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Where do you find good sci-fi that's also a good book?

Kurt Vonnegut. *

Would you consider the inclusion of the Pulitzer-Prize winning book The Road as static? Are you sure you aren't conflating Oprah's fanbase with her booklist choices?

Locus Magazine is a real magazine put together by Science Fiction Fans (notably Charlie Brown who has received many Hugo awards for it). Contains lots of reviews, you'll learn which reviewers have the same taste as you. Yeah, it's not a book club.
The Young Adult section of the library (don't sneer - the quality of the Science Fiction there is very high) shouldn't be forgotten. Cory's Little Brother is a must-read, and is a YA novel.

I've followed the /. headlines over this lack of a deal, and have been generally surprised by the neoliberals ordaining that the yahoo board had a duty to sell the company for short-term advantage. Despite the fact that under any decent discount rate, the whole proposal represented little more than a bet.

Even if regulated accounting doesn't float your boat, the ideas of Fischer Black (eg. http://www.amazon.com/Fischer-Black-Revolutionary-Idea-Finance/dp/0471457329/ref=sr_11_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1210920867&sr=11-1
) can't be ignored. Under that light, the entire deal seems to be more involved in noise trading than any solid economic expansion.

For $40 more, you can snag yourself the Nokia N800 Iternet Tablet. The N810 drove its price way down, and the only differences are a built-in GPS, slide-out keyboard, and a 2GB SD card. The rest of the hardware is identical, and you can flash the latest N810 OS on the N800. The thing is highly hackable, with as much open-source software as Ari Jaaksi, Nokia's open source director, could get them to embrace (about 2/3 of the base system). With a very bright 800x480 display, Firefox and mplayer, it renders everything almost perfectly. It's got a thriving open-source community behind it with a bunch of apt repositories and ports. It's also the nicest e-book reader I've ever used.

I don't work for Nokia. I just love mine. :)

Consumer-oriented reviews tend to emphasize its lack of pre-installed PIM apps and synchronization, but that's not a problem for your average technophile.

To give you an idea of how hackable it is, I hacked the init scripts to set up swap and mount my home directory from an SD card's ext2 partition. I SSH into it when I want to do this kind of stuff.

Parts of the hardware (and thus some of the drivers) aren't open. If you're a purist, this might put you off. Which brings us back on topic: the Chumby is completely open. Maybe this'll push Nokia to open more. Ari Jaaksi has even said that the open source software on the N800 is of far better quality than the in-house stuff - it's just convincing the suits that embracing it is a good idea that's difficult.

Economics was obviously a major driver (and slavery's as much a part of that as free trade), but a lot of it was emotional/political issues - slavery has a large impact on social organization, and people had strong emotional reactions both for and against it, and all that emphasis on the Union as personal identity and the "manifest destiny" crap; you don't get brother-killing-brother kinds of wars over trade policy. And you may remember that states were being admitted to the union in ways that balanced the numbers of new slave and free states - even though the new slave states weren't all in the Deep South which had the economics issues.

So much of the Union's desire to reconquer the Confederate States reminds me of China's insistence on reconquering and controlling their old empire, including Taiwan and Tibet (the, uh, Han shot first...)

And Lincoln wanted to increase central government power. While he wasn't a Prohibitionist, they were one of the groups that had joined to form the Republican party, and fighting slavery and Demon Rum required more central power.

Given that the military is used primarily as a weapon of big business

prove it.

Here you go. Proof positive from a far better man and a far better soldier than you could ever hope to be.

NATO disagrees with you. The events of 9/11 lead to invocation of "Article 5" of the NATO charter where all member states come to the mutual DEFENCE of a member state that has suffered an attack.>

In the first place, that would apply to other NATO countries, not the US.
In the second place, there was an opportunity to defend the US, but instead Bush chose to go follow their hare brained scheme of invading Iraq.

Are you really too stupid to have noticed that we were never attacked by Iraq? How the hell could we be defending ourselves by blowing the shit out of an uninvolved country? Exactly, not possible, hence it isn't defense.

Go read that book, and it constitutes all the proof you need for all of your idiotic requests for proof of the obvious.

Chances are, you have never been fucked by anyone or anything except the sad result of your own narrow-mindedness. Consequently, you have not had the chance to learn anything about the human spirit. But that is just a guess.

It's not even a guess. It's an idiotic delusional statement based on your complete ignorance of the US military's purpose and the uses to which it is most often put.
I have far more respect for the human spirit than some idiot who thinks murdering democratically elected leaders in order to install mass murdering thugs who are friendly to US corporate interests at the expense of their own people is defending America.

