Scott Bradford: Off on a Tangent

What Did Jesus Look Like?

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Most educated people are well-aware that ‘classical’ depictions of Jesus—the European look and long, brown, wavy hair—are not a realistic depiction of what he probably looked like. Critics of Christianity will sometimes use this to pick on us for our supposed lack of scientific and historical curiosity, as-if our artistic depictions of Jesus have any import on . . . anything. Surprise; art is not science!

It is still an interesting thing to consider though. What did Jesus look like?

Msgr. Charles Pope writes on the Archdiocese of Washington blog about this and, while he comes to no definitive conclusion (nor should he), he does present some food for thought. Jesus was a Jewish man, likely of Semitic origin. Hair styles at the time are believed to be shorter than the traditional depiction, and Semitic hair tends to be coarser and darker. Semitic men tended to have larger noses.

The image at right is a forensic reconstruction based on the skull of a Semitic man from the 1st century. He probably looks a lot more like the real Jesus than the traditional, European depiction.

Congress Car in the Snow

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Super busy this weekend with a whole lot of catch-up stuff . . . buying a mattress, working on some techie stuff, and various other to-dos. I’m only half done so my posting may be a little sparse for a while yet.

In the interest of not leaving my faithful readers hanging, here is a picture I took all the way back on Saturday, January 30 but (for some reason) never posted. That was a really busy weekend, complete with a sick cat, snow, getting new phones (and a new carrier), and more . . . so it probably just slipped my mind. I stumbled upon it in my iPhoto gallery today.

The last picture I took on my AT&T BlackBerry Bold before trading it in for my Verizon Palm Pre Plus was of a U.S. Congressman’s car on the snowy streets of Washington, D.C. The California license plate says ‘US Congress’ on the left, and ’28’ on the right. Assuming that the ’28’ means ‘District 28,’ which is not necessarily the case, this would be Representative Howard Berman (D-CA 28th).

I see Congressmen’s cars fairly regularly in the area, but I still think it’s kinda cool.

Daylight Stupid Time

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Am I the only one who hates daylight saving time and thinks its a big, pointless waste of time? (Get it? Waste of time?)

First and foremost, daylight is a zero-sum game. Whatever numbers we use to identify sunrise and sunset, the amount of daylight is the same. When the U.S. government decided to expand daylight saving time a few years ago, there was all kinds of talk about how it would save energy. Can anybody actually explain how moving the time labels by an hour changes the amount of air conditioning we need in a day, or makes any change whatsoever in how much energy we use in a day? Most reputable studies find no energy savings whatsoever due to daylight saving time.

There is one benefit . . . we get more daylight in the evening during the summer, which gives us more time for shopping, recreation, and so on. If this is the goal, why not just make daylight saving time into normal time? It wouldn’t make any difference in the winter when we’re all indoors anyway, we would still get our ‘extra’ hour of evening daylight in the summer, and we wouldn’t have to deal with pointless changes of the hour (and its requisite hassle and confusion) anymore. Problem solved.

I don’t personally care whether we standardize on ‘normal’ time or daylight saving time, but it’s about time that we standardized on one or the other and did away with the unnecessary time change. If we can’t pick one, let’s split the difference and shift time by 30 minutes. Time is just made-up numbers anyway, so make up some numbers that don’t have to randomly change twice per year.

The Land of Twits

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No offense to my Twitter-using friends, but I just don’t get it. I understand Facebook. I understood MySpace (though it was poorly implemented and annoying, and thus rightfully lost its leadership position). Blogger and LiveJournal each made sense to me in their days. Even when I didn’t use these systems, or when I drug my feet on joining, I at least understood the appeal.

The whole micro-blogging idea has some value, I suppose, but Twitter’s big flaw (in my humble opinion) is that it is just a micro-blogging platform. It does absolutely nothing else. Facebook’s success lies in that it is a micro-blogging platform, a regular blogging platform, a photo sharing platform, a social network, and more all rolled into one in a relatively usable and integrated system. You can use it for almost anything you want.

Twitter seems oriented entirely toward pointlessness (hence, I have deemed it The Land of Twits). People who use it a lot post multiple tweets per day that don’t even approach the usefulness of a normal blog post. Even if these Tweets had value, a recent study has determined that only about 21 percent of Twits are ‘true users’ (users with at least 10 followers, who follow at least 10 people, and have tweeted at least 10 times). Really, all I use Twitter for these days (aside from posting links to my site) is reading Conan O’Brien’s tweets; that’s about all there is going on out there.

Stick a fork it in; it’s done. I’ve said it all along: Twitter is a fad, and will disappear as quickly as it arrived . . . probably fairly soon.

Stupid Lawsuit of the Month

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Well, we now have a winner: washed-up former child star Lindsay Lohan has emerged from rehab long enough to file the Stupid Lawsuit of the Month. You may know the E*Trade advertisements with the talking baby. In one of these ads, the talking baby is chatting with his talking baby girlfriend about why he hadn’t called the night before. The girlfriend asks, suspiciously, “And that milkaholic Lindsay wasn’t over?” Another talking baby girl, presumably Lindsay, pops her head into the frame and says “Milk-a-what?”

It’s somewhat funny, I suppose, and I don’t think anybody thought this was a reference to any particular celebrity. The ad apparently hit a little too close to home for Lindsay Lohan though; she is suing E*Trade for improperly using her “likeness, name, characterization, and personality” without permission. She wants 100 million dollars in damages and the ad taken off the air.

First and foremost, the ad was not apparently about Lindsay Lohan. It was talking babies selling online trading services. I don’t think any viewers saw the ad and thought, “Ha, they’re making fun of Lindsay Lohan.” Secondly, even if it was supposed to be Lindsay Lohan, I really doubt her career has been harmed in any way whatsoever by the ad. If there’s no harm, there’s no damages, and no winning the lawsuit. Finally, even if there had been some sort of harm to Lohan, parody and celebrity impersonation is a time-honored and perfectly acceptable form of advertising, as long as it doesn’t imply endorsement by the celebrity. Nothing about a talking milkaholic baby who happens to be named Lindsay implies that Lindsay Lohan endorses E*Trade.

Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.