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Jesus was not born in the year 1 or on December 25. Here’s what we know about his actual and exact date of birth

February 27, 2026 by usatoday24

With Jesus of Nazareth something curious happens. Few characters have been more celebrated, discussed and reviewed throughout the centuries. Today historians they usually coincide in which (although there is no material evidence of its existence) was a historical figure that can be framed in the Galilee of 2,000 years ago. However, despite all the attention he has received over the last 20 centuries, there are certain key details of his biography that remain shrouded in shadows. For example the date of your birth. And by “date” we don’t just mean the day, but also the year. When discussing, we could even question where was he born. The usual thing is to think that Jesus came into the world on December 25 in Bethlehem of Judea and that six days later humanity (at least the West or the West of Christian influence) entered into a new eraone in which history was dislocated into two stages that we still use today in the 21st century, whether we are Christians or not: the one before and the one after the birth of Christ (Anno Domini). Totally normal, right? That is, why else would we celebrate Christmas every December 25th, a word that comes from the Latin “https://www.xataka.com/magnet/nativitas” (“birth”)? And why do we talk about years BC and AD if it is not for the birth of Christ? Reality is more complicated and has some chiaroscuros. What do we know about the birth of Jesus? The answer to the previous question is very simple: little. Historians usually agree that there are basically two sources to address the topic of the birth of Jesus and both are reflected in the same work: the New Testament of the Bible. The evangelist gives us a clue Matthew. The other, Luke. The problem is not only the scarcity of information, but that both texts were written many decades after the events they narrate. To be more precise, around 80 and 90 AD, half a century after the crucifixion. Of course in the New Testament there are older texts (such as the letters of Paul or even the gospel of Mark, written around 70 AD), but they are of little use if what interests us is the childhood (and especially the birth) of Jesus. Taking into account the few references there are and the importance of the topic (we are talking about the birth of the central character of one of the most influential religions in history), it would be logical that Matthew and Luke coincide in their stories. It’s not like that. In their texts both offer us what experts call “chronological anchors”references that help us date the birth of Jesus, but those clues are scarce and do not quite fit together. What exactly do they tell us? Let’s see. “And when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of King Herod, behold, wise men came from the east to Jerusalem, saying, ‘Where is the King of the Jews who has been born? For we have seen his star in the east, and we have come to worship him. When Herod heard this, he was troubled, and Jerusalem with him.’ Matthew 2:2-4 “And it came to pass in those days that an edict went out from Augustus Caesar, that all the land should be enumerated. This first enumeration was made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria. And they all went to be enumerated, each one to his city. Then Joseph went up from Galilee, from the city of Nazareth, to Judea, to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and family of David, to be registered with Mary, his wife, who was betrothed to him, who was with child. And it came to pass that while they were there, the days were fulfilled in which she was to give birth.” Luke 2:2-7 Although it may not seem like it a priori, both passages hide a small discrepancy, as explains in Wake up Ferro Professor Javier Alonso, philologist, historian and biblical scholar. The evangelist Matthew (and Luke) tells us that Jesus was born in the time of King Herod, but then Luke specifies that Mary was counted while she and Joseph were traveling to fulfill the census ordered in the time of Augustus. If we review history we see that both “anchors” they collide with each other. Herod the Greatruler under the orders of Rome, ruled Judea more or less between 40 and 4 BCyear of his death. As for the census that Luke tells us about, historians believe that it coincided with the census carried out by Quirinus in the time of Augustus, a fact mentioned by Flavius Josephus. The problem, remember Alonsois that Quirinus ruled around 6 AD the region that covers Judea, years after the death of Herod. Conclusion? Both evangelists are actually drawing a fairly broad time frame, of a decade, that could be set between the years prior to the king’s death and 6 AD “There is a difference of at least 10 years between Matthew and Luke,” explains Alonso. Why do we say that Jesus was born when he was born? At this point that is the most reasonable question. If the evangelists point to a time horizon that begins several years before our era (Anno Domini), because devils Do we say that Jesus was born a few days before the 1st AD? Who and how set that date? To answer these questions we must go back a few centuries, although without reaching the era of Herod. Our attention will focus on beginning of the 5th ADwhen at the request of the Pope the Scythian monk Dionysus ‘the Exiguous’ He launched into a difficult task: calculating the date of Christ’s birth. It may sound strange that so many centuries later the followers of Jesus would worry about this question, but at stake there was a primary issue: clarifying when Easter should be celebrated (Computus paschalis), the main celebration of Christianity. Its date … Read more

We already know how to retrieve the exact prompts that people use in AI models. It’s terrifying news

