So, according to the wiki there are actually 14 or 15 different commandments listed in the Bible. They’re listed twice, and they say slightly different things in each place, particularly concerning the Sabbath.
Different Christian sects group the commandments together differently, combining them arbitrarily here and there to bring the number down to the official “10”. Some branches of Christianity regard one of the commandments merely as a preface.
And then there’s the Evangelicals:
‘Modern Evangelicalism, under the influence of dispensationalism, commonly denies that the commandments have any abiding validity as a requirement binding upon Christians [..]’
Oh, also, in the proper historical context, “Thou shall not steal” actually means “Thou shall not kidnap”.
Because everyone knows that the wisest people of all are those that stop counting when they run out of fingers. Good effort, fellas. 🙂
‘There was a bone of contention about her gender..’
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‘When Sputnik took off 50 years ago, the world gazed at the heavens in awe and apprehension, watching what seemed like the unveiling of a sustained Soviet effort to conquer space and score a stunning Cold War triumph.
But 50 years later, it emerges that the momentous launch was far from being part of a well-planned strategy to demonstrate communist superiority over the West. Instead, the first artificial satellite in space was a spur-of-the-moment gamble driven by the dream of one scientist, whose team scrounged a rocket, slapped together a satellite and persuaded a dubious Kremlin to open the space age.
And that winking light that crowds around the globe gathered to watch in the night sky? Not Sputnik at all, as it turns out, but just the second stage of its booster rocket, according to Boris Chertok, one of the founders of the Soviet space program.’
‘It all comes out of the “Millenium Challenge ’02” war games we staged in the Persian Gulf this summer. The big scandal was that the Opposing Force Commander, Gen. Paul van Ripen, quit mid-game because the games were rigged for the US forces to win. The scenario was a US invasion of an unnamed Persian Gulf country (either Iraq or Iran). The US was testing a new hi-tech joint force doctrine, so naturally van Riper used every lo-tech trick he could think of to mess things up. When the Americans jammed his CCC network , he sent messages by motorbike.
The truth is that van Ripen did something so important that I still can’t believe the mainstream press hasn’t made anything of it. With nothing more than a few “small boats and aircraft,” van Ripen managed to sink most of the US fleet in the Persian Gulf.
What this means is as simple and plain as a skull: every US Navy battle group, every one of those big fancy aircraft carriers we love, won’t last one single day in combat against a serious enemy.’
‘Hair is a better source of ancient DNA than bone or muscle, a new study involving woolly mammoth hair suggests.
“The main problem with things like bone is that it contains real DNA from the source, but also a load of DNA that is undesirable,” said study team member Tom Gilbert of the University of Copenhagen. “For example, when a mammoth dies and the body starts putrefying, bacteria gets all throughout the body. Later, as it’s buried in the ground, soil bacteria get into it.”
Contamination from bacteria DNA generally make up 50 to more than 90 percent of the raw DNA extracted from the bone and muscles of ancient specimens, Gilbert said. In contrast, more than 90 percent of the DNA extracted from hairs taken from woolly mammoth specimens in the new study belonged to the extinct mega-mammals themselves.
“The quality of the DNA was fantastic,” Gilbert told LiveScience. “It was way better than we ever imagined. There’s both mitochondrial and nuclear DNA in there.”‘
A list of hundreds of hoaxes that have been perpetrated throughout history.
‘A monumental Bible rumoured to have been written with the help of the Devil has been returned to Prague for the first time in 350 years.
The 13th century Codex Gigas, which is 3ft long and weighs 165lb, is thought to be the biggest book in the world and is known as The Devil’s Bible due to a supposed satanic bargain made by its author.
It was looted by Swedish soldiers from Prague castle at the end of the Thirty Years War in 1648 and taken to Stockholm, where it is the prize exhibit at the Royal Library.
But until now Swedish authorities have refused to lend it to the Czech Republic, which regards the Bible as stolen property, for fear they would not get it back.
The priceless manuscript is housed in a vault-like room behind bullet-proof glass.’
‘Sotheby’s will auction off one of the earliest versions of the Magna Carta later this year, the auction house announced Tuesday.
This will be the first time any version of the Magna Carta has ever gone up for auction, according to David Redden, vice chairman of Sotheby’s.
