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...

Every time someone makes me a foe, I'm gonna friend them. Just for LOL's.

"Hi Buddy! Good to see ya!"

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.

Hey everyone,

It this time the herd might have really moved on?

I've tried to scavenge as many email addresses as I could from my friends list and added them to my google+ /. circle. I'm going to send out a message on it to see how many of those addresses still work.

But in the mean time, feel free to add me if I couldn't find you. You can find me on Google+ with my email address, noble.oblige at gmail.

That means you chacham, superyooser, etc...

So I've been looking back on my career. It is amazing to me the technologies that I was innovating with before their day.

I've been working on Linux since it was a toddler (pre 1.0). I've been doing automated image installation since before Ghost and Kickstart; windows and Linux unified directory services with LDAP+Kerberos before Centrify; and unified network on a scalable hardware platform before HP, Dell, Oracle, Microsoft and the like.

I was never the lone pioneer. There were others working on each technology at the time. Some were open with their ideas and I gained a lot from them. Others, like Amazon and Google's work on scalable infrastructure, kept them as proprietary secrets of strategic advantage.

I never found these technologies in an effort to build my career or be on the leading edge. I've spent some time playing with different technologies at home, and to be honest none of them seemed to go anywhere.

But these career choices seem to be remarkable in that they occured purely when focusing on enabling researchers or simplifying systems management.

For Linux, the need was given to me to explore, the Computer Lab needed to have a mature/complex environment to enforce security and be open enough for education. They found Linux, and simply found me a willing person to develop it for them.

For the imaging system, it was a need to administer 100+ workstations for a call center on my own, while the other corporate call centers had a ration of one FTE per 10 workstations. Automation was the only way to accomplish that. The need to make my job easier was also behind the LDAP+Kerberos.

But it wasn't until I found my way into large companies that I found an entirely different kind of need. A purely business created need -- the need for simply scaling architecture. The PMO process is, inalterably by its very nature, a waterfall approach to change. While large companies can benefit from economies of scale, the PMO processes seem to work on an economy of inflation -- the bigger the change more the inflation of resources needed to enact the change.

Hence the need for scalable architecture arose from the need to change and grow with as little imprint in the PMO as possible.

Now, PMO oversight is a business justified expense. I am in no wise critical of what value project management brings a large organization. But it is, and will continue, to be an inflationary environment which continues to drive evolution towards architectures which minimize its footprint in the PMO.

Right now I'm working on just what that means -- how do you minimize the PMO footprint of your architecture? What principles are developing that show what exactly is best to simplify, and where is the flexibility that needs to be pushed to soft-tooling rather than hard-tooling?

What are your thoughts? No place to find venerable IT workers fighting against the machine than Slashdot, no?

A nation cannot be free where its citizens are bonded in debt or reliant on welfare.

If the Lottery is a tax on people bad at math, then financial crisis such as the one we are going through are a tax on people who fail to fully account for value.

The Medici family, one of the richest in all of Europe, practically funded the movement we call the Renaissance. Much of that was on the good accounting practice of double-ledger accounting. But even with that stringent accounting, eventually their search for business went bankrupt. The powerful family was left with nothing left but a little political currency they could use to set one of themselves up as Pope. And what did they do when they obtained the Papacy? They spent the Catholic Church, itself rich enough to fund the largest building projects in Europe at the time, into the ground.

Here's something to think about. Lets say I need or want money, where do I get it? In an economic standpoint I see three basic transactions which get me money...

I can earn it.
I can sell for it.
I can take out a loan for it.

Each of those have their pluses and minuses.

Earning requires work, and establishing value for someone else who exchanges part of that value with you.

Selling means giving up something that could be useful to me.

And a loan requires me to take an obligation to somehow make the money later, by the two means above.

What if I could have the best of all those options. How about if instead of taking a debt for money, I get you to get into debt to pay me some money. In your new found abundance, each dollar is less valuable. Call it easy come, easy go, or perhaps your own personal inflation dilemma. It is burning a hole in your pocket and you are ready to spend it for something less valuable, less needed, then you were before. What if I sold you that something that was less valuable for more of that easy to come by money. Then, I'm richer, and you are in trouble.

I'm not saying that is in and of itself an evil process. In fact, at its worst it may be considered an unfairly churlish way of looking at how economies expand. The more money there is, the more that can promote the circulation of real value, and the more real value we all have the more prosperous we are and able to gain more money.