Seriously. You have proven yourself to be so stupid as to think that murdering innocents for profit is the action a patriot or even a decent human being would take.

You are dead fucking wrong about that.

Your contempt for humanity is evident since you stated flat out that you consider their lives to have no value unless they're slaving away at gunpoint to save you a nickel.

Thought experiment: What if things were different? Accepting Jesus, or doing good would result eternal punishment in hell. Doing bad would take you into heaven. What then? Who would follow Jesus?

Spiritual life starts when person starts to tackle with the questions above. Buddhism recognizes that our selfish ego stands between spiritual life. If you can get rid of your ego, you can do what is good for deep spiritual reason. You don't need to beliefs to anything "bigger than you" or supernatural, because you are not seeking good times or reward in the future. I think it's easier for atheist to enter spiritual life than it is for Christian.

May I suggest reading for you? Jesuit priest Anthony de Mello has written good book about spiritual life: Awareness

Television's purpose is to sell, not to entertain.

To make advertising pay, corporations need viewers to sit in front of the stupevision. "Entertainment" just has to keep you in your seat. If that means T&A shows, the "wide world of sports", live car accidents and one cartoon making fun of other cartoons, then so be it.

Whatever is cheapest to produce and easiest to recycle week after week to keep viewers in their seats is what stays on television.

This is not a perfect book, but reading it will make you think:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Arguments_for_the_Elimination_of_Television
http://www.amazon.com/Arguments-Elimination-Television-Jerry-Mander/dp/0688082742/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1210859168&sr=8-1

Certainly theists trying to ascribe some form of theism to Einstein are mistaken. However, the atheists can be just as bad. I have already seen in Internet forums that atheists are using this newly found statement of Einstein to boost their cause, arguing along the lines of "Einstein was a genius, and he didn't believe in God, so clearly rejecting the existence of God is the smart thing to do." Einstein, though a brilliant physicist, was not trained in the philosophy of religion. It's a pity that when atheists could refer to eminent philosophers of religion like Mackie in his The Miracle of Theism (Oxford University Press, 1983) or (pre-conversion) Flew as examples of how to argue well against theism, they instead use completely inappropriate figures like Einstein.

It does sound familiar, but probably for a different reason than you're thinking. There was a (rather depressing) book about that scenario that I read recently called The Sparrow. (See also wikipedia link.)

It's well known that Smith dictated the first version of the Mormon doctrine while reading it from a stone in his hat, with the hat placed over his face. When his associates (presumably skeptical) wife stole that copy and wouldn't give it back, Smith had to start over. Of course this time he dictated something different (presumably because he couldn't remember exactly what it was he said on the previous pass), which he explained as being a translation from a different set of documents.

"Well known" gets the raw deal here. Your account sounds strange, indeed, but the truth is that the Book of Mormon (your "first version of Mormon Doctrine") was translated with a Urim and Thummim (which has nothing to do with a hat, mind you). The lost manuscript (as the copy given to Martin Harris' wife is referred to) was deliberately not re-translated. If you read it, you'll find out that the original authors, Lehi and Nephi gave similar accounts of the same events precisely because this scenario was predicted.

Mormon history is great stuff, and it doesn't bother most Mormons in the least. This is because they figure that where it came from doesn't matter, as long as when they pray their god tells them it's all good.

Nope. Mormons believe because of... faith. It's a diminishing attribute in our modern world, but it can be found among people of all different walks of life. Even scientists. Mormon history is indeed great stuff, but as with all other religious history, looking at it with an eye of faith changes how that knowledge affects you. History doesn't change because "most people" think it's a bunch of hooey.

Joseph Smith's background is pretty well documented. See this for a good writeup. He was a con man and a thief, who (one can reasonably conjecture from the documented history) came up with a polygamist philosophy because he was also one randy goat.

I do not assume that America is the "apogee of human civilization" but it is the place where i happen to live right now, and i like it.

That's good. It sucks to live somewhere you don't like.

I don't want to be mean, because it's not my style, but you really, really need to at least read a book or two before making these "fortune cookie" assumptions about how China works. (Fortune cookies came from San Francisco by the way. They don't exist in the Middle Kingdom). I spent the better part of a decade there, and I don't think I know it all.

The Chinese method is clearly more efficient than our own and they will undoubtedly win the global economic war which is currently being waged.