The Magna Carta is expected to fetch at least $20 million to $30 million, Redden said.
Redden, who has also sold dinosaur bones, space race artifacts and a first printing of the Declaration of Independence, called the Magna Carta “the most important document on earth.”
The charter mandated the English king to cede certain basic rights to his citizens, ensuring that no man is above the law.’
‘A Pythagorean cup (also known as a Pythagoras cup) is a form of drinking cup which forces its user to imbibe only in moderation. Credited as an invention to Pythagoras of Samos, it allows the user to fill the cup with wine (a popular beverage in Pythagoras’ time) up to a certain level. If the user fills the cup no further than that level he may enjoy his drink in peace. If he exhibits gluttony however, the cup wreaks instant retribution by spilling its contents out the bottom (the intention being: onto the lap of the immodest drinker).’
‘The Soviet engineers gazed into the abandoned tunnel with dismay. It was 1974 and work was scheduled to resume on the construction of the Baikal-Amur Magistral (BAM), a railway line in north-eastern Siberia. The Dusse-Alin Tunnel had been completed in an earlier phase of the undertaking, as evidenced by the inscription “1947-1950” over the entrance and the busts of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin that earlier workers had hewn out of the nearby rock. But the harsh climate and intervening years had not been kind to the permafrost-piercing passage. Peering into the gaping hole, the worried workers could see something glinting inside. The BAM project, perhaps the greatest civil engineering endeavour the world has ever seen, had encountered yet another problem.’
‘Sergei Zimov bends down, picks up a handful of treacly mud and holds it up to his nose. It smells like a cow pat, but he knows better.
“It smells like mammoth dung,” he says.
This is more than just another symptom of global warming.
For millennia, layers of animal waste and other organic matter left behind by the creatures that used to roam the Arctic tundra have been sealed inside the frozen permafrost. Now climate change is thawing the permafrost and lifting this prehistoric ooze from suspended animation.
But Zimov, a scientist who for almost 30 years has studied climate change in Russia’s Arctic, believes that as this organic matter becomes exposed to the air it will accelerate global warming faster than even some of the most pessimistic forecasts.’
‘On October 8th, 1871, the small Wisconsin logging town of Peshtigo was consumed by one of the most severe and woefully under-reported fires in human history.
After a hot and dry year, with a mere two inches of rain falling from July through September, churchgoers were praying for much-needed precipitation. The creeks had dried up, and the Peshtigo River, which many residents relied upon for transportation and water, was dangerously low.
In the midst of that quiet Sunday evening, the tiny township was totally annihilated – charred by a gigantic fire that engulfed the buildings, the countryside, and even the townsfolk themselves. Even today the little-known blaze holds the distinction of being the deadliest fire ever to occur in the US.’
‘Three old bones from a left wrist offer a new twist in the long running debate about the so called hobbits of Indonesia, suggesting they were indeed a small and different kind of human species, rather than modern humans with a growth disorder.
Three years ago, Prof Mike Morwood, of the University of New England, in Armidale, Australia, and colleagues made headlines worldwide when they announced the discovery of 18,000-year-old remains of Homo floresiensis in the Liang Bua Cave on the Indonesian island of Flores. [..]
Today in the journal Science an analysis of three wrist bones of one of the fossil specimens (called LB1) led by Matthew Tocheri of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, and including Prof Morwood and colleagues in Indonesia and America shows that the bones are primitive and shaped differently compared to both the wrist bones of both humans and of Neanderthals, suggesting they do represent a different kind of human.’
Followup to Hobbits may be earliest Australians.
‘A school in northern France was evacuated yesterday after a nine-year-old girl took a World War II handgrenade to show to the class.
Her teacher had asked students to bring an unusual object to school, according to deputy police chief Vincent Roberti.
The girl obliged, pulling a grenade her brother had found out of her bag.
The teacher “immediately reacted, putting the weapon in a plastic bag, taking it to the courtyard and warning the school principal,” Mr Roberti said.
Police, firefighters and bomb-disposal experts arrived on the scene while the 191-student school was evacuated.’
‘A batch of laptops pre-installed with Windows Vista Home Premium was found to have been infected with a 13-year-old boot sector virus.
