So, I've been sitting on something for a couple of months, unsure of how to proceed. But first, some background. Let's talk about the Golden, Brass and other metal plates as described by Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon.
A popular FAIRMormon trope is that the plates are an example of a onetime anachronism that has since been vindicated. This is typically used to further the narrative that "the list of anachronisms in the Book of Mormon is growing shorter." However, the gold plates continue to be anachronistic for at least 4 different reasons:

No ancient codex of metal plates has ever been discovered anywhere in the world, ever
Codex anything had not been invented yet in 600 BC. The codex is an innovation that happened around the beginning of the Christian era.
The codex form did not exist in pre-Columbian America. The closest thing you'll find there is parchment folded accordion style.
Writing books on metal plates, likewise, was unknown in ancient America. You'll occasionally find labeled pictures engraved in metal, but that's about the extent of it.

Really, the only part that has been "vindicated" is that occasionally something would be written on metal in the ancient near east - however, this has never been in dispute, is described in both the Bible and the apocrypha, and can be traced to the early 19th century. So there is no vindication on this point.
Occasionally, people will try to buttress this point with archaeological finds of engraved metal. These finds pretty much always are from the Old World, not the New World, and are not in the codex style.
However, there has been one possible exception: the Etruscan Gold Book. This comes up every once in a while on apologetic sites like Book of Mormon Central. I was extremely skeptical that it was another Jordan Lead Codices situation (ie, fake), for a few reasons: despite what a few websites say regarding authentication, it doesn't seem that any actual experts in Etruscan have examined it. The museum that has it claims it was authenticated by professor Vladimir Georgiev, but he died in 1986, long before this artifact became public (see this quora comment by an Etruscan student). Further complicating this discovery is that it was not archaeologically excavated, and instead has a murky and opaque history on the antiquities market. In fact, I haven't been able to find a single academic paper anywhere that describes it, analyzes it or translates it. Perhaps the museum just wants first crack at it? Maybe, but it's been 17 years now. I also find it unusual that neither the Etruscan Studies Journal nor the flagship newsletter on Etruscan archaeology the Etruscan News from NYU's Institute for Etruscan and Italian Studies, which has been continually published since 2002, ever mention it, except in one letter to the Editor from a Jeff Hill from the University of New South Wales:

I hope that Richard Daniel De Puma will write an article concerning Etruscan forgeries, and make mention of the (fraudulent?) Etruscan Golden Book conserved in the Bulgarian National History Museum: (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/2939362.stm)

What I've been sitting on

I have something I've been mulling over, and I want to divulge this information without betraying any confidences. I saw the Etruscan Gold Book mentioned on the faithful sub today, and decided I should share what I know. On August 16, 2019 I emailed the then Editor of the Etruscan News, Professor Larissa Bonfante, and asked about this artifact:

Hi Professor Bonfante,
Someone recently alerted me to a bbc article from 2003 claiming a gold codex with Etruscan writing is housed in Bulgaria's national history museum. I was surprised by this (since I was under the impression the codex form was invented much later and typically used papyrus), so I searched through some old catalogs of Etruscan News, and couldn't find any discussion of this artifact, other than a letter to the Editor that suggests it's fraudulent.
It's been 16 years now, and I still can't find anything about it. Is this an authentic artifact? Has it been studied?
Thanks for you time, I'm just a curious bystander.

She replied the same day:

Thank you for your leter. WE will answer in the next Eruscan NEws.
best wishes

The Etruscan News is typically published once a year in Winter, so I bided my time until January, and then checked to see if there was a new issue. When I didn't see one, I did a little googling and learned that Professor Bonfante passed away just a week after our correspondence (I should probably stop emailing people - Grant Palmer passed away just a little over a week after I corresponded with him).
I have since followed up with another prominent Etruscan Scholar, asking if someone would be interested in publishing something on the subject. They wrote me back on March 11, 2020:

I'm sorry to take so long to answer your query, but emails get buried quickly in an election year in [location redacted]
[Names of 3 prominent Etruscan scholars redacted] conferred about the gold book and concluded that it was a fake. They hesitated to write an article exposing it -- I guess they did not want to offend the Bulgarians. If you think there would be interest in the subject, I could ask them to write a short article... Larissa's response to you (replete with her characteristic typos) suggests that she intended to do that.