In essence, the only problem with that transaction is in the discrepancy between the money given and the value received. The personal inflation problem caused more of a bubble then sustained economic growth. And the only person to blame, caveat emptor, is the buyer. When the person's ability to account for their own money, and prioritize to get the most value from that money. Or in other words, they devalued their own money by the triviality of their purchase. Or in even fewer words, they showed poor business sense.

Perhaps we can simply say that good business sense boils down to the fact that the more people account for their own money and needs, the more they will demand respect for their money. I'd certainly like to say that is good business sense, but when I walked away with that persons money, I'd be patted on the back by investors with more money -- given I can show that I can reliably do that for the foreseeable future. So lets say that good moral business sense boils down to good accounting as well as understanding of yours and others needs.

The distinction of the two is so difficult to see. Especially when the money circulation is such that one can siphon off that value with a large supply of takers for a seemingly infinite length of time. With that kind of seemingly endless money supply, what is the difference between that and the truly moral sense of economic growth? Such is the problem the S.E.C. has in enforcing regulations on corporate accounting.

But I don't understand accounting like they do. But I can learn a lot of the principles of true value and wealth from my own accounting practice -- the one in my own home.

And one thing I've learned in my family budget is that it can't be built in a day. But that doesn't mean it is hard to do. Like building a kit car, a budget is the last step of turning the key on an economic engine built for your home. It depends on some very simple practices that need to be taken one at a time. Each step is much easier then building a car, and just like when you got your first car the result of taking on the extra maintenance is much greater freedom.

I've been working on my own financial budget, out of necessity, for many years now. For myself, I've settled on Ledger-CLI for my accounting, I hire financial advisers each year and talk with them regularly. I've even found that instead of riding roughshod over my bank statements each month, it is easier to spend a little time each few days to go receipts. The closer I can get to the actual transaction, the easier it gets to account for my finances as a whole. But your mileage may vary, your engine is your own to build and drive. the most important value you can gain is not the money as much as the process.

Many years ago I was offered stock by RedHat during their now legendary IPO. I think it had something to do with my paying a consultant a large sum of my own money to help fix NFS in the Linux Kernel to be more compatible with AIX for my job. But at the time I had re-entered college and on a very strict budget. I had $2000 I had budgeted to use for the rest of the school year, in fact I only needed $1600 of it. That also happened to be about the exact minimum lot purchase price.

And I walked away, much to the chagrin of people around me who were begging to be in the Redhat IPO. Why? Because at the time the stability of knowing I could pay for the rest of my college was more important to me then anything I could get with any more money. I'm not adverse to risk, recently I plunged a lot of money I'll probably never see again into a start-up with a few friends. But that taught me the line, where my needs were more important, and nothing could be sold for it.

The principle, more than the money is what ultimately saved me from divorce, bankruptcy, depression, etc... I'll take the principle I learned over the $2000 or maybe even $20,000 I would have made. That money, even if used wisely at the time, wasn't enough to generate any sustained wealth that would have been invulnerable to poorly managed risk later. But knowing the real value of what I had helped me save everything that I hold most valuable with far less money.

And, even more importantly, the more they will have the fiscal sure-footedness to scrap with their representatives when it comes to keeping them honest -- yet wise -- with how they use that money.

Why is this so important to me now? Its all about the Balanced Budget Amendment that so many people are talking about.

You see, as someone who values fiscal responsibility I'm a great fan of the tea party and their call for a balanced budget. I can even say I was ready to march with them. But that was until someone asked me the same thing I'm asking everyone around me -- how can I make a balanced budget compact for my own home that would allow me to respond to emergencies? I've made some attempts but haven't found one that I feel comfortable with.

And that is because in a decade effort I've learned that a budget, let alone a balanced budget, is only the culmination of many steps of financial security. Now granted, the federal government has the accounting practice already in place that I had to learn. But the devil is in even finer details for the bean counters to keep tabs on.

A nation cannot be free where its citizens are bonded in debt or reliant on welfare.

If I'm desperate, I can't hold my politicians' feet to the fire. Instead I'm doing something more like harassing and begging, which is really just more powerless and desperate -- a ready victim. But there is a more powerful option, but it isn't pretty. The other option is to try to extort it through civil disobedience, a move which hurts everyone to extort a bit of favor for yourself, as we saw in London.

People who don't know where they would stand if all of a sudden the river of government or economy went dry. And they don't know because they don't know their own financial situation from a hole in the ground (which it likely resembles very closely). The scared are always going to either hop onto any bandwagon promising hope and change -- rescue from their own plight -- or try to rob or extort their financial security at the governments expense like children throwing a tantrum to get more dessert.

