What book are you reading now?

No I haven't heard of natural nuclear reactors, could this have been harnessed or usedss s weapon in earlier times is still the question

Oh, so he's more of a *** than Giorgios! Giorgios is just an ex-bodybuliding promoter with no credentials having the world of fun, harmless.

You and I would have had great fun at Sunday School. I lasted all of a few weeks. Had clashes over The Akedah, and yes, the story of Lot.

One week we were told that angels didn't have a physical body, but then that Lot offered up his daughters to stop them being defiled. When I pointed out that you can't defile a ghost, it didn't go down well.........

The Akedah is just as much of a silly story. If god is omnipotent why would he have needed to test Abraham's faith, or was he just having a joke! Pointed that out too!

Have you heard about the "Natural Nuclear Reactor"?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklo?wprov=sfla1

There were people actually mining in that area for thousands of years too. The phenomena seems to be natural, but the strange thing is that the "reactor" was given a wide birth by the mines.

Scotland has quite a lot of vitrified Bronze and Iron age architecture too. Glen Nevis Fort is probably the best known, but there are a lot.

Steven Collins is an utter gung-ho evangelist and in his videos he seems to like the sound of his own voice.  There is a good cartoon satire of the Sodom story up on You Tube too. How is it virtuous to try to offer your own virgin daughters to an inflamed mob to be raped in place of your guests? See a pretty skewed honour culture to me. 

Yes, I saw those references to the Brahmanastra!

I wonder how such a civilisation might have intuited how to split the atom, if that is what they did manage to do. I mean, without our kind of technology, could there be an equivalent of running two sticks together that could have provided these early Hindus with the understanding of how to create a nuclear weapon out of Uranium?

I heard it suggested that the Sodom and Gomorrah story was based on the story of an early nuclear war. And the Trinitite finds are more what you might expect there, but the science of it seems to concur more with the exploding meteriorite idea, whose plume might as well have been a nuke from the point of view of the temperatures produced, needed to melt pottery on one side to glass. 

BTW I'm not going all Ancient Aliens......

I read the Bhagavad Gita years before I'd found out about Mohenjo-Daro, the Vedic texts are a good read.

Mind you Oppenheimer was obsessed with the Vedas......

nexus9 said:

I was disappointed though that the writer, after all the science be brought to this discovery, then insists that Sodom and Gomorrah really did displease an alien god. 

He will never be this guy, never how hard he tries to imitate his spiel.

We like our vitrification Nexus! Trinitite can also be found in Indus Valley ruins of the Bronze age. Harrapa, Mohenjo-Daro, and an even older city Kot Diji have traces of it, along with radioactive areas.

As you say it's similar to Sodom and Gomorrah in respect to it being tied in with religious texts. The Vedic texts go into detail about an 18 day battle that was ended by a big explosion. The Mahrabharata makes references to many battles, and contains a part called the Book of Drona which details the "magical weapons" that were utilised. One being the "Brahmastra".......

Here's a few passages on it.

“a single projectile charged with all the power in the universe. It was an unknown weapon, an iron thunderbolt, a gigantic messenger of death which reduced to ashes an entire race. There was neither a counter attack nor a defense that could stop it.”

“an incandescent column of smoke and flame as bright as 10,000 suns that rose in all its splendor. After, corpses were so burned as to be unrecognizable. Their hair and nails fell out; pottery broke without any apparent cause, and the birds turned white… After a few hours, all foodstuffs were infected."

“Any target hit by the brahmastra would be utterly destroyed; land would become barren and lifeless, rainfall would cease, and infertility in humans and animals would follow for aeons of time.”

Etna was quiet. Did not manage to get to the summit, we were taken in a jeep to Rifiugio Sapienza, annoyingly my stamina for climbing was ziilch and the guide noticed. Athsmatics are warned to to go too far up. Catania is a little run-down. We took a light train that goes round the volcano and stayed in a medieval town on its slopes. 

Prisoner of Midnight is excellent. The whole series is. It might be better to start with the first though, this is the eighth and the last. The cost is called Those who Bunt the Night. A Spanish vampire coerces an old spy, James Asher, to work with him to find out who is killing vampires in Lodonrlped by his doctor wife, Lydia.

Very atmospheric, part historical.novels, part detective novels too. 

Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds.  Fifth time in three years.

This seems vastly more intellectual than the last book that I read! My 5 year old daughter's favourite book is 'Unicorn and the Rainbow Poop'! Which I have to read to her most evenings before bed! To be fair I would highly recommend it to anyone with young children, especially those that are still going through the 'toilet humour' stage!

Let me know how the book 'Prisoner of midnight' is please? I'm partial to the odd vampire story, sometimes :-)

:-D

I meant to ask you before, what were Catania and Etna like when you visited?

I just finished Utopia for Realists. It is about Basic Income. That is being piloted in one or two places. And despite what our cynical History teacher told is about school and the necessity for austerity in those times, all that was based on faulty research and damn lies. Seems the Speenhamland system worked well. 

Nixon came pretty close to implementing one. 

Now though I am reading something that was on the back shelf for a while, Prisoner of midnight by Barbara Hambly. From a series of vampire tales.

We did both of those stories at school

I have a long list of enemies who will pay dearly once I can recruit an army of 10,000 men willing to die for my noble cause.

Who are you planning to declare war on Plastic?  

Aw that's a shame, that you read the book expecting something 'meaty' but instead got something a lot less informative. When it comes to 'factual' books I prefer evidence based facts as opposed to people's opinions. Warfare is not usually my 'thing' to read about but I picked up a copy of the 'Suffolk Invasion' last time that I visited the Languard Fort. It's about the Dutch attack on Languard Fort in 1667. I shall read it purely for the historical accounts of how things were at that time, because the 1600's is an era that interests me. It's quite a small book too so not too much blood and gore for me to handle :-)

I've just read The Art Of War.    I'm disappointed - I was expecting something heavy and highly technical - but it's actually almost a pamphlet with short bullet points which are actually common sense and logical thoughts before starting a war - or not.

The book is padded out by people's opinions - a bit like those annoying TV programmes where they keep cutting away to some irrelevant Z-list 'sleb for their inane comment.