“Windy or not, a day this beautiful has to be lived. The day is bright and clear, the sky blue, and the dry air feels light. A northerly wind stirs a primal urge to move. The geese feel it, and so do I. Perhaps it is a last internal vestige from a time, long ago, when we migrated with the seasons across open plains, following the animals we pursued for food. Perhaps that is why the sight of migrating geese arrests our attention, why we feel the pull. We want to go, to travel in fresh or moody weather, taking in each newly revealed vista.”

– Carl Safina

Well actually I don’t. I doubt I have ever really enjoyed cycling in my younger days when I competed in duathlon and triathlon. It’s a frightening affair, with huge trucks whistling past and just narrowly missing you, time after time while you keep your sweat infested eyes on the wheel in front of you. It is dreadful, the antonym of fun.  So with that in mind I will ride the Argus for the first time tomorrow. Now when I thought I was going to sound smug while I said my training included and concluded with a brief splash in the pool last Thursday, the reply came “well, you’d be over trained then, if you are following the train, peak and compete on the same day regimen”. My attempt to impress is now dead to the world.

There always seems to be a brief bit on books in my posts, this one is no exception. I have completed Hitchens bibliography on Thomas Paine. An interesting read, which sadly shows that my messiah and the unknown messiah of the west was not perfect, but still super human. Now I have three books of Paine and about five which mention him. Two new books should arrive Monday; Mass Effect – Revelation and  The Elegant Universe.

I have also update the blog with the foundations that I donate towards, to those reading, please support them.

In the beginning – specifically on October 23, 4004 BC, at noon – out of quantum foam fluctuation God created the Big Bang, followed by cosmological inflation and an expanding universe. And darkness was upon the face of the deep, so He create Quarks and therefrom He created hydrogen atoms and thence He commanded the hydrogen atoms to fuse and become helium atoms and in the process to release energy in the form of light. And the light maker He called the sun, and the process He called fusion. And He saw the light was good because now He could see what he was doing, so he created Earth. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

And God said, Let there be lots of fusion light makers in the sky. Some of these fusion makers He grouped into collections He called galaxies, and these appeared to be millions and even billions of light-years from Earth, which would mean that they were created before the first creation in 4004 BC. This was confusing, so God created tired light, and the creation story was preserved. And He created many wondrous splendours such as Red GIants, White Dwarfs, Quasars, Pulsars, Supernovas, Worm Holes, and even Black Holes out of which nothing can escape. But since God cannot be constrained by nothing, He created Hawking radiation through which information can escape from Black Holes. This made God even more tired than tired light, and the evening and the morning were the second day.

And God said, Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together unto one place, and let the continenets drift apart by plate tectonics. He decreed that sea floor spreading would create zones of emergence, and He caused subduction zones to build mountains and cause earthquakes. In weak points in the crust God created volcanic islands, where the next day He would place organisms that were similar to but different from their relatives on the continents, so that still later created creatures called humans would mistake them for evolved descendants created by adaptive radiation. And the evening and morning were the third day.

And God saw that the island was barren, so He created animals bearing their own kind. Thou shalt not evolve into new species, and thy equilibrium shall not be punctuated. And God placed into the rocks, fossils that appeared older than 4004 BC that were similar to but different from living creatures. And the sequence resembled descent with modification. And the evening and morning were the fourth day.

And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly that moving creatures that have life, the fishes. And God created great whales whose skeletal structure and physiology were homologous with the land mammals He would create later that day. God then brought forth abundantly all creatures, great and small, declaring that microevolution was permitted, but not macroevolution. And God said, “Natura non facit saltum” – Nature shall not make leaps. And the evening and morning were the fifth day.

And God created the pongids and homonids with 98 percent genetic similarity, naming two of them Adam and Eve. In the book in which God explained how He did all this, the Bible, in one chapter He said He created Adam and Eve together out of the dust at the same time, but in another chapter He said he created Adam first, then later created Eve out of one of Adam’s ribs. This caused confusion in the valley of the shadow of doubt, so God created theologians to sort it out.

And in the ground placed He in adundance teeth, jaws, skulls, and pelvises of transitional fossils from pre-Adamite creatures. One chosen as his special creation He named Lucy, who could walk upright like a human but had a small brain like an ape. And God realized this too was confusing, so he created paleoanthropologists to figure it out.

Just as He was finishing up the loose ends of creation, God realized that Adam’s immediate descendants would not understand inflationary cosmology, global general relativity, quantum mechanics, astrophysics, biochemistry, paleontology, and evolutionary bioloy, so he created creation myths. But there were so many creation stories throughout the world that God realized this too was confusing, so created He anthropologists and mythologists to explain all that.

By now the valley of the shadow of doubt was overrun with skepticism, so God became angry – so angry that God lost his temper and cursed the first humans, telling them to go forth and multiply themselves (but not in those words). But the humans took God literally and now there are over six billion of them. And the evening and the mornin were the sixth day.

By now God was tired, so He proclaimed, “Thank Me it’s Friday,” and He made the weekend. It was a good idea.

On a similar note, Robert Crumb’s book on Genesis is also now available at your favourite local bookstore(except CUM by default).

On a book update, I am still busy with A brief History of the Future, and What is Good, and also bought my copy of Dawkins Greatest Show on Earth.