Dis (Divine Comedy) in red-hot tombs. Beyond are rings of those who were violent—to others, to themselves (suicides), to God (blasphemers), to art (usurers), and to nature (sexual perverts). Beyond the ruins of Dis are the frauds and corruptors, and finally the traitors. In ancient Roman mythology, Dis Pater ("Father Dis") is the ruler of the underworld and is named as such in the sixth book of Virgil's "Aeneid", one of the principal influences on Dante in his depiction of Hell (the god was also known as Pluto, a name not used by Virgil in the "Aeneid"). The hero Aeneas enters the "desolate
The Nine Billion Names of God is completed, God will bring the Universe to an end. Three centuries ago, the monks created an alphabet in which they calculated they could encode all the possible names of God, numbering about 9,000,000,000 ("nine billion") and each having no more than nine characters. Writing the names out by hand, as they had been doing, even after eliminating various nonsense combinations, would take another 15,000 years; the monks wish to use modern technology to finish this task more quickly. They rent a computer capable of printing all the possible permutations, and they hire two Westerners to install and program the