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The original Cosmos by Carl Sagan [1] has a fantastic episode called "The Persistence of Memory" in which he compares the collective intelligence and pathways of cities to the brain, DNA, etc. if you've never seen it, I highly recommend it.

1: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmos:_A_Personal_Voyage

I have a very worn copy of the book in Cosmos that I got in '83 - it's an excellent book and I love it, but I wonder if that's because I also loved the TV series.

I would fund a kickstarter today that was an XKCD comic adaptation of Carl Sagan's original Cosmos series with asides to update any relevant science information.

The Art of Creative Writing by Lajos Egri ended up playing a huge role a decade after I read it in how I approached sales and marketing.

From a more theoretical perspective Cosmos by Sagan had a huge impact on how I view life's big questions.

I don’t know about you, but reading that first paragraph of the organic chemistry textbook was not a drag. It may not have been Carl Sagan’s Cosmos but I don’t understand how any generally curious person wouldn’t find it interesting. For the record I never took anything beyond Chemistry I in college.

I read Cosmos having not seen the series (living in Australia at the time) and it is a great book. I think A Brief History is a similarly pitched book that's somewhat more up-to-date, and Bill Bryson is still around to revise it.

> The numbers are actually related to the mystery variables that the American astronomer and the planetary scientist Segan referred to in his Cosmos miniseries in which he discussed the Drake equation.

Typo: Segan :)

I'm a carbon chauvinist.
I freely admit it.
Carbon is tremendously abundant in the cosmos and it makes marvelously complex organic molecules that are terrifically good for life.
I'm also a water chauvinist.
It's an ideal solvent for organic molecules and it stays liquid over a very wide range of temperatures.
-Carl Sagan, Cosmos s01e05

They were also reprinted in Cosmos from Carl Sagan. It brings great memories back !

Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, first and foremost.

Much of Adam Curtis’ work is fantastic. Hypernormalization and The Trap were as fascinating as they were frightening. If I had the authority, I would mandate every child see A Century of the Self in school, and then again in college.

James Burke’s Connections was also excellent. Kind of like a link between Carl Sagan and Adam Curtis.

I personally loved the History Channel’s Engineering an Empire, not least because of the hilariously hyper-American host, Peter Weller (best known as RoboCop).

Okay, I'll voice my desire...

My understanding of this comes from Carl Sagan's original Cosmos miniseries...

Kepler and Brahe were reluctant allies. Brahe had the observational data Kepler needed to try to understand the motions of the planets...

...but how the hell did Kepler do it?

I've gone through Differential Equations, I've done Linear Algebra quite a bit, I'm good at computer graphics... I had to derive the equivalent of Bresenham's Ellipse drawing algorithm for a test... And I have no idea how it's even remotely possible for Kepler to have taken astronomical observational data, and derived the motions of the planets from that data.

Has anyone ever done a "For Dummies!" write up of how this was possible?

Having read Carl Sagan's Cosmos in my youth, I always feel guilty re-reading a book:

“If I finish a book a week, I will read only a few thousand books in my lifetime, about a tenth of a percent of the contents of the greatest libraries of our time. The trick is to know which books to read.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

Nope! He actually had a major role in producing Cosmos <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2395695/> with Neil deGrasse Tyson, and also has a major interest in space.

It’s a clip from Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos: A Personal Voyage”[1]. Searching for “Eratosthenes” returns tons of other videos that explain the experiment.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmos:_A_Personal_Voyage

Not exactly related but my current pile includes Carl Sagan's Cosmos which I recommend.

The late Carl Sagan had a great sequence in the original Cosmos where he made a similar point about how many books one could read in a lifetime:

  If I finish a book a week, I will read only a few thousand
  books in my lifetime, about a tenth of a percent of the 
  contents of the greatest libraries of our time. The trick 
  is to know which books to read.

(Michio who?)

hmm GEB was a charming book which popularized CS, you could say. uh .. The guy in Mr Robot? ...

Well, I guess if you had to ask, the answer's no. Well, Cosmos (the Sagan one, haven't seen anything from those other 2) was about a lot more than just physics. And it was a story of many centuries and countries, about many people who are household names. CS has a relatively short history, with most of the developments fairly if not extremely abstract and not easy to explain in a popular form. >layers of slightly out-of-focus binary digits flow across the screen< I'm not sure how much of it people want to know. But still, most things are fascinating when presented well.

