Skeptic's Annotated Bible / Quran / Book of Mormon

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http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/index.htm

Steve Wells -- "it is time for us all to stop believing in, or pretending to believe in, a book that is so unworthy of belief"


The Skeptic's Annotated Bible (SAB) is a website providing skeptical analysis of the Bible, edited by Steve Wells. It consists of annotations presented alongside the text of the King James Version of the Bible pointing out internal inconsistencies and contradictions with science and history, and suggesting that the Bible advocates reprehensible ethics.

Since its initial inception, The Skeptic's Annotated Bible has been expanded by Wells, with the addition of a discussion board, an annotated Qur'an, an annotated Book of Mormon, and various links to external sites such as The Brick Testament.

The Skeptic's Annotated Bible uses tags to highlight issues including injustice, absurdity, cruelty and violence, intolerance, contradictions, family values, women, science and history, prophecy, sex, language, interpretation, homosexuality, and "good stuff". Each tag offers negative, critical commentary with the exception of the "Good Stuff" section, which usually refers to positive ethical teachings in the Bible.

However, overall the sections that deal with impossibilities, contradictions, and negative teachings are to provide evidence that, as Wells explained, "it is time for us all to stop believing in, or pretending to believe in, a book that is so unworthy of belief"

Silent Witness: The Story of Lola Rein and her Dress

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Silent Witness: The Story of Lola Rein and her dress

In New York City, January 2002, Lola Rein met with a curator of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Lola told the story of her lonely survival during the Holocaust.

At the end of the interview she reached into her bag and took out this tiny dress, handing over the only item directly linking her to her mother. Lola had spent seven months hiding in a hole in a ground, wearing only this dress sewn by her mother. It was her only possession. Learn more about this silent witness......

http://www.ushmm.org/exhibition/silent-witness/

Eros ex Mathematica

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http://www.scribbletronics.com/image/eros-ex-mathematica/

Perpetual Ocean ~ Peter Miller

Eros ex Mathematica is a series of fractal images by digital artist and composer Peter Miller. He hastens to assure us that they "are created entirely from mathematical algorithms."

Moira Shearer The Red Shoes (part 2)

Based on a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale about a pair of enchanted crimson ballet slippers, 'The Red Shoes' follows the beautiful Vicky Page (Moira Shearer), a young socialite who loves ballet, the rising composer Julian Craster (Marius Goring) whom she loves, and her dictatorial director, Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook).

A glorious Technicolor epic that influenced generations of filmmakers, artists, and aspiring ballerinas, The Red Shoes intricately weaves backstage life with the thrill of performance.

A young ballerina (Moira Shearer) is torn between two forces: the composer who loves her (Marius Goring), and the impresario determined to fashion her into a great dancer (Anton Walbrook).

Moira Shearer in the 1948 film The Red Shoes...

Moira Shearer The Red Shoes (part 1)

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Based on a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale about a pair of enchanted crimson ballet slippers, 'The Red Shoes' follows the beautiful Vicky Page (Moira Shearer), a young socialite who loves ballet, the rising composer Julian Craster (Marius Goring) whom she loves, and her dictatorial director, Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook).

A glorious Technicolor epic that influenced generations of filmmakers, artists, and aspiring ballerinas, The Red Shoes intricately weaves backstage life with the thrill of performance.

 
A young ballerina (Moira Shearer) is torn between two forces: the composer who loves her (Marius Goring), and the impresario determined to fashion her into a great dancer (Anton Walbrook).

Moira Shearer in the 1948 film The Red Shoes...

Pas de Deux pt deux

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View entire film:
http://www.nfb.ca/film/pas_de_deux_en/

A thirteen minute live action short subject filmed by Norman McLaren of the National Film Board of Canada. It had been nominated for an Oscar, and won a BAFTA, the year before, in 1968. The film was entitled 'Pas de deux'.

The film’s subject is simply two ballet dancers, photographed on high contrast black and white stock, on a bare stage, with harsh side lighting.

