Clipmarks | invictus's clips

No Moses, no Joshua, no (so-called) monotheism

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 20:11:06 GMT

clipped by: invictus
clipper's remarks:

"In the text you have the story of the Israelites coming from outside, and then besieging the Canaanite cities, destroying them and then becoming a nation in the land of Canaan. Whereas archaeology tells us something which is the opposite. According to archaeology, the rise of early Israel is an outcome of the collapse of Canaanite society, not the reason for that collapse."

* The principle of monotheism (the worship of a single deity), established first by the Jews and later to form the foundation for both Christianity and Islam, took much longer to take root than most people assume. In fact, the archaeological discovery of troves of household idols in ancient Canaanite towns and cities proves that the Israelites practiced polytheism long after they had been thought to have discarded the practice.

Clip Source: www.jewishtucson.org

A new, two-hour edition of "Nova" begins with the pro vocative words, "God is dead," but the documentary is anything but an obituary for the Almighty.

Perhaps not surprisingly to some, the archaeological facts outlined in "The Bible's Buried Secrets" fly in the face of some of the strongest assertions of the Bible.

Among the findings that are likely to produce angry reactions from literal believers in the Bible:

* Though the story of the Hebrew nation's exodus from Egypt under the leadership of Moses is the most oft-mentioned incident in the Old Testament (according to the film), no real evidence of the event has ever been found.

* Archaeological evidence overwhelmingly supports a scenario in direct opposition to the biblical account of Joshua, the story in which the forerunners of the Jews - the Israelites - became established in Canaan

Tags: religion, judaism, monotheism, archaeology, israel

California burning

Sat, 15 Nov 2008 21:16:26 GMT

clipped by: invictus
clipper's remarks: Californian clippers, take care...

Clip Source: news.yahoo.com

Los Angeles firefighters douse a burning hillside with water during a wind driven wildfire in northern Los Angeles on Saturday, Nov. 15, 2008. The fire sent thousands of residents fleeing in the dark, forcing a hospital to evacuate and destroyed an untold number of homes.

Tags: california, wildfire

New Pyramid Found in Egypt

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 20:04:34 GMT

clipped by: invictus

Clip Source: dsc.discovery.com

Nov. 11, 2008 -- Egypt's chief archaeologist has announced the discovery of a 4,300-year-old pyramid in Saqqara, the sprawling necropolis and burial site of the rulers of ancient Memphis.

The pyramid is said to belong to Queen Sesheshet, the mother of King Teti who was the founder of the 6th Dynasty of Egypt's Old Kingdom.

Egypt's antiquities chief Zahi Hawass made the announcement Tuesday at the site in Saqqara, about 12 miles south of Cairo.

Hawass' team has been excavating the site for two years. He says the discovery was only made two months ago when it became clear that the 16-foot-tall structure uncovered from the sand was a pyramid.

Hawass says the new pyramid is the 118th discovered so far in Egypt.

Tags: archaeology, egypt, pyramids, egyptology

It's been 3 years, guys...

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 20:30:17 GMT

clipped by: invictus

Clip Source: omega.wordpress.com

Yes guys, time runs really fast. Three years ago today, I joined Clipmarks and my online experience has never been the same since the very first day I start clipping. No other web site, online service or community could give me so much valuable things that Clipmarks and the “clippiverse” generously offered. I enjoyed every single day very much and I learned so many things here, following your clips or reading your comments. More important than this, I have many good friends now all around the world - some of them have already become “old pals” for me.

So, thank you again EricG, Adam, EricSkiff, Derek and EricW: I owe all these to you. Hope to celebrate my 4th, 5th, 6th ….. clippiversaries here together!

And dear clippers, my friends, thank you for sharing your knowledge, feelings, recommendations and friendship.

Tags: clipmarks

12,000-year-old female shaman’s bones found

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 00:49:11 GMT

clipped by: invictus
clipper's remarks: An amazing discovery.

Clip Source: www.gulf-times.com

Archaeologists have found the 12,000-old skeleton of a female shaman buried in northern Israel alongside 50 tortoises, body parts of a leopard, a boar and other animals as well as a human foot.
The burial site is among the earliest known of a shaman, or healer, according to the archaeological team led by Leore Grosman of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

The grave was found during excavations of a 12,000-year-old cave site of the Natufian culture in Hilazon Tachtit, in the Galilee area of northern Israel.
Analysis of the bones show that the shaman was 45 years old, petite and had an unnatural, asymmetrical appearance due to a spinal disability that would have affected the woman’s gait, causing her to limp or drag her foot.
The burial site was unlike any from the Natufian or the preceding Paleolithic periods discovered to date, said Grosman.