Even if the government balances its budget, it will be powerless and at the whims of debt if the people are in debt. Scratch the surface of that conclusion just a little deeper and we see that it is our debt, handing over our unearned money for things of less value then they really hold, that actually caused the government debt crisis -- on so many levels.

Only a nation of individuals who practice financial freedom and stability can scrap with the politicians, letting them know that the politicians are really the needy and desperate ones. Only then can we hold their feet to the fire to give that money the respect it deserves. Only then can we collectively accept the need for real risk sometimes, but know when to draw the line before it robs us of our needs, and thus robs us of our freedom.

You can help out by making your own balanced budget. Take simple small steps that will wind up giving you the financial stability to look fearlessly at the times ahead, and help prevent such problems in the future.

And then, and only after that first step, help encourage others to do the same. From your neighbor to the federal government itself.

Adam and Eve are the center of the creation story we all know well. God creates a stage with everything we see naturally occurring. It isn't until a man walks across the stage, however, that the plot starts. And the first act is to create a woman. And unlike other stories that woman is not someone to save from a dragon or someone to clean a house as neither are yet introduced in the story.

Whether the man likes video games, or the woman likes sewing, or vice versa, is completely extraneous to the plot. It isn't worth even bringing in to fill out the characters on the stage. The story only progresses on one point, they continue creation together -- equally needed.



But the story is not unique to the branches of early Judaism (Christianity and Islam being two major branches). Norse mythology recognizes Ask and Embla as the first two humans. Hindu mythology points to Adam and Hevas. A Chinese mural may even show that a similar legend was told there, it shows a man and a woman in the setting of earth creation, and a mischievous monkey with a peach.

A great number of creation myths mark a different apex of creation that isn't human centered, yet still honoring the same duality where the father is the sky and the mother is the earth, and all living things are their children.
Humans are usually still created as man and woman, and sometimes work together in some form of rebellion to remake the world from the originally conceived environment to what we have today. For instance in Maori and Hindu tradition, they actively battle the sky and the earth apart. To what degree their rebellion, or how they work together differs. For instance in Greek mythology, Pandora acts alone with no real male figure around, to bring sorrow and pain into the world.

Today, we piece together a vision of the past, inductively. Many of the same elements still exist. Creation of everything living could have started in the spark of lightning in a methane filled sky creating a primordial soup on the earth that eventually roots into direct sustenance from the earth. Some theories even have a more direct seeding from living bacteria which evolved and formed in space on comets, that later roots into the earth.

Then at some point, man appears with the unique (to that point) ability to greatly affect the environment around him. Then this species moves from a state of being a hunter-gatherer, living directly off the life offered by the original creation to one that is actively involved in maintaining his own environment through toil and labor. Sort of like being kicked out of the house and having to live on your own, in a cultural progression from natural to civilized. In the act of changing the environment, mankind becomes responsible to upkeep -- live or die-- on their change.

The two key elements I glean from this elevation. One is how creation happens between the interaction of a complementary duality which story tellers can identify as a father and mother -- both equally necessary. The other is the responsibility -- or rather the transition of responsibility involved from the creator to the created for the environment they create for themselves.

Now, of course there are theories and myths that fit this model to various degrees, some even providing notable exceptions. I admit to taking some license with the altitude of the fly-over of the landscape of all of these different stories. For instance, the anthropological model of the paradise before civilization is not very paradisaical. Being dependent on untended mother nature to provide food can be quite hazardous to your health. And having to hunt and gather is no life of ease. And all of us are ultimately still dependent on the whims of mother nature, however emancipated by our own creation of houses and such.

But I maintain that in general, this is an fair way to characterize the path of civilization.

Another notable exception is the very centerpiece I mentioned first (merely because it is the one I personally grew up with). The original creation figure is uniquely singular, "God" who needs no other interaction to create anything. Even if you take the plural connotation of the original Hebrew, you could argue that they stand united without need of anything around them, to create. However, their creation emphasize a creation duality in the culmination of creating mankind as man and woman.

And perhaps that is the point. This congruence between many stories could simply be an artificial anthropomorphism, something we relate to and understand like how we relate to each other as human beings. It is something universal that we found and then understand intuitively using the circuitry of our brains created for socialization. It could also be the opposite, an emulation that we picked through millions of evolutionarily adjustments to the natural environment around us.

