Ark Nova is a 500-seat concert hall that can be packed up and transported thanks to its inflatable structure—according to its creators, the Ark Nova is the world’s first mobile inflatable concert hall. It measures 98 feet by 118 feet and features a rounded, organic design by British sculptor Anish Kapoor and Japanese architect Arata Isozaki. The hall was commissioned by the Swiss Lucerne Festival as a way to bring concerts and performances to areas of Japan that were affected by the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. Ark Nova was officially unveiled at the Lucerne Festival Ark Nova 2013 in Matsushima on September 27, 2013. The festival runs through October 13, 2013.
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The side of the political divide wearing tin-foil hats..
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That many Americans believe strange things is not surprising, but Public Policy Polling reports today that when it comes to embracing odd conspiracy theories, the political divide matters.
PPP's latest round of conspiracy-theory related questions finds that Republicans are more likely than Democrats to believe various government-related conspiracy theories, similar to results we found on our first round of conspiracy polling last April.
If you want to maintain some degree of confidence in rank-and-file Republican voters, you may not want to read further:
* 62% of Republicans believe the Obama administration is secretly trying to take everyone's guns away;
* 44% of Republicans believe President Obama is secretly trying to figure out a way to stay in office beyond January 2017;
* 42% of Republicans fear Sharia Law making its way into America's courts
* 21% of Republicans believe that the U.S. government engages in so-called "false flag" operations, where the government plans and executes terrorist or mass shooting events;
* 27% of Republicans think a group of world bankers are slowly eliminating paper currency to force most banking online -- only to cut the power grid so regular citizens can't access money and are forced into worldwide slavery.
The Open Hand Project aims to make advanced prosthetic hands more accessible to amputees. The Dextrus hand is the realization of this goal, it’s a low-cost robotic hand that offers much of the functionality of a human hand. Ultimately, these hands will be sold for under $1000 (£630).
The Open Hand Project is open-source, which means all of the plans to make a robotic hand will be published online with no patents, anyone has the right to make their own and even sell it themselves.
The Gospel According to Bill O’Reilly’s New Book “Killing Jesus”
Jesus was killed because of taxes. That’s more or less the message of Bill O’Reilly’s new book. Professor Candida Moss on what else the Fox host gets wrong—and what he leaves out.
In Killing Jesus: A History, Bill O’Reilly and writing partner Martin Dugard bring us their long-awaited “accurate account of not only how Jesus died, but also the way he lived.” This should settle two millennia of Christian debate. Although it lacks suspense (SPOILER ALERT: he dies), it’s a pretty good read and it’s fleshed out with tidbits about the ancient world.
Bill O'Reilly (Dennis Kleiman/Retna Ltd.)
But it should have been called The Gospel of Bill O’Reilly.
Here are some of the reasons why.
The methodology of this book is impossible to divine. O’Reilly says he wants “to separate fact from myth” but then never tells us how he does this. The rationale seems to be: include everything until you can’t, then plump for the good bits.
Sometimes O’Reilly includes two versions of the same story so that Jesus repeats the same action or says the same thing twice. In this book, Jesus overturned the moneychanger tables twice, for example. He really doesn’t like bureaucrats. On other occasions O’Reilly picks one particular Gospel (usually the longest version, rather than the earliest) and we never find out why.
To be fair, this isn’t just a problem with O’Reilly. In 1906 Albert Schweitzer observed that when people write lives of Jesus they inevitably end up describing themselves. It’s the key reason that some Biblical scholars think this whole project is bankrupt.
But without a method, Killing Jesus has all the critical rigor of your local church’s Nativity play.
The basic argument of the book is that Jesus died because he interfered with the taxation heavy Roman revenue stream. The reason the Jews eagerly anticipated the messiah, writes O’Reilly, is that “When that moment arrives, Rome will be defeated and their lives will be free of taxation and want.”
It’s true that the people did long for the Messiah, that the majority of them were poor and oppressed, and that very few benefitted from Roman occupation. But even if the Romans had been overthrown the people would have still been paying tithes to Jewish authorities to sustain the Temple, as Biblical and Jewish laws demand.
Killing Jesus: A History By Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard 304 pages. Henry Holt and Co. $28.
O’Reilly argues that Temple taxes and profits from the money-changers were back-channeled to Rome. Thus when Jesus overturned the tables of the money-changers he “interrupted the flow of funds from the Temple to Rome.”
