Joel's humanistic blog

I'm too busy right now to do a real post (and I will eventually put up a post about the 2009 reunion, which was highly successful), but wanted to mark the occasion; I've posted previously about the subject here , here , and here .

In only a few weeks, October 13, 2009 will mark the 100th anniversary of the death of educator Francisco Ferrer, an important figure in the history of freethought, education reform, and anarchism, whose execution for attempting to found secular schools in Spain sparked a long-lived movement in the United States to preserve his ideas and introduce freedom in education. I've already written blog posts on the 2006 and 2008 anniversaries, that give the background as well as I can. (I'm not going to organize a full-scale blog-a-thon like my Carl Sagan one, but feel free to post something appropriate on the anniversary, and I'll link to it.) Also, this Saturday brings the 2009 reunion of the Friends of the Modern School alumni association, held at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, near the site of the modern school and colony which was at Stelton, New Jersey; this is not just a way for people associated with the school to keep in touch, but a way of preserv...

I recently noticed that the webpages for individual videos on Google Video (I'm not talking about other pages on the site such as the front page or search pages) have had a bunch of little changes in layout and features made to them. To see what I mean, compare this screenshot of the old interface to the current version of the same video's page. Frustratingly, some of the old features and video information have seemingly been completely removed, including the "view video at 100% or 200% size" menu options (turning some videos into a blurry mess when blown up to the full player window — yes, you can get around this by making your browser window smaller, but it's not exact, and it shouldn't be that hard to let the user specify whatever exact zoom ratio one wants); the "comments" and "more from user" tabs (the latter tab was always poorly implemented, with its pages of thumbnails to click through, but it was better than nothing); the green ...

dorkbot-nyc, the funky meeting space for robot builders, programmers, nerds and other "people doing strange things with electricity" (although "We're very flexible on the people, strange and electricity parts" ), is resuming this fall after a summer break (as it does each year); the details for the September meeting have just been posted . Although I attend every meeting, my blogging about dorkbot-nyc has been somewhat irregular over the years (mostly due to laziness), but this season I'll try to be more conscientious about it.

The 1964 film by Sergei Paradjanov which provided the title for Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan's book (and whose DVD release was noted here previously) is being screened , in a new 35mm print with subtitles, at Anthology Film Archives in NYC on the 21st and 23rd. AFA's website describes it as "[a] boldly conceived and astonishingly photographed blend of enchanting mythology, hypnotic religious iconography, and pagan magic."

There's a brand-new Sagan-related blog in town ; topics in the 4 posts so far have ranged from the evolutionary origins of sports to neglected rocket pioneer Robert Goddard . Since Carl weighed in on a truly wide variety of topics, there should be plenty of material to blog about. (Hat tip: Francois Tremblay ; cross-posted to Celebrating Sagan )

I recently discovered that the back cover of the 2007 Penguin Classics edition of A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs has a prominent blurb by Carl Sagan: "Might it really be possible—in fact and not fancy—to venture with John Carter to the Kingdom of Helium on the planet Mars?" Although the cover does not specify the source of the quote, it's from the "Blues for a Red Planet" chapter from Cosmos ; references to his being a fan of the John Carter books since first reading them as a kid appear scattered throughout Sagan's writings, including an anecdote about obtaining a related vanity plate (due to a limit of 6 letters per plate, he had to settle for "PHOBOS" instead of his first choice, "BARSOOM"). And this hasn't been the first time that Burroughsians have noticed Sagan; for instance, consider the Burroughs fansite ERBzine's lengthy tribute to Sagan. I'd be happy to see more Sagan blurbs on other science fictio...

As the title suggests, on LiveJournal, there's a community called "Carl Sagan Lives On" , described as "an open community dedicated to the life, wisdom, and legacy of Carl Sagan." It's been running since 2003, with 94 posts in total; the number of posts has tapered off recently (only 6 posts in 2008), but maybe this post will encourage a few LiveJournal users to join up (after all, the news that Cosmos is on Hulu prompted the most recent post ). (This is the beginning of a few Carl Sagan-related posts that I'm cross-posting to Celebrating Sagan.)

Well, the website which has become known for offering up full-length TV shows (and a few movies) for free, ad-supported viewing (with a selection including a good amount of genre shows from The Addams Family to Firefly , but very light on science shows, and no, this doesn't count) has added the complete run of Carl Sagan's TV series to the mix. I guess this needs no further explanation, but Hulu's description is nice, especially the final sentence: In 1980, the landmark series Cosmos premiered on public television. Since then, it is estimated that more than a billion people around the planet have seen it. Cosmos chronicles the evolution of the planet and efforts to find our place in the universe. Each of the 13 episodes focuses on a specific aspect of the nature of life, consciousness, the universe and time. Topics include the origin of life on Earth (and perhaps elsewhere), the nature of consciousness, and the birth and death of stars. When it first aired, the series c...

I've been mulling over the idea of doing what it says in the title, motivated in part by this misguided take on Herbert Spencer ... details here .

Guess who wrote this: One of the odd features of a capitalist system is how socialist it is. Firms interact with customers and other firms through the decentralized machinery of trade. But firms themselves are miniature socialist states, hierarchical organizations controlled, at least in theory, by orders from above. The answer.

