Make that the Tigris and the Karun.

Smithsonian magazine had a good article on Eden and the Persian Gulf in 1987, too long ago to be in their online archives. Most references to it are on Christian sites. The article was based on archaeology by Juris Zarins. Genesis describes three rivers flowing into Eden. Zarins says two were the Tigris and Euphrates. The third is a fossil river in Saudi Arabia. The idea is simple and plausible. The Wikipedia page on Zarins: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juris_Zarins/ A good description of the research: http://ldolphin.org/eden/ I thought of this often during the Persian Gulf War -- the war in the Garden of Eden.

The microscope photo in the article shows four man-made particles of aluminum (blue arrows) plus one particle of olivine (left red arrow) and one of pyroxene (right red arrow).

Sky & Telescope magazine has a thorough story on this in its November issue. A press release with a link to a PDF of the article is at http://www.skyandtelescope.com/about/pressreleases/64679127.html#

I am pleased to see SoftMaker get some recognition. I've used OpenOffice.org since the early days of StarOffice, and have tried every GUI editor available for Linux. SoftMaker's suite is worth the money. I've bought it twice (the original TextMaker, and the 2006 suite), and will buy it again. TextMaker (the only member of the suite I use) is easy to use, has everything I need and more, and works well with Word formats. I only use OpenOffice when I have to make a document that uses Japanese and also requires formatting. Kennedy is right about OpenOffice's weakness. Not long ago I tried to make a document containing Machu Picchu pictures gleaned off the Web, with identifying captions. Just two to four photos on a page, with captions, so I could print out the set I had collected. OpenOffice failed utterly. Making captions was difficult, and it kept crashing. After each crash, photos would be distorted or missing. It couldn't properly reopen a document it had made, even one made fresh without a crash. TextMaker 2006 had no such problems. I was amazed that OpenOffice failed on such a simple task. TextMaker does have a number of weaknesses, and I have given SoftMaker feedback on my main gripes and requests. The biggest have to do with encodings and non-European languages. It allegedly can deal with Asian characters, but in practice does not. I have not bought the most recent versions because the older ones (I use two) work just fine for me, and because I am waiting until they iron out their encoding problems. It also has a proprietary file format, which I use only while working on a document; I keep documents for the long term as plain text, or in RTF or PDF format.