Day One Hundred and Five - Cosmos: The Persistence of Memory, "Yeah, where's a Bird of Prey when you need one?"

To be honest, I've watched this episode twice in the last twenty-four hours. 

The first time was last night while I was arranging perler beads for a crafting project with friends. There was much in the way of half-listening and little in the way of actual watching. 

The second time, however, hours later, I was able to give Carl the full-attention that he deserves and felt almost the same amount of awe that I've recalled from previous episodes.

I say "almost" because, well, I wasn't too impressed with his "Dandelions" monologue on the complexity of life. 

He does have a nice bit on whales, their songs, and the effect that man has had both on isolating our mammalian cousins from each other thanks to muddying the oceans with noise pollution and hunting them so close to extinction. So much so that I think one of the writers of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home started writing the treatment for their script the moment they finished watching the segment.

Also, I was particularly enthralled with his comparisons between the sheer amount of information it takes to begin to understand life, our brains, and our need as a species to compile additional information in large memory banks outside our brains... in libraries.

He also goes into a little bit about the Voyager space program and the golden discs that are aboard both soon to be extra-solar vehicles. I find this additionally amusing due to the fact that a Voyager spacecraft was the main villain of the original Star Trek movie.

I think it's pretty fair to say that this wasn't the most thrilling of the Cosmos episodes, but it's still a certainty that I always learn something (or am reminded of a fact that I've long since forgotten since the first time I saw Cosmos is Debbie Prell's Physics classes). I wasn't exactly overwhelmed with delight when he spent a good ten minutes equating the knowledge of the human race in its various forms with stacks of books, but it was interesting how quickly he introduced the viewer to the concept of the bit... a simple yes or no that matters immensely to computer programers and logicians, but very little to the laymen.

Heck I still don't know the specific reason video game system generations operated using the bit as a measure of processing power. It was just something I always accepted with more meaning better, but hearing Carl talk about the bit as a logic gate, it makes me want to research it on my own.

And that's something I dearly love about Cosmos... even in its weaker episodes, it manages to pique my curiosity in some manner and goad me into learning something new outside the show. Sure, it's a silly little thing like what 8-bit versus 16-bit really means, but still.

As ever, I think Cosmos should be on everyone's queue and I look forward to hearing its soothing new age soundtrack and the sonorous lilt of Carl's voice again in the near future.

Until tomorrow, Potatoes~

Day Seventy-eight - Cosmos: Episode 10, or "Prepare for brain drain... in a good way."

Cosmos has done a pretty good job of explaining both the fundamental and the cutting edge of science while maintaining senses of wonder, entertainment, and connection to the length and breadth of human history. Thanks to Carl and his series, I've visited Japan, Brooklyn, Greece (sadly, only through my monitor... I really need to start traveling), and so very many other places where human civilization has thought and hypothesized about the world.

This episode, though, "The Edge of Forever" is a serious strain on one's conceptualization ability.

I say this because we take a brief trip to Flatland.

Now, Flatland has always confused me. The idea of having no depth but still being able to perceive length and width is just so far beyond me, but Sagan takes it a bit further, using it as a means to broach the idea of a fourth physical dimension, one that is beyond our current perceptual realm and the Tesseract (what is this, Marvel 2.0?), or Hypercube, whose shadow can be represented to us.

Pretty heavy stuff, no?

Luckily, the rest of the episode isn't as difficult as Carl takes us on a trip to India and talks about the Hindu legends of the universe and its cycles of creation and destruction that may be similar to what actually happens. He uses this bit of culture to springboard into discussion about whether our universe is expanding eternally or will eventually contract in on itself.

Some of the dangerous concepts are only mentioned here... the reversal of cause and effect observation, the possible reordering of cosmic laws, but he also tries to dampen any fears due to the supreme scale of chronology that any eventuality, be it expansion or contraction, will have in relation to the lifespan of the human race.

Perhaps a bit depressing, but what else is there to do but live and be happy?

It was also good to see the Very Large Array (or VLA), what with being a New Mexican, myself, for the past twenty years or so. It's a point of pride for us, after all, and even garnered our state a bit of press as a location for Jodie Foster's movie based on Sagan's novel, Contact.

A tiny point of pride, but still.

As always, I love Cosmos... and miss Carl (and Debbie) terribly. While this episode had it's moments of "wha-huh?" I still enjoyed it quite a bit... especially the Cosmos Update which was a nice five minute segment at the end of the episode where an elder Sagan reported on developments made in the years after he first recorded the episode (and, sadly, before his death in 1996).

Until tomorrow, Potatoes~

Day Fifty-seven - Cosmos: Episode 7, or "Beyond Pythagoras and the Backbone of Night"

I really love Cosmos.

If I had children, when I have children (should I be so lucky), I would/will show it to them the moment they start to reason and understand. There's just something about the way Carl breaks down such complex topics as our place in the stars and relates it to the history of man, civilization, and science that makes it so interesting and awe-inspiring.

This particular episode of the series talks about not only the early concepts of the Earth, the Sun, and the stars, but also deals with a lot of the pushback that has occurred in history concerning science.

Now, you'd immediately think from that sentence that he went after the Dark Ages and the Inquisition and the like, but no. Instead, he explores and explains a source of suppression that I really wasn't expecting... especially since it comes from a name that I've been taught to revere for decades thanks to its intimate connection with how we learn mathematics.

Pythagoras.

Yes, the man whose name reminds us of one of the most fundamental formulas in algebra, was party to the suppression and persecution of observational scientists whose ideas and experiments may have contradicted his belief in the five perfect solids.

I'd never known... or, at least, never absorbed the information before that one of the hallowed forefathers of math and science was himself a sort of mystic who considered the fifth form, the dodecahedron, to be too dangerous for the public to consume and thusly had to be hidden from their hearts and minds. That sort of behavior seems antithetical to me.

Yet, here we are... and there I was, learning about it from Carl as he traced the line of thought from Aristarchus to Kepler to today.

I was especially fond of this episode's classroom sequences, where Carl speaks to a room full of elementary students about images taken by Voyager of the other planets in our solar system. To see the wonder in their eyes and hear their excitement as he passed out the photos, then see the gears turning in their minds as he gave a quick demonstration on detecting planets by their star's wobble.

Fun stuff!

As I said before, I love Cosmos. Every episode fills me with a sense of wonder and understanding, even as I know that I am thoroughly ignorant, a babe in the woods. This episode is no different from the others in giving me that feeling.

One thing that does stand out, though, is one of my favorite Sagan lines... that "the sky calls to us... if we do not destroy ourselves we will, one day, venture to the stars."

My main fear in life and living is that his couched warning will come to pass... that our current and continuing willful disregard for ourselves, our neighbors, our future generations, and the nature, fauna, and planet we call home will lead us to destroy any possibility of spreading out to other stars and worlds... that we will be a footnote in the cosmic history, doomed by our own hubris and petty jealousies and bickerings to die out, having poisoned our world beyond sustainability before we step out into the stars.

I think that and despair... yet, somehow, I still have some small measure of hope.

I wish he were still here with us, but I'm also glad he's gone so he wouldn't have to live in this current anti-science climate.

Until tomorrow, Potatoes~