Archaeologist Abdul Qader Hussan of the Rihab Centre for Archaeological Studies believes he has located the first Christian church, which lies beneath Saint Georgeous Church in Rihab, Mafraq.
“We have evidence to believe this church sheltered the early Christians: the 70 disciples of Jesus Christ,” the scholar said.
The early Christians, described in the mosaic inscription on St. Georgeous floor as “the 70 beloved by God and Divine”, are said to have fled from Jerusalem during the persecution of Christians, to the northern part of Jordan, particularly to Rihab, he added.
Citing historical sources, the expert said the 70 lived and practised their rituals in secrecy in this underground church.
We believe that they did not leave the cave and lived until the Christian religion was embraced by Roman rulers.
“It was then when St. Georgeous was built,” said Hussan.
Saint Georgeous is believed to be the oldest “proper” church in the world, built in 230AD. This status is only challenged by a church unearthed in Aqaba in 1998, also dating back to 3rd century.
The findings in the graveyard near the cave offer valuable clues, according to Hussan.
“We found pottery items that date back from the 3rd to 7th century,” he added. The findings show that the first Christians and their offshoot continued living in the area till the late Roman rule.
Detectives in Croatia have a little explaining to do. A woman by the name Hedviga Golik was reported as missing way back in 1966 when neighbors lost all sign of her. Apparently, no one thought to look in her apartment until yesterday. In order to establish who owned the long dormant apartment, cops finally entered and discovered the missing woman sitting in a chair in front of a black & white television. She had been sitting there for 42 years!
A police spokesman said: "So far, we have no idea how it is possible that someone officially reported missing so long ago was not found before in the same apartment she used to live in.
"When officers went there, they said it was like stepping into a place frozen in time.
"The cup she had been drinking tea from was still on a table next to the chair she had been sitting in and the house was full of things no one had seen for decades. Nothing had been disturbed for decades, even though there were more than a few cobwebs in there."
With more news outlets than ever, you'd think the American public would be well-informed...you'd be wrong. In this short and sweet lecture given at TED, Alisa Miller, CEO of Public Radio International, shows through charts and graphs that American news agencies have completely lost sight of their purpose.
My Money Blog has posted a rather awesome collection of fuel saving strategies you can use on hybrids and standard cars, which in some cases will earn you an impressive 30% boost in fuel economy.
Use an real-time fuel economy meter. If you don’t have a hybrid with a built-in meter, get yourself something like the ScanGuage II.
Inflate tires to much higher pressures. Higher tire pressures -> Lower rolling resistance -> better fuel economy. They recommend not just inflating to the psi recommended by your car, but the maximum sidewall rating allowed by your tire manufacturer. Some members even take advantage of the “factor of safety” that engineers use and pump it up to 25% over the max rating. 50+ psi is not unheard of.
Switch to a special motor oil. Using low kinematic viscosity oil helps improve mpg.
Forced Autostop: Turn off engine whenever possible. If you’re slowly stopping to a red light or just coasting, turn off your combustion engine completely (”force” it to “stop”). Keep the engine off while idle, and only start it up when you’re ready to go again. This reduces losses due to running the engine at idle.
Japan has a new fad on its hands, though one that hopefully won't be exported any time soon. In the last month alone, 60 people have committed suicide using a mixture of detergent and other chemicals, a recipe that is currently making the Internet rounds. Add this recent trend to Japan's current #1 status as a country with the most suicides and you have something bordering on epidemic.
Bill Bramanti of Illinois has made his future coffin look like a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon, ensuring his place in the White Trash Hall of Fame. Pabst Blue Ribbon? I wasn't even aware people still drank that crap. Sorts of tastes like an unsubmitted urine test.
Apparently you should be enjoying current gas prices, as two analysts are insisting that crude will be selling for $200 a barrel within 2-3 years.
