prosthetic knowledge
-
Abstract Christmas tree sparks protests in Brussels
A minimal voxelesque Christmas tree hasn’t gone down well with some … via BBC News:
Thousands of people have signed a petition against an abstract light installation replacing the traditional Christmas tree in Brussels city centre.
More than 11,000 signatures have been gathered in the online petition and a Facebook page attacking the new feature has been launched.
Critics accuse officials of opting for the installation for fear of offending non-Christians, especially Muslims.
But the mayor’s office said it was part of a theme this year of “light”.
Traditionally, a 20m (65ft) pine tree taken from the forests of the Ardennes has adorned the city’s central square, the Grand Place.
This year, it has been replaced with a 25m (82ft) construction, though smaller real Christmas trees still decorate the square, a spokesman at the mayor’s office said.
The city’s website said the new “tree” was one of five “light” installations around the Grand Place this year, offering visitors the chance to climb to the top and enjoy “beautiful views” of the city.
Tourism councillor Philippe Close at the mayor’s office said the aim was to show off the “avant-garde character” of Brussels by blending the modern and the traditional, to produce something new and different.
-
Holy Shit - DJ Format & Mr Thing - Uploaded bydj format
A turntablism mix which is put together by samples from religious records - trust me, it works …
‘Holy Shit’ is a mix of religious breaks,beats & music discovered mostly in charity shops and bargain bins of record shops over a number of years. I had been planning to do a mix of some of my weird & wonderful religious records for years and when i got chatting with Mr Thing about a new exciting discovery i had just made in a Leeds charity shop,it turned out he too had recently discovered the same religious LP!
We decided to team up and do a mix together and Holy Shit was the result. Although some of the music is top quality and was cut up in a B-boy style,the mix was definitely supposed to be fun..hence the Monty Python bits! It was released as a CD in 2009(?) and is now available for free download for the first time.
The term ‘Religious Record’ could mean a religious artist on a religious record label that had an unusually funky moment or it could mean a regular artist or group (not usually associated with the religious genre) that do a cover version of a song about God or Jesus i.e. ‘Put Your Hand In The Hand’ is a religious song covered by many different artists and quite often has a nice open drum break at the start of the song.
Ps..There’s a 1 minute silence at the end of the mix before a secret bonus track comes in at the end. This was deliberately done on the original CD for fun..rather than it being a manufacturing fault like some people (idiots who returned the CD as faulty!) seemed to think. -
The Onion: God Diagnosed With Bipolar Disorder
NEW HAVEN, CT–In a diagnosis that helps explain the confusing and contradictory aspects of the cosmos that have baffled philosophers, theologians, and other students of the human condition for millennia, God, creator of the universe and longtime deity to billions of followers, was found Monday to suffer from bipolar disorder.
… Evidence of God’s manic-depression can be found throughout the Universe, from the white-hot explosiveness of quasars to the cold, lifeless vacuum of space. However, theologians note, humanity’s exposure to God’s affliction comes primarily through His confusing propensity to alternately reward and punish His creations with little rhyme or reason.
-
Richard Dawkins reads hate e-mails
‘You should find the longest crowbar you can find and pull your head out of your behind …’
-
via talesofsomething / givememywings
(via the-astrovert)
-
Apple Logo Is an Agnostic's Crucifix, Star of David: Study 
Duke University study finds brands and religion fulfill the same psychoemotional needs (via piratepickings)
… in a new study from Duke University, which concludes: “The brand name logo on a laptop or a shirt pocket may do the same thing for some people that a pendant of a crucifix or Star of David does for others.” In fact, the more religious a person is, the less brand expression appears to matter.
Researchers at Duke ran several experiments to determine this disconnection between brand importance and religiosity. In one, the team analyzed geographic areas for the number of Apple, Macy’s, and Gap stores per million people. These statistics were compared with brand-discount stores. “Then they compared these rough measures of brand reliance against the number of congregations per thousand and self-reported attendance in church or synagogue, controlling for income, education and urbanization differences,” the report says. “In every analysis, they found a negative relationship between brand reliance and religiosity.”
I’m not surprised about this, and I think there has always been a connection between religion and branding … most Christian holidays are rebranded pagan calendar celebrations (winter solstice = Christmas, Easter = a Christian reworking of a pagan cult resurrection festival)
-
“americans need to be burning calories not the qur’an” — Q-Tip (Twitter) of ‘A Tribe Called Quest’ -
God did not create the universe, says Hawking
God did not create the universe and the “Big Bang” was an inevitable consequence of the laws of physics, the eminent British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking argues in a new book.
In “The Grand Design,” co-authored with U.S. physicist Leonard Mlodinow, Hawking says a new series of theories made a creator of the universe redundant, according to the Times newspaper which published extracts on Thursday.
“Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist,” Hawking writes.
“It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.”
-
A web filter to block all religious content on the web, for Windows and Mac:
GodBlock is a web filter that blocks religious content. It is targeted at parents and schools who wish to protect their kids from the often violent, sexual, and psychologically harmful material in many holy texts, and from being indoctrinated into any religion before they are of the age to make such decisions. When installed properly, GodBlock will test each page that your child visits before it is loaded, looking for passages from holy texts, names of religious figures, and other signs of religious propaganda. If none are found, then your child is allowed to browse freely.
-
Adagio (2000) (via drawdrawdraw)
Russian stop-motion animation made entirely of origami - conveys religious themes in a non-verbal way, against classical music - very well done.
-
“God is a verb. Our brittle language cracks and crumbles at the thought. (Is atheism a revolt against God, or the unwitting protest against god being turned into a noun?)” — cloudhead (via instantplasticmaybe) -
Jesus and Satan - follow or unfriend?
-
