Of course the mythology of the mayans is like the mythology of all societies...made up to explain what looked pretty darn serious to them, whatever it was.

As commeter East77 said, they were damn fine astronomers and if somehow, beyond our ability to undertand they were tracking a long period commet, well it will be the worst day planet earth's had since the last big one 12,900 years ago..or maybe the one described by the Holocene Impact Group which hit the Indian Ocean around 5000 years ago.

And while it's not the end of the world, back in the 70s when there was some concern over a returning ice age, well, there still should be some and maybe some sighs of relief that it didnt arrive thanks to some fortuitous warming for whatever reason. Ice ages don't just creep up slowly like a wall of ice but arrive with a massive killing frost when the crops don't grow from the Ukrain to Wisconsin and then the next year the same thing....we should be so lucky as to have only a bit of warming to accomodate, and if we successfully get the planet to cool, who is to say we won't overshoot a degree or two, just enough to shorten the growing season..that'll end the obeisity epidemic....for billions of us..in a permanent way.

Now that we know scientifically that those slight differences in genes are major differences in people, we should go back into eductional theory, sociology, psychology, and other social sciences of the last few decades upon which so much of our society's so-called enlightened perspectives are based and cast-out the old unscientific ideas and start re-examining them to address the terrible consequences of the standard sociological model. I'm sure there's more to come as well as these excellent, logical and progressive theories are discovered to contravene hard scientific evidence, but don't expect it the old ways to just roll-over. Suddenly a the widely applied description of "anti-science" will be stinging those whose pet theories are shown to be largely perceptual and not substantive no matter how tightly we cling to them.

I don't think Ms Hefner is so much of a feminist nightmare. What I think is a nightmare is when someone who is looking for guidance and leadership puts more faith in someone who only looks at the road map and ignores what's actually on the road. Ideology is not reality and logic is a way of saying what didn't happen yesterday won't happen tomorrow.

As we learn that in particular regarding sexuality it is not as we learn in school and that gender equality is a concept and not an accurate description of our genetically hardwired instinctual drives we ought to encorporate it rather than insist it's all just a result of some sociological construct imposed through the ages and which we happen to find inconsistent with our modern though soon to be outdated perspectives.

The economic engine and its hunger for energy that is so often condemned as the cause of global warming is feulling a growth of cities that we in the western world are not often fully aware of. Cities with over a million people are sprouting up like mushrooms after a warm summer rain. If that engine slows down, or is hobbled by making energy more expensive, it will be inevitably the least empowered of these people who lose their work and then these same people who are now flocking to these new cities in the developing world return to their homes in the countryside and start immediately degrading their environment by cutting down the trees for fuel or overfishing their coastlines or plowing wilderness in unsustainable ways for cash to buy food. Even if they stay in cities, but can't escape povery and the bad sanitation and poor health care that are part of the urban poor's miserable life, they will feel that a large number of children will help them alleviate some of their economic insecurity and so they stay in their old patterns. If expanding econommic conditions are good and offer advancement the people soon reduce their reproduction and no longer feel they need lots of children and they feel more secure in their futures when their offspring are getting education and finding jobs. Keeping the industrial economies humming and these cities growing actually help to curb the kind of growth that has so expanded the world's population over the last several decades.

A tax on energy will slow down economies and aggravate population growth as people who see no other course, continue to reproduce at high rates.

It is counter-intuitive in some respects but cannot be denied that economically secure families tend to have fewer children and those children recieve better care so that they can take advantage of opportunities they never imagined before, and ultimately the population stabilizes and can begin to improve efficiencies and economies of scale, wasting less of the resources that are being sought, reducing extractive pressures on the resources themselves.

It's going to be easier to make energy use more efficient and reduce negative impacts from its use if the people are urbanized in cities where economic growth is not artificially constrained.

..really. I never felt like I'd be able to. Note to self: always toss my gloves when in an avalanche.

She is hilarious. I saw a really funny interview with her by Phil Bronstein of the SF Chronicle. She'd been performing her schtick at the Julia Morgan in Berkeley...it's worth looking up.

What a waste. $500 million dollars wasted. Think if that were actually building tunnels underground in the desert in which would be farms and villages. Clearly R. Buckminster Fuller was correct when he noted that the only resource we lack on Earth is vision.