Translating this price into dollars and cents at the gas pump, one of our forecasters, the chairman of Houston-based Dune Energy, Alan Gaines, sees gas rising to $7–$8 a gallon. The other, a commodities tracker at Weiss Research in Jupiter, Fla., Sean Brodrick, projects a range of $8 to $10 a gallon.
Early last year, with a barrel of oil trading in the low $50s and gasoline nationally selling in a range of $2.30 to $2.50 a gallon, Mr. Gaines — in an impressive display of crystal ball gazing — accurately predicted oil was $100-bound and that gasoline would follow suit by reaching $4 a gallon.
Whether this prediction pans out or not, the global community is in for a world of hurt, one way or another, unless serious steps are taken to address our energy consumption. We put a man on the moon because we wanted to, and we can solve our energy problems if we put our collective minds at work. Unfortunately, if history is any indicator, we'll wait until it's too late, inevitably finding ourself living in a Mad Max future.
Say what you want about PETA, but you can't criticize the group for continually parading naked women in front of cameras in an effort to strengthen their cause for animal rights. In this case, two women are taking a shower right in the middle of Times Square. What was the issue again?
I've never heard of the Capuchin Catacombs in Pelermo, Sicily, but after viewing photographs of the place, I must say it appears to be a macabre paradise. It looks like The Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland exploded all over the place, with one wall after another adorned with actual mummies.
The catacomb holds roughly 8000 mummies, most of which are placed in poses that must surely please George Romero.
The New Yorker has posted a fascinating article by Nick Paumgarten titled "Up and Then Down - The Lives of Elevators". It covers a wide-range of topics, with special emphasis on one man in particular, Nicholas White, who was once trapped in an elevator for 40-hours.
Nicholas White opened the doors to urinate. As he did so, he hoped, in vain, that a trace of this violation might get the attention of someone in the lobby. He considered lighting matches and dropping them down the shaft, to attract notice, but still had the presence of mind to suspect that this might not be wise. The alarm bell kept ringing. He paced and waved at the overhead camera. He couldn’t tell whether it was night or day. To pass the time, he opened his wallet and compared an old twenty-dollar bill with a new one, and read the fine print on the back of a pair of tickets to a Jets game on Sunday afternoon, which he would never get to use. He imagined himself as Steve McQueen in “The Great Escape,” throwing the baseball against the wall. Eventually, he lay down on the floor, intent on sleep.
Nicholas White was never the same after his ordeal and it's a rather depressing story, but well worth your time. Perhaps more intriguing than the story is the actual security video that was taken from a camera within the elevator that documented the entirety of his ordeal. It's presented in time-lapse and stands as an eerily moving experience, which you can view here.
The Atlantic Monthly has a thought-provoking article written by Matt Miller that rips the U.S. educational system a new a-hole. I think we can all agree that education in the U.S. is a disaster, especially when compared to test results from just about every other country. Unfortunately, we've been agreeing on this topic for decades now and nothing ever seems to get fixed.
The United States spends more than nearly every other nation on schools, but out of 29 developed countries in a 2003 assessment, we ranked 24th in math and in problem-solving, 18th in science, and 15th in reading. Half of all black and Latino students in the U.S. don’t graduate on time (or ever) from high school. As of 2005, about 70 percent of eighth-graders were not proficient in reading. By the end of eighth grade, what passes for a math curriculum in America is two years behind that of other countries.
So we spend more...and get less. Anyone see a problem with this? Instead of harping on the overall issue, Mr. Miller focuses on the root of the problem by targeting his perceived culprit: school boards.
The dirty little secret of local control is the enormous tax advantage it confers on better-off Americans: communities with high property wealth can tax themselves at low rates and still generate far more dollars per pupil than poor communities taxing themselves heavily. This wasn’t always the case: in the 19th century, property taxes were rightly seen as the fairest way to pay for education, since property was the main form of wealth, and the rich and poor tended to live near one another. But the rise of commuter suburbs since World War II led to economically segregated communities; today, the spending gap between districts can be thousands of dollars per pupil.
