more Sagan stuff

Last week, The Ithaca Times ran a great new Sagan-related article by Larry Klaes, "An Organizational Voyage" (Klaes also kindly reposted the article in the comments section of this blog, as well as on Celebrating Sagan). It centers on Sagan fan Patrick Fish's efforts to plan an upcoming Sagan Gathering to coincide with the late May/early June Ithaca Festival. The article also touches on how Pat was influenced by Sagan (he's one of the Cosmos Premiere Generation); and describes Pat's trip to Sagan's gravesite, documented further on Pat's YouTube page. At the site, Pat found two articles from last December, both also by Klaes, that somebody left there and which were preserved in the snow: "Bloggers remember Sagan" from the Ithaca Times, about the blog-a-thon I initiated; and "Sagan and the Scientific Experience" from Tompinks Weekly, about the Varieties of Scientific Experience book. It's hard to express how touched and surprised I am by this.

For even more from Klaes, check out his in-depth review of the Contact film and a 2003 Ithaca Times article on Sagan's protege Bill Nye the Science Guy.

Pat contacted me about a month ago, and since then we've discussed his plans and all things Sagan. And just as Pat was partially inspired by my blog-a-thon, he's in turn galvanized me to get back to things Sagan.

Pat is now looking for people who are interested in participating in the Gathering to contact him, which you can do at this email address.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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

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