It doesn't matter a bit. To Christians, the Bible is the word of God, trying to teach a thing or two about love, not killing one another, and so on.

To make an analogy, the fact that at age 3, you thought Santa Claus to be a literal account is not all that matters, what matters is whether your parents loved you and whether you had a good time watching "Santa Claus" at the mall. It would be a gross misunderstanding of parenthood to claim that since you believed at age 3 there was a Santa Claus, a) your parents lied to you and were evil people, or b) they had to believe it themselves. Unfortunately, the position you expressed demonstrates a similar misunderstanding.

On the other hand, there's no mental gymnastic involved at all in realizing that your parents knew more than you did, and that you understood what they told you only years after they did. Just the same, there's no mental gymnastic involved in believing that the word of God may contain truths that we only understand much later.

To Christians, the reference for understanding the Bible is Jesus Christ. And Jesus Christ said both that the Old Testament was true (e.g. Matthew 5:17-20) and that it was insufficient (e.g. Mark 10:5). From that point on, humanity has been supposed to talk to God directly ("Our Father, ...", a prayer taught by Jesus Christ).

That last point is the key. To many Christians, faith is not a third-party account, it's a first-person relationship with God, today. A reasoning such as "The Bible is wrong, therefore God does not exist" is, to a first-person Christian, similar to a reasoning about the non-existence of Santa Claus implying that parents don't love their kids or (worse yet) that they don't exist. Such a reasoning may seem super-solid to you, but to a Christian, it is incredibly weak, shallow and unconvincing, irrespective of your intelligence and of the proofs you accumulate of errors in the Bible.

You can take the Bible as the word of God without considering it as being a literal truth. It's educational material. I'm not the one saying this, Jesus did several times, for instance Mark 10:5 (see http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=mark%2010:4-9&version=ASV):

If your dad told you that the square of something is always positive when you were 3, and then told you that the square of i is -1 when you were 6, then (putting aside the fact that you are a math genius) do you believe that he was wrong the first time? Or that you need to stretch his interpretation based on your newly acquired knowledge? I don't think so. Rather, you think that he adapted his wording based on your capabilities.

For the Bible, I think it's not a stretch to claim that Genesis, for example, is about as good a description of how the world evolved that anybody could give to the tribes who lived 2000BC. Actually, put in context, it's remarkably good at identifying the key inflection points, in particular when you consider that "day" in that context is not a precise duration, you could say "period".

First, earth has no shape, it's not yet formed, it's just stuff floating around. Then light, sun and stars. Then planets form, only then is there a "sky". Then dry land and seas separate (Wikipedia says "Over time, such cosmic bombardments ceased, allowing the planet to cool and form a solid crust. Water that was brought here by comets and asteroids condensed into clouds and the oceans took shape.", not that different). Then vegetation (and there's no obvious reason at all for people at the time to infer that vegetation would appear first). Then the moon and the stars. It's the one big anachronistic description in the list, but I've always wondered if it was possible to see stars or the moon in the sky before vegetation cleared the atmosphere. Then living creatures, animals, but in two periods: fish, birds and insects first (period of the dinosaurs), then a second "day" with stock animals (mammals). And finally man.

So overall, this creation myth is pretty good in terms of teaching power, at least compared to various other myths of the same era, see here for a few examples: http://www.magictails.com/creationlinks.html.

Which, of course, is binding to Christians... Sigh.

Well, to prove just how idiotic this reasoning is, I've decided to apply it the other way round. Do you trust Linus Torvalds? Surely most Slashdot readers do. So there's a good chance you do too. Yet, dear VeniceBeach, a literal interpretation of Linus Torvalds own words is totally incompatible with biology, the Apple App Store, or basic economy. It's even incompatible with Slashdot! Don't believe me? I have proof: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/l/linus_torvalds.html.

> Software is like sex
Burn biologists! They claim that sex is about reproduction!

> Any program is only as good as it is useful.
Burn the guy who wrote Bubble Wrap for the iPhone!

> Giving the same thing to a thousand consumers is not really any more expensive than giving it to just one.
Burn the car dealer who refused to sell me one thousand cars for the price of one!

