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A 300-year-old book that appears to be bound in human skin has been found in northern England, police said Saturday.

The macabre discovery was made on a central street in Leeds, and officers said the ledger may have been dumped following a burglary.

Detectives were trying to trace its rightful owner and believe it may have been taken from a dwelling in the area.

Much of the text is in French, and it was not uncommon around the time of the French Revolution for books to be covered in human skin.

The practice, known as anthropodermic bibliopegy, was sometimes used in the 18th and 19th centuries when accounts of murder trials were bound in the killer’s skin.

Anatomy books also were sometimes bound in the skin of a dissected cadaver. In World War II, Nazis were accused of using the skin from Holocaust victims to bind books.

In a brief statement, West Yorkshire police said the ledger, which contained handwriting in black ink, appears to date back to the 1700s, and they appealed to anyone who may be able to help identify the owners of the item to contact authorities.

West Yorkshire Police put two photographs of the book on their Web site, but officers were unable on Saturday to answer any questions about it, including the book’s subject matter.

via newsvine.

An early Christian manuscript, including the only known text of the Gospel of Judas, has surfaced after 1,700 years, and it portrays Judas Iscariot not as a betrayer of Jesus but as his favored disciple and willing collaborator.

In this text, scholars reported, the account of events leading to the Crucifixion differs sharply from the four gospels in the New Testament. Here Jesus is said to entrust Judas with special knowledge and ask him to betray him to the Roman authorities. By doing so, he tells Judas, "you will exceed" the other disciples.

"You will be cursed by the other generations, and you will come to rule over them," Jesus confides to Judas in the document, which was made public at a news conference at the National Geographic Society in Washington.

Though some theologians have hypothesized the "good Judas" before, scholars who have translated and studied the text said this was the first time an ancient document lent specific support to a revised image of the man whose name in history has been synonymous with treachery.

The discovery in the desert of Egypt of the leather-bound papyrus manuscript, its wanderings through Europe and Long Island, and now its translation, were announced by scholars assembled by the National Geographic Society. The 26-page Judas text is believed to be a copy in the Coptic language, made around A.D. 300, of the original Gospel of Judas, written in Greek the century before.

via NYT.

Digital Video Guru is running a comparison of 10 digital video sharing sites - EyeSpot Beta, Google Video Beta, Grouper Beta, Jumpcut Beta, OurMedia, Revver Beta, VideoEgg, Vimeo, vSocial and YouTube. Currently, based on traffic, YouTube is the leader of the pack (more heavily visited MSN Video does not support user-uploaded videos), but Digital Video Guru blog awards Vimeo for fastest uploads, JumpCut for editing, and YouTube for community features.

"The number of video-sharing sites has shot through the roof recently, as dozens of companies try to become the Flickr of the online video world.  To this end, many video services have started offering new features like editing and remixability in an attempt to snatch a piece of the ever-expanding online video pie.  But for the average user–who just wants to post a video on the ‘net and share it with some friends–there are already too many options out there.  All one really wants to know is, which site is going to work, with the least amount of hassle?

I took 10 of these sites out for a test drive, and picked some winners.  If you want to post, watch, share, or edit video online, this post’s for you.

To test each service, I uploaded my demo reel (a 15MB Sorenson 3-encoded Quicktime file) to each site and compared video quality, site interface, community features, and functionality.  Where applicable I also tried to embed the resulting video in a Wordpress page.  Many of these sites are still in beta, and their functionality could change in the coming months, but if you’re looking to post and share video today, this is the current state of things."

Read the whole review at dvguru.