October 31, 2025 by usatoday24

A group of researchers has published a study that once again raises alarm bells regarding privacy when using AI. What they have managed to demonstrate is that it is possible to know the exact prompt that a user used when asking a chatbot something, and that puts AI companies in a delicate position. They can, more than ever, know everything about us. A terrifying study. If you are told that ‘Linguistic models are injective and, therefore, invertible’ you will probably be shocked. That’s the title from the study carried out by European researchers in which they explain that large language models (LLM) have a major privacy problem. And it has it because the transformer architecture is designed that way: each different prompt corresponds to a different “embedding” in the latent space of the model. A sneaky algorithm. During the development of their theory, the researchers created an algorithm called SIPIT (Sequential Inverse Prompt via ITerative updates). Such an algorithm reconstructs the exact input text from the hidden activations/states with a guarantee that it will do so in linear time. Or what is the same: you can make the model “snap” easily and quickly. What does this mean. What all this means is that the answer you got when using that AI model allows you to find out exactly what you asked it. In reality, it is not the answer that gives away, but the hidden states or embeddings that the AI models use to end up giving the final answer. That’s a problem, because AI companies keep these states hidden, which would theoretically allow them to know the input prompt with absolute accuracy. But many companies already saved the prompts. That’s true, but that “injectivity” creates an additional privacy risk. Many embeddings or internal states are stored for caching, for monitoring or diagnosis, and for customization. If a company only deletes the plain text conversation but does not delete the embeddings file, the prompt is still recoverable from that file. The study shows that any system that stores hidden states is effectively handling the input text itself. Legal impact. There is also a dangerous legal component here. Until now, regulators and companies argued that internal states were not considered “recoverable personal data,” but that invertibility changes the rules of the game. If an AI company tells you that “don’t worry, I don’t save the prompts” but it does save the hidden states, it’s as if that theoretical privacy guarantee is of no use. Possible data leaks. A priori it does not seem easy for a potential attacker to do something like this because they would first have to have access to those embeddings. A security breach that results in the leak of a database of those internal/hidden states (embeddings) would no longer be considered an exposure of “abstract” or “encrypted” data, but rather a plain text source from which, for example, financial data or passwords that a company or user has used when asking the AI model could be obtained. Right to be forgotten. This injectivity of LLM also complicates the requirements of regulatory compliance for the protection of personal data, such as the GDPR or the “right to be forgotten.” If a user requests complete deletion of their data from a company like OpenAI, they must ensure that they delete not only visible chat logs, but also all internal representations (embeddings). If any hidden state persists in any register or cache, the original prompt would still be potentially recoverable. Image | Levart Photographer In Xataka | OpenAI is making the tech industry unite its destiny with yours. For the sake of the global economy, it better work

There are people who never know when to leave a series. Someone has investigated the exact moment to do so

March 5, 2025 by usatoday24

It has all the meaning of the world that we discuss and reflect tirelessly on what point the series spoils, how the series are not eternal and what methods we can find to anticipate the tragic moment in which our favorite series ceases to be what it was. After all, we invest a lot of time in them: They are hours and hours of our free time, and when they stop liking ourselves, we continue looking for their company in the hope that they will do it again. Sometimes it happens, sometimes not. Daniel Parris’s Newsletter Significant Star It is dedicated to answering these types of questions using thousands of data collected in databases of the most varied. ¿When we stop finding new music? ¿What classic films endure the passage of time? ¿They die more famous now than before? And above all, the essential:People hate as much as it looks like Coldplay? (In this case I can speak for me, and no statistics are needed). In this line of transcendental questions that can be answered with statistics (A fan of statistics assures us, but that’s another issue), it’s’How many episodes of a series have to endure before stopping seeing it?‘Before continuing, it would be necessary to clarify that these data start from the logical fallacy of thinking that a note in IMDB is the mother of the lamb, and a series (or episode) that suspends in IMDB is effectively bad, when there are thousands of variants (Review Bombicscult series to which the well-mal dichotomy does not feel good or, punch, that many times people are wrong) that question this reasoning. But let’s start from there. The average grade as a canon Parris calculations take, for example, to calculate the average grade of all the episodes of a series. Puts the example of ‘Friends‘, which has an average (quite high) note of 8.34. We can say that this is the intermediate quality point: an episode with more note that will have a greater quality than the majority, with less that quality will be lower. There are series whose first episodes are already around this average note (‘Game of Thrones‘, for example), in other cases the series take to find that average note. The aforementioned ‘Friends’, for example, It does not reach that 8.34 to the seventh episode. Well: Parris calculation consists in taking all IMDB series and Compare the note of each episode with this average grade, and the result is a differential. Most of the series, it seems to be, take six or seven episodes to achieve that average quality. It is clearly appreciated in this graphic Image: Stant significant Is it a lot? Is little? Well, it is a considerable amount of hours, but Parris overlooks a very complicated topic to quantify: the last episodes of a series are better/more interesting/more exciting than the former because … This is how stories work! The first episodes always serve to prepare the way and then have interest. The data we can get from this is: do not trust a statesman to make cultural criticism. But let’s continue. After all, as Parris says, the verySeinfeld‘It took 16 episodes in find your Mojo. How much before I take me? But you can go further, and expand the photo: what if we go to the seasons? Practically All series have a time when interest begins to declinewhere they have been elongated beyond the reasonable, where everything that could be counted has been counted and we entered into argumentary arches that are repeated, characters that no longer have grace, loss of originality, skacuartos spirit and other phenomena that can come to load the memory of a series in its entirety because, again Paradigmatic case of ‘Game of Thrones’ It appears, many times from the end is what people remember the most. Let’s look at this new picture: Image: Stant significant Again using that average note as the base of the quality of a series, we have to in most series there is a change between the fifth and sixth season. From there there is no back. Of course, There are variables: In ‘Game of Thrones’ the greatest fall in the valuations with respect to the first is the eighth season, in ‘House of Cards’ the sixth and in ‘Star Trek: Discovery’ the fourth. They are not necessarily the last seasons, but the most disappointing season. There is no clear rule, but a more or less immutable truth: there is no series that can be prolonged indefinitely. Can conclusions based on mathematics from here be drawn? Well yes and no: It seems more or less reasonable to think that no series can survive foreverbut there are some that after a great quality descent recover something from its initial attraction. The advice that can be removed from this data is: there is no unique solution and applicable to all series, but in general, when you start seeing a decline in quality, leave it. In very, very rare occasions things will be like in that wonderful episode eight of the first season. Header | Warner In Xataka | The 17 best streaming series of 2024 and where to see them