He’s right: the Temple incident led to Jesus’s arrest and execution and the Romans were responsible for killing Jesus. But there is no evidence that the Romans benefitted from the financial affairs of the Temple during Jesus’s lifetime. Pilate didn’t get dibs on the lamb shanks some used to pay the priests. Jesus died because he was a rabble-rouser who disturbed the peace and challenged the authorities. Jesus didn’t die for our W2s.
Even if Jesus’s actions had been all about taxes, he died protesting a skeletal taxation system that privileged the rich. Wealthy citizens were exempt from most taxes altogether, non-citizens paid a flat rate poll tax regardless of income, the property tax was 1%, and the money from taxes was used to build roads and fund the military. It's not like the Romans did anything obscene like tend to the poor.
As for Jesus himself, O Reilly thinks that one of the main reasons Jesus was appealing and successful was because he was an independent powerful pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps kind of guy. According to O’Reilly, “[He] had no infrastructure. He had no government behind him. He had no corporation.”
The single most consistent social teaching in the New Testament is that Christians must support the poor, widows, and orphans, but this hardly gets a mention in Killing Jesus.
True, but this fact alone doesn’t make Jesus special.
None of the charismatic prophets or would-be messiahs had corporate sponsorship. They had patrons: wealthier, more powerful individuals (like Mary Magdalene) who supported them financially. O’Reilly calls this charity, but it wasn’t; it was a network of social debt and responsibility.
For a book so concerned with economics, O’Reilly should be more concerned about the impact of Jesus’s own ministry. A divine man who floods the market with miraculously generated free food? Think of all the honest, hardworking bakers and fishermen put out of work by the feeding of the five thousand.
Jesus’s followers are mishandled, too. In the afterword, we hear the Sunday school story that Peter asked to be crucified upside down because he was unworthy to die like Christ. Nope: that’s a fifth-century interpretation. And we learn that “it is a fact that the disciples of Jesus traveled as far as India, Britain, and even into Africa.” Even Africa? Tunisia is a great deal closer to Jerusalem than Britain. More importantly, these aren’t facts, they’re legends.
Women do less well in O’Reilly’s biblical world. Following Sunday school tradition, Mary Magdalene is identified as the prostitute who anointed the feet of Jesus with oil. That’s not in the Bible. This is a fifth century error that originates with Gregory the Great.
Unfortunate, especially considering that Mary Magdalene was Jesus’s patron. Imagine opening your home and checkbook to support a fledging religious group only to have history remember you as a prostitute. Slut shaming: it’s not just a modern phenomenon.
Oddly, O’Reilly thinks woman had it pretty good. He notes that they “were treated better in the time of Jesus than they are in a great many places in the world.” Unless you were a slave, in which case you could be beaten, raped, and killed as a non-person. A commendable instinct to champion women’s rights, I’m sure, but hardly correct.
The most striking part of O’Reilly’s biography is what is left out.
When O’Reilly tells Luke’s story of John the Baptist, he includes the Baptist’s insistence that tax collectors stop overcharging and that soldiers stop extorting the poor, but casually omits the instruction to everyone (the crowds) that “whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise.”
There’s no mention of the free healthcare offered by Jesus and his followers or the insistence that the wealthy give away their possessions.
The single most consistent social teaching in the New Testament is that Christians must support the poor, widows, and orphans, but this hardly gets a mention in Killing Jesus.
According to Fox News CEO Roger Ailes, “the first rule of media bias is selection.” Perhaps O’Reilly was squeezed for space
In his whimsical installation series, Japanese artist Jun Kitagawa has placed giant zippers on floors, ponds, and other curious locations.
via Spoon & Tamago
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Sep 26, 2013
Fringe Factor: Bill Nye The Science Guy Does Not Understand Science
Creationists know more about science than Bill Nye, Hillary Clinton could be our first lesbian president and other assertions from the political fringe. By Caitlin Dickson
AP
Creationist Pastor: Bill Nye ‘The Science Guy’ Does Not Understand Science
Oh, silly Bill Nye. There you go again, you former Boeing engineer, calling your self the “Science Guy,” teaching kids about chemistry and laughing about creationists with Bill Maher. Good thing pastor Ken Ham is here to set you straight. The creationist pastor took to Facebook to slam Nye’s appearance on Real Time with Bill Maher, in which Maher and Nye discuss the politicization of science. Ham charged that “Bill Nye doesn’t understand the difference between historical science and observational science, so he may be known as ‘Bill Nye The Science Guy’ but he doesn’t understand science correctly.” What’s that? You, too, aren’t sure that you understand the difference between “historical” and “observational science?” According to Ham and other so-called “historical science” creationists, the only science that is valid is that which you’ve observed personally. Ham’s organization, “Answers in Genesis,” promotes the idea that God created the universe in seven days. “What a load of nonsense,” Ham wrote of Nye and Maher’s conversation. “These two mock the Bible and totally distort the Bible’s account of the creation of the sun and the moon.”