> Microsoft isn't evil
Burn Slashdot!

Need I go on? Or can you accept the idea that Christians don't have to take the Bible literally? There's a fraction of ultra-bigots in the US who are ready to take everything in the Bible literally, save for "thou shalt not kill" when it applies to a deer or restricts their right to bear arms. I demand that Christians (or Americans, for that matter) not be judged by this standard.

Equating any Christian to this stereotype is as insulting to the majority of Christians as equating all Linux kernel hacker to a lowly -1 Slashdot troll.

If I understand correctly, the idea is that a simulation would put some observable limits on, say, the energy of particles.

For some reason, this reminds me of another interesting thought exercise, but going backwards. Patrick Demichel is looking for the first of all Skewes' numbers. He devised a method which results, roughly, in "1.397162914×10^316 is the first Skewes' number, or there's not enough energy in the Universe find the actual value." See http://grenouillebouillie.wordpress.com/2008/03/05/the-number-you-cant-compute. I see that he kept working on it since then, I wonder if that statement (dating back 2008) still holds...

3D visualization of GeoRSS earthquakes database available here.

We created a Gitorious project to share sample code. The first sample shows the location of earthquakes in real-time.

You are right I guess. I'll take that into account for my next Slashdot submission :-)

Let's try making something like that together. Here's one way to do it:

1) Create a small web server somewhere that returns the stuff you are interested it, for example in CSV format. Say you get lines with X,Y,Z,"label".

2) Read that web server with Tao Presentations, using code that looks like this:

Of course, your server could also send color, or a sphere diameter, so you could have something like:

If you don't want to access the network to get your data, you can also read that from a local file. For example, you can have a Perl script that munches your input data and writes it to a given local file. Then, your Tao Presentations document does something similar to the above, but with load_csv instead of get_url_csv.

You could obviously send data in other formats and parse it with regexps (XML and JSON are coming soon, hopefully). But at the moment, CSV is by far the fastest way to read relatively big amounts of data for Tao Presentations. In this 3D star map example, we use that very technique to show about 15000 stars from the Hipparcos catalog, and it runs smoothly on a modern laptop.

I understand your position. To be honest, we didn't really expect to hit the Slashdot front page (not that I will complain). We were content with people who look at the Firehose.

But to respond to you point, I think there is a lot of value in this new brand of journalism made of first person straight talk: blogs, video posts on YouTube, etc. You talk to me, I respond to you. Nobody in between. You know it's me, an individual, who loves his product and is clearly biased, and not some abstract and distant entity who doesn't care and just pushes "information" just because they're paid to pretend they are unbiased.

What I love first about Slashdot is that posts are from people who care about stuff, not about anonymous drones. When we get a story about Intel unveiling a new 10 watt chip (right below ours), isn't that also blatant advertising? But my hope is that this was actually submitted by some Intel guy who actually works on the chip.

The second thing I love about Slashdot is that the small guys (like us) have a fighting chance in telling their story. Hey, I'm right next to Intel, and we are a gazillion times smaller. Sure, it's free advertising too. But I've put a lot of my money in that stuff, it's paying relatively little at the moment, so do you really think that I can pass on this opportunity of reaching a wide audience on a level playing field?

The third thing about Slashdot are the comments. Granted, I would have loved to see just a little more positive feedback to what we have to offer. Still, the comments generally crack me up (this is an acquired taste, though, the rest of the team is just looking at them and just going "Huh?"). And more importantly, they are very valid data points.

If someone tells me that the language is hard to read, I need to dig further to see what we can do about it. If someone else tells me that you can do that in OpenGL in no time flat, I have to deduce that most readers, even on Slashdot, don't realize what it really took to make interactive 3D that simple. Yes, our app is written in OpenGL, and no it didn't take us "no time flat", and yes, we are good (I personally wrote the first 3D platform game, back in 1989, a year or so before Carmack's Hovertank 3D). So now, we need to explain better why this matters. Without Slashdot, I have no chance to get such live feedback.