At this elevation, whether contrived by mankind to understand nature or imbued in mankind by emulating nature, it looks like the same thing to me. It looks like a principle that is both elemental and natural, as well as personal and human. They both mirror the other with no real way to establish which came first, it is a uniquely human version of the chicken or the egg conundrum.

So its no wonder to me you can come to the same climax of the story whether or not you start with a lone intelligence of omniscience, or a duality that combines together to create life at the get-go. For what creates a whole universe and then culminates in the duality of man and woman? Or what is the duality or a mother earth and father sky which then humans emulate naturally?

By a duality of creation, I mean to denote those cases where we have separation and distinction in the participants of creation. The ability to procreate is not given to one alone, the ability is broken into complement parts and separated between two: sky and earth, man and woman.

Another separation happens in the transfer of responsibility. In moving from direct dependency on nature to one's on ability to create your own environment within nature, there is a degree of separation between nature and the creation. In becoming responsible for one's own environment where you must plant now to have food later, you have become somewhat separated from the dependency for nature to take care of you.

And now I walked us through the whole stage, the universe that Adam and Eve find themselves in, we come to the next act. Creation isn't over with the distinction of the man and the woman. The final act of creation is their marriage, bringing them back together. It is their assuming responsibility for what they create until they pass it on again to those they create. Its a recursive pattern, repeating itself and renewing itself with each generation.

Even in the stories of father sky and mother earth, often the culminating act for the two trouble makers who just changed the whole earth is to be united in marriage. I read this a few ways, one is "you two caused this together, now you two have to deal with it together". But there is also a romantic aspect of it, they worked together to conquer something they both didn't like and now their reward is each other and a heritage they created that is given as legend to each generation thereafter.

Their act, their creation, their choice, their ability to create, lives happily ever after even after they die. Hence the birth of legend and heritage itself. Adam might not walk on the stage carrying a book, but Eve (or rather the nature of their union and creation) becomes the mother of necessity for books.

At this point, one might see this as an attempt to say marriage is what it is, "yeah, yeah it is man and woman we get it already". It might be seen as an appeal to whatever natural circumstance created tradition in the first place to justify tradition. I think if I went down that road, I'd have to once again tackle that chicken and egg problem.

But I'd rather point out, that the healing of the separation or uniting of what is lost, is all happening through marriage. And that makes marriage the perfect story of egalitarianism, the naturally perfected model of enlightenment and equality.

What I described might be how marriage came to be as a natural product of the universe, but it is definitely the very model of equality that we hope to understand further by participating in it.

As I mentioned before, at that pristine point in the story (and here we have to look primarily at the myth rather than the inductive reasoning of anthropology) there is not character backdrop that gives us any reason to believe that one owned the other, or that there was any inequality between them. They might have been hunting buddies, they might have gathered together, they might not have. We have no insight in the division of labor until after they changed their own environment.

Sure, the primordial soup that really created life may have been made with just one stroke of lightning, but back then it is likely that Father Sky produced an order of magnitude more lightning then it does today and sustained that over millions of years. The energy used by either the sky or earth before life caught on is impossible to measure, but the value of their contribution (given that that model is accurate in how life was created) is not. Both were necessary, both were needed.

Here's an experiment in equality for you. Go to some room in the house where a light is rigged to two switches. You'll notice that either of them can turn it on, or off. Operators at both switches have to agree to some position relative to the other for the light to remain on. At each switch put two people, but reward them for the opposite result. For one person, offer five dollars to keep the light on. For the other person, offer five dollars to keep the light off. After as much blinking of the lights as you can stand, stop the process. Likely neither participant will feel sure enough in their victory to stop switching. The light was on and off the whole time, at different times so who wins? So in that uncertainty they likely will continue to try. You might have to assure them that they both lose, just to stop the blinking.

Now look at the other possibility. It is much easier to achieve one or the other if both are rewarded for the same outcome. It is settled almost immediately and both receive a reward.

In each scenario the energy both put in by each operator was roughly the same. The reward in each scenario was likewise the same for both participants, but not the same for both scenarios. That makes it equality along a very narrow interpretation for the operators. But in the marriage interpretation of equality, the importance of each person to a unified outcome is valued the same in only one scenario. The responsibility for each person is likewise unified for the same goal in only one model of marriage equality. And that also happens to be the only model where both participants receive the reward, both in the scenario and in the marriage.

That is a very binary example of the same dilemma that marriage hopes to unite people behind.