I waited, but the most recent edition of Etruscan News did not include anything on the artifact (most of it is an in memoriam for Professor Bonfante). From this, I gather that they don't want to offend the Bulgarian Museum, and for that reason I have redacted any identifying information. I have sent a copy of the email to fuzzy_thoughts since we already know each others irl identities. Since I know authentication is important to this group, I would be willing to forward this email to someone else, preferably a believer with an established reputation, who I feel confident would not betray any confidences - both my identity, and that of the scholars who wish to not offend.
At any rate, apologists should stop using the Etruscan book as vindication for the Book of Mormon, since it's been concluded by the relevant scholars not to be an authentic artifact. I also think this is an instructive example on epistemology - apologists fall for fakes like the Jordan Lead Codices and the Etruscan Gold Book because it confirms their priors and they are working backwards from a conclusion. Using a more straightforward analysis, and basing my opinions on mainstream consensus scholarship, I was able to make a correct prediction (that the book was a fake) without any specialized knowledge of Etruscan or Archaeology. I think that should be the true takeaway.
Please don't all rush to email the most obvious Etruscan scholars. I appreciate the need to authenticate, and perhaps we can choose someone to do so, but the last thing we need is to sic an army of internet Mormons and ex-Mormons on unsuspecting scholars, for whom Mormonism is the last thing on their minds.
Thanks /mormon!

[LONGREAD]What's the weirdest plane?

Weird Wings statistics

Rationale

From the very start of my attendance to this sub I was contemplating on a simple question -- how do you choose weirdness -- which itself distilled into several questions:

which airplane is the weirdest?
how do I stop myself from posting duplicates
how to find unique aircraft that has never ever been posted or even do I really have to hold back on that?

Regarding that last question, jost look at that Edgley Optica from 4th of July 2020. It has been posted here fifteen times already! But it is still equally weird and beautiful (you guys need to frequent prettywings more often) and the OP gave us a bit of a new information

Edgley Optica spotted this morning in Tampa, FL.

If you haven't figured that out yet, yes please, do post duplicates :) Regarding load, neither mods nor users wont have any trouble combing thru them. And the latter might just sit back and enjoy them. Look here:

Average posts per day

Year	2016	2017	2018	2019	2020
Count	2	3	4	8	9

Methodology

Back to the subject at hand. The data originates from pushift.io where you have to tinker on different variables to get all the posts from weirdwings. The default reddit website UX allows you to get only the last 1k posts from reddit. Only if you know what to search for, you can get to, say, the very first post here: To get us all started, let's have this...
The result will be JSON formatted data, some 6933 entries -- I've got the data from the sub's inception untill D-Day this year, so any newer entries from that time forward will be missing in my stats. Here's some stats to get you started:

Post type statistics (general)

entries	count	ratio
meta (mod infos, announcements)	19	2.74‰
spam (spam, sexposting, advertizing)	35	5.05‰
shitpost (shitposts, lostredditors)	68	9.81‰
aircraft (useful data)	6811	98.24%
total	6933	100%

This part of stats is basically a firm salute to all of you weirdos who frequent this sub. The math speaks of itself.
Let us focus on useful data where I've had a fairly easy job sorting some 60% of entries, with some minor fiddling on variations like Blohm und Voss, Bolhm un Voss, and then some F-16/F16/F 16 models where you just cannot be sure, right? The rest of the entries was a bitch to sort, especially when all you have in your JSON is a title that starts with There are more aircraft in the oceans than submarines in the sky or with [request] what is this plane?. Yeah, thanks, I've had to open some 2k links to see what the OP was up to. And it took me a whole month to do it (avg 2-6 hrs/day). What you'd do while in isolation?
Just to make sure, I'm not complaining. I've learned a million on planes while looking for some amazing and obscure sources to corroborate some entries. This is what I've found:

Post type statistics (useful data)

entries	count	ratio
recognized (real aircraft)	6572	94.79%
unrecognized (unknown, many planes)	239	3.45%
flared entry	2894	41.74%
total	6811	100%

"Unrecognized" entry is basically an unsorted entry that has several types of reasons:

crossposting to other plane-related subs where model was also imprecisely described (yup, I've checked those)
many planes in one picture (think Dryden class photos with 5+ birds in one place)
links on various articles on unrealized/future prototype concepts
fake aircrafts (April fools, photoshop abominations/beauties)
fictional movie/cartoon/game aircraft
fuselages or wings used in architecture
DIY modifications like Beetle-Cessna or Learmousine road vehicles
drone+assault rifles scaring the bejesus of everyone etc.

These were interesting enough for you to post it more than once (and were/are flying at some point) so I've accounted them as well.
What I've ignored? Mainly 2 things, deleted posts, and the posts with zero upvotes. This basic filter allowed me to finally get the "real" data.

What's the weirdest bird out there?

Behold the list of aircraft that have more than 10 duplicated entries. According to user submission, the weirdest thing that flew over this realm is polish PZL M-15 Belphegor

Top 10 aircraft models (10+ entries)

Count	Model	Designer, Manufaturer	Country
19	PZL M-15 Belphegor	PZL Mielec	Poland
17	MD-160 Lun-class Ekranoplan (NATO: Duck)	Alekseyev	Russia
	Bv 141	Blohm & Voss	Germany
	Do 31	Dornier	Germany
	GA-466 Inflatoplane	Goodyear Aircraft	USA
	Model 35 Skew Wing (NASA/AMES AD-1 OWRA)	Rutan Aircraft Factory, NASA, Ames	USA
16	Gannet	Fairey	UK
	Martin XB-51	Glenn L. Martin	USA
	XF-85 Goblin	McDonnell	USA
15	F2Y Sea Dart	Convair	USA
	EA-7 Optica	Edgley	UK
	P.180 Avanti	Piaggio Aero	Italy
	V-173 Flying Pancake	Vought	USA
14	Bartini VVA-14 Ekranoplan	Beriev	Russia
	Ca.60 Noviplano	Caproni	Italy
	XFY Pogo	Convair	USA
	XB-70 Valkyrie	North American Aviation	USA
	T-4	Sukhoi	Russia
13	X-32	Boeing	USA
	XP-82, F-82 Twin Mustang	North American Aviation	USA
	XFV-12	Rockwell	USA
12	X-14 VTOL	Bell	USA
	YFM-1 Airacuda	Bell	USA
	YC-14	Boeing	USA
	Stipa-Caproni	Caproni	Italy
	XB-42 Mixmaster	Douglas	USA
	VM-T Atlant	Myasishchev	Russia
	Tacit Blue	Northrop	USA
	XP-56 Black Bullet	Northrop	USA
11	KM Korabl Maket (Caspian Sea Monster)	Alekseyev	Russia
	Rotodyne	Fairey	UK
	F-16XL Fighting Falcon	General Dynamics	USA
	XP-67 Moonbat	McDonnell	USA
	Cri-Cri	Michel Colomban	France
	XP-79 Flying Ram	Northrop	USA
	VZ-3 Vertiplane	Ryan Aeronautical	USA
	SR.45 Princess	Saunders-Roe	UK
	S.55	Savoia Marchetti	Italy
10	B-377-SG/SGT Super Guppy	Aero Spacelines, NASA	USA
	Meteor F.8 WK935 Prone Pilot	Armstrong-Whitworth, Gloster	UK
	VZ-9 Avrocar	Avro Canada	Canada
	JB-17G Testbed	Boeing	USA
	Do 335 Pfeil (Arrow)	Dornier	Germany
	He 111Z Zwilling (Twin)	Heinkel	Germany
	J7W1 Shinden (Magnificent Lightning)	Kyūshū Hikōki K.K.	Japan
	XF-84H Thunderscreech	Republic	USA
	C.450 Coléoptère (Beetle)	SNECMA, Nord	France
	S-72	Sikorsky	USA
	Wellington	Vickers-Armstrongs	UK

