And said God, "lets gather the waters under the heavens into one place, and lets see it dry."
Called God the dry "Earth", and the collection of waters he called "Seas", And saw God "that's good".

For those just tuning in, think more mashup than advocacy. Kind of like The Cleverly's 'Mo Diggity', bringing something new into a more rooted history. This takes current cosmology on the start of the universe and sees if we can tell it through a hopefully not too stretched interpretation of Genesis 1.
The first day was all about creating dimension and light, which was recast as the big bang. The second day was a creation of expanse, which was cast as the great inflation.
We discussed how cosmic flows are 'waters' in some sense like calling our galaxy the 'Milky Way' instead of the cloudy way, which fits the nature of fluid motion seen in the universe. And ultimately the water we know and experience everyday is separated from the cosmic flows, and that water is the physical liquid designated as waters under the heavens that we experience every day.
So today we look at the creation of land, and the separation of the land and water, and I can't help but wonder if in the previous entry I would have better said that the water we experience is refined from the basic hydrogen that makes up much of the fluid motion of the cosmos. Refinement being a process of separation which allows for some elemental changes as well.
Because matter and energy are not created or destroyed. The Big Bang did not create matter or energy, but energy did create space. Even today dark energy is how we account for the acceleration of the expansion of the universe.
From the cosmic refining of matter into the elements, we have another two ways to see separation of water from land. The outer Kuiper Belt water from the inner rocky planets past the snow zone, and later a more intense separation of water locked in hydrous rocks that appear dry.
Earth received water from both sources, and possibly the seeds of life from the water beyond the snow line of the solar system and from what was locked into rocks in front of the snow line. Mostly from the inner solar system.
But oceans didn't appear until that water was extracted from melting the rocks as the kinetic energy of many collisions melted the earth's lithosphere, and then the earth cooled again to below 100 degrees Celsius.

Up to this point the whole story of the creation of earth could have been told from the context of the whole universe, or just our solar system. But now we have something called 'Earth' under the heavens. Both possible interpretations of the story line are merged from this point on.

And said God, lets bring forth on the ground grass, the plants producing seeds and the tree -- fruit, producing fruit according to its type, whose seed is within itself on the earth. And so it was, grass on the ground, the herb producing seeds according to its own kind and the tree producing fruit with seeds within itself according to its kind. And God saw it was just right.

So essentially we have the gymnosperm plants and the angiosperm plants, which diverged 240+ million years ago, evolving mainly 100 million years after that into unmistakable fruit. That is tens of millions of years after we see land based animals which are not yet mentioned.

I need to write up more on this, but if we accept that waters are discussed before oceans are formed, earth is formed before the Sun appears, then this follows the pattern of giving us a confusing confligration of what we experience now with its kind. And here it is more egregious as we could have just said 'grass' and even 'trees' but it went further to clearly designate gymnosperm and angiosperm plants.

Is it so egregious that I have to change it? I'm going to go back to my target audience to decide. Is a kindergartener going to be confused when they learn later that plants they understand and eat as grains / seeds vs fruits didn't exist as such at this time? But even beyond that there are trees with both gymnosperms and angiosperms as well as regular plants.

Still while exceptions exist this description is pretty well rooted what they experience. Grains come from plants, and fruit mostly comes from trees or woody vines. Is it going to be rooted well enough that they can slip in later the concept of a progenitor plant that existed before what they experience now?

Now I haven't once said that this version of Genesis is what was intended all along, I'm just seeing if it is useful. And to be useful to kindergarteners, as discussed before, taking some liberty to place things as they experience them today in a context of what it emerges from is not a bad way to teach them. But at the end of the day that is left for the reader to think about for themselves.

All I'm going to say is as a college textbook this wouldn't fly, but having taught preschoolers through 10 year olds, such compromises to find something rooted in a child's experience are made all the time and even necessary.

And given how adults scoff at the pedantic wrestling of academia even today, it seems like I can expect a preference for this kind of rooting from bronze age people.

Welcome to the latest installment in my series. So far I've set up the context -- telling real science and cosmology to kindergartners using Genesis as our text to see how well it works or doesn't work. Kindergartners are just our approximation of bronze age campfire communities.

The story started before the big bang, in a dimensionless stage with a strong feeling of liminal space. We watched the spark of the big bank, a flash of light that lasted several hundreds of thousands of years, that eventually subsided to a twilight of cosmic background radiation. A story that is remarkably abstract, yet salient in the few details provided so far.

After the big bang comes the great inflation, where space expanded at a significantly accelerated rate even compared to the Big Bang or what we observe now in the universe. Does that fit account of Genesis Day 2?