I want Julia Evans to be 'it'. :-D

It is hard to say what my favorite book is. But the book that impacted my life most was Cosmos by Carl Sagan. Read it.

My favorite authors and playwrights are (in no meaningful order) Michael Lewis, Carl Sagan, Siddhartha Gautama, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Aldous Huxley, Ayn Rand, Patrick Marber, Arthur Miller, and Shakespeare.

Cosmos is wonderful. But I'd mostly rather read to learn, it's faster.

I'm a huge fan of documentaries that aren't mind-expanding and focus on quirky subcultures:

King of Kong - Never cared about professional video gamers, but this film made me care deeply for 90 minutes.

Spellbound - The incredible varied backstories behind the kids in the national spelling bee

Grizzly Man - Don't even know how to describe this one. See Alaska through the eyes of a crazy person.

Monster Camp - About people into live-action roleplaying. The culture clash with the couple on a leisurely stroll through the park that has no idea what's going on around them is one of the all-time great moments in documentaries.

American Movie - Couldn't tell if this was real or Christopher Guest at first. It's real. It's awesome.

This news reminded me of Carl Sagan's Cosmos episode about the Drake Equation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation) that I watched as a kid. It is really an improved estimate for a couple of the terms.

That segment of Cosmos is online:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlikCebQSlY

Cosmos was written in a similar style. Try reading it in Carl Sagan's voice and see if it's any more interesting to you.

The purpose of longform writing is to provide flavour and context, which are important parts of an information diet. Not everything has to be about the freshest facts delivered to your brain as urgently as possible. Just because you've happened across this in a frenzied binge of clicking HN headlines, doesn't mean it was designed to be consumed that way. If you don't feel you have time to sit through a New Yorker article, save it for later.

I missed the article but it sounds interesting, please link it if you have it.

You are correct only to a point when it comes to self-knowledge. I am horrified that I was never allowed to learn about evolution and science in general, though I've done my best to catch up (started with the cosmos series from the 70s, just finished The Grand Design for the second time and am currently reading Cosmos and the Greatest Show on Earth).

I suspect the idea of the sacred and profane is a vestigial part of most human's brains.

> This would be like complaining that Carl Sagan's Cosmos or Bill Nye the Science Guy are copyrighted videos.

No. That would be like complaining that we don't have a license to inspect the details of and fix errors in those videos. Free software is usually not in the public domain. To be honest, it would be nice to have that option with videos (or text books!) that you get. I've worked as a teacher before -- I would definitely have exercised that option if it were available (Especially as I was teaching English as a foreign language -- I would have loved to do voice overs for some of the material I had to present). As another aside, you have no idea how much I would have loved to use assets from textbooks that we were forced to buy rather than write/draw my own from scratch -- Over 5 years, I practically had to write my own text book.

But both the point you are making and the one you are trying to refute are quite valid. By putting software in the school system, you are effectively training people to use that software. Sure, it's not software that people have to use, but it's still software that people will choose to use.

On the one hand, it's great to use Minecraft in school, because a lot of kids already play Minecraft. In this case, that's really the point. If you put in a free software project that is similar to Minecraft, it probably won't be as engaging to students.

Free software, on the other hand, opens up opportunities that you won't have with non-free alternatives. It allows people to use the software for any purpose as opposed the the purposes allowed in most educational licenses. It allows people to study and learn from the source code. It allows people to modify the code and to help their friends by sharing their modifications.

In short, both for motivated teachers and students, free software licenses are dramatically better than most academic licenses for software. I agree that you might still choose something else, but ignoring the value that a better license gives you is cutting off your nose to spite your face.

The world is complex, but we haven't gotten to the stage yet where you should feel lost, even as a layman. It is absolutely possible to know enough classical physics, QM, and theory of relativity to have a decent understanding of our current models. You absolutely don't have to be able to recite a table of elementary particles in order to understand this.

> I often wish for some kind of "Physical Philosophy". That tries to make sense of the world independent from those theories.