It's time for changes, but it will only happen if you pressure your representatives. Enough talk. Enough statistics. It's time for an overhaul.
If it's true that the purpose of traffic tickets is to deter speeding and promote public safety, then local municipalities and law enforcement should be ecstatic over the recent launching of the website Trapster.com. So what is it? For those who sign up and participate in the free service, it turns their mobile phone into the modern-day equivalent of a CB Radio and every other member into a respective Daisy Duke or Cooter, ready to help you avoid Sheriff Roscoe P. Coltrain's speed traps.
No, participants aren't expected to wear distracting cut-off jeans or use a tow truck to "accidentally" block the Sheriff's path. Instead, once someone detects a sneaky cruiser hiding behind a bend in the road or, as happens in my neighborhood, a motorcycle officer parked behind some bushes on someone's private driveway (!), they enter a numerical code into their phone which uses it's GPS chip to map the trap. Later, other members who drive by will get an audible alert on their phone warning them of the hidden public safety promoter. Of course it's no help against Boss Hog's remote control speed limit signs nor does it change the real motivation behind speeding tickets.
The April issue of the British Journal of Psychiatry has an interesting report involving research into paranoia. It appears the general populace is far more paranoid than initially thought.
In our daily interactions with others, we pick up on facial and other cues that help us judge whether or not to trust another person. These judgments, however, are error-prone and can lead to exaggerated or unfounded fears about threats from others. These paranoid thoughts can range from thinking strangers are looking at you critically, or that others are spreading nasty rumors about you, to the feeling that others are deliberately trying to harm you in some way.
I personally believe paranoia serves a great evolutionary service, as without it, we probably wouldn't be here as a species. It's when the feeling cripples you that problems arise, rationality melting away.
Freeman and his colleagues equipped 200 volunteers with virtual reality headsets. The volunteers stepped into a virtual London underground subway, where they walked around during the four-minute trip between stations. Scattered throughout the train car were avatars that breathed, looked around and sometimes met a participant's gaze. One avatar read a newspaper and another occasionally smiled if looked at.
The participants reacted differently to the same avatars. While the volunteers most commonly perceived the virtual train riders as friendly or neutral, nearly 40 percent of participants reported at least one paranoid thought.
"It is an excellent example of the importance of interpretation," Freeman told LiveScience. "Two people can see the same things but draw completely opposite conclusions."
Have you ever had a paranoid experience that changed the way you approached a specific situation? Did it turn out to be real or was it all an illusion?
I guess I've been out of it, as I had no idea pen spinning was a talent, let alone a sport that merits an association. Nor did I know that a Pen Spinning champ is crowned every year, with the latest king being Ryuki Omura, a 16-year-old Japanese high school student.
From Reuters:
According to the Pen Spinning Association's Web site, spinning tricks range from "normal" -- resting the pen on the side of the middle finger, then flicking it to writing mode -- to "sonic" -- holding the pen between the middle and ring fingers, and twirling it so it rests between the middle and index fingers.
There's a video of Ryuki in action at the official site, though I can't seem to figure out where it is, as my Japanese isn't up to snuff this morning. However, I did find an amazing video that spotlights what this craze is all about.
According to Lifehackery, there are 50 useful things you can do with tennis balls. Interestingly, tennis is not one of the 50. I had no idea these things were so multifaceted. I can now gaze upon a can of unopened tennis balls with newfound respect, realizing the endless possibilities awaiting within.
34) Keep the yuckiness out of your pool by floating some tennis balls in the water. Supposedly, the balls will absorb body oils from people who swim in the water - but you need to replace them every few weeks to keep them fresh.
Now what I find fascinating in this feature is that it abolishes the one use for tennis balls I had confidence in, namely, a dog toy. Wrong!
Some words of caution: tennis balls should not be used as dog toys. The felt that covers them can wear down a dog’s teeth. Larger dogs can choke on tennis balls. Ask your veterinarian for advice on alternative toys.