Iowa: Thousands of Americans Have Been Killed By Illegal Immigrants
It’s been a few weeks since Rep. Steve King last graced the Fringe Factor with his hateful theories about illegal immigrants, so it was only a matter of time before he said something noteworthy. Luckily, the Iowa Rep. was given the perfect opportunity at a rally in in Nebraska for crime victims, including 93-year-old Louise Sallowin who was raped and beaten at her Omaha home this summer by a 19-year-old Mexican man who is in the U.S. illegally. King made the claim that the number of Americans killed by illegal immigrants is “in multiples of the victims of September 11,” a figure he said he once heard from a former immigration official. “Now that hits home, doesn’t it?” To emphasize his point, King said he asked his staffers to research stories of people hurt or killed by illegal immigrants and they discovered several tales of rape, murder, and fatal drunk driving accidents. “Obama, how much blood has to be spilled before you defend our border?” he asked.
New Hampshire: Male Unemployment Responsible for Mass Shootings
More women in the workplace means more unemployed men which then leads to more mass shooting. That’s the theory Jim Rubens is peddling as he kicks off his campaign to unseat Jeanne Shaheen in the U.S. Senate. Buzzfeed interviewed Rubens this week about a 2009 post on his website in which he first laid out this view and discovered that he still very much believes it. “The collaborative, flexible, amorphously hierarchical American economy is shutting out ordinary men who were once the nation’s breadwinners in living-wage labor and manufacturing jobs,” Rubens wrote in his 2009 post. “Because status success is more vital to the male psychology, males are falling over the edge in increasing numbers.” This week he reiterated that point, arguing that “men are more sensitive than women to external indicators of status,” and, “If you look through individual psychology of mass shooters over the past 10 to 20 years, you can see that in the profile. Often it's a person who has been subjected to extreme stress in the form of social rejection, job loss and associated mental health issues.” Rubens, who is actually a pretty moderate Republican in favor of same-sex marriage and reproductive rights, did clarify that he is in favor of women in the workplace, noting that he’s business partners with his wife, a woman. He simply thinks more manufacturing jobs would decrease male violence. Interesting.
Kansas: NRA Members’ Kids Should Die
A University of Kansas professor took his outrage over this week’s shooting at the Washington, D.C. Navy Yard too far. “The blood is on the hands of the #NRA. Next time, let it be YOUR sons and daughters. Shame on you. May God damn you,” journalism professor David Guth tweeted on Monday, following the shooting. The University of Kansas was not pleased with the teacher’s hateful comment and the school’s chancellor announced Friday that Guth had been suspended indefinitely. Earlier in the week, Guth told the website, Campus Reform, “Hell no, hell no, I do not regret that tweet. I don’t take it back one bit.”
American Family Association: Hillary Clinton Could Be the First Lesbian President
Hillary Clinton’s potential presidential election in 2016 would be a historic one, making her the first lesbian president of the United States. This is according to the American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer, who gets his information from Gennifer Flowers. The American Family Association is a non-profit Christian organization which the Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled a hate group for its anti-gay activism. Earlier this week, an American Family Association radio host suggested that the Starbucks CEO’s request that customers not bring guns to his coffee shops might result in the next mass shooting taking place in a Starbucks.) And Gennifer Flowers is, of course, one of the women with whom Hillary’s husband, President Bill Clinton, allegedly had an affair. Fischer spoke on AFA television this week of an interview Flowers gave to the Daily Mail, in which she claimed that she and Bill would be together today if it weren’t for his daughter, Chelsea. Hillary, Flowers said, is a bisexual and she’s not surprised by rumors that she and Huma Abedin are sexually involved, despite admitting to not knowing Abedin at all. That was enough for Fisher, though. “Bottom line is, if Hillary Clinton becomes president in 2016, she will not only be our first female president, she could be our first lesbian president,” he warned.
California: Ted Cruz Staffer's Kids Deserve to Die
Sacramento County's Democratic Party communications chair, Allen Brauer, landed himself in what a good communications person might consider a PR disaster. Brauer tweeted, Friday at Ted Cruz speechwriter Amanda Carpenter, "May your children all die from debilitating, painful and incurable diseases." When Carpenter noted that Brauer's hateful words should lose him some followers, he kept the nastiness coming. "Busy blocking the tapeworms that have slithered out of hellspawn @amandacarpenter's asshole," he continued, making clear that his words were sparked by Carpenter's boss's crusade against Obamacare. "I'm being attacked on Twitter for wishing one of Ted Cruz's public live to experience the pain and suffering her boss is inflicting on Americans," he wrote. "Yes, your party takes bread from the mouths of starving children and medicine from the sick, and I'm the problem. Got it.