For full disclosure, american P-51 Mustang was, in almost every concievable form possible, mentioned 39 times, and that includes the Dart-Stang as well. Spitfires were either pink or black, or german but they never came close the Cadillac of the sky.
The company (designemanufacturer) was a bitch to sort out because of various different bankruptcies, mergers, buyouts and cooperations. This list is far from precise, but here you go: Boeing birds are 50% more posted than second placed Lockheed...

Top 10 companies

Count	by company	Count	by country
313	Boeing (USA)	313	Boeing (USA)
176	Lockheed (USA)	87	Tupolev (Russia)
132	Convair (USA)	71	Dornier (Germany)
131	Northrop (USA)	73	Antonov (Ukraine)
112	North American Aviation (USA)	57	Short Brothers (UK)
92	Douglas (USA)	47	Caproni (Italy)
87	Tupolev (Russia)	39	Bréguet (France)
80	Grumman (USA)	37	Saab (Sweden)
73	Antonov (Ukraine)	33	PZL Mielec (Poland)
71	Dornier (Germany)	18	Canadair (Canada)

Sorting countries was even worse -- in the dawn of aviation Russia was a tzarist empire, then it was USSR, and after the fall of the wall became the Russian federation. The same thing happened to Austria-Hungary, then Yugoslavia, then Czechoslovakia... the old continent was, and still is, politically rather turbulent place for aviation. I took the easy way and attributed most of the planes to Russia instead of more precise federative states. The same road was taken with KuK monarchy and the Balkan states. But, the list is here -- whenever you feel stuck, or temporary uninspired, browse thru your local continent and try finding some obscure and interesting contraption near by:

Countries by continent

count	Europe	count	Americas	count	Asia	count	Africa
1	Denmark	1	Peru	1	Indonesia	1	Nigeria
1	Lithuania	9	Brasil	1	Vietnam	3	Egypt
2	Norway	30	Argentina	2	UAE	4	Ghana
2	Slovakia	84	Canada	3	Mongolia	9	South Africa
3	Austria	3123	USA	4	New Zealand
3	Bulgaria			4	South Korea
3	Hungary			5	Taiwan
4	Romania			5	Thailand
4	Slovenia			8	India
5	Belarus			13	Iran
5	Finland			23	Israel
8	Belgium			24	China
12	Spain			37	Australia
14	Austria-Hungary			89	Japan
15	Czechoslovakia
17	Yugoslavia
34	Netherlands
41	Sweden
43	Switzerland
55	Poland
76	Ukraine
167	Italy
462	France
587	Germany
636	Russia
768	UK

Frequency data

There are total of 3207 unique aircraft posted in weirdwings. The following table shows the distribution of duplicates. No worries, you've posted so far only 46% uniques, and 60% of those (1948) are mentioned only once -- there's plenty of room for improvement :D

No. of duplicates	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19
Frequency	1948	570	263	152	78	60	36	30	21	11	9	8	3	5	4	3	5	0	1

It took me a better part of the day to write this up (daily life you know). If the occasion arise, I'll either update this post or provide further explanations in comments.
EDIT: 1) If you're on mobile, scroll right when you get to the tables because some of them are wide. 2) frequency table added

2k Subs from r/writing and r/teenagers users

Years from now, should Dice make another WW1 game?

Elaborating on the Controversial Gaia Hypothesis, and evidence supporting Gaia's metaphorical goddess power to determine Earth processes, and her plans for life on Earth (warning: from the human perspective, She's a cold-hearted bitch ...

