Toward a better Aeneid

My university had us read Virgil's Aeneid in translation. We were to concentrate on books 2, 4, and 6 of twelve, all in "the Odyssey half". Those are, by coincidence, the same books which Virgil tested out to the Imperial family when he was writing the thing.

There's a legend around that epic as a whole. Virgil was dissatisfied with the text and asked Augustus to burn the draughts he had. Then Virgil caught sick and died. Somehow, those draughts were maintained. Either Augustus had the whole set of galleys, or else Virgil failed to burn what he had (understandable if he was going to revise it).

I remember leafing through books 7-12, the "Iliad half". All I remember of it was that it was a tiresome waste of time. I read books 1, 3, and 5 more closely. Book 1 is bogstandard intro, 3 is where the Odyssey Half goes fanfic, and 5 is Aeneas' character-establishment... 5/12ths into the story.

I expect that whatever changes Virgil was going to make to books 2, 4, and 6 would have been superficial - to tie it all in better with the more drastic changes made elsewhere. Why ruin what you already know to be good. And why upset an Imperial patron.

Books 7-12 would have taken the brunt of the changes. An editor would then target Book 1 for foreshadowing, after overhauling books 7-12. I couldn't tell you how to save book 3. Maybe book 5 was slated for full-on deletion, with an eye to trim the B-Side of the overall epic to five books. But I have a better notion about book 5: replace it. There's room for a saga of Italy before the Trojan landing.

It may even be why Virgil wanted back to Italia, to collect Oscan and Rasnal folklore and legendry (respectively) to write that new book 5. In the 10s BC, those peoples yet lived.

Perspective?

Tunku Varadarajan offers "perspective". With 3D perspective, no less! ISWYDT

The graph's visual design is purty enough. It's good that the past, which its lower population, is marked as narrower. The misses I see are Cyprian's Plague during the early third anno domini century, and the cocoliztli in Mesoamerica in the middle sixteenth. It doesn't go before the Antonines, so we don't read (say) the Hittite Plague in the thirteenth century BC nor Yersinia during the Balkan Chalcolithic. But these are nits. Or fleas, in the latter case.

@tunkuv's main problem is that Covid sits on his list at all, since this virus has only just started. The curves for affected countries are still in their expo part of the bell-curve.

I'm afraid that @tunkuv has offered yet more comfort-food to those who would downplay this beast.

BACKDATE 4/3

Vinegar

Science Daily has relayed this on, about making acetate from nanowires. Acetate is vinegar. (Of course I could also make acetic acid from my cold underground moonshine still but anyhoo.)

The process' ingredients are Sporomusa ovata bacteria, water, and sunlight - and CO₂. Its use of sunlight is 3.6% efficient, almost as good as sugarcane for sucrose; at that level, it's thought that Martian insolation would suffice for it. Another byproduct is oxygen (yay!).

Venus' clouds would also suffice for it. I can get water there too. Here I prefer to engineer such bacteria as can break down concentrated sulfuric acid, instead of water.

OR 1/12/2021: you could make your acetic from carbon-monoxide.

As good as it gets

When you work in a clerical field - a field where, at best, you do problem-solving in an office - you run into misfits. One such strain of misfit is the Gamma Male. He's the guy in the (sexual) hierarchy who finds his niche as the sensitive man who is some (stupid) woman's platonic BFF. His mating strategy is to wear her down.

If you own a Y chromosome, you don't want to drift into Gamma. Smart women see through the Gamma and hate him. The younger Gamma will graduate to a full-on bullshit artist, who gets fired a lot. Or he will wax embittered with women and give up: these are the Omegas to the extent they're still on the scale, or are just shut-ins like Jack Nicholson's author in As Good As It Gets. To the extent Gammas are prey, many younger Gammas are targets of male preeverts in their early teens - of these, many Come Out later in life, wherefrom is no going back in.

Anyway, Vox Day - who has done more than anyone to identify the Gamma pattern - has turned to the fiction enamoured by these pathetic creatures. VD quotes a correspondent calling out Ernest Cline's Ready Player One to which he calls out Patrick Rothfuss's Name of the Wind himself. I've not read the former but did see the movie; I tried to read Rothfuss but couldn't finish, since the protagonist disgusted me. Obviously I concur with the Vox Populi analysis.

As Good As It Gets had its author whose best sellers feature a female protagonist. The female fans of said books saw them as understanding the female psyche in a way most male authors (and many females) didn't. In the movie, one fan-ette confronted Nicholson and asked how he did this sorcery. Nicholson - having a bad day - angrily retorted that "I take a man and remove reason and responsibility". In an otherwise liberal movie NOT siding with Nicholson, this quote is the only quote its viewers remember today. On 4chan, a.k.a. Omegas Anonymous, the quote crops up almost daily.

I posit that that's because Nicholson was right - about flawed female protagonists. At least, flawed in those ways which damaged men can understand: weak, emotional, vengeful, all the other defects which women and men must overcome in life.