On Peace Day, September 21, 2013, 9,000 human figures were drawn on a beach in Arromanches, France to commemorate the soldiers and civilians who died during D-Day, June 6, 1944. The installation, called “The Fallen,” was organized by Jamie Wardley and Andy Moss of Sandinyoureye. More than 500 volunteers used stencils to draw the figures on the beach. The installation was swept away a few hours later by the tide.
via Lustik, Colossal
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Sep 25, 2013
9 Out Of 10 Americans Are Completely Wrong About This Mind-Blowing Fact
This pretty much speaks for itself. At 1:05, I get a rude awakening. At 1:41, he starts talking about you. At 2:24, he says a "bad" word. At 3:50, he kind of breaks my brain. At 4:50, he lets you know how broke you really are. At 5:20, he rubs it in. And at 5:50, he points out that reality isn't close to what we think it is. This pretty much speaks for itself. At 1:05, I get a rude awakening. At 1:41, he starts talking about you. At 2:24, he says a "bad" word. At 3:50, he kind of breaks my brain. At 4:50, he lets you know how broke you really are. At 5:20, he rubs it in. And at 5:50, he points out that reality isn't close to what we think it is.
Ted Cruz’s war against Obamacare is a racket to raise his profile and millions of dollars. Patricia Murphy says even his Republican colleagues loathe him.
When Sen. Ted Cruz went to the Senate floor Tuesday to block a bill that would fund the federal government for the next two months, he said to the C-SPAN cameras, "We don't need fake fights. We don't need fake votes. What we need is real change."
via Youtube
But at that moment, Cruz was leading a fake fight over a fake vote that nearly all in Washington agree would never actually defund Obamacare the way Cruz said it would.
As for the “real change” Ted Cruz said he was looking for, that change has arrived in Washington, and the change is Ted Cruz himself. Almost single-handedly, the freshman Tea Party apostle has upended the clubby U.S. Senate, roiled the tradition-bound GOP, and revolutionized the business of power in the nation’s capital, all thanks to the health-care bill that Cruz, former senator Jim DeMint, and a small army of conservative operatives have essentially made a living out of hating.
"These guys aren't stupid. They can read the votes,” says a veteran Republican operative. “That's why Republicans are so infuriated. Folks know exactly why they're doing this. They are using this issue and misleading conservatives in order to expand their own influence and raise money for themselves."
“Audio Ammunition” is a 5-part documentary about The Clash, featuring interviews with Joe Strummer and the 3 other principal members of the iconic punk rock group
Photos of the Final Years of Hong Kong’s Notoriously Overcrowded Kowloon Walled City
In the late 80s and early 90s photographer Greg Girard documented the last years of Kowloon Walled City, a notoriously overcrowded and lawless Hong Kong enclave in which 33,000 people were crammed into a monolithic structure made up of 300 tightly packed, interconnected high-rises. Girard collaborated with fellow photographer Ian Lambot during the five-year project to produce a photo book on the enclave, City of Darkness: Life in Kowloon Walled City. Starting in 1991, Kowloon Walled City was gradually cleared of its inhabitants, and demolition was completed in 1994. For more photos see Girard’s photo gallery.
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The Instrumentals is a new series by the cdza collective in which they showcase a “soloist while telling a story about the instrument.” In their very first episode, “Journey of Guitar,” musician Mark Sidney Johnson performs 28 famous guitar solos from the last 50 years
If there are two things you should remember, it’s not to cross a Hutt, and that Mercury’s surface can throw up all kinds of surprises. In this image, a portion of the terrain surrounding the northern margin of the Caloris basin hosts an elevated block in the shape of a certain carbonite-encased smuggler who can make the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs. This block may be part of the original surface that pre-dates the formation of Caloris, which was shaped by material ejected during the basin-forming event.
Each of these stalwart monkeys and apes utilize specific weapons, clothing and support equipment in order to complete their challenging and dangerous tasks and missions.
New Jersey resident Roger Buchko created a massive, 350-pound replica of a Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum handgun as his mailbox. The project took a couple hours each day over a period of about four months to finish. “I built it because I can,” Buchko told the Daily News. “You know what I mean?”
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