When ever my wife and I might contemplate divorce, (I'm not afraid to say that has happened) a few things come into much sharper focus. The first is that if either wanted the marriage off, it was off. We both had to be united to make it work to keep things together. We both had to be united for the same goal, and for the same purpose.

The other was that if we were divorced two things would not change. The first, we would both still be related through our children. We couldn't really escape from each other and be justified by the court in doing so. The second is that while separated we would not have any chance of equality. The third is that the separation, both in what was irreparably destroyed as childlike ideals, and in the confusion of what parenting is in the separation, would damage and hurt the children. There may be a way to forget the pain, but fixing the pain would be even harder.

Another fourth item came into focus, primarily for my wife. Life and career would be much harder for her than myself. She, having a father who still delinquent on child support in her parent's divorce, realized that like her mother she more stuck with the children then I would be. I might be a gallant sort who does everything I can, or I might not be, and she is at that whim. And even if I am gallant, her investment already in childbearing put her at a disadvantage in the career marketplace. I've already written a lot on this subject, that the gender gap in salary is really just a manifestation of the marriage gap. Women's tie to children makes them less able to take on the extra-demands that very high paying jobs give. Flexibility to handle children comes at a cost in salary that men seem to be able to dodge better then women (and I credit women for it because I feel it is because they are ready to take on that responsibility).

But just look at the statistics, Google them if needed. Single women vs Single men, the difference in their careers isn't a pretty picture. At some point something's gotta give, someone's got to take responsibility for the kids and that requires flexibility from work. If women further seek emancipation from that responsibility, then it only comes at abandoning the children even more. Men seem to have their hands firmly on the switch of freedom from the kids.

On the other head of that same coin, however, are a movement of men who feel the women have completely cut them out of their children's lives. Men who still break down in tears about the last memory they have seeing their kids, men who would gladly mean more to their children then being a paycheck. These are men who claim they were falsely accused of things they never did, and guilty by vague suspicion only. Women seem well in control of the switch when it comes to custody.

What does this tell me? Well, it tells me that single women need more of our support. It tells me that we need more wisdom in how we handle custody. But it also shows, and what all four of those items showed me and my wife if we ever thought about separating, is that it is impossible to equally value each others responsibilities and rights if we were separated. Only when we were united for the same goal would we really achieve that reward.

So, we make it work. We do whatever it takes to make it work. We both are united for the same goal of equality, to equally value the rights and responsibilities of our spouse and the children we have together.

Only then does the marriage bring us the happiness we always expected it to. A happiness that only marriage can bring.

We are two people who need each other, we have that duality of creation. We are two people who have taken responsibility for our children, instead of letting nature have their way directly with them. Our choices are leaving a legacy with our children, just as my parents stuck it through some hard times we are continuing that example for my children. Just as my wife's mother took responsibility for her children, so is she continuing in that example. We are both taking the best of our parents, and passing that on. And the best always seems to be that heritage of changing nature to facilitate taking responsibility for each other and our children. Just like Adam and Eve, really.

The egalitarian model of marriage is -- to equally recognize the rights and responsibilities of the man, woman, and child they potentially have together. The unit is unique, it is the unit of procreation in humanity -- man, woman and child. It is unique in its completion of complementary duality of humankind. It is unique in its position to pass through example and emulation the principles of egalitarianism -- the integration of complementary duality and responsibility -- to the very products of that union.

Marriage is directly linked to creation, and my argument here has been that it is is the epitome of the model of egalitarianism because it is directly linked to creation in a way that has created civilization as well, and all that creation has meant throughout history.

To much? Too flowery? Too mystically universal? No. It is just as simple as a man and a woman ready create a child together, knowing full well that to fully stand without accusation they need to equally respect each others responsibilities and rights in how the child is created. So often we are told that history will judge us in how we come down in the debate about marriage. Should we be ashamed that we want to bolster our adherence to the egalitarian model of marriage? Well, perhaps more important to ask yourself is will you be accused of neglecting your responsibilities to your spouse or your children. Did you equally recognize their rights and responsibilities with yours?

But perhaps no better put then the place I first learned it, "Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh. And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed."

As Tevia and his family sings about this very repetition of life, the bride and groom stand with quickly beating hearts. Sunrise, and sunset, quickly flow the years, one season following another. The passing of responsibility through the generations is like the beating heart of civilization itself.