Tags: archaeology, anthropology, prehistory, israel, shaman, natufian

Welcome back, "Blue America"

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 05:42:14 GMT

clipped by: invictus
clipper's remarks: It's exciting witnessing the history... The eight-year-long nightmare is over at last.

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

Barack Hussein Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States on Tuesday, sweeping away the last racial barrier in American politics with ease as the country chose him as its first black chief executive.

Mr. Obama’s election amounted to a national catharsis — a repudiation of a historically unpopular Republican president and his economic and foreign policies, and an embrace of Mr. Obama’s call for a change in the direction and the tone of the country. But it was just as much a strikingly symbolic moment in the evolution of the nation’s fraught racial history, a breakthrough that would have seemed unthinkable just two years ago.

Tags: barack obama, elections, united states

Obama moves to brink of historic win

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 03:50:57 GMT

clipped by: invictus
clipper's remarks: Congrats go to all my American friends...

Clip Source: www.reuters.com

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Democrat Barack Obama moved to the brink of becoming the first black U.S. president on Tuesday with a breakthrough win in Ohio, leaving Republican John McCain fighting for his political life.

Tags: elections, united states, barack obama, democrats

"Spider God" Temple Found in Peru

Sat, 01 Nov 2008 00:46:46 GMT

clipped by: invictus
clipper's remarks: Watch the video at the source site.

Clip Source: news.nationalgeographic.com

A 3,000-year-old temple featuring an image of a spider god may hold clues to little-known cultures in ancient Peru.

People of the Cupisnique culture, which thrived from roughly 1500 to 1000 B.C., built the temple in the Lambayeque valley on Peru's north coast.

The finds suggest that the three valley sites may have been part of a large capital for divine worship, said archaeologist Walter Alva, director of the Royal Tombs of Sipán Museum.

The entire religious complex houses every ancient Peruvian architectural style up to the Inca, Walter Alva said, one of only a few sites in Peru that spans so many cultures.

The spider-god image appears often in other sites created during Peru's Early Formative Period, 1200 to 400 B.C.

Tags: archaeology, south america, peru, pre-inca

'Oldest Hebrew script' is found

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 22:00:00 GMT

clipped by: invictus

Clip Source: news.bbc.co.uk

Five lines of ancient script on a shard of pottery could be the oldest example of Hebrew writing ever discovered, an archaeologist in Israel says.

The shard was found by a teenage volunteer during a dig about 20km (12 miles) south-west of Jerusalem.

Experts at Hebrew University said dating showed it was written 3,000 years ago - about 1,000 years earlier than the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Other scientists cautioned that further study was needed to understand it.

Preliminary investigations since the shard was found in July have deciphered some words, including judge, slave and king.

The characters are written in proto-Canaanite, a precursor of the Hebrew alphabet.

Tags: archaeology, israel, middle east, hebrew, writing

Wealth gap creating a social time bomb

Fri, 24 Oct 2008 18:37:12 GMT

clipped by: invictus

Clip Source: www.guardian.co.uk

Growing inequality in US cities could lead to widespread social unrest and increased mortality, says a new United Nations report on the urban environment.

"High levels of inequality can lead to negative social, economic and political consequences that have a destabilising effect on societies," said the report. "[They] create social and political fractures that can develop into social unrest and insecurity."

According to the annual State of the World's cities report from UN-Habitat, race is one of the most important factors determining levels of inequality in the US and Canada.

"It is clear that social tension comes from inequality. The trickle down theory [that wealth starts with the rich] has not delivered. Inequality is not good for anybody," said Anna Tibaijuka, head of UN-Habitat, in London yesterday.

Tags: inequality, economy, capitalism, wealth

yBook: Free e-book reader

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 23:01:01 GMT

clipped by: invictus
clipper's remarks: A free etext reader with a built in "Project Gutenberg" catalogue, which makes to download a book a snap. Couple of nice features - easy to use.

Clip Source: www.spacejock.com

Freeware pdb, text, html and rtf ebook reader software

Features:

Runs on any Windows PC (Win95 or later)
Display your book on side-by-side or single pages.
Resize the pages, adjust the margins, set text and paper colour.
Text, html and RTF reader
PDB and PRC reader
Search for words or phrases
Automatic bookmarks
Text sizes from tiny to HUGE
No zooming, panning or scrolling
Direct download of all Gutenberg titles, with index.
Internationalised menus - Spanish, German, etc

Completely free to use: No registration, no adware, no spyware.

