What’s more original to Pagels’s book is the view that Revelation is essentially an anti-Christian polemic. That is, it was written by an expatriate follower of Jesus who wanted the movement to remain within an entirely Jewish context, as opposed to the “Christianity” just then being invented by St. Paul, who welcomed uncircumcised and trayf-eating Gentiles into the sect. At a time when no one quite called himself “Christian,” in the modern sense, John is prophesying what would happen if people did. That’s the forward-looking worry in the book. “In retrospect, we can see that John stood on the cusp of an enormous change—one that eventually would transform the entire movement from a Jewish messianic sect into ‘Christianity,’ a new religion flooded with Gentiles,” Pagels writes.

via Elaine Pagels on the Book of Revelation : The New Yorker.

Seriously?

Balaam and Jezebel, named as satanic prophets in Revelation, are, in this view, caricatures of “Pauline” Christians, who blithely violated Jewish food and sexual laws while still claiming to be followers of the good rabbi Yeshua. Jezebel, in particular—the name that John assigns her is that of an infamous Canaanite queen, but she’s seen preaching in the nearby town of Thyatira—suggests the women evangelists who were central to Paul’s version of the movement and anathema to a pious Jew like John. She is the original shiksa goddess. (“When John accuses ‘Balaam’ and ‘Jezebel’ of inducing people to ‘eat food sacrificed to idols and practice fornication,’ he might have in mind anything from tolerating people who engage in incest to Jews who become sexually involved with Gentiles or, worse, who marry them,” Pagels notes.) The scarlet whores and mad beasts in Revelation are the Gentile followers of Paul—and so, in a neat irony, the spiritual ancestors of today’s Protestant evangelicals.

Really?

Since version 10.5 “Leopard”, Mac OS X has had DTrace, a tool used for performance analysis and troubleshooting. It provides data for Apple’s Instruments tool, as well as a collection of command line tools that are implemented as DTrace scripts. I’m familiar with the latter as I wrote the originals for the DTraceToolkit, which Apple then customized and enhanced for Mac OS X where they are shipped by default (great!). I use them regularly to answer this question:

why is my MacBook slow?

I work in an office where everyone has MacBook Pros, and “why is my MacBook slow?” is a common question. Applications can become slow or unresponsive while waiting for CPU work, memory requests or disk I/O to complete.

via Brendan's blog » Top 10 DTrace scripts for Mac OS X.

“Why," she asks me, "are the followers of reason so unreasonable?"

As Warsi was on her way to catch her flight to Rome she heard Dawkins, the supreme prophet of neo-atheism, on Radio 4's Today programme. He was attempting to celebrate a survey that proved, at least to his satisfaction, that supposedly Christian Britain was a fraud. People who said they were Christians did not go to church and knew little of the faith. Giles Fraser, a priest of the Church of England, then challenged Dawkins to give the full title of Darwin's Origin of Species. Falling into confusion, he failed. Fraser's point was that Dawkins was therefore, by his own criterion, not a Darwinian. Becoming even more confused, Dawkins exclaimed in his response: "Oh, God!"

“Immediately he was out of control, he said, 'Oh, God!'" Warsi recalls, "so even the most self-confessed secular fundamentalist at this moment of need needed to turn to the Almighty. It kind of defeats his own argument that only people who go to church have a faith."

De Botton finds Dawkins a psychologically troubling figure.

“He has taken a very strange position. He's unusual, in that he came from an elite British Anglican family with all its privileges and then he had this extraordinary career, and now he stands at the head of what can really be called a cult . . . I think what happened was that he has been frightened by the militancy of religious people he has met on his travels and it has driven him to the other side.

“It smacks of a sort of psychological collapse in him, a collapse in those resources of maturity that would keep someone on an even keel. There is what psychoanalysts would call a deep rigidity in him."

via New Statesman - The God wars.

On a recent winter’s afternoon, nine computer science students were sitting around a conference table in the engineering faculty at University College London. The room was strip-lit, unadorned, and windowless. On the wall, a formerly white whiteboard was a dirty cloud, tormented by the weight of technical scribblings and rubbings-out upon it. A poster in the corner described the importance of having a heterogenous experimental network, or Hen.MoreON THIS STORYNascar nationPeter Aspden Cary FukunagaWhat Eve Arnold sawWatch out, ObamaCalled to the barON THIS TOPICComment UK must stay open to foreign studentsIN FT MAGAZINEThe Inventory Ann WiddecombeThe naked truth on how to find our organsFirst Person Sarah PriceHow to have a conversationSix of the students were undergraduates. The other three were PhD researchers from UCL’s elite Financial Computing Centre. The only person keeping notes was one of them: a bearded, 30-year-old Polish researcher called Michal Galas. Galas was leading the meeting, a weekly update on the building of a vast new collection of social data, culled from the internet. Under the direction of the PhD students, the undergraduates were writing computer programs to haul millions of pages of publicly available digital chatter – from Facebook, Twitter, blogs and news stories – into a real-time archive which could be analysed for signs of the public mood, particularly in regard to financial markets. Word of the project, known as SocialSTREAM, had reached the City months ago. The Financial Computing Centre was getting calls most days from companies wanting to know when it would be finished. The Bank of England had been in touch.

via School for quants - FT.com.

Magic is an art, as capable of beauty as music, painting or poetry. But the core of every trick is a cold, cognitive experiment in perception: Does the trick fool the audience?

via Smithsonian Magazine.

Until now, Disney parks and resort employees had been prohibited from growing beards and goatees. Starting Friday they may do so, so long as theyre a quarter-inch or shorter.

via cnn.com

The lift of the beard ban follows earlier fashion reforms at the Happiest Place on Earth. In 2000 the company moved to allow mustaches, and in 2010 it decreed that women were no longer required to wear pantyhose with skirts.

There are still some fashion restrictions... Visible tattoos and body piercings are verboten, as is unnatural hair coloring.

"The Disney Look is a classic look that is clean, natural, polished and professional, and avoids 'cutting edge' trends or extreme styles," the company says on its website.

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998?