[queue sunrise-sunset]

Ask Slashdot:

Where can I search through the most ancient of the Slashdot archives? I'm talking about the olden days before logins were required and we could just put our name on each comment we wrote manually. The days just after Bits and Chips.

I need to find a specific comment I wrote way back then.

Ever thought that the reason we are fighting over things like same-sex marriage, is because our legal system is a dinosaur of code? While programming languages have made many leaps and bounds over decades, legal code is still stuck in the dark ages. With just one simple feature common to all programming languages, we can make a real compromise.

It is hard to remember the early days of Linux. A time when the greatest struggle was finding applications that did what we could do in Windows, applications like Office, AutoCAD, Outlook, etc...

I remember, with fondness, looking at very powerful tools like SIAG or PINE, that could do what I wanted to. While easy enough for a novice like me, the learning curve was long. But it was long because it had such depth and power, at each step the skills I learned seemed to make my mind sharper and my processes simpler. But there were still some very easy tasks I wanted to do that were out of my reach. How do I collaborate? Do they need learn what I've learned just to work with me in these tools? How do I just do (said task) by clicking on this?

Sure, OpenOffice came around and back then it was StarOffice, an app that was so phobic of the X interface that it encapsulated itself within its own desktop. Its gotten much better since then, but at some point I abandoned it for TexMacs, which produced cleaner and more beautiful results that, once again, worked into very simple processes to be productive. TexMacs can hook into many scientific programs that I found very useful, and it published within structured templates that I expected when I wanted to write something (for the most part).

Then an amazing thing happened. I could say it was just Google, but really it was the cloud. Google was just one of the first that realized that if they could get everyone to use their servers, they could collaborate with each other much more easily. The world if ease expanded with RSS feeds, labels which allowed a multidimensional way of categorizing emails beyond the folders I was used to. Its search function was so efficient that I found I didn't need to even categorize and organize most of what I had. Amazon and Ebay seemed to catch on to the same trick, if everyone used their servers they could provide each other's products in ways which were much more convenient for sellers to find. Amazon soon packaged up the proprietary data center management as the Cloud so others could have the same results. It was, in essence collaboration in a simple and easy to use maner. It was social networking, facilitated through central computers who seemed to know everyone and everything around them.

And as far as those applications go, the Cloud is still an exciting and glorious place. In fact the Cloud can be seen as the necessary infrastructure to enable the advent as smart-phones. I see smart phones as nothing more than handy personal interfaces to the vastness of the Cloud.

Perhaps now that I have satisfied the need collaborate, with all the vast sums of knowledge it keeps me connected to with a screen I can fit into my pocket, I'm finding that for personal productivity nothing beats the command line. I'm giving up on using Google and web interfaces to do the things I need to do, and going back to the power of the command line.

Case in point, Personal Finance Software. Its a killer app that I've never found anything that I was satisfied with. I've tried Cloud, Linux and Windows list of usual suspects. I've observed that there are many contenders for simplified finance managers based on many different paradigms (like YNAB). But in the end, I've found "Ledger" and I'm quite happy with the ability to use VI or Emacs, or even sed, to keep my ledger in my own way as a simple text file, while the 'ledger' command line program understands it and simply gives me stats and reports. I've even found ofx.py, a little script to download my banking information which ledger also understands. Now I finally feel like I have a long learning curve again. And once again I have that feeling of conquest, that at every step of the way I'm getting sharper, smarter, and more able to handle and process more information in successively easier ways.

But that isn't all. Since smart phones have all the graphical and UI candy I might ever need, I found myself pairing back my laptop's desktop. I've found myself drawn to the philosophy of a site called "suckless.org", which offers very simple tools to do very simple tasks. Only I divert from their tools in two instances, I use EvilWM and UZBL instead of their very fine alternatives. But that is neither here nor there.

The real jewel that expresses the new ease of desktop management through the CLI is 'dmenu', which is a cross between beagle and a dock but is usable in so many more situations. For instance, UZBL uses it to do URL completion based on what is in your browser history. Sure, my laptop has power to spare to run Beagle, Cairo-Dock, and such. But dmenu's simplicity is really its value, and especially how many times I find myself needing to use it for things like Ledger to do automated completion of all the accounts I use -- within vi. Cairo-Dock in particular does its job well, but dmenu has a certain simplicty to it which makes it useful to do the same job in so many different instances.

And that, right there, is probably the best way I can describe why I'm trending towards the CLI in my life. Because after some time in the field, I get it. I get why it works. And it is all about personal productivity, or if you will, process productivity.