Carl Sagan day 2008, and an update

Well, today is the 12th anniversary of Carl Sagan's passing, a date which was commemorated on this blog by blog-a-thons in 2006 and 2007.  Ann Druyan and Nick Sagan have both already put up posts to mark the occasion, both pointing to a recent NASA video on the new Carl Sagan Exoplanet Fellowship (also discussed in an ETFF interview with Ann Druyan broadcast last month to commemorate Carl's birthday).

I'm sure that some of you are wondering why I haven't done a blog-a-thon this year, and why you haven't heard anything Sagan-related from me in a while.  Basically, what's up: no, I haven't fallen off the planet, and haven't abandoned Sagan-related stuff.  Basically, the blog-a-thon was originally intended to be a one-shot event, and only afterwards did I decide to try to repeat it a year later, and possibly annually.  And while there were some great posts in the 2007 blog-a-thon, I came to realize that doing an annual event wasn't the best way to go to keep the Sagan fans in the blogosphere connected, since a year in blogosphere time is a very long time to go between updates.  After much consideration, I came to the conclusion that the best way to do something regular and Sagan related would be to have something closer to the "blog carnival" format, where there would be a new installment every couple of months or so, and have a theme each time in addition to the basic Sagan one, to give a fresh "handle" to write about.  I haven't been able to iron out the details in time for today, but I do have plans to do so.

Comments

Anonymous said…
I did an unofficial "third annual" bit yesterday; I'd picked up The Varieties of Scientific Experience recently and blogged two quotes from the book that I found timely and important.

Then, a friend of mine wrote about Sagan yesterday as well.

If there is to be a "Carnival of Carl" (needs a better name), that would make for some fascinating reading. One obvious topic comes to mind from my own experience — science-fiction writers who have been inspired by Sagan's work.

Could be fun.
Sunday, December 21, 2008 8:57:00 PM
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