You're wrong there. There is an input (cheap, but not very efficient labor) which helps, but that only takes you so far. The further up the value-add chain you go, the less you can get by on cheap inputs, and the more original design expertise you need. A lot of the design work is still coming from the US, Japan, Taiwan, Europe, etc. while the manufacturing is done in China. This is not a permanent situation, and you should not assume that Chinese are incapable of doing original design work. Just the same, while throwing a million monkeys on a factory line will make mainboards, it won't design semiconductors or write Hamlet for that matter.

Basic research is still largely done elsewhere, for a large number of reasons.

For hundreds of years (if not thousands) China has regarded itself as the center of the world, the further away you were from China, the more worthless you were.

Consider the neighbors. China considered themselves better because in every demonstrable sense, they WERE better. Japan did not break away from China in terms of wealth, cultural, or technological development until the Meiji Restoration in the 1850s. Of course, Europe had been doing a lot of interesting things, but Europe was far, and nobody who had any influence in China had ever been there, therefore, Europe for all it's castles, cathedrals, science and sages did not exist to China until the 1700s. 150 years of wars, unequal treaties, extraterritorial jurisdictions (i.e. concessions in China that were operated under American, British, or German, and not Chinese law), etc. etc. set straight that the "center of the world" was a pretty backwards place. The Communist revolution was one response as to how to drag China into the modern world. It was decidedly not the best response that could have been come up with.

It was for these reasons that they would export far more than they would allow in.

Nope. It was because finished Chinese goods (porcelains, silks, artwork, etc.) were more valuable than the materials made by "tributary states". In modern business we call this high value-add vs low value-add.

The west see's China as an invading army of merchants ready to undercut their prices to the point of running us out of business. It's only natural for us to fight against this.

Chinese goods are only sold in the US to the extent that American government policies allow them in and American merchandisers are willing to sell them. There is a supermarket near my house owned and operated by overseas Chinese. Their contribution to the GDP of the city of Seattle is negligible. The little building that sits right above them sells more Chinese-owned products in 20 minutes than they sell in a year.

Anything which serves the purpose of reducing their isolation from the rest of the world is good in my book.

Do you live anywhere near a university? Notice one or two students there from China? Guess what? 90% of them will go home to China after finishing their studies here. How many of your American-born friends have lived or studied overseas? Anybody? Bueller?

There is a country which is isolated and needs to be opened up, but that's not China. They know full well how backwards they are and a

Actually, building houses in relatively pristine factories and assembling them on-site (modular housing) is becoming quite popular, even for higher end houses.

Link to book "Modular Mansions" on Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Modular-Mansions-Sheri-Koones/dp/1586857126

I don't see that as funny at all. I thought that there was 750 MB in a sperm and 2x of that would make a "human", but these articles http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/26/science/26DNA.html and http://askville.amazon.com/information-encoded-human-DNA-GB-TB/AnswerViewer.do?requestId=3907491 say that the whole human code is only 750MB.

That will fit on a CD.

To me, thats _really_ impressive.

Then, when you think that we are 98-99% the same genetically as chimpanzees and 90% the same as a rat, and then you look at how different people are that are practically identical codewise.

I dunno, whenever I talk about this, its basically a parse error in my brain.

A goofy friend of mine said that a cum shot is one of the fastest bandwidth that humans can achieve to date. Funny and true at the same time :)

You can do this if you wish to Amazon Kindle Kindle Digital Text Platform

Anne McCaffrey wrote a book called PartnerShip with a plot very similar to this situation. The villian provides chips to the Galaxy, including the military. When nearly everyone has upgraded, it turns out that he can remotely control every device, including military hardware, controlled by the chips. That's enough of a spoiler. How can such a grand and well planned scheme be defeated? You'll have to read to find out...

There may be other options.

Here is an improvement on the dead tree option - it is a book made from plastic resins which I actually like the feel of more than dead tree books. The pages are waterproof, the book has a good, sturdy feel, and it is recyclable (not downcyclable).

The book talks about how smart manufacturing processes that take toxicity, recycling, and design principles into account can serve multiple needs - and are often cheaper and more pleasant than our current processes.

It says we can have all the stuff we want without the environmental or health problems normally associated with production.

