"Sire, I had no need of that hypothesis", as Laplace said when Napoleon wondered how the famous mathmatician had managed to write his book without mentioning God.
Steam just tossed me a baker's dozen of the damn things, so if you want one or know someone who does, by all means let me know :)
No comments | Permalink | Give thumb upHi there, glad to be alive? I sure am! Feels like we dodged another bullet there, December 21st has arrived, no fiery balls of death or biblical plagues to be seen!
Phew! Let's all take a nice, deep breath and take a moment to look back on all those times this beautiful little human world of ours came withing a hair's breadth of total annihilation!...according to those guys with the sandwich boards at least.
Now us humans seem to have built up a little fetish with these doomsday scenarios. Peculiarly enough (well maybe not so much) many of the end of the world scares had a direct link to Christianity. Apocalypses and second comings abound for all ages! Here's a little summup since going into any sort of detail would take ages. These are just a FEW of the many many many times we almost all died and the people that announced the joyous news.
Earliest Christians - 1 generation after Christ's death
The Montanists - sometime in their lifetime (handy that)
Hilary of Poitiers - 365, cause fancy number!
Martin of Tours - By the year 400, fanciER number!
Hippolytus of Rome, Sextus Julius Africanus AND Irenaeus - The year 500, cause how much fancier can you get really?!
Beatus of Liébana - 793, Apr 6, announced the end of the world to a crowd of people, looked like a bit of a tit afterwards
Gregory of Tours - somewhere 799 and 806, the magic of math!
Sextus Julius Africanus - 800...remember this guy from before? Yeah, changed his mind.
Thiota - 848, was really hoping to miss dinner with the in-laws
Pope Sylvester II - The year 1000...cause COME ON! This is like the best number ever!
Some Christian guys - 1033, one big fancy number after the death of Christ, surely this will work eventually?!
Various christian prophets - 1184...went to the same party
John of Toledo - A new technique! Predicted the end of the world through planetary alignment, never went out of style since!
Joachim of Fiore - somewhere between 1200 and 1260, cause fuck it that sounds about right
Pope Innocent III - 1284 (666 years after rise of Islam), this one came from the guys at PR
Joachimites - followers of Joachim, pretended everything was fine after 1260, revised to 1290...and then to 1335...look we forgot to carry the one okay?!
Europeans - 1346–51, the black plague...okay, that one made some sense
Quite frankly, this list is so long it just silly to list all of them. Here's a few more to round off.
Melchior Hoffman (with that name, I'd believe him!) - 1533 in strassbourg, He claimed that 144,000 people would be saved, while the rest of the world would be consumed by fire.
Martin Luther (yes that one) - Was conviced the world would be over by 1600
Some Christians again - 1656...1656 is the number of years between Creation and the Great Flood in the bible. See now they we're starting to get creative! Think outside the box and all that.
Christians - 1666, aaaaand back to the fancy number theory!
The Prophet Hen of Leeds (yes a chicken) - In Leeds, England in 1806 a hen began laying eggs on which the phrase "Christ is coming" was written. Eventually it was discovered to be a hoax. The hoaxster had written on the eggs in a corrosive ink so as to etch the eggs, and reinserted the eggs back into the hen.
Okay, that's a good one to cap the list off with! Besides, it's all the same afterwards really.
MORAL OF THE STORY
Probably best to keep acting like everything will be fine :)
http://www.waroftheroses-community.com/index.php
This website only just took off, so user count is still a little low. If you're interested in the game, please do pay us a visit! I'm on there all the time, so I'll be sure to catch you ;)
If you're not familiar with the game, Think of an RTS castle builder basically. If you're not familiar with kickstarter, it's a website where people pledge money to help finance projects such as game development that they find interesting. In return they offer certain incentives for certain amounts of money pledged. Starting at $15, you will get Beta access as well as the full game as soon as it's released! How cheap is that? That's like half off.
Now, this kickstarter was started yesterday. It will run 29 more days. they have ALREADY exceeded their target of $80 000, at the time of writing it stands at a WHOPPING $192,139! In other words, their budget just exploded.
So by Jove get in on this! Not even a Scotsman is cheap enough to say no to this.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/902505202/castle-story
And if you're planning on signing up, do us a favour and use this here referal link: http://www.waroftherosesthegame.com/?ref=c7d091a3a8a
So I can get in there quicker ^_^
Today, CERN announced the results of it's most recent efforts to dicover the elusive Higgs Boson. Both of the massive detectors tasked with this search have
reported.
The CMS detector announces the discovery of a boson with a mass of 125.3 ± 0.6 GeV (Giga Electron Volt, a unit of energy) within 4.9 standard deviations (or sigma). Atlas detector results lie closer to 126 GeV, also at the level of 5 sigma. Interesting fact is that these energy ranges are roughly 130 times as high as those of a proton, indicating that this single particle is heavier than most commonly found elements. It really is massive.
These findings meet the formal level required to announce a new particle which is "consistent with" the Higgs boson, but scientists are cautious as to whether it is formally identified as actually being the Higgs boson, pending further analysis.
For those not familiar with the Higgs Boson, Firstly I would like to welcome you back from your lengthy stay undar a rock! Secondly, it is a fundamental particle in the so-called "standard-model" of physics, which is the currently used model to interpret and explain the universe.
On a more advanced level, the Higgs Boson is supposedly the particle that gives ALL other particles their mass. It is created by the exitation of the Higgs-field (analogeous to an electro-magnetic field), which is found everywhere in the universe. This is the reason they needed such a large particle accelerator to find it, since it requires collisions of truly massive proportions to even stand a chance of creating these particles.
HAPPY HIGGS DAY EVERYONE! ^_^
If you'd like to sign up to the beta, just make a quick account here: http://beta.salemthegame.com/?ref=72f13599492
Might be an interesting game.
You see the title, Merry Christmas you bloody bugger!
No comments | Permalink | Give thumb uphttp://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-16212418
"British-born author, literary critic and journalist Christopher Hitchens has died at the age of 62."
The world lost one of it's greatest and sharpest minds today. I never met the man, but I can't help feeling personally afflicted by his loss. His writing and his recorded dabates played a role in the development of my own rationality and steeled the lack of my religious beliefs. If we had more of his caliber, the world would be a better place.
And the speciffically, the mod called Mount&Musket? (If you don't, I can't recommend it highly enough btw.)
If any of the people here do, you are hereby invited to join the 16te Westphalen infantry regiment. Great people, great fun and plenty of musket-y action :P
This totally isn't a transparant recruiting attempt btw.
