I was never a big fan of Cosmos, though I think that it did a lot of good in interesting people in space. I’m listening to a rerun on the SCIHD channel, and I recall why.
Sagan’s voice is too pompous, too arrogant, and the ubiquitous sonorous tone, and pauses, which lent themselves to parody (“billions and billions”) are really arrogant. I wish that he had written it, and someone else narrated.
Gorillas have been photographed in the wild copulating face to face.
I have to agree with Derb:
I’ve always liked Ben’s stuff — used to read his diary in The American Spectator way back in the 1970s. Smart, funny, worldly guy, with just that endearing streak of eccentricity. I’m sorry to see he’s lost his marbles.
Me, too. Some conservatives have this very strange blind spot when it comes to evolution.
[Update a few minutes later]
Derb eviscerates Stein’s thesis. As is usually the case, his attack on evolution (or as he calls it, “Darwinism”) is founded on a profound ignorance of the subject.
[Late afternoon update]
Well, this is a heck of a way to celebrate the old man’s 199th birthday:
Florida’s department of education will vote next week on a new science curriculum that could be in jeopardy, because some conservative counties oppose it.
Nine of Florida’s 64 counties have passed resolutions over the last two months condemning the new curriculum that explicitly calls for teaching evolution. The resolutions, passed in heavily Christian counties in the state’s northern reaches, demand that evolution be “balanced” with alternative theories, mainly creationist.
That’s not really Florida. It’s more like deep southern Georgia, culturally…
I don’t know if there’s much point to living ten times as long if you’re a nematode, but if it works for us, too, Methuselah, here we come.
…and property rights. Some thoughts on the beginning of commerce and trade from Donald Sensing.
Apparently, women have thicker skulls than men.
Why monkeys shout during s3x:
To investigate the purpose behind these calls, scientists at the German Primate Center in G
Was there trade between China and the west five millennia ago?
And from an unlikely source:
Although the work of 39 year old Garrett Lisi still has a way to go to convince the establishment, let alone match the achievements of Albert Einstein, the two do have one thing in common: Einstein also began his great adventure in theoretical physics while outside the mainstream scientific establishment, working as a patent officer, though failed to achieve the Holy Grail, an overarching explanation to unite all the particles and forces of the cosmos.
Now Lisi, currently in Nevada, has come up with a proposal to do this. Lee Smolin at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, describes Lisi’s work as “fabulous”. “It is one of the most compelling unification models I’ve seen in many, many years,” he says.
“Although he cultivates a bit of a surfer-guy image its clear he has put enormous effort and time into working the complexities of this structure out over several years,” Prof Smolin tells The Telegraph.
Not just unusual because he’s a surfer, but also because he seems a little old to do something like this, which is supposedly more likely from a younger mind.