How long, oh Lord?

I find this article fascinating. It follows a long tradition. Eggs are bad...eggs are good. Wine bad...wine good. Olive oil EVIL...olive oil health secret sent from God. The list goes on (btw smoking lowers your risk of alzheimer's) and on. What's great about this article is that Gerberding, one of the government scientists, is so opposed to the new findings. Her career, as well as the careers of thousands of other government workers and the budgets of many government agencies, are dependent upon the continued belief that people over a certain BMI have a higher mortality rate. Who knows if it was actually ever true, who cares? If, decades ago, someone decided that being UNDERweight was horribly, horribly bad for you, and a government bureaucracy was built around that, the same scientists would now be arguing about the dangers of being skinny. It's not about what's true, it's about what reinforces what people already believe and/or have a financial stake in. If this were a business matter, the companies involved would be under investigation now, and if this were a religous matter, church-members would be being pilloried for continuing to believe in a discredited system.

Oh, yes...and by the way, some anchient Christian texts...

This story caught my eye. I have to look into it more. The implications are pretty cool, maybe some more Sophocles and such. I remember watching a special on scientists figuring out how to read the text in a book that had been hidden by someone else writing over it. They discovered that somebody, Euclid I think, had discovered calculus, like 2000 years before everyone else had. Wait...nope... it was Archimedes, 1000 years before everyone else (I found an article (is it "discovered" or "invented" for math?). Anyway, it's pretty cool. Maybe we'll find out that Euripides wrote "Hey, Jude" 2000 years before John Lennon did or something.

I really liked how they threw in "oh, yeah, maybe some Christian Gospels..." at the end. "Scientists have found some works of some folks that probably only a few million people on Earth have ever of, and even less have even studdied!!! Wow!!! oh, and btw, they also found some... whazzit? 'gospels,' do they call them? that a couple of billion people use as the foundation of their lives *yawn*." Ain't it always the way? :)

I'm not sure about the ages of the oldest existing copies of the Gospels...hmmm...lemme look. Nope, couldn't find a source online that I trusted, but I think that the oldest copies come from around 350 AD. So, this could be a major find, possibly bigger than the Dead Sea Scrolls, depending upon the accuracy of this article. Let me 'splain. No, is too much. Let me sum up.

1. The article says "up to 2000" years. A nice phrase that could literally mean anywhere between 2000 years ago and, well, right now. So, the "Lost Christian Gospels" could be that little Bible that I lost in 1990 (I miss that little Bible).
2. What does "a series of Christian gospels" mean? Do they mean Matthew, Mark, Luke and John? Do they mean extra-cannonical (non-Biblical) gospels, like the "Gnostic gospels," which are nothing more than heresy? or do they mean copies of other New Testament books?
3. If they are authentic Biblical books and can be properly dated AND are old enough they could have the same effect on liberal Biblical scholars that the Dead Sea Scrolls did (the Dead Sea Scrolls disproved some of the liberal scholars ideas about the origins of the book of Isaiah, it didn't necessarally change their minds, it just proved them wrong). Scholars who don't want to believe that certain parts of the Bible are authentic (written when and by whom traditional Christian scholarship says they were) like to play fast and loose with the dates that the books of the Bible were written (i.e. they usually have prophetic books being written after the events that they prophesy about took place). So...if, say, liberal scholarship says that the book of Matthew was written by my grandfather in 1916 and I can find a copy of the Gospel in a Bible copyrighted 1915, then they have to admit they are wrong (actually, they would probably question the accuracy of the copyright). Thus, if the people examining these documents finds a copy of Mark that existed in the year 90 A.D. (or somesuch), then it would disprove anyone who said that it was written later. That's kinda what happened with the Dead Sea Scrolls re the book of Isaiah.

I'll have to look into this more.

This is why I will not sell computers :)

Hokey smoke!! I was just reading this book (well, the excerpts anyway). It made me sad(reality==depressing). Go ahead and read it...I'll wait.


Ya see? The author goes into great detail about how low the profit margin is for building computers yourself. Actually, any hardware-related sales seems to be a losing proposition. My favorite part was the "sell $200,000 worth of computers in a year but only take home $17,000 profit" bit. I looked around the Web for other company's prices and
this Dell system cemented it. $298 for a computer with a 17" monitor, Windows XP Home, WordPerfect and a free printer. I'm not even going to try to compete with that. The cheapest 17 inch monitor I could get locally is over $100 (I really don't want to mail-order stuff like I should, and I doubt I could get that much cheeper anyway) and Windows XP Home is $80 (with the perchase of a hard drive ($55) or somesuch), then there is the case ($22). Lessee...that's $257 without a motherboard, memory, a mouse, a keyboard, or a CPU (then there is labor and maintainance...). Sooooooo... it looks like I'm going to be "selling my time" (see the above book link..fer real this time) doing on-site computer and network repair. Which is what I wanted to do in the first place, so...good. No inventory, no returns, less hassle. And now, if anyone asks me why I don't sell computers I'm just gonna say "Dimension 2400." Of course, if they want me to charge them $60 or so to order it and set it up for them...I'm cool with that :).


There... no computer sales...decision made. Whew.... Now I just have to come up with a name.