And said God, let there be expansion in the midst of the waters, and let it separate in the waters from the waters.

Why two waters? Babylonians drew up the waters as dragons, one representing salt water (depths, seas) and one representing fresh water (rain, rivers, lakes). That isn't far from the more mainstream tradition that the night sky was looking directly into one kind of water, and the earth we experienced another kind of water. Which isn't so weird when you think of it, after all we call the largest observable object in the sky the "Milky Way", not the cloudy way.

But it also isn't weird when you look at the imagery we have from the Sun in the past few decades. Splashes, rain, ripples all dance across the Sun in a way that is observable only when you have the right instruments. The Milky Way is a galaxy, which not only looks milky from within, but from the outside at a distance looks like water flowing down a drain.

During the rapid expanse of the Great Inflation, space expanded while all of the forces of the universe like gravity, electro-static, and even the nuclear forces kept cohesion. I suspect it looked something like a jug of water being hit with a bullet or shotgun slug, a rapid expansion with the water's own cohesion being stretched to thin tendrils and eventually small droplets. Only these droplets would soon start shining like jewels, much like light shimmering through rain.

The thin tendrils resemble the very large structures we see in the universe today comprising of a kind of cohesion keeping galaxies relatively close around the edges of huge cosmic voids.

So I'm torn on continuing this analogy with kindergartners. On one side, calling the universe "the waters" is a very neolithic sense. We have new and better words and a need to use them to describe cosmic flows and chaos. I could simply say "cosmos" and remove the ambiguity of thinking it was H20. But Kindergartners are still very visceral, and there is a reason "waters" worked for those ancient societies. Rooting the analogy in water is useful to keeping them engaged and grounded in the experience.

If I had to make the decision I would go with it, invest in it, and plat the seed for a clearer distinction between H20 and cosmic flows around the 3rd grade. But one of the first compounds that formed as stars began their fusion burning was H20, as Oxygen is the most reactive element most readily formed element we get when we start fusing Hydrogen and Helium. e.g. https://phys.org/news/2011-06-baby-star-blasts-jets-space.html

So we continue with the explanation in Genesis...

God caused the expansion, refining the waters that are under the space from the outer space waters. And it happened as planned.

And God named the expansion "space", and that was the morning and evening for day two.

Cosmology has nothing to say so far, except agreeing there is no dimension or substance or life, but if there was a casual observer that could exist in these circumstances the emotions provided in the preceding verses would suffice for our kindergartners.

But Cosmology has a lot to say about the next verse,

And said God, "Let there be light", and there was light.

We turn on the lights in the room at God's que, and finally the first material on the stage is light itself. It continues on the emotion of getting to work, like when we enter into a room where we intend to do work we first turn on the light, or if we sit at a desk to do work we turn on the light to that desk. Something a five year old could certainly relate to.

This is interesting because in a system of study where predictability is the measure of how good a concept is, like we have in science, this starts out with something we can make an observable prediction for. The Big Bang, the spark of light that started everything, is a scientific theory created from and expectation made from the positer's personal theology. If you want to learn more about this many others have treated this topic of the Big Bang Theory and its creator, Father Georges Lemaître. After the initial spark, the work commences with division.

God Saw the light was just right, and then God divided between the light and darkness

We have light distinct and in opposition to the preceding dimensionless darkness.

Since contriving the big bang theory as a flash of light, cosmology gives us an even fuller view of a universe was filled with light thick and tangible like soup for hundreds of thousands of years, something similar to what goes on inside stars today. This is a plasma which not only generates light, but light keeps bouncing off of. It can take X years for light to reach the surface of the Sun, and inside it is a plasma all filled with light. This is one reason why it may be just as possible to construct a Genesis narrative over the big bang and the creation of just our solar system. But we continue with the Big Bang which not only supplies light, but space and expansion.

I don't know how to preserve this simile as well as Genesis does in abstraction, but I wish I could. But if I were to make it avideo I would do it by visually drawing on the similar picture that the big bang and the initial spark of our solar system would have.

But moving on to the expansion, which gives us dimensional space to have light before we even have the emptiness of "outer space". Pv=NRT still applies, so the expanding universe quickly cools the plasma until it becomes regular gas and is no longer hot enough to make light. So you have this moment of universal twilight as what is white hot subdues to a dull red and eventually extinguishes into darkness. Whatever caused the universe to expand in the first place caused darkness separate from the light.

The twilight from that first plasma is still seen as cosmic background microwave light.

Such is the morning, day, twilight and eventually night of the first day.

And called God the light day, and the darkness he called night. There was the evening and there was the morning -- day one.