If your sense-making framework can (or must?) be independent from the facts, there is an enormous multitude from all cultures available for you to choose from. But if facts are important to you, and you don't know where to start, watch some popular science documentaries. If you prefer a touch of philosophy, I can suggest the original Cosmos series by Carl Sagan. But on the whole, sense and meaning is not something that can be prescribed by scientific knowledge - it can, however, help inform your own decisions about sense and meaning.

> For example: what if the theories just keep growing indefinitely?

This does not describe the current state of physics research. In fact, we are almost struggling to discover new physics, and so far most particle physics experiments line up so well with theory it's almost frustrating. What we can see right now is not the bottomless fractal recursion into nothingness which you describe.

I like the definition that Carl Sagan presented on Cosmos:

> It is, so far, entirely a human invention, evolved by natural selection in the cerebral cortex for one simple reason: it works. It is not perfect. It can be misused. It is only a tool. But it is by far the best tool we have, self-correcting, ongoing, applicable to everything. It has two rules. First: there are no sacred truths; all assumptions must be critically examined; arguments from authority are worthless. Second: whatever is inconsistent with the facts must be discarded or revised.

Fiction:

1. Life of Pi - Yann Martel

2. The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas : An awesome closeup of revenge

3. The complete Sherlock Holmes series : 'nuff said.

Non fiction:

1. Cosmos - Carl Sagan : I fell in love with science post-reading this book.

2. October Sky - Homer Hickham : A real life story of how a group of boys in a backwater town build a rocket that changes their lives.

3. Chariots of the Gods - Erich Von Daniken - A real mind bender, even if you choose not to agree with his ideas.

I was in high school when I got the news that he had died. Having grown up treasuring a hardback copy of Cosmos that my parents had got for me when I was 5 or so (still on my bookshelf today of course), I had fallen immediately in love with the phenomenal PBS series of the book and looked up to Carl Sagan as someone very special indeed. It was no wonder that my parents helped me to become a member of Carl Sagan's Planetary Society back in grade school, a membership I held all through high school.

In utter shock and disbelief when I received his news, I remember I had been walking to our school's computer lab. By the time I reached it, my brain was numb and I just sort of walked aimlessly to a computer along the south wall. As I approached the desk, I told our lab teacher what I had just learned, sat down, put my head in my hands, and cried.

Looking back on it now, I'm still not entirely sure why news of his death had so profound an effect on me, but I suspect it had something to do with Carl Sagan's "real talent for being profoundly inspiring on a deeper level," as burke so eloquently pointed out.

EDIT: Just finished watching the three videos. Absolutely blown away. And no, it's not really a mystery why he had so profound an effect on so many: between the eloquence of his words and his hypnotic speech and diction, who couldn't help but we swept away by his lessons? Only he could render in such convincing detail "the view that Kepler dreamed of," (if you have a copy of Cosmos lying around, you'll recognize that particular caption's stunning photo), and so much more in the universe beyond.

Beautiful Young Minds: Youngsters hoping to represent Britain in the International Maths Olympiad 2006.

Tetris: From Russia with Love - This is the fascinating story behind the game set against the backdrop of Cold War tensions between East and West.

Revolution OS

Triumph of the Nerds: The Rise of Accidental Empires

N is a Number: A Portrait of Paul Erdös

The Ascent of Man: Written and presented by Jacob Bronowski.

Cosmos: Carl Sagan

Not really. Have you heard of lead paint and gasoline ?
The Ancient Greeks knew lead was poisonous - didn't stop american companies from using it since it improved profit.

Source : Cosmos by NDTyson

Neil DeGrasse Tyson's Cosmos had a very good episode dedicated to him fighting the establishment.

Zircons were the key afaik and comparing them to deep sea lead percentages. Zircons are little crystals that keep things locked up and make for a useful record thats useful for investigating envoirnmental anomalies like this.

The theory of how lead poisoing lead to the fall of Rome is also interesting.

It doesn't have to be any one person, either.

As scientific progress becomes increasingly interdisciplinary, communication becomes increasingly valuable both within teams and with the greater public.

I would be perfectly happy seeing tens of enthusiastic and brilliant physicists stepping up to become the celebrity scientists of the upcoming generation, rather than just one or two.

Until they surface, however, the responsibility falls upon each and every one of us to stoke the fires of passion and wonder in our fellow humans.

