian in the Hittite ritual-texts? Hurrians and Urartians in the way? (Same goes for Phrygian, still.)

How to speak to the rest of us

Watching Paul Gilster go off to BlueSky "for obvious reasons" was a blow. It actually hurt. Not the move, but the "Kamala Obviously" attitude. Peter Woit, well... I never had much respect for that one, so his "post-truth" tantrum washed over me. And then there was Daniel Suarez calling Trump an authoritarian liar but, somehow, hoping we'd all come together after November to buy his book (by all accounts a decent book). But: enough of the negative.

Here's the positive: Casey Handmer on the d.o.g.e.

Handmer conducts a master class in gently advising the people in charge, whoever they might be in January, what benefits might accrue to this populace if the governmental-efficiency is NOT a sword to use against enemies. It could be used - generally - against pork, which trends actually highly Republican, as much as Democrat.

I admit I don't default to this attitude. I am not saying I always agree with Handmer - although, he's convinced me on battery storage and even on solar. Overall if you want people to take you seriously, this seems the best attitude to have. It may be too late for Gilster and Woit but Suarez could learn from this.