... "as humankind may be the primer by which Gaia will reproduce" ... we are being used) "... the nature of life on Earth is not at all like Gaia. If we were to choose a mythical mother figure to characterise the biosphere, it would more accurately be Medea, the murderous wife of Jason of the Argonauts. She was a sorceress, a princess – and a killer of her own children." Source Like most dualities, a Gaia/Medea sister hegemony covers more territory than either hypothesis alone.
Strong Telos of my Gaia/Medea Hypothesis Some subtle traits found in nature induced Homo Sapiens to rise from small scattered nomadic hunter-gatherer bands into large complex sedentary societies with advanced technology. One might easily interpret these hidden (until recently) traits were a deterministic feature of a supernaturally created world.
Weak Telos of my Gaia/Medea Hypothesis The rise of advanced machines and computers appear to be destined to replace humans. These super-AI machines would be capable of interstellar travel, and most likely are the only viable mechanism to transport memories of Earth outside our Solar System. One might easily interpret this hidden agenda of exporting Systems-Earth onward as Gaia/Medea's intention to reproduce. She is Alive!
Do we, as Dr. Pangloss suggested, live in the best of all possible worlds?
Is the Universe Fine-Tuned for Life?
How many fundamental constants does it take to define our Universe?
Subtle Traits in Nature Some of the controversy opposing the Gaia Theory is political. Globalist Power Brokers want to establish fear in the populations so they can extract carbon taxes. Climate change is not cooperating with their dire predictions of increasing heat, just the opposite. solar activity and clouds
Most subtle of all are opiates hidden in agriculture-sourced foods milk and cereal grains. Without addiction, there was no practical reason to abandon ancient habits of hunting-gathering nature's bounty. Primitive agriculture was long hours of grinding hard labor, security problems, new diseases, organizational problems, and more. Humans persevered against these obstacles to have their "daily bread", with "milk and honey" until advanced cultures evolved via group competition.
The evidence presented in this key link suggests the following interpretation. "The ingestion of cereals and milk, activates reward centres in the brain. Foods that were common in the diet before agriculture (fruits and so on) do not have this pharmacological property. The effects of exorphins are qualitatively the same as those produced by other opioid and/or dopaminergic drugs ... perhaps even addiction."
Going on, "... celiac disease (should) be viewed not as a rare 'genetically-determined' disorder, but as an extreme example of our body communicating to us a once universal, species-specific affliction: severe intolerance to wheat... If wheat really is more like a drug than a food, anesthetizing us to its ill effects on our body, it will be difficult for us to understand its grasp upon us unless and until we eliminate it from our diet. Source, Dr Schwartz
endorphins and exorphins
Food opioids - addiction to constipation (LOL) www.ibsgroup.org/forums/topic/177625-food-opioids-addiction-to-constipation/
Gluten is the main structural protein complex of wheat consisting of glutenins and gliadins... which can be further degraded to a collection of opioid-like polypeptides called exorphins in the gastrointestinal tract... Opioid effects of gluten exorphins (technical report) | BioMed
A secondary effect of capsaicin, an irritant, is the body's reaction to it, namely to induce formation of endocrine "endorphins". Other Addictive common foods
Some Subtle Traits of cultural selection This section moved to Understanding the road to Domestication, a biologic two-way street
"... unless we get off the planet." Or, move to isolated parts of this world. The Future of Evolution: What Will We Become? | LIVESCIENCE
Whales Save Humans 4 min.
Wrapping it up
James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis (a compendium of articles) | new scientist
Gaia Hypothesis
Why haven't we found aliens yet? Maybe they're all dead... Gaian Bottleneck hypothesis
USaving our planet begins with U (2.3m views, 31k likes, 2 wks) 14 min. | Riddle
Bill Whittle the Science Guy: "The Earth knows how to save itself." 10 min.
Trends in Human Evolution
Homo aquaticus? in SpeculativeEvolution
7.2-Million-Year-Old Pre-Human Remains Found in Bulgaria, Greece Show First Pre-Humans Developed in Balkans, Not Africa | ScienceDaily
Review of The Human Era, new timescale begins at Göbekli Tepe | Kurzgesagt 8 min.
Who Built Gobekli Tepe? New theory!
Genetic Engineering Will Change Everything Forever – CRISPR | Kurzgesagt 16 min.
Forever Young (a fun animated short, an esoteric fantasy on aging) 4 min.
Cultural Marxist SJWs, and Leftist editorial writers rant opposition to genetic engineering or modification because it can help rich people improve their family health, while poor people can't... leading to evolution of Homo simpleton.
Improbable events that resulted in humans (natural history) 17 min. | prof. Marc Defant TEDxUSF
update Dec.10.2020 Is the Earth an organism? (our biosphere is evolving)