I started watching Niel deGrasse Tyson's Cosmos reboot the other day, and the first episode is definitely worth a watch for everyone reading this thread. It was also covered in Business Insider: http://www.businessinsider.com/inspiring-story-young-neil-de...

You don't need a platform or a massive following to ignite a spark of curiosity in another person. Small acts of kindness and encouragement can last a lifetime.

Wow, author of Cosmos here. For the record I didn't post this. So thanks to OP and everyone who upvoted. It's cool that Cosmos still generates new interest after so many years.

Yes, Cosmos is very similar to Storybook. It's also older, and I'm only saying this because I'm tired of getting asked how does it differ. Both projects provide an isolated component environment to help tackle complexity in single page apps. The difference boils down to setup compatibility and personal taste.

I'm not gonna lie, some of the comments are tough to process, but what can you do. I still appreciate all feedback and as usual I'll try to incorporate it as best as I can.

Cosmos by John North.

This book is just threatening to be a masterpiece. An overview of mans scientific ideas about the stars and the planets and the cosmos in general from before Ptolemy to Einstein and modern times. Absolutely epic in scope. This book is to the history of astronomy like "The Prize" is to the history of oil, only bigger.

A few movies left me with some feelings like this. I take it as a chance to try to capture some insight and write it down. Regardless of movies I think is healthy to periodically review life's important questions, but if a movie triggered that, then it would be very welcomed. On the personal side, due to the age at which Carl Sagan's Cosmos catch me, that was profoundly influential and inspiring.

“Many hypotheses proposed by scientists as well as by nonscientists turn out to be wrong. But science is a self-correcting enterprise. To be accepted, all new ideas must survive rigorous standards of evidence. The worst aspect of the Velikovsky affair is not that his hypotheses were wrong or in contradiction to firmly established facts, but that some who called themselves scientists attempted to suppress Velikovsky's work. Science is generated by and devoted to free inquiry: the idea that any hypothesis, no matter how strange, deserves to be considered on its merits. The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion and politics, but it is not the path to knowledge; it has no place in the endeavor of science. We do not know in advance who will discover fundamental new insights.”

Carl Sagan, Cosmos

> In Neil DeGrasse Tyson's version of "Cosmos" there is a great illustration where he says that if we visualize the entire history of the universe as being scaled to one calendar year then every human being that has ever lived has essentially existed somewhere within the last 12 seconds of that year.

Was that in the original Carl Sagan version of Cosmos as well? I seem to recall it, but I've never seen the Neil DeGrasse Tyson version.

Well-intentioned, actually the exposition it the best part. The book list - well are mostly about “beating the system.”

The Frankl book is excellent for readers from any century, it will be a future classic on the scale of Epictetus, unless suffering is someday conquered by future people.

My top book for young minds: Cosmos by Carl Sagan.

Yay, I'm going to model my library after someone else's opinion of what I ought to read! Literature ought to be a popularity contest!

I think I've read over half of the volumes mentioned there, and disliked a lot of them. I thought "The Grapes of Wrath" was awful, and never did figure out why anybody was ever impressed by "The Catcher In The Rye". To me, both of those were good examples of books that people read because other people read them, and nobody can really describe why they're so profound, but since everybody else has read them, they must be. And, among all these "profound" works, they included "Into Thin Air". I enjoyed it, and I used to be a climber, but what's it doing on that list?

Then, there are the many titles not found on the list. How about "The Decameron", for one? "Pale Blue Dot"? "A Brief History of Time"? "Cosmos"? "The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam"?

And, I'd argue that reading should be done as much for enjoyment as for edification. So, why not some "Calvin and Hobbes"? Or "Words I Wish I Wrote"? Or some Neil Gaiman or Greg Bear or George RR Martin?

I'm not ranting at you; I agree with you 100%. Your comment just seemed like an appropriate place to attach a rant against the article. :-)

I would make a counter-case that scientists don't get much credit from the scientific community for communicating with the public, which funds their research, engages potential students, etc.

An extreme case is Issac Asimov who dropped out of the rat race of academia and writing Sci Fi with L. Ron Hubbard for a penny a word and wrote decades of monthly essays about science for the public that were a big reason why I went for a PhD. He didn't contribute hugely in terms of research or traditional teaching, but his impact was immense.

