frezik

And they validated this data 4 times. It's really good data.

This is getting a little beyond my knowledge, but it appears to me that polytheistic oral cultures tended not to care too much. For example, Caligula followed the Cult of Isis, an Egyptian god. This doesn't seem to be particularly unusual. Everybody was in some kind of cult; they functioned more like social clubs with "secret" knowledge (that was probably unremarkable and disappointing, tbh), something like the modern Masons.

The exceptions to this "let everyone believe whatever" seem to have been Judaism and Christianity. Judaism had long since thrown off its monolatry (many gods exist, but we have this one primary one; early parts of the Hebrew scriptures read this way) and became fully monotheistic (only our god exists). Christianity grows up from that to be monotheisitc from the start. This is something that simply does not jive with polytheistic religions around them. Rome would let you believe whatever else you want as long as you recognized the Imperial Cult, but Judaism and Christianity refused. That's why they were both heavily persecuted for a time under the Roman Empire.

An interesting insight I gathered from a Bart Ehrman lecture somewhere is that cultures that have a primarily oral-based tradition don't care as much about consistency in their lore. Not because they're dumb or anything; it just doesn't matter to them as much.

Both Judaism and Christianity started as oral traditions. That's why you have two separate creation stories in Genesis, and different accounts of how Judas died, and the wildly different Gnostic tradition of Christianity. It doesn't go much deeper than that: an oral culture that used these stories as parables that weren't really meant as literal truth, but later got treated that way when it evolved into a written culture.

This is a Gnostic gospel, and they have their own cosmology that breaks with the mainstream Judeo-Christian traditional entirely. By their account, there was a singular creator god, but there were also a bunch of lesser gods. The ancient Jews inadvertently started worshiping one of these lesser gods, mistakenly thinking he was the main guy. Jesus came to set all this straight, and Judas was the only apostle who really figured this out.

Jesus is a very different character in these. He usually comes off as an asshole. In particular, see the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, where a young Jesus kills his friends with his mind for not sharing the ball: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gA8hXDJocQ

Is it more fantastical? Not really, but it's not marching in the same direction as the rest of the story. It's the difference between Captain Picard's mom dying when he was young when we saw him dream her as an old woman, versus Captain Picard walking on the bridge and kicking Riker straight in the nuts for no reason and then lighting up a joint. One is a contradiction, but not really that important when it comes down to it (unless you insist that the material is absolutely true, in which case you have other problems). The other is so far off from the character's normal behavior that we have to assume something is wrong.

Depends on which story you believe. Matthew says he hung himself. Acts says he fell and busted his head open in a more accidental way. And then there's a few other accounts that aren't in the biblical canon.

Seems like most of them moved on to vaccines, election tampering, and flat earth. Other than the odd blurb about 5G (ignoring older generations and WiFi), I barely hear at all about cell phones causing cancer anymore. Used to be all over Reddit.

It was still pretty out there. RF in these frequencies isn't new. Radar installations have been using them for decades before, and at far higher power levels than what comes out of any cell phone.

Not only that, but today's cell phones tend to use less output power than those old bricks from the '80s. If there were issues, we'd expect early adopters to be affected all the more, and there just wasn't anything there.

Could there be a difference in how the signal works between radar, analog phones, and digital phones that causes a problem? If it had, it would have been a big surprise. Still, there was a crack of possibility open, which is now sealed shut.

WHO uses the precautionary principle a little too hard sometimes. If it was carcinogenic at all, it'd be at a very small rate.

Tom's Hardware wrote plenty of junk back in the day. I remember articles where Tom's Hardware would say "AMD trashes Intel in this benchmark", but the difference was barely measurable. It was like they had a form fill for what to say after showing a graph. If one side was ahead by any margin at all, it trashed the competition.

Anandtech was more sobering, but their website was a mess. Go to any section of the site (storage, gpus, whatever) and product announcements are sorted together with reviews. There are about ten product announcements for every review. When trying to get a comparison of different products for a build, it was hard to track down a useful article.

Neither site had much changed their layout in 20 years, but Tom's Hardware at least makes it easier to find what you want.

Broadly, yes. They're 12 year olds being pushed into unsafe diet and exercise plans, often with very high pressure coming from parents and coaches. The Olympic committee was right to raise the minimum competition age over the last few decades, but this shit still happens.

It's curious that things went this way. Broadcom originally made these chips for the cheapass end of the tablet market, but I thought RPi was gobbling up the entire supply. Why put in those features in the first place when the Pi5 wasn't going to use them?

Seems to be a constant problem with the Rasbperry Pi Foundation designs. They've often screwed up their power design.

Not that using shitty old phone chargers was ever going to work, but it should never have been as picky as it was.

Tell that to the 12 year old gymnastics competitors I ran into once outside a venue when it was 40 degrees out. They have a very low body fat percentage.

That's a sport that should probably die off, at least in anything like its current form, along with American Football.