Tags: books, etext, free, reading, software

World's Most Advanced Microscope Unveiled

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 22:14:59 GMT

clipped by: invictus
clipper's remarks: "The Hubble Telescope" of microcosmos.

Clip Source: www.sciencedaily.com

ScienceDaily (Oct. 23, 2008) — It's the equivalent of taking the Hubble Telescope and aiming it at the atomic level rather than at stars and galaxies, says Gianluigi Botton, director of the new Canadian Centre for Electron Microscopy at McMaster, site of the world's most advanced and powerful electron microscope.

The Titan 80-300 Cubed was installed at the University early in the summer, and since then it has been put through its paces to achieve unprecedented resolution, and is quickly gaining attention from the media and scientists who work in the field.

"We are certainly the first university in the world with a microscope of such a high calibre," says Botton. "With this microscope we can now easily identify atoms, measure their chemical state and even probe the electrons that bind them together."

Mo Elbestawi, McMaster's vice-president, Research and International Affairs, says the power of the microscope is making McMaster a hub for a fast growing field.

Tags: microscopes, optics, science

Plants send S.O.S. signal when under attack

Mon, 20 Oct 2008 02:06:30 GMT

clipped by: invictus
clipper's remarks: This reminded me the legendary (and controversial) book of the '70s, "The Secret Life of Plants".

Clip Source: www.sciencedaily.com

ScienceDaily (Oct. 17, 2008) — Researchers at the University of Delaware have discovered that when the leaf of a plant is under attack by a pathogen, it can send out an S.O.S. to the roots for help, and the roots will respond by secreting an acid that brings beneficial bacteria to the rescue.

The finding quashes the misperception that plants are “sitting ducks”--at the mercy of passing pathogens--and sheds new light on a sophisticated signaling system inside plants that rivals the nervous system in humans and animals.

Top: This Arabidopsis plant infected with the pathogen Pseudomonas syringae shows typical yellowing and disease symptoms. Bottom: This plant's roots were treated with the beneficial bacterium Bacillus subtilis. (Credit: Photos by Thimmaraju Rudrappa)

Tags: plants, biology, science

The Crisis: Q & A by Walden Bello

Sun, 19 Oct 2008 15:35:32 GMT

clipped by: invictus
clipper's remarks:

We’re seeing the intensification of one of the central crises or contradictions of global capitalism: the crisis of overproduction, also known as overaccumulation or overcapacity.

In other words, capitalism has a tendency to build up tremendous productive capacity that outruns the population’s capacity to consume owing to social inequalities that limit popular purchasing power, thus eroding profitability.

Clip Source: www.fpif.org

Did greed cause the collapse of global capitalism’s nerve center?

Good old-fashioned greed certainly played a part. This is what Klaus Schwab, the organizer of the World Economic Forum, the yearly global elite jamboree in the Swiss Alps, meant when he said in an interview earlier this year: “We have to pay for the sins of the past.”

Was this a case of Wall Street outsmarting itself?

Definitely. Financial speculators outsmarted themselves by creating more and more complex financial contracts like derivatives that would securitize and make money from all forms of risk — including such exotic futures instruments as “credit default swaps” that enable investors to bet on the odds that the banks’ own corporate borrowers would not be able to pay their debts

Was it lack of regulation?

Yes. Everyone acknowledges by now that Wall Street’s capacity to innovate and turn out more and more sophisticated financial instruments had run far ahead of government’s regulatory capability

Tags: economy, finance, crisis, finance-capital, capitalism, globalism, wall street

Exposing the 'Jesus' Brother' Fraud

Sun, 19 Oct 2008 03:34:18 GMT

clipped by: invictus

Clip Source: www.time.com

For as long as man has worshipped a god, there have been forgers, crafty hucksters who seize on a believer's desire to possess material proof of the divine. In Jerusalem, it is a bountiful trade.

But indisputable historical evidence that Jesus Christ, or any of the other Biblical prophets, truly existed is something that eludes religious scholars. There was therefore much excitement in 2001 when a reclusive Tel Aviv collector, Oded Golan, announced that a stone reliquary had come into his possession inscribed with the words "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus."

After a two-year investigation, police in December 2004 charged the antiquities collector and four others of forgery, alleging that the James ossuary was a clever fake and that Golan had masterminded an international ring of thieves that over the past 20 years had duped major museums and collectors out of millions.

Tags: archaeology, james ossuary, fraud, israel