Also, Carl Sagan's involvement in Cosmos and the books he wrote overshadows a completely solid career in space and planetary science.

I enjoyed my time in college, I even learned and experienced much that I still value. However, to be honest, most of the knowledge that I value has come outside of traditional education. Much of my most useful knowledge in physics, biology, astronomy, language, etc. has come from self-study, from reading old issues of National Geographic, Popular Science, Scientific American during high school and after, from reading text books and non-fiction books on my own. The most important contribution to my intellectual character has probably come from Carl Sagan's Cosmos, above any course or line of study in formal education.

That being said, there have been some substantial and crucial bits of knowledge I likely would not have acquired outside of school. Calculus and advanced mathematics, most especially the rigor of formal proofs that has proven immensely useful and practical to me and yet came of a degree course I chose essential by accident. And the experience of chemistry laboratory courses, using equipment that I would not have had access to outside of college, is something I would be sorry to have missed.

Overall, I'd say that college can still be a valuable experience but the increasing reliance on college as the sole route to education is troublesome and problematic.

The other anecdote concerning Sir Isaac Newton that seems most apt, and it was particularly well dramatized in Neil DeGrasse Tyson's updated Cosmos series, arose when the Royal Society delayed publishing his Principia due to the spectacular failure of their Encyclopedia of Fish the year before! I am not sure which amazes me more: that "natural philosophy" encompasses everything in the cosmos from optics to marine life. Or contemporaneous short-sightedness can imbue one subject with the most paramount economic and social import, whilst viewing the other as nothing more than a mere parlor trick. Only to have the perspective of history upend such dogma centuries later!

I tend to agree with you that there are problems with teaching kids how to use proprietary software like Microsoft Office, but this is a bit different.

It's not like Minecraft is a business tool that you're teaching to school kids, who will then go on to use it when they graduate. It's an educational tool.

This would be like complaining that Carl Sagan's Cosmos or Bill Nye the Science Guy are copyrighted videos.

Surprised not to have seen it elsewhere, but I remember telling my mom that we began studying astronomy in grade school (5th or 6th?) and she gave me Cosmos by Carl Sagan. I didn't know there was a TV series for it at the time, where reading it truly blew my mind that there were other galaxies and stellar objects beyond the Milky Way, and how happenstance humanity's origin story began. It also provided a great foundation for understanding what future missions would explore: finding habitibility zones outside of the earth, probes zooming to the edges of our galaxy, radio telescopes designed to listen for signals from far away, and space telescopes expanding our map of the cosmos just to name a few.

>When I was a teen, growing up on a diet of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos and Alvin Toffler’s Futurism, I had plenty of big ideas: spaceflight, supersonic travel, mag-lev trains, geodesic domes, bio-nanotech for longevity, and social organization to provide maximum freedom for all. Cheesy, but optimistic.

Now I am 29 and I have no big, optimistic ideas.[...]It feels like I’m in the belly of the ship, frenetically plugging leaky holes, never even having the space of mind to think where the ship should go. Ostensibly, those decisions are made on the bridge of the ship, which, in October 2020, seems to be populated by well-intentioned individuals, but hamstrung in their ability to make good collective decisions.*

So the author turned into an adult. Geodesic domes and flying cars are cool but whether the future is good or not will depend on many people doing boring work over many decades and stuffing those leaks in the ship. Torvalds has said many times that you make the future better fixing one pothole at a time, and what he has built proves that's true. Bold visions aren't all they're cracked up to be and I'll take the linux kernel and git over Bezos phallic rockets when it comes to world improvement in tech. What I'll take from Bezos is the decidedly non-futuristic idea of putting books into boxes a little bit faster than everyone else. That made the world a bit better as well.

The reality is that is usually the marketing force behind an artist that generates his revenue, not actually the art itself. I have met so many extraordinary musicians that can shred the guitar and who write very clever music on a daily basis but will never make any money at it unless someone better looking than them takes their music and performs it. Since Meatloaf, I cannot think of any fat pop musicians. Art driven by profits is not always the best art. Coming from eastern Canada, Friday nights and weekends we have caleighs where anyone can pick up an instrument, sing or clap along, and nobody ever holds out for more money to perform. I do agree with your first sentence though, more time spent on art produces better art. But in the case of Carl Sagan who was a scientist, got his inspiration from his day job, which in turn helped him to produce his art (I include his Cosmos series as part of his art, I don't think we need to get into the debate of what is and isn't art). Its more of a sad reality that most art needs money to exist. I'm not calling for an art revolution or anything, I just wanted to point this out as some food for thought. Inspiration can come from anywhere.

