the real success will be when they can clone enough for our growing demand for obnoxious furry boots

$20 says this poster is a woman

Burn the windmills.

my faster time is 39 seconds, can anyone beat it?

As a member of the PPDCP (purple polka dot clowns party) I find this post highly offensive.

First of all, since when is UC San Diego a top research university?
Second of all, wtf are they doing with a picture of Harvard (Widener library) on this article when Harvard has nothing at all to do with this? Insinuating that this survey, "research", has anything to do with Harvard is an asshat move. Harvard goes to such crazy extremes to combat cheating that it's unreal.

because they aren't fun majors. duh.

F science, I want to be a sculptor.

This will require him to play a Wii

a slightly slower, yet far more terrifying rubix cube bot can be seen here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaRcWB3jwMo&feature=player_embedded

I remember when the iPhone 4 came out and there was news coverage everywhere of huge lines, preorders selling out in minutes, etc. Two or three weeks after it was launched I needed to get a phone, so I walked into a Radioshack in the busiest intersection in Cambridge, MA, asked for an iPhone 4, and walked out with one 20 minutes later. Maybe I was lucky?

Telling you what the most important things they have to say is basically like trying to tell you what the most important thing a 2,000 year old library has to say. This book, by one of the most accomplished DSS scholars is worth getting if you are really curious:
http://www.amazon.com/Dead-Sea-Scrolls-Today-rev/dp/080286435X/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1317177844&sr=1-2

People that keep talking about them as if they are a menace have probably never read any of them, and are probably looking for reasons to discount Christianity specifically, or theism generally. That's my hunch.

About the Jesus coming from Qumran thing. Jesus was from Galilee, born and raised. It is possible that he and or John the Baptist had run-ins with the Essenes (the group that we generally equate with those living in Qumran) at some point, either because there were Essenes in Galilee, or because John's itinerancy was in the Judaean wilderness after all, the same place as Qumran. To make things short, the message of Jesus and John were quite contrary to the teaching we find in the DSS.

In the future, as a good litmus test for these theories. Observe if the person saying them has a PhD, where they got it from, and what the PhD is in. There are all kinds of conspirators that have published outside the scholarly circles, with no peer review. They will either not have a PhD, have a PhD from some obscure Bible college, or have a PhD in something completely unrelated like geology or math.

Helmut Koester, a professor here at Harvard that has been teaching since the 1950's, and one of my advisors, has published one of the standards in the field with his introduction to Early Christianity: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/3110149702

It is really unfair how good a scholar he is. He has been doing it so long he has essentially amassed the combined knowledge of two scholarly lifetimes, and it shows in his work. As far as Christianity in the East, that is East of the Roman Empire--this is the next boom in the field of Ancient Christian studies because it has not been explored that much. It's unfortunately quite difficult to give you the name of a scholarly monograph on the topic, but authors you might look out for are Adam Becker and Charles Stang. They both specialize in Ancient Christianity of the East. If you have access to an academic library or online journals the Syriac/Syrian Christian tradition and the Manichean tradition are probably what you will find the most fruitful in attempting to make any connections with Buddhism (though I wouldn't have high hopes for anything that accomplishes this). Syrian Orthodoxy is still around in India today as a matter of fact.

It is actually rather remarkable how well everyone worked together to keep them out of private collections. Again, when they were found they were in Jordan's territory and the Israel Independence War and the tension following it could have made sure all of this stuff was scattered in collections to the highest bidder. Some of the fragments were sold before people realized how immensely important they were (the family that found the first ones was burning them for kindling). Most of the ones that are in private collections have been purchased by universities like Princeton Theological Seminary in order to get them released.

there is only one on metal, the Copper Scroll (3Q15). This is actually the scroll I published on.

There are a few on parchment but mostly papyri.

There was nothing on pottery or stone, but other stuff like this, called ostraca epigraphy, until the DSS was about all we had from the time in Judaea save a few papyri like PNash.