Well, after unofficially taking a month-long "vacation" from blogging during January, I'm trying to get back to posting on a regular schedule, and am aiming to post something (even if it's just something as short as a quote) daily for the rest of the month.

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...

I am saddened to find out that Beatrice Gross, an author/educator who, together with her husband Ronald Gross, co-edited several important anthologies on education, including Radical School Reform (1969) and The Children's Rights Movement: Overcoming the Oppression of Young People (1977), and were called "the Bonnie and Clyde of education" (Stan Isaacs), passed away last month, according to obituaries in Newsday and Great Neck Record . The contributors to Radical School Reform (see the full table of contents on WorldCat) are a virtual Who's Who of education reformers of the 1960s and 1970s, including Sylvia Ashton-Warner, George Dennison, Joseph Featherstone, Edgar Z. Friedenberg, Paul Goodman, James Herndon, John Holt, Herbert Kohl, Jonathan Kozol, George Leonard, Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner. The book was favorably reviewed twice in The New York Times , by John Leonard and Harold Taylor , and the paper's archives also include the Grosses' art...

Today, to mark Carl Sagan's birthday (he would have been 74), the WBAI radio program Equal Time for Freethought broadcast a special interview with Sagan's widow and collaborator Ann Druyan (the half-hour interview was originally intended for a fund drive show in September, but not aired in its entirety until now). An audio permalink will be added to equaltimeforfreethought.org soon, but for now, it can be found at the WBAI archive here and also temporarily in WMA format here . The main news is NASA's establishment of a Sagan Fellowship to study exoplanets (planets outside the Solar System), but the conversation ranges from the profound (how to communicate the wonder of science) to the quirky (an extended discussion of what Sagan ate for breakfast). Check it out! Cross-posted to Celebrating Sagan .

Communist historian Eric Hobsbawm's 1969 essay "Reflections on Anarchism" (collected in 1973's Revolutionaries , currently in print in a 2001 edition by New Press ) is mostly a by-the-numbers Marxist, largely dismissive take on classical leftist anarchism (and needless to say more than a little befuddled at anarchism's revival at the time); he treats the movement as romantic and quixotic (quite literally , saying it's no coincidence that classical anarchism's last hurrah was in the land of Cervantes), and intellectually lightweight: saying that Kropotkin is the only "anarchist theorist who could be read with real interest by non-anarchists", due to his scientific work, as opposed to mere artists like Pissarro and Signac (and presumably the likes of Herbert Read, Thoreau, Tolstoy, and Wilde), and whose substantial ideas are redundant with those on other strands of the left. But at one point, the essay suddenly goes in an unexpected direction: ...

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...

Today is the 99th anniversary of the death of anarchist, freethinker, and education pioneer Francisco Ferrer y Guardia, which sparked the international movement which was founded to carry on his ideas. Since I covered the basic background in my original Modern School post two years ago, I will link to that rather than repeating myself. Instead, I will concentrate on the 36th annual reunion of the Friends of the Modern School, held on September 20 at its usual location at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. As usual, it functioned as a social reunion for alumni (mostly of the Stelton school and colony which was near New Brunswick), but this time, the proceedings were enlivened by an unusually large group of interested outsiders. Author Perdita Buchan spoke about her book Utopia, New Jersey: Travels in the Nearest Eden (which has appeared previously on this blog ) which allots a chapter to eight utopian colonies in the Garden State, including one for Stelton. The Emma G...

I am saddened to find out , from Patrick Farenga on HoltGWS.com , of the passing of Nancy Wallace, a pioneering homeschooling parent and author going back to the very early days of the modern homeschooling movement. It seems just yesterday that I discovered in the NYPL stacks (largely due to its provocative title and its introduction by John Holt) Wallace's wonderful 1983 book Better Than School: One Family's Declaration of Independence , in which she recounted in a charming, readable manner her experiences homeschooling her children, Ishmael and Vita (at the time, 11 and 7 years old, as depicted on the cover ) in New Hampshire and Ithaca, NY, at a time when the homeschooling movement had yet to gather its current legal and organizational status. I can attest that, as Farenga puts it, her "prose was full of gentle insight". (I will definitely put up a review when I get the chance.) Farenga describes his and Holt's perspective on their longtime, mutually suppor...

One of the more (in)famous examples of anarchist humor is the original pamphlet cover of Murray Bookchin's famous 1969 essay "Listen, Marxist!" , which criticized Marxist groups like Progressive Labor Party that were part of the sectarianism which was pulling apart SDS. The cover lampooned the propensity of Marxist books to put a succession of faces on the cover to correspond with their hyphenated ideologies by including the faces of Marx, Engels and Lenin — but then adding Bugs Bunny to the mix. This was mentioned in my original RIP for Bookchin posted here in 2006, and also by Jesse Walker and Eugene Plawiuk — and Todd Gitlin in The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage : SDS's 1969 convention, its last, met in the cavernous Chicago Coliseum, amid a veritable counterconvention of reporters (excluded), FBI agents (equipped with long lenses on the third floor of a vacant building across the street), and hundreds of police milling around, in and out of uniform, snap...