Sagan Gathering note

Since I've mentioned on this blog the Sagan Gathering that was scheduled to happen in Ithaca, NY this past weekend, I think I ought to give a somewhat disappointing update. Through personal communication with organizer Patrick Fish, I found out that due to having to recover from an unexpected health emergency earlier last week, he was unable to participate in most of the planned events, and therefore (since as of this time, it's a one-man operation) had to call off most of the events. And as it happened, the Festival got rained out anyway.

On the bright side: the preparations for the Gathering have unearthed a lot of goodwill towards Sagan's legacy in the Ithaca area, and have laid the groundwork for a bigger, better Gathering next year. Frankly, it's reinvigorated my Sagan-ania. And some Sagan fans did show up to participate in the Festival and tour Sagan-related locations in Ithaca on their own, including one all the way from Indiana.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Announcing the Carl Sagan memorial blog-a-thon

Next month, December 20, 2006 will mark the tenth anniversary Carl Sagan's passing. In his honor, I am organizing a special memorial "blog-a-thon" among Sagan's fans throughout the blogosphere. If you're a Sagan fan with a blog, you can participate by posting something related to him on or near that date. Read or reread a Sagan book and review it; discuss cool things that you've done that's been influenced by him; pontificate on one of the many topics he treated (SETI, astronomy, critical thinking, the history of science, human intelligence....), or post about something completely surprising. Contact me by email or by leaving a comment, and then when the date approaches, I will create a meta-post that links to all the stuff people are doing, providing a network of the participating bloggers. A list of Sagan stuff online that may be a source of ideas. Carl's son Nick Sagan on the blog-a-thon . Publicity for the blog-a-thon includes Cornell Univer
Read more

another day, another pair of letters to the editor

Image
The Russians were going to have come in 2010! "U.S. and Russia in space"  in the Queens Chronicle looks back at the little-discussed sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey , and how it envisioned less tense relations between the US and the then-assumed-to-still-be-Soviet-in-the-2010s Russia.  (I should also clarify that I am not now, nor have I aver been a member of the Russian conspiracy, though I technically can't truthfully deny association with  "H.U.A.C."  since the "House of Un-American Activities" was the unofficial nickname for the home of some college friends back in the day.) This image is a rerun, but so is the content it's illustrating. "Reducing costs"  in the Queens Examiner  (and the other outlets in the Queens Ledger/Brooklyn Star Newspaper Group) asks free-market advocates to stop brushing aside concerns about "materialism, social inequality and economic instability" and instead start pointing out how econom
Read more

AOL Hometown shutting down, and taking a bit of bronze with it

Well, with the announcement that AOL's Hometown service is shutting down by October 31, one of the truly old school web hosting sites from the early days of the Web, up there with GeoCities and Tripod, and all of the websites hosted at URLs "hometown.aol.com", "members.aol.com" and "users.aol.com", will be going the way of Xoom into the land of dead bits. The shutdown is pretty abrupt; the formal announcement was only posted on September 30, and according to it, if webmasters don't back up their website files by the 31st, they'll simply be gone. All Hometown pages have one of two prominently placed banners atop the pages announcing the shutdown, one of which says "AOL Hometown is Closing its Doors. Find out how to BACK UP AND SAVE YOUR FILES before we say goodbye for good." and the other stating that "A Blogger is Always Prepared. DON'T GET LEFT BEHIND. Learn how to BACK UP & SAVE YOUR INFORMATION now." (desp
Read more