The day of vengeance

Christians promise the Day Of Judgement. The Islamic term is, as all my readers assuredly know already: the Yawm al-Dîni. I was having trouble finding a Yôm had-Dyn in Hebrew. In 2009, Drew Longacre may have found something like it.

The proof-text is in Deuteronomy 32:35-37. This is the famous quote that vengeance is Mine, lî. But maybe it wasn't lî. Maybe it was li-yôm.

Although the latter is not in MT, neither is it noncontextual (excuse the 2x-neg, plz). After the Lord discusses nqm; He goes on to talk of time, even unto The Day. Also the Greek here translates en hemerai ekdikesios.

The MT lî enjoys support from the Targums. It gets formidable support in the Christian translations. These latter, anyway, may depend on Saint Paul: who - exPharisee - notoriously quoted from a protoMT against the LXX. The Epistle of Hebrews however did not... excepting right here, which also has "vengeance is Mine".

Longacre notes here Qumran and the Samaritans. The Samaritan Torah proves that the Greek didn't just cook this up. A real Hebrew text was here in the centuries BC.

I'll also note that the Hebrew is nqm and not dyn. Our "Day of Judgement" looks like something brought from the MT, that Graeco-Samaritan variant being forgotten. It was assembled from other text.

BACKDATE 9/13

Water-rich terrestrial planets

Trappist-1's planets are in mean-motion resonance. Since we're still looking at this system, most of its planets remain unconstrained - except that they are not very dense. Alejandra Ross et al. have a study on similar MMR systems, not Trappist-1 itself.

The dataset numbers 24 systems. Kepler-36 and Kepler-105, specifically -36b and -105c, are standouts. Not only are these less dense than the others; they cannot even be made of stone. The Ross team implies that most MMR systems had formed in-situ.

Two other outliers: WASP-47 e, and good ol' 55 Cancri e. These, the study proposes, formed where they are like the other twenty. They were once Neptunians; but, in the heat and the tides, have boiled off most their atmo.

Those two Kepler planets - therefore their systems - must be migrates from out in the coal and ice regions, with (relatively) less stone and iron. Now they have supercritical "oceans". The paper wants to label the two, Icy Core Worlds. Various models are possible; suffice this blog that K-36 b is 1-5% water and K 105 c is a whopping 11-25%.

On the other side of density, Kepler-107 c is marked a superMercury. It happens this is the only one in the 'set. Elsewhere Trappist-1 - say - doesn't have any.

BACKDATE 9/13 Kyplanet.

Kevin van Bladel saves his skin

Dr. Kevin van Bladel wants to retire the Biblical term "Semitic". His argument is that there is no such thing as race. If Jews and Muslims agree to apply "Banu Sham" to themselves, they shouldn't.

In fact several genetic markers do cluster with those ethnoi, or gens if you like, who call themselves Semites; terms like "Natufian" and the "J Y-chromosome" are rife in the literature. The linguistic affinities have been known since antiquity, as van Bladel must admit. If "race" be political, that is because politics evolve among clans to advance the clans' interests. "There is no such thing as race" is an ideal, not a fact. It is "ought to be" against "is".

Van Bladel cannot be unaware of this. To be blunter: he is lying.

Which leads us to query his motive for the lie. It must be difficult for a "van Bladel" to survive in modern academia. I must add that the Plattdütschman in question is hitherto best-famed for pointing out sura 18's dependence on Heracleian propaganda, and maybe even postHeracleian.

This man, to use the chromosomal definition, will likely come out a decade from now like Gladwell admitting that he said things in order to keep his position.

Venezuela is a narco-cartel

A day or so ago, the US sank a boat carrying deadly drugs and armed Venezuelans. Said boat was in international waters and, legally, should not have been granted port access anywhere. Once they entered those waters they became pirates. Or, a Venezuelan offencive forse. (Sorry, I sometimes like switching up those c's.) It was up to Venezuela's President to decide which.

Maduro has decided which.

The first bloodland

The genetics are in for what we call the AD 500s - when Christ and His Angels slept. The Slavs, or people with Slavic DNA anyway, pushed into Pomerania - and into Croatia. This transfer of population is politely termed "Demic".

At the back of the migration, these populations became 80% Slavic.

I don't know that the culprits in Pomerania were properly Slavic however. Isn't this seen in the Middle Ages as "Prussia"? No Slavs there; the language used to be considered instead "Baltic", but now I understand is termed a third branch of "BaltoSlavic".

As usual, talk of "ancestral" languages get rough before Late Antiquity. Most agree that the territory wasn't originally German, although the ?Slavs ?Prussians took it from Germans. Some call the ancestors here, "Temematic" UPDATE 7/12/26 but that's probably before all this.

Inspiration for dungeons

I have offloaded one more project, a bit more adventurous than the last two. If nothing else, the logic is mine save the algo's (so I am playing the rôle of Mark Barnes).

Enjoy Cellular Automata, or "Cave" for short. If you do C# and don't mind the /unsafe tag.

Ringquest

In 1982, BYTE was running a competition for games. We've met the "winner" which nobody remembers. Enjoying a better reputation today is the number-five loser: Gordon Mills' Ringquest - at least, for the Redditors. This game is available in the MicroM8 emulator. All for the higher-end Apples, like 48k RAM.

This game is a fanfic / alternate of Lord of the Rings where/when the bulk of the Fellowship has failed in the depths of Moria. Now the Balrog owns Sauron's Ring. Your job is to get down there and pry the Ring off him/it, before everybody else is screwed. Treasure can be found. Mills switches-up the usual Nethack / Rogue conventions such that you can use the treasure to bribe encounters out of a fight; except for the Balrog itself of course. Your aim is progress toward the MacGuffin, not to gain loot.

The comp winner was in Forth. The fourth-with-a-u also-ran was in Basic... mostly. To input this thing into your machine required manual entry of many, many hexadecimal bytes: this is how most the data were separate from the program, which prog took up 6k RAM. I suppose the step after that would have been to compress the data which at least might have cut the manual entry (but could you do that in 8-bit?). The map, at least, was procedurally-generated.

I feel like the author should instead have saved it to cassette and sold it. This was wasted on BYTE. Maybe the use of the Tolkien Estate's property was the problem; Beyond Zork solved this with the "Coconut of Quendor".