  The existence of a singularity by definition implies a preferred scale--the
affine parameter distance from/to the singularity of a causal geodesic that is
used to define it. However, this variable scale is also captured by the
expansion along the geodesic, and this can be used to obtain a regularized
state space picture by means of a conformal transformation that factors out the
expansion. This leads to the conformal `Hubble-normalized' orthonormal frame
approach which allows one to translate methods and results concerning spatially
homogeneous models into the generic inhomogeneous context, which in turn
enables one to derive the dynamical nature of generic cosmological
singularities. Here we describe this approach and outline the derivation of the
`cosmological billiard attractor,' which describes the generic dynamical
asymptotic behavior towards a generic spacelike singularity. We also compare
the `dynamical systems picture' resulting from this approach with other work on
generic spacelike singularities: the metric approach of Belinskii, Lifschitz,
and Khalatnikov, and the recent Iwasawa based Hamiltonian method used by
Damour, Henneaux, and Nicolai; in particular we show that the cosmological
billiards obtained by the latter and the cosmological billiard attractor form
complementary `dual' descriptions of the generic asymptotic dynamics of generic
spacelike singularities.
