Amidst all the scholarly chatter about ossuaries, patinas and epigraphy there isn’t much talk about the Freemason connection to the Jesus Family Tomb. This, I think, is where the Cameron/Jacobovici documentary could have its biggest impact. Consider the number of people who believe that the DaVinci Code is fact. By all accounts Cameron and Jacobovici…
How could I have missed this? I was killing a few idle minutes by poking around the web browser on my Treo 650, and I pointed to Google Maps. Instead of the “this device does not support Java” error that I used to get, there was a redirect for a prc download. Google Maps for…
Before this James Cameron business hit the filter I was stewing over a line of ad copy for Victor J. Stegner’s book God: Failed Hypothesis: Science has advanced sufficiently to make a definitive statement on the existence-or nonexistence-of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God. But as it turns out, science hasn’t even reached the point where it can…
Biblical scholars are falling over themselves to point out reasons that James Cameron’s “The Lost Tomb of Jesus” is a bad piece of investigation. Ben Witherington of Asbury Seminary lists some quick thoughts notably that Jacobovici’s claim that one of the ossuaries belongs to Mary Magdalene is without evidence. All historical references to Mary Magdalene…
Critics are accusing filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici of leaping to conclusions in the upcoming Discovery Channel documentary The Jesus Tomb. And this isn’t the first time such accusations have been made against him. Critics accused him of playing fast and loose with the facts in his documentary about the Exodus.
I confess I’ve been a little unnerved by director James Cameron’s Titanic announcement that he’s found Jesus–I wasn’t aware that Jesus was missing. Cameron’s latest project, a TV documentary called The Lost Tomb of Jesus will supposedly unveil evidence that could rock the foundation of Christianity. Namely that the bodies of Jesus Christ and his…
I’ve been itching for a good boycott for a while. Here’s one that I can support–Gizmodo’s Boycott the RIAA in March. The RIAA’s trenchant enforcement of outdated copyright laws threaten innovation in computer-mediated communicatons. And there’s some evidence that closed copyrights put a damper on music sales (the classic example is the Grateful Dead, who…
The Number 23 promised to be a sublimely disorienting voyage into paranoia. A little Eternal Sunshine followed by a slice of Pi. But it just doesn’t quite make it. Too bad the studio won’t take this film back into the editing bay for a little knife-work. It’s about 2/3 of the way toward being great…
What goes through your mind when your parachute fails…and then your backup chute? Amazingly Michael Holmes lived to tell about it. The British skydiver survived a drop of some 14,000 feet, thanks partly to the drag from his failed parachute as well as a blackberry thicket on the ground. One more thing. He was wearing…
If you’re planning on hosting a Super Bowl party, you could be risking time behind bars. If you show the game on more than one TV screen, or if your screen is larger than 55″ you are breaking the law. UPDATE (2/04/07): After a barrage of complaints the NFL backs down and says “never mind.”
BoingBoing cites a new study showing that suburban living makes you fatter. Or, more to the point, people who live in high density neighborhoods interspersed with shops and services are ten pounds lighter, on average, than people who live in the cul de sacs. This insight is somewhat along the lines of the Amish Diet—…
Nick Brandt’s safari photos are some of the wildest, most powerful photos I’ve seen in a long time. There’s a haunting, heart-stopping quality that comes out even across the Internet. Here’s what Nick says about his own work: Few photographers have ever considered the photography of wild animals, as distinctly opposed to the genre of…
Annie Dillard writes about the doomed Franklin Expedition which set out in 1845 to map the icy Northwest Passage. The expedition wound up frozen in an ice floe. Fourteen years later the men’s bodies were found and it was clear that their survival was hindered by the amount of useless crap they tried to take…
Here are 4 Easy Photoshop Techniques to Make Your Pictures Pop. Some of these are a little two “processy” for my taste, but the blur/overlay trick looks like a must-try.
Here’s a site describing a low impact woodland home. Very Hobbit-y. I drafted plans for a home almost identical to this when I was in 10th grade, only I envisioned clean modernistic lines with concrete as the main building material.
