Returning to the Cosmos

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Tonight at 9pm is the premier of the reboot of Cosmos, hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson. It’s been 33 years since the original Cosmos was aired on PBS.

That was quite a sequence of years for science: the year before, in 1979, the Voyager spacecrafts flew by Jupiter; in 1980 and 81 they flew by Saturn. In that low-tech pre-Internet age, an incredible thing happened: PBS stations across the US opened their doors to allow people to come in and view the live feed from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, hosted by Carl Sagan himself. After school, I took the bus to the Maine Public Broadcasting studios on the UMaine campus where my mother worked. The feeds from JPL were made available by direct satellite link, a feat which felt futuristic at the time.

In real time, 13-year-old me watched as the first images of the rings of Jupiter, and the moons of Saturn were returned to Earth at a speed roughly equivalent to the modems we would be using for dialup Internet access a decade later. How amazing that we could accomplish such a feat – never before had mankind been witness to acts of discovery such as this in real time across our solar system.

Jim Blinn's computer rendering of Saturn for the Cosmos TV Series.

Jim Blinn’s computer rendering of Saturn for the Cosmos TV Series — one of the first computer graphics ever produced for television.

There is no small amount of irony that the new Cosmos is airing on Fox Television. It is even perhaps a greater irony that in the 80s Cold War era, we were more focused on science than we are today. Today, members of the US Congress regularly espouse a disbelief in evolution and natural selection, and display scorn for the scientific process as a whole. But how are we going to advance as a species without science? Does it take the us-versus-them mentality to really make it happen?

Tyson was a student of Sagan’s, and will bring his own style to the show. But he is bringing back the Cosmic Calendar and the Spaceship of the Imagination, and for that I am grateful. I am hopeful that it will renew, if only for a moment, the sense of amazing discovery that the original series did when it first aired.

And if we need another sense of renewal, the entire original series is available on YouTube. It still stands the test of time.

Armistice Day

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I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

Armistice Day has become Veterans’ Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans’ Day is not.

So I will throw Veterans’ Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don’t want to throw away any sacred things.

What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance.

And all music is.

Kurt Vonnegut
Breakfast of Champions (1973)

Gin’n’Tonic

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Gin'n'Tonic

It is a curious fact, and one to which no one knows quite how much importance to attach, that something like 85% of all known worlds in the Galaxy, be they primitive or highly advanced, have invented a drink called jynnan tonnyx, or gee-N’N-T’N-ix, or jinond-o-nicks, or any one of a thousand or more variations on the same phonetic theme. The drinks themselves are not the same, and vary between the Sivolvian ‘chinanto/mnigs’ which is ordinary water served at slightly above room temperature, and the Gagrakackan ‘tzjin-anthony-ks’ which kill cows at a hundred paces; and in fact the one common factor between all of them, beyond the fact that the names sound the same, is that they were all invented and named before the worlds concerned made contact with any other worlds.

What can be made of this fact? It exists in total isolation. As far as any theory of structural linguistics is concerned it is right off the graph, and yet it persists. Old structural linguists get very angry when young structural linguists go on about it. Young structural linguists get deeply excited about it and stay up late at night convinced that they are very close to something of profound importance, and end up becoming old structural linguists before their time, getting very angry with the young ones. Structural linguistics is a bitterly divided and unhappy discipline, and a large number of its practitioners spend too many nights drowning their problems in Ouisghian Zodahs.

–Douglas Adams — The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Searching for the perfect pub

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When I was eight years old, I went to the UK with my parents.  My father was on sabbatical from the university he taught at;  we spent four months touring France, England, Scotland, and Wales.  France was a destination because my father was working on a book;  the UK was on the itinerary for a multitude of reasons, undoubtedly including a desire to introduce me to my cultural heritage.

I remember visiting a small rural pub in Cornwall after a long day’s journey touring through the countryside.  My parents ordered beer – I ordered an orange squash – essentially orange juice. But this being a British pub, and not altogether used to children, the pints arrived before the orange squash. The day had been hot, and long. I had tasted beer before, so my mother let me have a sip of her pint while we waited – something which would probably land her in prison if it occurred in 2013.

The beer was cold, and delicious, and I drank half of it before I could be stopped.

Pub culture in the UK is very different from bar culture in the US. Bars are apart from society, not an integral part of it – in keeping with our Puritan roots. Instead of an extension of the home, bars are more commonly depicted like Moe’s, Homer Simpson’s hangout. Yet this small pub in Cornwall had room for an American family with an 8-year old child, tired from a long day and looking to relax.

The UK has changed quite a bit since 1976.  On my last visit in 2009, the two Horse Guards outside Whitehall were a female soldier and a soldier of what in the UK would be considered Afro-Caribbean descent – a big change in the last 30 years.  But the best thing about societies is that they adapt – sometimes for the worse, occasionally for the better.

Paul Moody and Robin Turner’s [amazon asin=1409112675&text=The Search for the Perfect Pub] paints a picture of Britain’s pubs of yesteryear through the lens of George Orwell’s Moon Under Water, and attempts to track its course in the 21st century. There is some rough sailing and heavy weather’ but some of the unique properties of the British pub will see it safe into the 21st century.