The Big Bang was the formation of the entire universe. About ten billion years later, our solar system, and eventually the Earth, started forming due to gravity pulling various bits of matter together. Ten billion years is a really, really long time! The two events are completely separate.

If you're interested in cosmology, there are a ton of fascinating popular science books on the topic, and research is very active and ongoing. As an introduction, I recommend Cosmos by Carl Sagan. It's a bit outdated these days, but the main points hold and it's a fascinating read from start to finish. Alternatively, if you prefer video, check out Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey with Neil deGrasse Tyson. It's an up-to-date retelling of Sagan's original idea.

Thanks for posting.

Now I get why Kepler was hell bent on trying to fit the orbits of the 5 known planets (at his time) with the 5 platonic solids [1]. This part of Kepler's life is very nicely depicted in Carl Sagan's Cosmos [2]. It seemed interesting when I watched it, but I didn't give it much thought back then.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Kepler#Mysterium_Cosmo...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLBA8DC67D52968201&featur...

Cosmos by Carl Sagan

Getting More - Stuart Diamond. I still think this is the best book on the art of negotiation.

Getting Things Done - David Allen. If you have adult ADHD like me, and you haven't read this, it's the first system that's really worked for productivity for me.

Man's Search for Meaning - Victor Frankl.

Living Buddha, Living Christ - Thich Nhat Hanh.

Cosmos - Carl Sagan.

The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula K. LeGuin.

The One who Walks Away from Omelas - U.K. LeGuin.

Wild Seed - Octavia Butler.

The Heike Monogatari - (tr. Helen Craig McCullough) “The sound of the Gion Shoja temple bells echoes the impermanence of all things; the color of the sala flowers reveals the truth that to flourish is to fall. The proud do not endure, like a passing dream on a night in spring; the mighty fall at last, to be no more than dust before the wind.” If you need a comparison. this is the Japanese historical equivalent of Game of Thrones combined with a bit of MacBeth. The rise and fall of two shogunate families, and an analysis of the tragic flaws of character that brought their fall about.

Les Miserables - Victor Hugo.

Small Gods - Terry Pratchett.

Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad.

The Guide - R. K. Narayan.

Evidence - Mary Oliver.

All of Us - The Collected Poetry of Raymond Carver.

Silence - Shusaku Endo.

The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle - Murakami Haruki. This and the next four are odd choices, perhaps, since it's a surrealist book, but IMO books that force your imagination to work hard do as much for creativity and fresh ideas as any of the more popular methods.

The Well-Built City (The Physiognomy / Memoranda / The Beyond) Jeffery Ford - Surrealist novellas best described as about the protagonist living and achieving agency within the constructs, dreams, and nightmares of a "Great Man's" mind.

Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson.

Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon.

Dhalgren - Samuel L. "Chip" Delany.

> With this in mind, we can view our future with some certainty. Something big is going to smash into us, sooner or later, and probably sooner.

I started reading Cosmos by Carl Sagan a week ago and he discusses the Tunguska event for several pages. It's an amazing book that I wish I had studied long ago. Had I not read that book, this statement would have instilled an impending sense of doom into me, which does nothing but demoralize me. Now that I've read that book, I can now tell with certainty that this prophecy is utter crap. As this article mentions, the asteroids are being tracked, so, we most likely will know it before hand.

OTOH, here's an article from science alert

http://www.sciencealert.com/next-month-an-asteroid-will-pass...

> Before you freak out, there's no chance that the asteroid is going to smash into us. The space agency is still determining its exact trajectory, but at the closest estimate, it'll be 18,000 km (11,000 miles) away as it passes us by - which would make it easily viewable with the help of a telescope. To put that into perspective, that's roughly one-twentieth the distance from Earth to the Moon. Alternatively, the asteroid could travel further afield, and pass us at a distance of around 14 million km (9 million miles).

