Celebrate Inquiry

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On November 9th:

Celebrate Carl Sagan Day

 

Carl Sagan Carl Sagan (11/9/1934 — 12/20/1996)

While Isaac Asimov knew of none more handsome, he did admit to having meet in his life two people who were smarter than he was. One was Carl Sagan. The question of who was the better looking has yet to be definitively resolved.

One way to celebrate the day would be to take a poor believer to lunch and actually listen to them compasionately while evidencing not the slightest hint of your pity. But then you don't have to be Carl Sagan. It is enough for the rest of us to endeavor to be more like him. Alas, most can expect to fall short of thinking as well as he did.

So what to do? Well you can hardly go wrong rewatching an episode of Cosmos (or all 13 in a Cosmos marathon—much easier than running 42+ klicks). Don't own a copy? They're all over: see YouTube, Hulu, bitTorrents...)

In episode 7 of Cosmos, "The Backbone of Night," Sagan speaks of not the cosmos, but how he and the collective we came to know what we think we know about the cosmos. The story is largely the story of the Ionian Greeks, begining with Thales. For a brief introduction, consider: Ionian Heros of Mind.

You could do his 'Dragon in the Whatever' as preference art. One person, as prearranged, states that "there's a fire-breathing dragon in my basement." Everyone else gets to play Carl. One person knows Carl's answers and can guide the happening if needed.

You can have an apple pie making contest. While all are eating apple pie, watch Carl's video where he explains how to make an apple pie FROM SCRATCH!

Provide free copies of Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit to each. It's just a link away and prints on one page. Even better, read/print the article.pdf itself in its full awesomeness.

Printing one B/W page for each guest to your party should be affordable. For a bit more in ink, consider giving a full-color poster (8.5x11) suitable for framing. The small print-it-yourself poster is a free download here (click to view, right click and save as). It is a JPG file hat has been saved from the original 18x24 inch poster (which fits common poster frames) at max quality (so it is a bit large). The poster includes over twenty choice Sagan quotes. The original is available at full size from the Zazzle store of xyz (Zazzle does not allow a royalty setting of less than 10% so if any of these posters are sold, the 'profit' of up to $1.50 will be donated to a worthy organization mentioned on the right—the poster is offered to celebrate Sagan, not make money off of him. November 2014, apparently to celebrate his birthday, his estate forced Zazzle to remove the poster since they weren't getting their cut. It is all about DRM you know. The next decision is weather to bring legal action to close this site. Sagan was himself litigious to a fault, so perhaps he would want this page removed. There appears to be an afterlife after all, one populated by lawyers and those who claim to own Carl. You can no longer get the large scale poster from Zazzle, and taking it to WalMart to print would be a crime. In the years the poster was on Zazzle I never sold one until the month before it's removal was forced. Probably the estate/lawyer ordered one so they could claim a crime had actually been commited. I donated the $1.37 to FreeThought AZ. Be sure to sue them to get the money back. Copy this page/site in case it goes away for some reason.).

Celebrate Carl Sagan Day
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