It has a headphone out - and you can add a mic (via audio). I didn't see any issues during call. Used twinkle to connect to external asterisk server! And yeah $9 chip!
@steve's, And, as you can imagine, it is difficult to do any kind of half-decent job in a format like this... especially since there are whole reliable textbooks devoted to the subject, so why bother with me. ;-) Anyway, I am trying but since I have other responsibilities in my life - a wife, a job, two cats, a book to write, three grad students to supervise, and MEETINGS! I am going to have to give this stuff a rest. I appreciate people are curious - if a bit confrontational in the way they choose to engage in the subject - but relying on only one person to talk about an entire subject is not fair to that person nor does it do the subject the proper justice.
That book relies on a wrong model for the speed of light. The author argues that you can assume that the speed of a source of light is added to the motion of light itself, increasing its speed. This flies in the face of evidence accumulated since the Michelson-Morley Experiments in the late 1880s, that demonstrated that the speed of light is independent of the motion of the source. All observers measure the speed of light to be the same, constant value, regardless of relative velocity. This is why you should be very careful about content lying around on the internet - you never know who wrote it or whether or not they understand basic observations about the universe around us. I hope this helps you be a bit more careful about choosing sources.
So, were those predictions verified? Yes. The light from the early universe was detected as microwaves in the 1960s, quite by accident. The properties of the microwave energy, measured very well in the early 1990s, corresponded to a universe with an average temperature of just about 3K.
The relative abundance of Hydrogen and Helium is highly consistent with the predictions from "nucleosynthesis" in the 1950s-1960s.
These are just a few things, fairly approachable observations. There are a number of more esoteric things. If you have an old cathode ray tube TV that gets analog stations and you tune it to a station that doesn't come in (in the US, that's all of them now), and turn the brightness down until you can barely see snow on the screen, about 1-in-100 of those flecks of snow is a photon left over from the early universe, cooled by its expansion, striking the antenna of the TV and making a speck on the screen.
Second, let's understand the early predictions of such an idea.
1. One should observe that very distant astronomical objects, corresponding to faint objects (e.g. because intensity falls off with distance), are moving away from us in any direction we look.
Evidence: Edwin Hubble and others observed distant galaxies are all receding from us in every direction.
Of course, alternative explanations were offered for that observation, as in any good scientific situation. Let's look at another prediction that came after more was understood about nuclear forces.
2. Light nuclei - Hydrogen and Helium, and likely also Lithium - should all have been formed early in the universe, when it was still hot, and the ratios of those in the universe "locked in" when it cooled sufficiently.
3. Because the universe became electrically neutral and light was no longer trapped, the universe should be filled in all directions with light from the early universe.
As I said earlier, you clearly have some kind of world view or other thing that you are working to protect. I'm going to go back to being a practicing scientist, testing the natural world in the hopes of finding a better explanation for it, one that explains all that came before and predicts new things we can test. I recommend you go back to your work, too. I wish you well. I really do encourage you you to work through one of those online university courses, if you're really interested in and serious about physics. If you have questions about what you learn, feel free to ask.
Have a good day! (or whatever time-zone appropriate sign-off is needed here)
@axemansays, Einstein was Jewish, though not particularly devout; that's why he fled Nazi Germany in 1933 - the purge of "Jewish Academics" put his life at risk and he was brought to the US by colleagues at Princeton, where he remained the rest of his days. He actually refuted the big bang idea at the beginning because he felt it smacked too much of Biblical theology, but changed his mind when presented with Hubble's observations. He didn't like quantum mechanics because it allows definite predictions of all possible outcomes but no way to determine which outcome will happen with absolute certainty in a specific atomic process, and he never did get comfortable with that reality revealed by experiment (that atomic behavior is not deterministic). Einstein had many mistakes in his career, as do all scientists; the key was that there were other physicists around who learned from his mistakes and had new insights as a result. Thus is science a process.
@axemansays @steve Not to mention that Einstein was christian and said that "God does not play dice with the universe" which shows that even one of the greatest physicists of all time didn't believe in randomness which is required for a big bang and life to occur for an atheist.