Where do we start with little five year olds?

Genesis is abstract such that it might map to that early big bang, or it could map to the first time our sun light up what would soon be its domain -- our solar system.

  Cosmology cannot reliably peer into the big bang. Our models break down in the immense heat and physics that boiled the universe over in those first moments. We know quite a bit about the stellar nebula that must have coalesced into our sun and planets. But for Kindergartners, the rule of cool reigns, and nothing is more awesome than the Big Bang.

So lets start with Genesis 1, and I take some license with the translation to suit it to our audience:

To start there was God beginning creation of the ground and sky
even the earth was formless, void -- just darkness over the surface of the deep.
And the Spirit of God was brooding over the deep face of the depths.

I don't think this really a stretch from the original language. "The Deep" here and even the word formless are similar derivations to a chaotic dragon that we call "Tiamat", representing the depths of the salty ocean from the Babylonian traditions. Even in Taoist beliefs the beginning is signified with he distinction made between yin and yang, a division of chaotic energies that like Tiamat are closely related to chaotic dragons. The serpent shape dividing, and circumscribing these energies are meant to evoke the imagery of dragons. The creation of the universe from the body of a Dragon is a tradition which dates back over 100,000 years to earliest humans in Africa. We'll get more into this allusion when we more specifically talk about the 'waters' in later verses. But for now 'deep' is best given as a close synonym to seas or chaotic depths.

While "dragon" would certainly appeal to the kindergarteners more than just a depth, there is a reason to keep it a bit subdued.

There is little physical we can work with before the big bang, our stage is pretty simple. Almost abstractly so, like a surrealistic painting to give the imagery too much form might ruin the mood.

To begin we have nothing but a motivation, (to me spirits are our way of describing basic emotional influences) and an immensity to move in. That feeling and motivation has an energy that might best be described as kenopsia, "the eerie, forlorn atmosphere of a place thatâ(TM)s usually bustling with people but is now abandoned and quietâ"a school hallway in the evening, an unlit office on a weekend, vacant fairgroundsâ"an emotional afterimage that makes it seem not just empty but hyper-empty, with a total population in the negative, who are so conspicuously absent they glow like neon signs." Or perhaps the feeling we have on a dark starless night on the ocean, when all we can percieve is our own existence, and an immense depth of potential we are just barely penetrating the surface of. You feel the life of untold mysterious creatures below you, and feel absolutely alone and singular in the immensity all at the same time.

Like an empty canvas, but painted in a way where that canvas feels more like whatever a potential universe is formed from.

To me, that is -- if I am successful -- the best way to start with kindergartners. What we feel, what we see didn't exist yet but you can feel its potential all the same.

In order to not interfere with cosmology or religion we start as abstract as possible, with only the theatrical and physical elements needed to set the stage when there really can be no physical stage.

Cosmology, evolution, paleontology, are all fields of science where we can peer into the past after countless thousands of hours spent in painstaking effort to deduce physical cues from the world around us. We can look past history to see human families and sociality extending more than a hundred thousand years with the tools, bones and footprints they left. We can look even farther into the past before humans even existed and see a continuity of primordial evolution that takes us back to the dawn of life. By looking at the artifacts in the cosmos we can peer into a few hundred thousand years from the Big Bang that gave us a cosmos to look at.

The story in Genesis is one example of a creation story with a different lineage. We can see that it has roots in oral traditions which were captured sometime at the dawn or early morning of history. These stories were told in part to entertain and what I take to be a genuine desire inform neolithic to bronze age gatherings,

I don't have any experience with what that audience would be looking for. But I do know kindergartners, and they like to be entertained and informed, and are on the dawn to early morning of their discovery of writing as well. So if I'm going to judge the usefulness of Genesis chapter 1 in its natural setting, the closest I can get in this thought experiment is a class of kindergartners. With the lights turned off, ready to wow them at every turn, and hopefully avoiding the quagmire of scientific dulldrum.

So how does the story hold up? How well would Genesis work as a entertaining and informative story to give a good sense of what the creation was like?

Lets start with the god in the room ... it is generally held that if you mention God it is a religious work and not a scientific one. Describing a process as "then a miracle occurs" is admittedly bad science.

However, I can't help but notice how well children respond to people guiding them or representing something mysterious in a narrative. Every children's story needs a mentor / guide figure. This can be the conductor on Dinosaur Train, or Dora the Explorer, but at that age they seem to understand a story better if a person plays the roll of something difficult to understand.

Even as adults, we personify things we don't understand well, Maxwell conjures up a demon for his famous thought experiment on thermodynamics. Atoms "want" to live in the lowest state and have their electron shells filled. Its not a hard and fast rule, and a lot of mathematics can be easily summarized by just saying it is a very human like preference.