I have detected the exact moment in which things in Marvel began to fail and that has culminated in ‘Captain America’

February 13, 2025 by usatoday24

Until the weekend, when the public’s opinion begins to fly over the Internet (which in the end is the one who pays and the one that interests Disney, since the consensus of criticism and public they generated ‘Infinity War‘ and ‘Endey me‘It is unlikely to be repeated again), we will not know if’Captain America: Brave New World‘It is a failure or a triumph. What we can analyze is at what point in the history of MCU Things began to twist. The majority opinion. We can all be more or less agree that there is an MCU stage with a more or less positive balance (which goes from acceptable to the glorious, according to the fan’s enthusiasm) that begins in ‘Iron Man’ and extends until ‘ Endgame ‘. And from there, things began to twist, with stages 4 and 5 mainly disastrous that led to the first Marvel box office failures, to a possible “Superheroic fatigue“And at the time of current uncertainty. But there are nuances. Matiz one: Not the whole field is oregano. 23 films, which is said soon, make up the MCU from ‘Iron Man’ to ‘Endgame’ (well, to ‘Spider-Man: Far from home‘). It is statistically impossible for all to be round, and we cannot even agree on our appreciations. For example, for the signer ‘Iron Man 3’ it is one of the peaks of the MCU, many would say the opposite, and I think it was a mistake that Marvel did not continue to cultivate that way. And there are a multitude of bland films, which are celebrated just because they are in the context of very grossing productions and well considered: ‘Iron Man 2’, ‘Thor: The dark world’ or ‘Avengers: the era of ultron’ are some of them . Matiz two: Not everything is horrible from phase 4. And on the contrary, there are innumerable films (and series) to celebrate from ‘Endgame’: ‘Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of madness‘It is hilarious, and the generally hated’Quantumanía‘ either ‘The Marvels‘They are failed films but with a very claimable personality. And of course, there are multiple remarkable moments in ‘Wandavision‘,’Knight Luna‘ either ‘Agatha, who if not?‘ The authentic problem. The drama of phases 4 and 5 is that they do not have that very pleasant style of the first three stages of going in one direction and with a purpose. Perhaps it became like this, perhaps not, but the feeling that ‘Endgame’ is designed from the first appearance of the Avengers is there, and that does not exist in phases 4 and 5. Of course, there are threads that connect everything, like The theme of the multiversos, but there are many films (‘Shang-Chi‘,’Thor: Love and Thunder‘,’Wakanda Forever‘), which seem to air shots, as looking for new charismatic heroes that replace the Avengers. And as in ‘Brave New World’, the feeling that is a useless effort floats. The movie hinge. And Marvel’s first failure, ‘Eternals‘It is the key point. Marvel had loose films previously, and possibly any did not give up at the box office as they expected, but ‘Eternals’ is the first one that forced them to go back. They wanted the group to become a new avengers, but a team capable of supporting the weight of several films: they raised sub -brains that would last in other films, and new characters seen fleetingly, such as Starfox, of which we did not return namely. Marvel reculled in his plan, and the worst thing is that he saw that he could reculate and the public accepted it, which multiplied the test movies, the ideas that were isolated in a film and the failed experiments. A world that played the mirage of being compact and coherent became one where neglect and carelessness predominates. Header | Disney In Xataka | The first trailer of ‘The fantastic 4: first steps’ reveals the key ingredient for Marvel’s future: its villain

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