Starship Asterisk*

geckzilla wrote:Try using a private browser, Rob.

Ann wrote:
I loved Cosmos. One of the things I'll never forget about it is when Carl Sagan stood next to an oak and talked about how living beings from other planets will be totally different from life on Earth.

"The oak and I are close relatives," said Carl Sagan. "But no being from another planet will be the least bit related to me."

• It was just Carl's little oak.
  
  (I was stumped at first, too)

Beyond wrote:
I wood have put it... Carl's little joak.

You were stumped by it?? Dang! Could have used that in the 'Stump Art' thread.

• an oak but with one green leaf on it would have
  answered her; my very visor began to assume life and
  scold with her. She told me, not thinking I had been
  myself, that I was the prince's jester, that I was
  duller than a great thaw; huddling jest upon jest
  with such impossible conveyance upon me that I stood
  like a man at a mark, with a whole army shooting at me.

geckzilla wrote:Try using a private browser, Rob.

rstevenson wrote:

geckzilla wrote:Try using a private browser, Rob.

... meaning... ... ?

geckzilla wrote:Blog entry regarding the use of Bruno as a hero in Cosmos.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/outth ... rong-hero/

geckzilla wrote:Blog entry regarding the use of Bruno as a hero in Cosmos.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/outth ... rong-hero/

geckzilla wrote:

Chris Peterson wrote:

geckzilla wrote:
Blog entry regarding the use of Bruno as a hero in Cosmos.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/outth ... rong-hero/

Good points about Bruno, who was a mystic and poor choice as a martyr to science. Digges, however, was best left undiscussed. The point of that part of the segment was to illustrate how religious dogma and unrestrained religious power suppressed scientific thinking and held back the advance of knowledge.

I think the correct example should have been Galileo, who was actually a scientist, and who was genuinely persecuted for his scientific ideas, not for an assortment of purely theological disagreements.

Yeah, I'm not sure what was going through their minds when they chose Bruno. Digges is interesting simply because I know nothing about him but Galileo is definitely the poster child for persecution and he was all around pretty awesome. These days it seems like political dogma and power is trying to suppress science, not just religion. Global warming is the obvious example here but I think there are some more examples to be found if one looks enough. (Politics, bleh!)

geckzilla wrote:
It still seems contrived to me.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno#Appearances_in_fiction wrote:
<<Giordano Bruno (Iordanus Brunus Nolanus; 1548 – February 17, 1600), and his theory of 'the coincidence of contraries' (coincidentia oppositorum) plays an important role in James Joyce's novel Finnegans Wake. Joyce wrote in a letter to his patroness, Harriet Shaw Weaver, 'His philosophy is a kind of dualism - every power in nature must evolve an opposite in order to realise itself and opposition brings reunion'. Amongst his numerous allusions to Bruno in his novel, including his trial and torture, Joyce plays upon Bruno's notion of coincidentia oppositorum through applying his name to word puns such as "Browne and Nolan" (name of Dublin printers) and '"brownesberrow in nolandsland". >>

http://www.metaportal.com.br/jjoyce/burgess1.htm wrote:

---

Finnegans Wake: What It' s All About
by Anthony Burgess

<<[HCE & ALP's] twin sons, illustrate a sort of tragi-comic dialectic which owes a good deal to the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), the heretic from Nola who (in the words of Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) was "terribly burned". Bruno the Nolan taught that opposite principles are eventually reconciled, in heaven if not on earth, and much of Finnegans Wake deals with the clash of two brothers unconsciously endeavouring to be made one, to flow back into the unifying father who begot their opposed natures. Joyce Hibernicises Bruno the Nolan into "Browne and Nolan", the names of the Dublin printers who published his first piece of juvenilia, and he contrives other punning tropes to allude to the Brunonian theory-"Father San Browne . . . Padre Don Bruno"; "Bruno Nowlan"; "B. Rohan . . . N. Ohlan"; "brownesberrow in nolandsland"; "Bruin and Noselong". The tragedy of HCE's two sons lies in the fact that each on his own is only half the man his father was: neither is fit to supersede the father in the task of ruling the community. They appear usually as Shem the Penman and Shaun the Post: the first writes the Word, the second delivers it-generally in a distorted and debased form. Shem is the artist, and his most typical manifestation is as James Joyce himself ("Shem" is the Irish form of "James")-the man who can make the dead speak but is totally incapable of coming to terms with the living, the exile who is cut off from action. Shaun (who owes a little to James Joyce's brother Stanislaus) is a born demagogue and missionary, a kind of sham Christ, at home in the world of action but aware that he lacks the creative spark that is needed to fire the engine of rule. They hate each other, but their fights are really a vain attempt to become synthetised into a whole capable of bearing the burden of government. Anything either does tends to be cancelled out by the action of the other: when Shaun is accused of his father's crime, Shem bears false witness against him, and the four Judges, remembering the Brunonian thesis, return a verdict of 'Nolans Brumans" - the accused goes scot-free.>>

Nitpicker wrote:Being an alien, I don't think I'd ever heard of the old or new Cosmos series before this thread. But I just read that Carl Sagan's series was originally modelled after Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man, one of my favourite documentary series of all time ... I even purchased the series in a DVD box set a few years ago, which is rare for me.

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/ascent-of-man/

I'll keep a look out for DVDs or viable downloads of Cosmos, old and new.

MargaritaMc wrote:

Nitpicker wrote:Being an alien, I don't think I'd ever heard of the old or new Cosmos series before this thread. But I just read that Carl Sagan's series was originally modelled after Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man, one of my favourite documentary series of all time ... I even purchased the series in a DVD box set a few years ago, which is rare for me.

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/ascent-of-man/

I'll keep a look out for DVDs or viable downloads of Cosmos, old and new.

The original Sagan Cosmos is on YouTube

http://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBA8DC67D52968201

As are at least some of the Christmas Lectures at the Royal Institution which Carl Sagan presented, marvellously, in 1977. I watched them when they were broadcast...

The quality of these videos, taken somehow from the original broadcasts (I'm sure that that was before the days of home video recorders), is shaky, but Sagan is pure magic.

This is Lecture One http://youtube.com/watch?v=BdXtjNSDi4s