It was in its post production manipulation, however, that the film became truly memorable. McLaren passed the original image through an optical printer, up to eleven times at some places, to produce a beautiful stroboscopic image of movement.

The film tells the story of a female Narcissus who is completely self -involved until a young man appears to win her attention. It is a plea that we must look outside ourselves and love others, the same theme which underlay McLaren’s Oscar winning 1952 short feature, Neighbours.

If you have ever seen it before, you will remember this film. If you have not seen it before, it is well worth the expenditure of time, regardless of whether you do, or do not, enjoy ballet.

Pas de Deux pt1

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Pas de deux (1968) is an award winning film by Scottish-Canadian director Norman McLaren, produced by the NFB.

The film sees two performers dancing a pas de deux, filmed on high contrast film stock with very stark side lighting. This is augmented by step-and-repeat printing on an optical printer. This gives the film an almost stroboscopic appearance.

Biographer Maynard Collins points out that the "technical virtuosity of this film, its ethereal beauty, its lovely Roumanian pan-type music, made it a joy to watch, even if - perhaps, especially if - you do not care for ballet."

Norman McLaren's Oscar-nominated short film Pas de Deux (1969) is a beautiful surreal dream. Pas de Deux bends our perception of movement, shape and form—and ballet itself—as two dancers, first seen in normal dance become endless reflections of themselves. McLaren became a ground-breaking abstract experimental filmmaker accumulating a body of influential short films.

In the film "Pas de deux" he does more than a recording of choreography. Much like with Norman McLaren other work the process of the recording is part of it's art.

He exposes the same frames as many as ten times, creating a multiple image of a ballerina and her partner. Black background and backlit figures coupled with pan pipes produce a quiet and detachment similar to that of his film Lines.

It contains components of both abstract and realism but unlike his other pieces it leans closer to the realistic end of the spectrum. One dancer is made to appear to be dancing with herself.

When the male dancer is introduced it then becomes more based on design there are trails of movement that are used as brush strokes as an artist paints on a canvas. Then the art fades as another stroke begins.

One would consider him from the impressionists school of theory. His works appeared to depart from realism. He was famous, for even using live subjects, having them appear animated.

His use of juxtaposition, rupture and speed alteration exemplify this in his films.
There is a feeling of dream like motion incorporated into the choreography through his work.

Pas de deux captures an aspect of dance that the human eye would not be able to achieve alone. It shows the use of patterns made through space in a clear fashion.....

Vortex Smoke Ring Collision

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vortex ring collision 

http://youtu.be/XJk8ijAUCiI

 Once generated two similar swirls with opposite angular speed, they increase the size of your radio to go forward. The speed with which approach becomes increasingly smaller, and increases the size of its radius faster. The radius will increase until both swirls disintegrate. If both are perfectly symmetrical eddies, the velocity of fluid elements parallel to the axis of symmetry in the middle between eddy and swirl is equal to zero. This line generated by all points where the velocity is zero, becomes a solid border where the speed through the wall is zero.



Smoke rings collide - If they did that in sci-fi movies, viewers would be all like, "Oh, come on, that's not even close to realistic!"


This is what physicists do when they're high.... :)

N I G H T

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Rating:	★★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	Biographies & Memoirs
Author:	Elie Wiesel

Note: Although Night is not necessarily a memoir, it is often referred to as one, since the work’s mixture of testimony, deposition, and emotional truth-telling renders it similar to works in the memoir genre.

It is clear that Eliezer is meant to serve, to a great extent, as author Elie Wiesel’s stand-in and representative. Minor details have been altered, but what happens to Eliezer is what happened to Wiesel himself during the Holocaust.

It is important to remember, however, that there is a difference between the persona of Night’s narrator, Eliezer, and that of Night’s author, Elie Wiesel.



Night is narrated by Eliezer, a Jewish teenager who, when the memoir begins, lives in his hometown of Sighet, in Hungarian Transylvania. Eliezer studies the Torah (the first five books of the Old Testament) and the Cabbala (a doctrine of Jewish mysticism). His instruction is cut short, however, when his teacher, Moshe the Beadle, is deported. In a few months, Moshe returns, telling a horrifying tale: the Gestapo (the German secret police force) took charge of his train, led everyone into the woods, and systematically butchered them. Nobody believes Moshe, who is taken for a lunatic.