quora bulgaria video

Bulgaria is by far the most unhappy country in the EU, a newly-released survey has found. The former communist country, which joined the European Quora is a place to gain and share knowledge. It's a platform to ask questions and connect with people who contribute unique insights and quality answers. This empowers people to learn from each other and to better understand the world. Quora is one of our highest-quality channels. Organic traffic coming from Quora has the highest visit-to-subscription conversion rate of any of our acquisition channels, and leads from Quora ads convert at 4-5x our other social channels. Bulgaria, since both its ancient and modern beginnings, has been invariably a multiethnic, mainly Slavic and Turkic, polity. School textbooks in Bulgaria lavish much attention on the ancient Bulgars, who in the Middle Ages founded several Bulgarias from the Volga to Italy, including the surviving one in the Balkans. In 2001 Bulgaria’s former King Simeon II made a comeback by winning the country's parliamentary election. As a foreigner I've lived in Bulgaria for a few years now. Overall I'm very happy here. It has its challenges like anywhere else in the world. I'll outline the pros & cons below. Before I lived here I seen the Bulgarian people described as outrage... Rent in Bulgaria on average is 74.06% lower than in the UK. Cost of living in Bulgaria is 48.12% lower than in the United Kingdom. Alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages cost on average 65% less, and clothing costs are 75% less than the European Union average. Naturally enough a low cost of living is a massive draw. You can unsubscribe from Quora marketing emails at any time by clicking the unsubscribe link in the email. Our team is here to help you grow your business on Quora.

quora bulgaria top

The HOTTEST Teachers You Wish You Had! - YouTube

Hello So as many of you guys know, I am studying in Bulgaria. Quite a few of you guys and my friends and family have been asking many questions about my expe... In this video we only scratch the surface of a very complex and dilapidated discussion that is not easily discussed, covering the general objective layout. W... The HOTTEST Teachers You Wish You Had!Subscribe to Top 10s https://goo.gl/zvGBHeDescription:Charlie from Top 10s counts down the top The HOTTEST Teachers Y... How two generations look at the transition - and what's changed for both. UK student in Medicine in English in Sofia, Bulgaria shares his experience with the university and Inter HECS. From applying for admission to Sofia Medical U... Why is Paganism and other Occult beliefs booming in Europe, America and beyond?Today, we'll discuss a fascinating phenomenon that stretches back thousands of... Knowledgia is focusing on making animated videos about History and on answering interesting questions about the world we live in. If you are interested in these topics - Please Subscribe : https ... Our series on the history of the Cold War period continues with a documentary on the Sovietization of Bulgaria and Romania. Consider supporting us on Patreon... Bulgaria vs Serbia - Army/Military Power Comparison 2018 Subscribe Daily Media for watching daily videos.CreditsMusic Nr.1 Ansia Orchestra - Battlefield ... Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

The Pros & Cons Of Expat Life In Bulgaria | Expatra

quora bulgaria

quora bulgaria - win

Quora: If Trump gets elected, should I move to Bulgaria?

Was the Ottoman Empire one of the most evil empires in this world?

Map of Prussia, and The countries that have earned the nickname Prussia of the " ". [OC]

Hootekk G-ay Da-ting Nw_

Anachronisms: The Metal Codex and the Etruscan Gold Book