The linked article is a good read also. Putting it in All the Feels.
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Xenon 124 is radioactive. It just has a halflife of 18 sextillion years.
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While most xenon isotopes have half-lives of less than 12 days
Are there any stable ones? Or should this say âradioactive isotopes?â
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quoth the wikipedia:
Xenon has the second-highest number of stable isotopes. Only tin, with 10 stable isotopes, has more
However, the proton is theoretically unstable; therefore all elements of Xenon are unstable, with half lives in the 10^34 year range.
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does some napkin math
A tonne of xenon is about 4.6 octillion atoms.
At that half-life, thatâs only 18 decay events per year per tonne.
Iâm impressed they could even detect that.
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hereâs the preprint
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Yâknow, crap like this makes me want to have a cryptozoological creature discovered and documented. Doesnât have to be the Yeti. Nessie would do. Just something to remind assholes that sometimes the weird shit turns out to be real after all.
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I would prefer Nessie, especially if it really did turn out to be a plesiosaur. After all coelacanths turned out to be still around.
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An extremophile which doesnât use dna might shed the most light on the beginnings of life on earth.
Vendobiots might shed the most light on the beginnings of multicellular life here.
Of Mesozoic sea reptiles, Ichthyosaurs have a better chance of passing unnoticed.
(âWait. something seems odd about those dolphinsâ tailsâŠâ)
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*carefully hides his jackalope ranch*
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Voynich Manuscript Decoded?
Gerard Cheshire1 claims to have figured it all out after noodling over the text for a couple weeks.
1. which is totally not a made up name at all.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02639904.2019.1599566
FTA (full disclosure: I did not even begin to read the whole thing):
Past scholarly attempts at solving the writing system are far too numerous to mention individually, but none was successful in any way, because every attempt simply used the wrong approach. [âŠ]
Unbeknown to the scholarly community, the manuscript was written in an extinct and hitherto unrecorded language as well as using an unknown writing system and with no punctuation marks, thereby making the problem triply difficult to solve. Furthermore, some of the manuscript text uses standard Latin phrasing and abbreviations, only adding a fourth dimension of difficulty.
Thus, without knowledge of this information it was quite impossible for anyone to even begin to fathom the meaning of the symbols and apprehend the words, the phrases and the sentences they spelled out. When a connection between the lost language and the writing system was explored, in May 2017, the solution duly emerged by elucidating both the language and the writing system in unison: i.e. both revealed themselves in the process, rather like patiently unravelling a tangle of chains. Thus, the solution was found by employing an innovative and independent technique of thought experiment.
Seems legit.
Ars is skeptical, though, for some reasonâŠ
And the University of Bristol, with whom Cheshire claims faculty affiliation, have apparently reconsidered their previous enthusiasm for his findings.
Following media coverage, concerns have been raised about the validity of this research from academics in the fields of linguistics and medieval studies. We take such concerns very seriously and have therefore removed the story regarding this research from our website to seek further validation and allow further discussions both internally and with the journal concerned.
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ââŠa kind of proto-Romance language, a precursor to modern languages like Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian, Romanian, Catalan, and Galician that he claims is now extinct because it was seldom written in official documents. (Latin was the preferred language of import). If true, that would make the Voynich manuscript the only known surviving example of such a proto-Romance language.â
Technobabble, the linguistics version. A mysterious language that was never written down, during a period when the clerisy tended to write down everything going on around them. I wonder what Cheshire is trying to sell.
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Common enough.
I have been reading SteÌphane Goyetteâs âThe Emergence of the Romance Languages From Latin a Case for Creolization Effects.â About half-way in.
The fact that the different languages tend to use the same propositions, such as de to mark the genitive, and ad/a for all sorts of things, indicates that they were still in contact when this happened.
The history of Romanian and Aromanian are unclear, but itâs quite likely they have been separated since late antiquity.
According to Goyette, some of the grammatical changes appear in graffitti in Pompeii.
So whether thereâs a single Proto-Romance Language, or a dialect continuum of Early Romance Languages, or just separate Early Romance languages, they begin in classical antiquity.
Not everything was written down.
There was a tendency to adjust things towards the written language, classical Latin, if they were written down. And
Not much of what was written down has survived.
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Yeah, I kind of figure there has to be a proto for pretty much anything. It doesnât just spring forth fully-formed, right?
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Itâs debated whether there was ever a proto-Altaic, or a gradual convergence of different languages in long-term contact. So there isnât necessarily a single proto-language.
In this case, I think the question is whether the Romance languages derive from a distinct Proto-Romance language (alongside Classical Latin, in a dialect continuum), or a single Proto-Romance basilect (with Classical Latin as the acrolect, in a creole continuum or other sociolelect continuum) or whether they derive from regional basilects (with Classical Latin as the common acrolect, and borrowing).
Goyette notes that Classical Latin has 2 words for tongue: âlinguaâ is more common, while âdinguaâ is noted by Varro, and is the expected form based on Indo-European. Romance consistently uses derivatives of âlingua.â Romance uses a lot of weird forms from Classical Latin which suggest it derives from Classical Latin instead of a sister-language, ruling out the 1st possibility. Depending on the degree of borrowing, there are only differences of degree between the 2nd and 3rd possibilities.
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Athena-language!
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