You have missed my point. Creating this data base allows the officer to more quickly gather data he already had access to. Nothing in this database is anything that a zealous officer (or agent of the state for the sake of your conspiracy theory) couldn't dig up on their own. And although you site a figure without any supporting evidence, I will go ahead and back you up and say it's true that in totalitarian nations crime tends to be higher, but correlation and causation are not the same. Causal links have been shown between poverty and crime and it just so happens totalitarian states and poverty have a strong trend as well I don't have a link to back that up, just a minor in the subject. As a good refrence though, try reading the Violence and Terrorism annual editions put out by McGraw-Hill/Dushkin.

Two things to keep in mind.

1) The Mobi version of the file they make available works on any platform that supports MobiReader, which includes WindowsPC, Palm, Symbian, Windows Mobile, Blackberry, as well as dedicated E-Ink book readers that include the Booken and iRex(http://www.mobipocket.com/en/downloadsoft/productdetailsreader.asp). The Kindle's description page also says it supports Mobi files (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000FI73MA/ref=amb_link_6774572_2?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_r=11XJPR7RV9D55KC6YNPC&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=394924101&pf_rd_i=507846).

2) Baen has been trying to get other publishers to use their store (which they've overhauled within the past year or so). SO far they've got SOME books from DelRey and Tor, but they've said that other publishers don't quite understand why Baen is making money and sometimes overprice their products. This is cultural thing though, and so long as Baen keeps making money, other's will want to follow in their footsteps and that should lead to a culture change at the publishing houses.

If you assume for a minute that the author of TFA is smart enough to figure out if this was a google search or not, this is probably pretty interesting. I'm going to, perhaps naively, assume that the data mining approach was done as a reasonable experiment of a mining approach on some set of data, and arrived at a set of names that should be interesting to check up up. I'll further assume that he properly restricted his training set of data to only data that was available before 9/11.

If that is the case, this is a pretty impressive set of results. Being able to identify, say, 5 of the attackers, and to have a number of the other hits be known associates, when the training set likely consisted of at least 10's of thousands of names, is pretty fair accuracy. The false positive rate is pretty fair, as well, especially when you contrast it to the No Fly list, which has numerous false positives, and no known successes in identifying anyone of interest.

There is likely some sort of clustering algorithm behind this, and the math behind those is pretty solid. Before you dis this, or even get excited about privacy issues, I'd suggest you check out a reference such as this

I'm not really concerned about data mining as a privacy issue, and I think it's a pretty legitimate approach for law enforcement. As a side note, I do data mining and predictive analytics for a living. It's objective, it's factual, and if the practitioner is knowledgable about it, it shouldn't be stigmatizing. Indeed, it would reduce scrutiny on the majority of the folks that would otherwise be tarred by having an arabic surname and swarthy skin.

It would have the potential to be vastly more effective, and vastly less expensive than the path we are on now. One reason that we might not be using could be that we -have- used it, and didn't find anything. That's the thing about objective data mining, if there is nothing there, it'll tell you that. I don't think, for our current administration, that it's a desireable outcome to find that there is nothing to worry about. If that happened, the populace would be less fearful, and less easy to control.

Take this one step further, and apply this bit of thought. It has been shown time and again that the TSA is incompetent, and that any motivated terrorist could get a weapon on board a plane. It is further obvious that our ports are porous, and that soft targets abound. We have seen no triumphant pictures of the authorities frog marching attempted terrorists away, no success stories of how these measures have saved our lives again. We have also seen no further attacks.

This strongly suggests to this practitioner that we have a near zero incidence rate of terrorists in the US; that when a terrorist attempts an attack, he succeeds, and that the lack of attacks suggests that the attack rate is close to zero.

Data mining would be a useful tool to calibrate this theory.

English majors who write on scientific matters for laymen seem to delight in such unexpected phenomena as near-simultaneous discovery and invention by geniuses working independently.

At least one researcher has come up with a more prosaic explanation for the coincidental telephone patent filings - he believes that Bell bribed a patent office employee to show him Gray's filing, after which Bell returned to his lab, completely revised his approach, and soon re-filed with a description of his triumphant "invention".

This strikes me as entirely believable. I've learned that even among highly educated engineers, there are pathological liars who have no qualms about taking credit for excellent work done by others, if they think they can get away with it. Think of it as the engineering version of "Bosnian sniper fire". And don't believe everything you see on a resume.

Did he wind up in Andalusia?
(starts off with some classical/flamenco stylings, goes right off the Jimi Hendrix cliff)

You know, you are getting more than Microsoft ever offered to you to pay for. What comes with the Mac version of OOo? Everything, including Base. What comes with the Mac version of Office 2008? I certainly don't see Access anywhere in the list. FileMaker Pro costs a pretty penny to get database support.