And I posit that Nicholson's author is Rothfuss and Cline after they'd turned their eye upon their own past behaviour and reskinned their characters as females. Which Rothfuss and Cline themselves have not done, to my knowledge. Hey, they got paid, right?

As for Rothfuss and Cline, a healthy fiction readership would never accept them. What sales they have rung up come at the expense of emotionally-stunted misfits in the fandom - seeking escape. The verbal-SAT set know this, and know how to twist the knife. This is how "toxic fandom" has become such a theme, when verbal-SAT sets out to manipulate the wider populace. If you meet a fan of Rothfuss and/or Cline, you know not to trust him, like you wouldn't trust a porn addict. And if there are many of these fans, they witness only to that much spread of their mental disease.

My advice to the Gamma seeking a writing career is to start by writing an Omega character, and move on to an unsympathetic female. Open that vein. Then work with humble characters in a sensawunda setting. In shâ'llâh you'll grow out of Gamma. My advice to publishers is to pass that advice on to their writers. Failing that, my advice to readers is to boycott Gamma-enabling publishers. We can start with Tor.

Carbon-dioxide to booze

Stafford Sheehan back in 2017 found an electrolysis that mixes (liquid) water with carbon-dioxide, and produces a weak alcoholic result. Last year the climate-changers and anti-"capitalists" found out. (Verbal-SATers gotta verbal-SAT.)

From that, any distiller can run their own process, to get azeotropic 96% alcohol. Then you dilute that with pure water again and - I dunno, age it in a barrel, or sell it as vodka. Or you don't dilute it and hand it straight-up to the medics.

Quibble: it's not quite true that the process is sticking two carbon dioxides together. Alcohols have hydrogen. That has to come from somewhere. Sheehan, as noted, used water.

I'm thinking this will be the alcohol-generation method of choice in Venus. She has the CO₂, and her surface brings the heat for distillation. She doesn't have the water but that can be brought in. (Mars too. It's easier on Mars where frozen water is everywhere. There, the still can use mirrors to run up the heat in daylight.)

But I do wonder if the electrolysis needs that water. 5 MPa cold liquid (or, below Ishtar, supercritical) CO₂ is already a solvent so, at that temperature, any miscible hydrogen compound should do.

SEQUEL 4/18/2020: For a hydrogen source, I recommend NOT using hydrogen sulfide.

Upload #188b: the wind blows on

When one makes a change on a great scale, old assumptions ripple out as errors. Consider this update today a continuation of yesterday's.

On the 'Abbâsî assumption that sura 29 was later than (I now know) it is, "Against Jihad" was having that one quote from sura 35 as well as from sura 16. I'd thought sura 35 was quoting sura 16 as well... so something had to give. "Islamic Ethics" now has sura 35 quoting from sura 29. From sura 43 too.

Some of the 16/35 links turn out to be independent adaptations. One such was the Tasrif al-Riyahi, in sura 16 but not 35. That's from sura 2 and/or 45 - probably sura 45. It's all from sura 25 ultimately so I have added that 25>45 to "Defending the Days of Allâh", and another 45>16 to "Plots". Long overdue, for the former; I already knew of a parallel but didn't then know what to do with it, so buried it in a footnote. This killed a tentative (but wrong!) 45>34 in "What Waits Beside These Roads".

Madrassa.

Upload #188: break the cycle

I needed to sort out the mess in my Timeline. To that end, I've tightened the 21>52 link in "Fire from the Mountain" and the 52>44 in "New Plague". And I've a new link for sura 40 in "Reformer from Pharaoh's Family": 52>40.

The real problem I've had is with suwar 16, 29, 43. I messed up - I'd trusted the Muslims. Specifically, I'd followed the 'Abbâsid clowns who'd proposed 43 >16 >29, as you may read in Shahrastani, therefore Jeffery. And since (they told me) sura 29 is late, I felt free to pose sura 29 as a reaction to sura 9 in "Against the Jihad".

But it was striking me how much a "late" sura didn't know. Sura 29's Abraham / Lot story doesn't parallel (for instance) sura 51, beyond what either has from 7, 11, 15. And the links to suras-9-plus have dissolved into links to sura 7 or 39.

That's what my 16>29 links were doing here, they had to be here on my 16>9>29 assumption. And then... a 29/43 link bugging me since the 2000s - never posted here - was starting to look like 29>43. But 16 used 43! I'd got at least three essays into an endless loop.

Well, no more of that. "Against the Jihad" is overhauled. It still argues sura 29 belongs after sura 21. But now that it's lost the suras 9 and 16 references, it's having to be tentative about 23, 35, 42, 44, and 46 also. Meanwhile, "Plots Against The Qurra" now argues for sura 16's direct use of sura 29. And "Defending Jesus" owns that sura 43 used sura 29.

Madrassa.