In the spring of 1944, the Nazis occupy Hungary. Not long afterward, a series of increasingly repressive measures are passed, and the Jews of Eliezer’s town are forced into small ghettos within Sighet. Soon they are herded onto cattle cars, and a nightmarish journey ensues. After days and nights crammed into the car, exhausted and near starvation, the passengers arrive at Birkenau, the gateway to Auschwitz.

Upon his arrival in Birkenau, Eliezer and his father are separated from his mother and sisters, whom they never see again. In the first of many “selections” that Eliezer describes in the memoir, the Jews are evaluated to determine whether they should be killed immediately or put to work. Eliezer and his father seem to pass the evaluation, but before they are brought to the prisoners’ barracks, they stumble upon the open-pit furnaces where the Nazis are burning babies by the truckload.

The Jewish arrivals are stripped, shaved, disinfected, and treated with almost unimaginable cruelty. Eventually, their captors march them from Birkenau to the main camp, Auschwitz. They eventually arrive in Buna, a work camp, where Eliezer is put to work in an electrical-fittings factory. Under slave-labor conditions, severely malnourished and decimated by the frequent “selections,” the Jews take solace in caring for each other, in religion, and in Zionism, a movement favoring the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, considered the holy land. In the camp, the Jews are subject to beatings and repeated humiliations. A vicious foreman forces Eliezer to give him his gold tooth, which is pried out of his mouth with a rusty spoon.

The prisoners are forced to watch the hanging of fellow prisoners in the camp courtyard. On one occasion, the Gestapo even hang a small child who had been associated with some rebels within Buna. Because of the horrific conditions in the camps and the ever-present danger of death, many of the prisoners themselves begin to slide into cruelty, concerned only with personal survival. Sons begin to abandon and abuse their fathers. Eliezer himself begins to lose his humanity and his faith, both in God and in the people around him.

After months in the camp, Eliezer undergoes an operation for a foot injury. While he is in the infirmary, however, the Nazis decide to evacuate the camp because the Russians are advancing and are on the verge of liberating Buna. In the middle of a snowstorm, the prisoners begin a death march: they are forced to run for more than fifty miles to the Gleiwitz concentration camp. Many die of exposure to the harsh weather and exhaustion.

At Gleiwitz, the prisoners are herded into cattle cars once again. They begin another deadly journey: one hundred Jews board the car, but only twelve remain alive when the train reaches the concentration camp Buchenwald. Throughout the ordeal, Eliezer and his father help each other to survive by means of mutual support and concern. In Buchenwald, however, Eliezer’s father dies of dysentery and physical abuse. Eliezer survives, an empty shell of a man until April 11, 1945, the day that the American army liberates the camp.


ANALYSIS


Although we know that Elie Wiesel, Night’s author, recovered his faith in man and God and went on to lead a productive life after the Holocaust, none of this post-Holocaust biographical information is present in Night.

Because the scope of Night does not extend beyond Eliezer’s liberation, some readers argue that the memoir offers no hope whatsoever. Eliezer has been witness to the ultimate evil; he has lost his faith in God, and in the souls of men.

Night’s final line, in which Eliezer looks at himself in the mirror and sees a “corpse,” suggests that Eliezer’s survival is a stroke of luck, a strange coincidence, no cause for rejoicing. It seems from his closing vision that Eliezer believes that without hope and faith, after having seen the unimaginable, he might as well be dead.

Night does not end with optimism and a rosy message, but neither does it end as bleakly as many believe. What we are left with are questions—about God’s and man’s capacity for evil—but no true answers.

Night does not try to answer these questions; perhaps this lack of answers is one of the reasons that the story ends with the liberation of Buchenwald. The moral responsibility for remembering the Holocaust, and for confronting these difficult moral and theological questions, falls directly upon us, the readers.