MS Office 2008 for Mac: $314.99
FileMaker Pro: $274.99
OpenOffice.org: $0.00

We have a winner folks. If I owned a Mac, I'd be more than happy to pay $0 versus $589.98. But if you still want to go the latter route, at least Amazon will ship it to you for free.

You know, you are getting more than Microsoft ever offered to you to pay for. What comes with the Mac version of OOo? Everything, including Base. What comes with the Mac version of Office 2008? I certainly don't see Access anywhere in the list. FileMaker Pro costs a pretty penny to get database support.

MS Office 2008 for Mac: $314.99
FileMaker Pro: $274.99
OpenOffice.org: $0.00

We have a winner folks. If I owned a Mac, I'd be more than happy to pay $0 versus $589.98. But if you still want to go the latter route, at least Amazon will ship it to you for free.

Von-Neumann machines? They're already there.

http://www.amazon.com/There-Are-Electrons-Electronics-Earthlings/dp/0962781592

The explanations are simple and the diagrams are helpful. It contains both basic circuit theory and example circuits to show how components are used.

I bought the Radio Shack version of this book back in grade school. It was very helpful in learning how to read schematics and build basic projects. A bit of helpful advise is also mixed in throughout.

His Engineer's Notebook series of books are also helpful to get basic circuit ideas.

I'm in the same boat (programmer never did hardware). I just started this book and am having a blast: Making Things Talk Although I got sidetracked by this great site: Lady Ada which sells a kit you can assemble.

I wanted to build some robots, so I bought a book on electronics: It's by Benard Grob, I have found it to be a great book. It starts off with what electricity is, how it moves down a wire etc.. then goes into electronic components, how and why they work.

http://www.amazon.com/Grob-Basic-Electronics-Books/dp/002802253X

My first robot is almost done, it's very simple and just reverses direction when it bumps into something.

Yes, cut the rest of the link off starting with "ref=..." so that it looks like http://www.amazon.com/Bebop-Boolean-Boogie-Unconventional-Electronics/dp/0750675438/

Yeah, somebody already came up with a modest proposal

Indeed, we live in a Huxleyian dystopia instead.

http://www.amazon.com/Brave-New-World-Aldous-Huxley/dp/0060929871

Another good book you might want to look at is the ARRL Handbook - the beginning has a good rundown on various electronics subjects and it's chock full of schematics, diagrams, and writeups on various projects. True, it's mostly radio gear in there - but that also leads to another thing - Amateur radio is a -really- good way to get into electronics and learn a lot, and you can build stuff you can use right away.

If you can find a local amateur radio club, it's usually cheap or free to take the license exam, and with the dropping of the morse code requirment you get HF priveleges right away with the Technician license.

http://www.amazon.com/Arrl-Ham-Radio-License-Manual/dp/0872599639 Is a good book to read to know all you need to get yourself up to speed and get your first license..

Almost everything I know about electronics I learned through amateur radio, I've been licensed since I was 11, if i recall, 19 now and just picked up my General class license recently.

It's a very interesting hobby and it can go either way for you - you can be an expensive appliance operator, or you can be one of the interesting folk and build and design your own radios and other gear (such as amplifiers, filters, etc).

If you're interested in hearing more, fling an email to mokuba@gmail.com.

Also, any hams around FM19tm fling me one as well ;) Always looking to meet some new people :)

73's, KB3HAG

I can see whole floors of college dorm rooms sharing pirated copies and having the answering server set up in the nerd's room.

Well, it's easier than that, because -

Wait. Back up a sec. Did you really use the term "nerd?" Really? In a year after 1998, and in any forum outside a playground, let alone Slashdot? Hmm.

Amazon may have a book recommendation for you. ;)

Aaaanyway - in the scheme you propose, you have to (1) allocate a machine to serve as the Jolly-Roger Activation Server, and (2) hack all of the other apps to redirect their activation requests to the avast-matey machine. Why bother with that mess? Just hack each app to get rid of the activation check. Hell, you might be able to hack the app once, deploy it on a fast network, and have everyone just use that...

- David Stein

Orwellian dystopia? I spend a few months over there earlier this year and must have missed that bit...

Wasn't a major point of 1984 that only a tiny amount of unusually sensitive people would recognize a totalitarian state for what it is? There was no hope in the proles in Orwell's future England because their lives were just as miserable before as after and they didn't have time to ruminate on things like Winston Smith and Julia. When Smith tried to ask an old man about former days, he couldn't seem to make any argument against the current state of things. Thanks to Smith's own work in the Ministry of Truth, the population couldn't actually read about how bad things really were.