> The reason for the big difference in these two estimates is that NASA only discovered this asteroid three years ago - hence the very-catchy name, asteroid 2013 TX68 - and haven't had much time to observe it just yet.

I picture Chomsky as Kepler, trying to build orbits out of Platonic solids.

Until Kepler had access to Brahe's data, he was not going to be able to come up with his theories of planetary motions.

Worse than that, the laws of planetary motion present a simplistic view of the universe: what happens when a bunch of small objects orbit a very massive object. I think they wouldn't help you out at all, in trying to understand planets moving in a binary star system.

There is no analytic solution to the N-body problem. We can only simulate the motions of a group of massive bodies by iteratively applying the laws of gravitation that we have deduced. Knowing the mathematical properties of how objects behave in a gravitational field, and actually understanding HOW GRAVITY WORKS are two enormously different things. Newton was frustrated with the theory of Gravity, because it was, as Norvig's models, just a model - with no explanation of why. But the model allows you to make falsifiable predictions, and understand how the universe will behave. Looking for the Higgs Boson is awesome - but there is potentially no equivalent in the linguistic world.

Chomsky asks us to ignore F = G * m1 * m2 / r^2, because there's no WHY attached to it.

PS - this understanding of the history of science is brought to you by Carl Sagan's Cosmos TV series. I have no deeper insight than that.

Unfortunately, this is one of those points where the two opposing camps are generally not able to come to any sort of agreement. I grew up reading Cosmos and straining my eyes through a bad telescope and looking up and wanting to be there instead of stuck here.

And, unfortunately, it's all too common on HN that we can't have a discussion about value that doesn't involve a concrete measurement of actual dollars, and since I am not one of the three wealthiest people on the planet, I cannot quote any kind of significant figure for what I personally would be willing to pay to leave the planet in a permanent way.

But, I will say that historically, the populist argument against exploration has always been that it wasn't worth the cost, and that that argument has almost always turned out to be wrong. The technological improvements required to accomplish the exploration have always further benefited human technological development, to say nothing of inspiring later generations to continue pushing boundaries, or of showing us just how possible it is to break through certain boundaries, or of discovering unimagined treasures along the way.

I am steadfastly amongst those few remaining people who thinks that real space exploration is not only worth it, but is essential to our species.

Cosmos - Carl Sagan

1984 - George Orwell

Tao Teh Ching - Lao Tse

Yeah, I really don't buy that premise at all. Just because some individual likes the idea of drones, doesn't make them implicitly virtuous.

The decision to use resources to pollute the wilderness with arbitrary technology is a leadership decision, relying on the personality characteristics of an entity or social chain of command.

This business about "drones" is an anachronistic paraphrasing of the original concept. People didn't speak in terms of the "drone" fad in the 20th century, like we do now. Drones were usually just target practice for the Air Force and Navy.

The original concept just specified range of influence, and a demonstration of presence. It did not impose a manner of activity, be it drone replication or direct colonization with regimented staff, and divisions of duty among personel. [0] The Fermi paradox remained agnostic, simply implying possible speed of travel given geological time scales.

Carl Sagan's Cosmos mentioned unmanned satellites (or unaliened? unoccupied...) as the most likely hypothetical form of first contact. Before we bump into any living thing, will probably notice a few remote control devices fanned out in front of their main corpus of civilization or colonization. That TV show also hypothesized about the possibility of dying civilizations leaving behind self-perpetuating remnants of technology, the likes of which might or might not be sentient. All of it was TV speculation though, not presented as surely factual.

If you read between the lines, the premise of a "dying" civilization hints at the lack of self control present in a runaway factory neglected and left to churn out garbage. That idea does not assume that a collective of entities would always wish to tamper with and contaminate their surrounding domain presumptiously.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox

I'm not sure where to begin.

Demon-Haunted World is about skepticism, and how to use science and rational inquiry to avoid scams, pseudoscience, hoaxes, and possibly religion. It is not a strictly atheist book, although you could read it as one if you tilt your head properly.

But how can you not know anything else about Carl Sagan?

He wrote many books popularizing science, including Contact, The Dragons of Eden, Broca's Brain, and Cosmos. He also co-wrote and hosted the series Cosmos on PBS, which is the most-watched PBS show in history, and well worth watching on DVD.