Those of you with a long memory will vividly recall the year 1994: Nirvana’s lead singer Kurt Cobain died, South Africa held its first multi-racial elections, and Tony Blair became leader of the Labour party. Oh, and Microsoft’s operating system was the quaint, pre-NT Windows for Workgroups.
But it was a year that also saw the arrival of a boot sector computer virus known as Stoned.Angelina which moved the original master boot record to cylinder 0, head 0, sector 9.
It would appear that this teenage virus has not yet been consigned to the history books.
According to Virus Bulletin, the consignment of infected Medion laptops – which could number anything up to 100,000 shipments – had been sold in Danish and German branches of retail giant Aldi.’
‘The hidden content in ancient works could be illuminated by a light source 10 billion times brighter than the Sun.
The technique employs Britain’s new facility, the Diamond synchrotron, and could be used on works such as the Dead Sea Scrolls or musical scores by Bach.
Intense light beams will enable scientists to uncover the text in scrolls and books without having to open – and potentially damage – them. [..]
The team now plans to use the Diamond synchrotron’s powerful X-ray source to penetrate many layers of parchment.
The synchrotron, which covers the area of five football pitches, generates light beams that can probe matter down to the molecular and atomic scale.’
‘The Defence Department is urging war veterans and historical groups to write in and tell them why they deserve a free decommissioned Leopard Tank.
The German-built Leopards began service in 1977 but are being phased out to make way for 59 new Abrams tanks.
The 42-tonne armoured monsters are nearly 10 metres long and come with a 105mm main gun capable of firing armour-piercing shells.
The Australian Army’s Leopards have never been used in action.
To be eligible for consideration organisations need to show that the tank will have historical or cultural significance.’
‘Lick me in the ass!
Let us be glad!
Grumbling is in vain!
Growling, droning is in vain,
is the true bane of life,
Droning is in vain,
Growling, droning is in vain, in vain!
Thus let us be cheerful and merry, be glad!’
‘”The head fell on the severed surface of the neck and I did not therefor have to take it up in my hands, as all the newspapers have vied with each other in repeating; I was not obliged even to touch it in order to set it upright. Chance served me well for the observation, which I wished to make.
“Here, then, is what I was able to note immediately after the decapitation: the eyelids and lips of the guillotined man worked in irregularly rhythmic contractions for about five or six seconds. This phenomenon has been remarked by all those finding themselves in the same conditions as myself for observing what happens after the severing of the neck…’
‘The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints issued a long-awaited apology today for the massacre of an immigrant wagon train by local church members 150 years ago in southwestern Utah.
Elder Henry B. Eyring of the Quorum of the Twelve read the church’s statement on assignment from the church’s governing First Presidency during a memorial ceremony at the grave site of some of the massacre victims at Mountain Meadows, about 35 miles northwest of St. George. The statement also places blame for the Sept. 11, 1857, massacre on the local church leaders at the time and church members who followed their orders to murder some 120 unarmed men, women and children.’
‘The National Library of France (BnF) has an amazing collection of prints from 1910 which depict life in the year 2000. They are credited to Villemard.
There’s speculation that they were included with “foodstuffs” of the era [..]’
‘1. Flower-Flavored PEZ®
No, that’s not a typo. Although it would be equally disgusting, we’re talking about flower, not flour.
Introduced in the late 1960’s, flower-flavored PEZ was designed to appeal to the hippie generation — complete with a groovy, psychedelic dispenser. But even in the decade of free love, no love could be found for the flavor power of flower.
Floral scents make for great perfume, but nobody eats perfume, and apparently, there’s a reason why. The flower version flopped, and became the next addition to PEZ’s long and disturbing list of flavor failures.’
‘Nothing binds a town together like a powerful story: the Giants win the pennant, for example, or a mother wolf rescues twin boys from the riverbank, or a silversmith and a borrowed horse conspire to foil the Redcoats.
In this town, the story is broken.
The characters are not heroes. They are not even villains. They are merely conniving mercenaries with a tolerance for gore.
If you have heard of Vernon, population 780, an old steamboat port between the red hills of Alabama and the white shores of Florida’s Emerald Coast, there is a good chance you have heard this story. To the outside world, it has become Vernon’s master narrative.
