The Goddess of Reqem

Davila has posted a 2017 report on the winged-lion temple at Reqem, called Petra. Which report we can now ignore - because Davila also links the finds. This is the smallest temple of four.

Of course the first chapter I scrolled-at was chapter 17 on the inscriptions. Here is presented a fine lapidary on how to do the temple sacrifice, assuredly the most important inscription for them and - had it survived in full - for us. This may well be the template for such inscriptions as featured once in the Jerusalem Temple, the "Temple Scroll" being a blueprint for what to incise on that Temple once the Essenes ever got back(?) in there. Unfortunately - for Nabatists - Reqem's marble is light on specifics to Reqem.

Nah. Here the best chapter is seventh chapter, R. Wenning's on Sculpture. This is where is pondered, which god(dess). But again: Manôt laughs at us mortals. We've had a lot of speculation on "al-'Uzza!!" but this is based on something called a "baetyl", which might be associated with Her elsewhere. An inscription refers to a "Goddess of Hayyân" - but Who? Those baetyls are early - and shared with a clear Isis from Egypt. So this temple hosts that sort of goddess, a royal rather than Fortuna. It turns out, in polytheism, a temple is supposed to be the home of one goddess in particular. A foreign deity can approach Her as a guest - a foreigner like Isis. We do not know Reqem's Hostess.

The shakiest platform in the solar-system

ToughSF links Erik van Helvoirt over Venus ~2013. Van Helvoirt now works at Guerrilla Games of Horizon fame. I don't think there's a game attached to this pic.

This is a balloon, dangling a station with ... panels. Probably not radiators, probably solar. For them to work consistently where the balloon itself isn't overhead this is likely a polar latitude. I wonder if that's the vortex.

ToughSF says the balloon is helium. Commenters ponder whether hydrogen could work. I suspect hydrogen would burn in sulfur-dioxide - but we might not have sufficient SO₂ way up here to spark it up. More serious is that hydrogen isn't that much more common than helium up here. Best I think would be superheated... CO₂, with a balloon reinforced against implosion. Leave the hydrogen for the colonists to sip.

With all those dangling panels, though, how are they protecting from that insane windspeed, especially polar?

The anarcho-syndicalist future

The Weinersmiths are still at it - talking communities in space. They're going with small-scale communes. If I were a Marxist (a good part of my economics is at least paraMarx) small communes would be how I'd scale it.

I suggest they trade amongst each other. Asteroid-to-asteroid, largescale cargo-transfer would work much like living on the asteroid itself. Hence why I keep harping on cyclers.

We might even have some work on microcargo over astronomical distances. Apparently no less than Paul Krugman (pdf) - back in 1978 - wrote a paper on trade over relativistic speeds. That would be microcargoes from Earth to some very distant colony; Krugman says "Trantor" but is clearly pondering Barnard's or αCen-C. One might ponder also a Kuiper colony, say on Eris. A central Federal Reserve Of Venus probably wouldn't be a thing - at least, we'd hope not.

Eccentricity timeseries

This blog has applied von Zeipel to two systems: GJ 229 and ToI 1408. I have a notion on how to apply this to others.

Say we have a two-body system of a star and a brown-dwarf maybe even red; the latter is visible to our 'scopes. These bodies define the inclination of the overall system. Introduce a[nother] planet around the main star. It is eccentric and inclined. Radial-velocity will catch its eccentricity. The inclination - relative to Earth - is unknown.

Von Zeipel suggests that we could run a time series on the eccentricity and also on the amplitude - apparent msini. As the eccentricity changes, given constant mass so should the amplitude. Constraints on the mass should be visible given better spectrometry.

It gets better: as inclination relative to us hits 90°, which I've admitted won't happen with GJ 229, we will start seeing transits. Yea even unto 1 AU from the host star. On the flipside some of our further-out transits, if they do have large outer planets, stand to shift away from transit over time. Luckily we've now had those snapshots.

Exciting as all this is for mostly-future researchers, I must warn that planets subject to ultraMilankovitch will not be habitable. They'll have ultraIceAges.

Can Tim Walz sue?

Theodore Beale promoted a tweet by the not-so-black "insurrectionist", Docnetyoutube. Cerno and Ace stayed away from the accusation.

Beale is an old hand at not committing to direct slander, instead bringing up tangential evidence and letting others do the slander for him. But if website owners aren't keen on having governments go after "misinformation", I suggest to those owners they engage in less of it.

The root of Christian vegetarianism

A few weeks back I had the dubious pleasure of sitting across a family with a strident female vegetarian. Her case was that Jesus was himself a vegetarian. As far as I knew that is untrue; Jewish Galileans ate fish and also herded flocks, and (especially) made use of animal parchment. Of all the misdeeds our Lord imputed upon Herod's Temple, the sacrifices were not among them. But.

There is a tradition in Christianity of red-meat-avoidance, especially during Lent, but also some ascetics did without meat all their lives. Some were in the Ebionite sect. These were - famously - in the tradition of saints James and Peter and not of Paul. These were Jewish Christians. Dr Yitzhaq Feder is now reporting that Judaism, also, had a ... mixed understanding of eating meat. The Second Temple take, which is the Sadducean and Essenian take I understand, is to eat only the meat as comes from the Levite Priests. Essenes weren't part of this Temple so didn't eat it.

So I am - retroactively - glad I did not pipe up; notwithstanding it'd be rude, and just tag myself as yet another annoying mansplainer.

Although, now equipped with TheTorah: to argue for Christ's vegetarianism would would be to read the Cross as the abolition of the Temple Sacrifice - which it is, in our tradition. Like the Essenes, we'd not have a substitute until the Messianic Banquet. So - if we in this Goyisch Israel be using leather and vellum, what do we do with the meat?

Spectrometry will be cheaper

One constraint on finding stuff like Barnard b out there is spectral noise. This affects radial-velocity shifting and planets themselves.

Smaller spectrometers can be put on space-telescopes like Webb, lowering the mass/science ratio (if that's a term). They're also pondering fluorescence detection on account, hey, small, doesn't have to take up a hospital's entire basement.