He was founder and first President of The Planetary Society (http://www.planetary.org/). He was an avid supporter of SETI. He assembled the gold plaque that went into space on Pioneer 10, and the golden records that went out on the Voyager probes.

As an astronomer, he made several important hypotheses about the structure of other planets, particularly Venus, and drew connections between Venus and Earth-based global warming and greenhouse emissions.

He was active in investigating UFO claims, including serving on the Ad Hoc Committee that reviewed the Air Force's Project Blue Book. He was convinced of the probability of extra-terrestrial intelligence, but equally convinced that we had not encountered it yet.

Most importantly, he brought us the phrase "billions and billions", even though he never said it himself until long after it was a joke.

Here's a collection of quotations: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Carl_Sagan

And one for the road: "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe."

50 years ago was 1970.

In 1980 Cosmos: A Personal Voyage came out. A companion book came out the next year. In it, Carl Sagan warns about the dangers of global warming.

We knew. Climate science 50 years ago was good enough to identify this as a problem.

Al Gore decided to be Clinton's running mate in part due to how HW Bush was handling environmental issues. Issues he was bringing up in Congress since 1976 when he was first elected.

Once again, we knew.

We also knew that the best time to get a handle on the problem was then.

Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra. Cosmos by Carl Sagan. Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. Albert Einstein by Walter Isaacson. The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda.

I am Indian-American and know exactly what you mean. I'm currently writing stuff for my 'science project' that hopes to synthesize Eastern and Western, Ancient and Modern schools of thought.

Always go back to the classics

* The Design of Everyday Things
* Design for the Real World
* A Pattern Language
* Notes on the Synthesis of Form
* Never Leave Well Enough Alone
* Don't Make Me Think
* How Things Don't Work
* Usable Usability
* The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
* A Theory of Fun for Game Design

Other left-field books I've found myself going back to for design inspiration more than I would've thought

* The Death and Life of Great American Cities
* The Philosophy of Andy Warhol
* Influence by Robert Caldini
* Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
* The Art of Looking Sideways
* Cosmos
* Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth
* The Theory of Moral Sentiments

And just specifically for computer UX, Smashing UX Design is a pretty good crash course.

Interesting how things keep coming back to Carl Sagan's Cosmos recently -- I don't have the exact episode at hand, but he makes this point while standing in the New York Public Library. Pointing to a shelf of books, smaller than one might imagine, he says something along the lines of "The trick is knowing which books to read."

Cosmos by Carl Sagan

I've had a deep interest in science, math, and technology since I was a tiny child. I nursed that interest by reading scifi/fantasy novels, old issues of various sci/tech magazines (Scientific American, National Geographic, Popular Science), the occasional text-book now and then, and especially Carl Sagan's Cosmos. I developed a strong attachment to programmable graphic calculators and later the family computer (an IBM PS/1 with 1meg of RAM, a 286 processor, and a 30meg harddrive) during high school. I had a huge collection of various programming projects, games, experiments, genetic algorithms, etc. But I didn't consider myself a "real" programmer.

In high-school I displayed an unnatural ease with mathematics, which lead directly toward attaining a bachelor's degree in the subject before I had the slightest clue what to do with it. Meanwhile, my interest in computers and programming had grown considerably, I pursued an additional bachelor's degree with a double major in Chemistry and Computer Science. It wasn't until I got my first job, while still going to school, that I realized how deeply software engineering was in my blood, and I haven't looked back since.

I think the author did address this but you raise an interesting analogy. I remember Carl Sagan made a point in Cosmos that the natural sciences lost millenia of progress thanks to the dominance of Platonic thought and mysticism over empiricle research and observation. I do not think it will take millenia to see it, but perhaps in a few decades we will see the present circumstances of program language application in a similar light.

Jacob Bronowski appeared to believe that if Ludwig Boltzmann hadn't done his bit for atomic theory then Physics would be set back "decades, and perhaps a hundred years".

https://youtu.be/LPBjcMKiezg?t=36m50s

Either way this clip from The Ascent of Man is always worth watching, as is the whole series. It was the inspiration for Carl Sagan's Cosmos which I understand is fondly received in this community.