In this instance, I agree England is not yet an Orwellian dystopia. However, dystopias have a way of establishing themselves without many noticing.

I always found Master Handbook of 1001 Practical Electronic Circuits to come in handy when I build projects. There are designs for all kinds of basic electronic circuits that you can chain together to come up with some usefull designs. The nice part about a book like this is that it gives you all the common chip numbers that many other manuals gloss over.

That and a Digikey catalog are all you need.

This book is great - I've owned (and used) both editions (lent the first edition out and ended up buying the second as a replacement). I find it particularly useful in that it answers design questions in a straight forward manner and shows you how to solve whatever problem you might be working with while at the same time giving solid theoretical explanations (the water pressure motif used throughout the book is quite good).

I also own The Art of Electronics but usually turn to Practical Electronics for Inventors first.

I really enjoyed: There Are No Electrons : Electronics for Earthlings"

With Amazon.com book links you can:
  - Remove the book title from the URL
  - Remove ref=... from the URL

For your recommended book:
  - http://www.amazon.com/dp/0750675438/

This is somewhat in line with what Zecharia Sitchen has been translating from Sumerian tablets for decades (but a bit off, surprise surprise). Check out his first major book in a series on the subject - 'The Twelfth Planet' - http://www.amazon.com/Twelfth-Planet-Book-Earth-Chronicles/dp/0061379131

The books read a bit like scripture, so it's not exactly an easy read but it is fascinating nonetheless. I stumbled onto them as reference in another book called 'Everything You Know is Wrong' by Lloyd Pye. If this stuff interests you I highly recommend you see what both of these guys have to say about it all. It all ties into Intervention Theory, as I understand and accept it, based loosely on what Pye has summarized, much of that basis being on what Sitchen has translated. His site - www.lloydpye.com - is very informative. There are all kinds of easily accessible slide shows presenting the information in an easy to understand way. I'd say his writings are a lot more accessible, I'm not great at finishing books and that's one I couldn't put down.

I've heard before that our moon seems to be of a more ancient origin than our planet. According to the Sumerian tablets, and this was the first civilization on Earth we are aware of that had a written language - cuneiform, and via Sitchen's translations of their tablets and cylinder seals: a rogue planet, which they called Nibiru, came into our system billions of years ago ago and it's moon collided with what they called Tiamat, our planet's predecessor. Nibiru was pulled into the orbit of our sun and has remained on a large elliptical orbit of it, ever since. There were subsequent collisions, that I can't recall the order of exactly, and Tiamat was broken when Nibiru, itself, eventually collided with it. The fractured pieces resulted in comets and an asteroid belt and the remaining part of the planet, still solidifying, became Earth and ended up with an alien moon. Our planet is truely an anomaly in it's geological form (as far as we know), it shows the scars of that ancient collision. Another interesting tidbit, the Sumerians also accurately described Uranus and Neptune as gassy and blue, and as twins. We discovered them in the 20th century and some people have realized they were right about them (this has some implications) but the Sumerian writings still reside inthe myth pile, if you will, as far as mainstream science goes.

If you you've read up on some of the ideas as to what the pending end of this age really means, physically, to the planet, you'll find one of the larger schools of thought on it involves the so-called Planet-X and the possible effects on Earth that a large planet passing nearby it could have. Sitchen says the Sumerians estimated Nibiru's orbit to be about 3,600 of our years. That is all pretty controversial stuff, it's certainly nicer to think we'll just be seeing the stars' constellations will simply be in a different place. Regardless of whether the end of age should be suspected as catastrophic, there is evidence that suggests there is a cycle of catastrophic events on this planet. I do not desire to be the bearer of bad news or thought to be a doomsayer, I just find it relevant, worth discussing, and worth pointing at for other people who might be interested. If you read up on the Sumerian 'Mythology' per Mr. Sitchen, you'll see no shortage of similarities to what it says and what the bible says, and it may help you understand better how things have come to be as they are, with our current dogma of science and religion (not to say that they say the same thing exactly, they just both seem to speak of the same events and some of the same characters, be it with different, yet often similar names). You can get a good and brief summary on Mr. Pye's site, though it will no doubt be a lot to process and that's always hard when it's hard to believe what you're trying to process in the first place. I learned about it all the slow and easy way and