- Posts tagged Cosmos
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Reality Can Bite
How to Protect Yourself From the Bomb by Remembering that it's There
In actuality I never dared to hope for even a single conversion amongst the conspiracy theorists themselves. The mechanism of being a true believer in something so incredible is often a closed loop. Those who cherish such fantasies are not easily swayed, especially by arguments made by half-witted bloggers.
I suppose the most I wished for was some consciousness-raising amongst the previously unconcerned. An optimistic theory of mine is that most people are intelligent, rational souls who tend to go down the correct path if only given directions to the trail-head. But issues such as whether or not man landed on the moon are trivial in the day-to-day process of living on this planet, and general indifference is to be expected.
Decisions in Dorkland
Ah, how severe a thing is choice. How final, how absolute. If we are judged by our actions rather than our intentions then choice is literally the mechanism by which we are defined.
Cosmos Carl and the Apple's Adventures in Flatland
As some may have deduced, I've been way into Carl Sagan of late.
He was always someone I'd heard of, with 'billions and billions' being the one quote I could attribute to him, despite the fact that he never actually said it.
But I didn't know Sagan. I couldn't pick him out of a lineup, nor had I ever actually heard his voice, although I had heard poor impressions of it often enough.
But I've certainly heard a bunch of it now. Sagan became an interest of mine through Steven Novella, a well known podcaster and Yale Neurologist, as well as being a bit of an intellectual hero of mine. He discussed Sagan at length on his weekly show, the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe.
Novella and his co-hosts couldn't say enough about Sagan and 'Cosmos', the 80s PBS series for which he was most famous. It had obviously inspired an appreciation of science and skepticism in the younger versions of all of them.
One day I finally went hunting, and behold, Cosmos was available for the getting. Once downloaded I tore into the episodes, and over three days watched the entire 13-hour series.
Carl Sagan had extremely rare gifts. In Cosmos he demonstrates his ability to inspire with science, or more accurately, with his own endless appreciation of it. He manages to do what so few working scientists can, in that he communicates, using poetry instead of statistics, the truly awesome scope of the truths that science unearths.
And the voice! He absolutely must be the inspiration for Hugo Weaving' portrayal of Agent Smith in 'The Matrix'.
I could just listen to it for hours. Monotone but quirky, Sagan almost sounds like a disguised alien who learned perfect english in an effort to fit in to our society, but could never get the casual tone right. But he's also the alien that when he realized this, was confident enough not to give a shit.
Sagan smoked pot and wrote a mean book, and was the coolest mega-dork I've ever seen.
This is one of my favourite clips from the show, so I thought I'd share.