When looking at creation, we are looking at the reason we can thank for being alive. Things didn't have to happen this way, and the many times that chance broke our way can be come across as being guided by a very human preference that we wind up existing. There is an appreciation and awe that for my audience just writes itself as a ready made personification.

Whether that is a childish thing that can be done away as we learn to express things in more mechanical and mathematical terms, or a real set of fingerprints for a divine being, is a question that we all will wind up grappling with. And most importantly, one that can be put off until the children are older for the purpose of this thought exercise.

At least to start with. We'll just have to go verse by verse to see if this all works. But the fact it has a character as the face we can ascribe our awe and appreciation to is not in and of itself a deal breaker in my book.

Gone are the old-bold days. Rosebud.

I wonder if Cheezeburger Brown saw The Meep was a wolf in sheep's clothing villain in the throwback 10th Doctor.

Heh, villAIn...

OpenLDAP (slapd) has always been one of the trickier things to have to deal with. I'd have a hard time figuring out what the fuck kind of magic shit needs to go into slapd.conf to deal with some interoperability problem, but Google is everyone's friend. Invariably someone else has had the problem first, and so I'd just look up the magic incantation and that's that. It wasn't too hard.

But that was old versions of slapd. They've changed how you configure it.

Have you seen recent versions? The slapd.d database? slapcat followed by ldapmodify? OMFG.

Words cannot express my hate. The man-days lost. Fuck you, slapd team! What were you thinking, you evil pieces of shit?!?

(Someone speaking to an intern): "When you send stuff like that, save it as doc, not odt. That way, people who don't have Openoffice can open it."

It's a happening place. There are upwards of 3, maybe 4 posts a day!
You should join us, if you like.

http://www.reddit.com/r/CircularRefuge
(message mods to join; can't let the riffraff on reddit in! Just our very own special riffraff.)

Hey, Slashdot was instrumental in finding Twue Wuv for me, so I couldn't possibly leave it forever. The 14 day comment limit, however, is unfortunate for those of us who stop by only every 6-9 months. :^)

I have read your updates and am interested in your lives and would love to leave a comment expressing as much.

So, hey, Red5, congratulations on the marriage and baby and stuff! And all the other babies that have happened in the past 5 years or so for everybody else! And marriages! And diplomas! And new jobs! And sorry/congrats about the divorces!

Yes I admit it I am tired of the idiot ACs that post on Slashdot. Really just make people log in and even allow them to hide there Nick when posting but at least give them the karma hit when they post something foul and and or racist. It is not like Slashdot karma is important in the real world so the chilling effect should be very low.

I'm a masochist. No, not of the sexual variety. Of the slashdot variety. For some reason, not only do I still continue to read this site, I click on links to stories about cars and phones. The raging stupidity and arrogance is amazing.

And yet I come back.

Some people don't know that Obama lied. But it's obvious fact based on the evidence. In another discussion some apparent trolls were complaining about the claim, but I am uninterested in discussing it, but for those who are interested, the basic summary is this:

* The administration said, for weeks, that the video and the unrest around it was a cause of the attack on the embassy in Benghazi.

* They claimed that the evidence led them to say so.

* They have never provided any such evidence. Some of what they claimed happened -- such as protests existing at the embassy in Benghazi -- was false, and there was never any evidence it was true (maybe in the first hours, but not after the first days).

* There was much evidence, even in the first days, that the attack was preplanned, but it was ignored in favor of the nonexistent evidence of spontaneity.

* The documentary evidence shows that, from the beginning, they had evidence that it was preplanned, and the only "evidence" of spontaneity cited was that it happened soon after protests in Cairo.

Draw your own conclusions, but I do not believe that the President would say it was a spontaneous reaction to the video without some evidence of it, and he had none. He said it because he thought it was believable and wanted to win an election, and if it were preplanned then it is a failure of his administration.

If you want more, check out last week's 60 Minutes report by Lara Logan. Most of it has to do with showing that we a. knew the attack was coming and b. didn't take reasonable steps to prevent it.

Does anything around here work anymore? I go to the zoo.pl page (uid changed to mine to protect the guilty) to try to change friend/foe/neutral status, and I get:

OK

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, admin@slashdot.org and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
Apache/2.2.3 (CentOS) Server at slashdot.org Port 80

I have to click in three different places to find the right link to let me do a JE.
I was gonna give a laundry list, but fuck it, it's just pissing in the wind. I figure Dice was able to buy it for, what, the price of one week of coffee at Starbucks?

Thanks to whoever burned five.