Poor country folk get desperate. Poor country folk get an idea. Poor country folk buy insurance. Poor country folk fire guns at selves, blowing off hands or feet, and poor country folk get rich.’
‘George Orwell’s left-wing views and bohemian clothes led British police to label him a communist – but the MI5 spy agency stepped in to correct that view, the writer’s newly released security file reveals.
The secret file that MI5 kept on the author from 1929 until his death in 1950 is being declassified today by the National Archives.
It reveals that in contrast to the fictional “Big Brother”, the cruel and all-seeing secret police of Orwell’s classic 1984, MI5 took a surprisingly benign view of the writer.
Orwell savaged the totalitarianism of Stalin’s Russia in Animal Farm and 1984.
But he was also a socialist who railed against inequality in earlier works such as Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier. [..]
MI5 had already been watching Orwell since 1929, when he was a struggling journalist in Paris, attempting to write for left-wing publications.’
‘China’s Shaolin Temple, the cradle of Chinese kung fu, is demanding an apology from an internet user who said its monks had once been beaten in unarmed combat by a Japanese ninja, Chinese media reported today. [..]
The internet user, calling themselves “Five Minutes Every Day”, said on an online forum last week that a Japanese ninja came to Shaolin, asked for a fight and many monks failed to beat him, the newspaper said.
“The facts that the monks could not defeat a Japanese ninja showed that they were named as kung fu masters in vain,” the internet user was quoted as saying in the post.
The Shaolin temple “strongly condemned the horrible deeds” of the user, the newspaper said.’
‘A simple key many think could have saved the Titanic from hitting the Atlantic iceberg that sank it 95 years ago will go up for auction in Britain next month.
The key is believed to have been for the luxury oceanliner’s crow’s nest locker that held binoculars crew members could have used to search for dangerous icebergs, The Guardian reported Wednesday. The key wasn’t on the ship during its fateful 1912 maiden voyage because second officer David Blair was taken off at the last minute and he forgot to turn it over to his replacement.
Crew member Fred Fleet, who survived the sinking, told investigators if they had binoculars they would have seen the iceberg soon enough to avoid it.’
‘The Navy accepts no theories of racial differences in inborn ability, but expects that every man wearing its uniform be trained and used in accordance with his maximum individual capacity determined on the basis of individual performance.
It is recognized, of course, that Negro performance in Naval training and tasks on the average has not been equal to the average performance of white personnel. Explanation of this difference by resort to some theory of differences in natural endowment, however, leads only to confusion in which the potentialities of individuals become obscured.
It has been established by experience that individual Negroes vary as widely in native ability as do members of any other race. It is the Navy’s responsibility to develop the potentialities of individuals to the extent that the exigencies of war require and permit.’
‘During World War II the Army Corps of Engineers needed to hide the Lockheed Burbank Aircraft Plant to protect it from a Japanese air attack. They covered it with camouflage netting and trompe l’oeil to make it look like a rural subdivision from the air.’
‘There are few who would call postal delivery exciting. The reasons for this attitude are difficult to pin down, but it seems there is something inherent about the meticulous sorting and distribution of various pieces of paper that fails to capture the imagination. Nevertheless, over the last century there have been those who have wanted to change that: visionaries who looked beyond the truck and mailbag and imagined a means of delivering credit card bills and erotic magazines that would defy the heavens and shake the very Earth itself. Rarely has history seen a concept so grand, and so impractical, as Rocket Mail. [..]
This success was met with great excitement. While naysayers quibbled over such details as the wisdom of launching intercontinental cruise missiles to deliver postcards during the height of the Cold War, others were already mapping out a bright future for rocket mail. [..]’
‘A shipwreck off the coast of Western Australia is not that of HMAS Sydney, an investigation by the Royal Australian Navy (RAN) has found.
HMAS Sydney with 645 crew members disappeared in mysterious circumstances off the coast of Western Australia in November 1941.
The Navy hydrographic survey ship HMAS Leeuwin this week investigated a wreck near Dirk Hartog Island, based on coordinates provided by the Western Australian Maritime Museum.
The investigation concluded the 30m shipwreck lacked the overall dimensions and features of a military vessel of the scale of the Sydney.’
Followup to Wreck of HMAS Sydney found off WA.