So I understand your point, but believe me, the fact that articles about a noname startup from the south of France show up on Slashdot is a good sign. It demonstrates IMO that the Slashdot spirit is still alive and kicking. But hey, I'm biased ;-)

The idea here was precisely to show the kind of things you could do with mere regular expressions (we introduced a regexp module recently). Yes, I know it is theoretically wrong, and if you knew how much I don't care, you wouldn't bother insulting me with the suggestion that we wouldn't know how to use libxml2. XML parsing is on its way, but if you want to add it yourself, Taodyne provides a C++ SDK (here is an example to get you started).

As mentioned in the story, it's called XL. Can you elaborate why you think it is hard to read? As an aside, I completely disagree with that statement. Here is for example how you create a slide in Reveal.js:

Here is how you create a similar slide in Tao Presentations:

For me, I already know which one I find easier to read (or to copy-paste in Slashdot for that matter). But the difference really shows when you want to add a time-dependent HSV color:

Now, writing this in Reveal.js is left as an exercise for the reader...

Rather, I think you just... missed the point. The point is not the end result, it is to show how you can now create dynamic 3D documents really easily.

You'd assume wrong. In addition to OpenGL, you need at least: font rendering and typography, typesetting, JPEG image decoding, networking, text parsing. If you don't believe me, go ahead, do it. I did that short example over a coffee break, definitely less than 2 hours. Let me see how long your "no time flat" will be if you do "something like this" with straight OpenGL.

If you want to replicate this with another technology, you'd be much luckier starting with Reveal.js, Impress.js and combining this with Three.js. With that basis, I think you can probably get somewhere rapidly. At least, you'll have text and picture rendering.

Not transparently event-driven, no. For example, consider the following Tao Presentations code:

Because we used time in the inner block, we will re-evaluate that block more rapidly than the rest (roughly 60 times per second in that case). So we transparently detect that this or that part of the document needs this or that event. I don't think Javascript does that, does it?

Are you really arguing that this is unreadable by humans?

feed "US News", "http://news.google.com/news?ned=us&charset=utf8&output=rss"
feed "Slashdot", "http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot"
feed "Twitter taodyne", "http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=taodyne

How is the fact that I'm the founder of Taodyne making the story irrelevant to Slashdot readers? What would have been unethical would have been to ask a friend to submit the story for me.

Of course, I'm biased. I've put years of my life into creating what I believe is the first interactive 3D document description language. I think that this is relevant to Slashdot readers. Remember, "News for nerds"? Our first tag line was "3D presentation software for geeks", it's still in my Slashdot signature.

My idea of being a "nerd" is not "I will the (N+1)-th post to rant about how big corporations are evil". Mine is "I will create this bleeding edge 3D language so that uber-geeks can use live tweets as bullet points next time they talk about some hot topic." YMMV. Don't like what we did? Feel free to not use it.

There are frameworks such as Reveal.js or Impress.js that try to present things nicely using CSS3, HTML5, etc. Taodyne didn't use markup languages on purpose. From that article:

Standard markup, yes, but still a new language
On the surface, this structure is well known, so that you can leverage what you already know about HTML.

But notice how the two examples above don't use exactly the same syntax. There's a reason for that: in both cases, the power of that code really lies in additional definitions using Javascript and CSS 3D. We no longer use a really standard language, but some kind of dialect. We still need to learn this dialect before creating presentations.

It's not like the required code is extraordinarily big. For Impress.js, we are talking about 700 lines of CSS and 800 lines of Javascript. Reveal.js is slightly more extensive, with 1238 lines of CSS and 1039 lines of Javascript, not counting a few libraries.

However, that still means that you need to learn new semantics on how to build animations. The benefits of using a "standard" language are somewhat mitigated. More importantly, it means that what makes the presentation really different, the interesting 3D animations and transitions, are not in the document description itself.

A new kind of programming language designed specifically for real-time, interactive documents has a number of benefits. For example, we don't have a linear execution model. Parts of the document execute in response to events, transparently. That way, if you have a document that refreshes only once per second, we use practically no CPU. And if only this or that part of the document executes. See Execution and Drawing Model on this description of Tao documents.