 February 22, 2012 at 6:41 am  Deacon Duncan
If you thought WikiLeaks was something, wait till you see The Transparency Grenade.
Equipped with a tiny computer, microphone and powerful wireless antenna, the Transparency Grenade captures network traffic and audio at the site and securely and anonymously streams it to a dedicated server where it is mined for information. Email fragments, HTML pages, images and voice extracted from this data are then presented on an online, public map, shown at the location of the detonation.
Because the best way to sneak a high-tech spy device into a sensitive high-security meeting is to make it look like a bomb.
via “The Transparency Grenade”.
February 21, 2012 at 5:58 am Deacon Duncan
The Washington Post reports that a team of Russian scientists has successfully reanimated a flowering plant from some old seeds. Really old seeds.
The Russian research team recovered the fruit after investigating dozens of fossil burrows hidden in ice deposits on the right bank of the lower Kolyma River in northeastern Siberia, the sediments dating back 30,000-32,000 years.
What makes this so remarkable is that according to top scholars at ChristianAnswers.net, this is three times longer than the entire earth has been in existence, making it clear that the Russians have not only resurrected an extremely ancient species, but have found a way to recover plant materials from some other dimension, like maybe heaven. Or something. It’s probably quantum.
Yeah, that’s the ticket. Quantum.
February 20, 2012 at 6:47 am Deacon Duncan
In Gospel Disproof #36, we looked at how the resurrection story of Lazarus shows that the resurrection of Jesus is not about resuscitating the latter’s physical body. Even apart from the question of Jesus’ resurrection, though, there are some significant inconsistencies in the story of Lazarus and his alleged resurrection.
February 18, 2012 at 10:39 am Deacon Duncan
What do you do when consumer protection regulations are interfering with profits? Well, if you’re as big as AT&T, you just buy yourself some new laws.
The industry is pushing Senate Bill 135, referred to as “the AT&T bill” by its sponsor and others because it originated with that company’s lobbyists. The bill would strip the Kentucky Public Service Commission of most of its remaining oversight of basic phone service provided by the three major carriers — AT&T, Windstream and Cincinnati Bell — such as the power to initiate investigations into service problems.
via Kentucky telephone companies pushing for option to end basic service | Politics and Government | Kentucky.com.
February 18, 2012 at 10:09 am Deacon Duncan
I’m catching up on some issues that ended up on the back burner while I was under the weather, and one of them is this comment by Kevin Harris over at Evangelical Realism, on the topic of whether the “Resurrection theory” is a more historical explanation than the non-supernatural alternatives proposed by critics. Kevin claims that the critical theories are disqualified by application of Craig’s six criteria for historical credibility: historical fit, early independent sources, embarrassment, dissimilarity, semitisms and coherence. Just for fun, I’d like to take one of the alternatives and run it past Craig’s six criteria.
February 17, 2012 at 5:10 am Deacon Duncan
This looks like it’s going to be, well, amazing…
Justin Weinstein and Tyler Meason, two of the filmmakers behind Being Elmo: A Puppeteer’s Journey and Sons of Perdition respectively, are making a documentary about the man, appropriately titled An Honest Liar: The Story of the Amazing James Randi. The film will not only dive into his past and talk to other fellow expert skeptics like Adam Savage, Bill Nye, Richard Dawkins, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Penn and Teller, but it will also serve to document Randi’s next grand debunking as he plans and assembles, “an Ocean’s Eleven-type team for a carefully orchestrated exposure of a fraudulent religious organization.”
Hat tip to Movies.com. Trailer below the fold.
February 16, 2012 at 6:15 am Deacon Duncan
Many people are in shock and mourning after the unexpected death of singer Whitney Houston. As reported by the International Business Times, however, others are crying all the way to the bank.
Sony Music raised the price of Houston’s songs just 30 minutes after her death, reports The Guardian. The retail price was raised from about $8 (£4.99) to about $13 (£7.99), which automatically raised the price of digital sales on platforms such as iTunes.
I have just one thing to say about that.
February 15, 2012 at 6:30 am Deacon Duncan
Via Greg Laden’s blog, this leaked document from climate change denialists:
Dr. Wojick is a consultant with the Office of Scientific and Technical Information at the U.S. Department of Energy in the area of information and communication science. His effort wil focus on providing curriculum that shows that the topic of climate change is controversial and uncertain — two key points that are effective at dissuading teachers from teaching science. We tentatively plan to pay Dr. Wojick $100,000 for 20 modules in 2012, with funding pledged by the Anonymous Donor.
Is that for real? Holy crap.
February 14, 2012 at 7:25 pm Deacon Duncan
Last Sunday morning, I woke up with a sharp pain in the back of my nasal passages, as though I’d somehow gotten a grain of sand or something stuck there. I thought it would pass, and it sort of did—by becoming a full-blown sore throat and swollen glands and let’s-just-make-life-a-bit-more-miserable-overall. No biggie, I’ve had head colds before. But this one is slightly different. I just changed jobs, and that means I have no health insurance for the next 3 months. My old company was too small to qualify me for COBRA benefits and my new company has a 3-month break-in period or whatever they call it.
And that’s it. I’m a professional, I make a good salary, I work hard. And I’ve got no health insurance, for myself or my family.
Like I said, it’s just a head cold. I’ve had them before and they never bothered me. But I had insurance then. If they got worse, I went to the doctor. Last time my wife had a bad cough, she went to the doctor and found out she had pneumonia. Me, I’m trying to eat healthy, drink fluids, and get lots of rest, because I don’t have anything else right now. And some people raise kids under these conditions? Something is seriously wrong when a first-world country like the USA can’t even provide decent health care coverage to its citizens.
February 13, 2012 at 6:39 am Deacon Duncan
One mistake a lot of people make is to assume that Christians have always believed the same Gospel. If we look more closely, however, we can see evidence in the New Testament itself that suggests the resurrection story has evolved significantly, especially in the early decades of the Church. A good way to highlight this evolution is to compare the resurrection stories about Jesus with the story of the resurrection of Lazarus.
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