Speaking of Carl Sagan . . .

No, I haven’t seen anything more of the “updated” Cosmos shows outside of this trailer released earlier this week at San Diego ComiCon.

Yet I have to wonder.

This Cosmos seems loud. Bassoforte. And dripping with CGI. It’s true the intro to the 1980s Cosmos looks almost Victorian to the modern eye:

But dammit, that’s CARL SAGAN on the BEACH with a TIE. How is Neil deGrasse Tyson going to top that?

Apparently, with lots of bassoforte and CGI.

I don’t deny there may be some science that needs updating, as progress goes forward. But the attraction and charm in the original Cosmos comes in Sagan’s delivery and in the simple methods used to convey the scientific principles he’s teaching. Yes, he could have used animation or slick CGI to illustrate Eratosthenes’ calculations on the Earth’s circumference, but as he does it here you get an immediate, human feel to the concept. You don’t need CGI or animation or anything, just a man, the sun, and a bit of stiff cardboard with two obelisks sticking out of it. You can imagine Eratosthenes doing the same kind of experiment, without having to use a computer to do it. I like the clarity of the explanation. Hopefully Tyson et al can maintain that.

Of course, the CGI is cheap. Cheaper than a trip of Egypt – and given the political climate there right now, certainly safer. But I worry the CGI is going to cheapen things. I love, for example, to look at the raw images sent back by Voyager, by Curiosity, by Cassini. And though I love some of the CGI produced to go along with these images, my fear is that with a top-heavy CGI Cosmos, the raw, the real, is going to get lost. We have so many bells and whistles these days they drown out the whisper of the solar wind, if I can turn a Saganesque bit of phraseology.

And what is cooler than seeing Carl Sagan wander around on a freakin’ SET of the SOLAR SYSTEM, to debunk a nimrod who thought Venus was expelled by Jupiter? When I saw this bit, I wanted a similar set to play around in when I was a kid. I still kinda want one now. A CGI solar system would have taken the human out of the equation. Maybe it would look better, but it would look cheaper.

But that’s our day and age now.

Pale Blue Dot

Pale Blue Dot from ORDER on Vimeo.

If only it were free of typos . . .

Bugs in the Arithmetic

So, did the Viking landers really find life on Mars, way back in 1976? Headline writers and breathless bloggers across the Internet sure think so.

What did they really find?

Gullibility. Or at least evidence that an as-yet unverified mathematical process that could detect signs of life in data from the Mars Viking landers might possibly have found proof of life in that data.

But there’s a problem with their method: It’s unverified. Writes Discovery.com:

Critics counter that the method has not yet been proven effective for differentiating between biological and non-biological processes on Earth so it's premature to draw any conclusions.

"Ideally to use a technique on data from Mars one would want to show that the technique has been well calibrated and well established on Earth. The need to do so is clear; on Mars we have no way to test the method, while on Earth we can," planetary scientist and astrobiologist Christopher McKay, with NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., told Discovery News.

Sounds like the researchers used a complexity analysis to see if Viking’s readings showed biological chemical reactions in tested soil, rather than geological reactions, as the scientific consensus lies. I don’t pretend to understand the math, but apparently there is some caution urged when using such analyses, as data showing, for example, poor results as compared to another analysis could, in the longer run, actually show better results over time.

I don’t doubt there is life on other planets; to disbelieve such is ludicrous. Finding life, however, is going to take more than mathematical analysis. It’s going to take money, and the political will to send more accurate probes to places such as Mars to discover that life. It’s romantic to think that you’re going to find proof in data that’s been lying around since he 1970s, but if that proof relies on unverified methods, it’s not really proof at all.

Into the Briny Blue -- On Mars

There may not be canals on Mars, but it appears there is free-flowing salty water on the planet’s surface after all. Or just underneath the surface. Or not.

It’s kinda hard to tell, because in typical NASA-ese, the announcement hedges every bet:

The images show flows lengthen and darken on rocky equator-facing slopes from late spring to early fall. The seasonality, latitude distribution and brightness changes suggest a volatile material is involved, but there is no direct detection of one. The settings are too warm for carbon-dioxide frost and, at some sites, too cold for pure water. This suggests the action of brines, which have lower freezing points. Salt deposits over much of Mars indicate brines were abundant in Mars' past. These recent observations suggest brines still may form near the surface today in limited times and places.

When researchers checked flow-marked slopes with the orbiter's Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM), no sign of water appeared. The features may quickly dry on the surface or could be shallow subsurface flows.

"The flows are not dark because of being wet," McEwen said. "They are dark for some other reason."

A flow initiated by briny water could rearrange grains or change surface roughness in a way that darkens the appearance. How the features brighten again when temperatures drop is harder to explain.

Water in the form of ice is known to exist on Mars already (as well as on the Moon), but to see free-flowing water, briny or not, on the surface or just below it, is pretty exciting stuff. There may indeed be physical forces other than wind shifting the surface of the planet and offering yet another spot where future expeditions could search for microbial life forms.

No word if NASA has named the newly-discovered features. Too bad. Giovanni Schiaprelli, the Italian astronomer noted for naming the features he could identify on the Martian surface as “canali” would have loved to help. He named dozens of canals on Mars.

And maybe one of these two guys would want to help as well.

All that matters is you see your world and I see mine. Is that not enough no matter what we each believe?

Space . . .

With the landing of the final space shuttle flight this week at Cape Canaveral, Florida, about all I could think of was this:

(Yeah, the music doesn’t track with the film as it does in the real thing. The real thing is here, I’m just not able to embed it.)

If I could go back in time, I might very well pick the mid-1960s. Not necessarily for the race riots, the inequality, the Vietnam War, or any of the other terrible things going on. But for the optimism that still remained in a lot of people when it came to that thing called “human progress.” We have gobs of it now, but it is lost in the noise. And perhaps I would find that same phenomenon back then; perhaps I’m better off looking through the noise of now to find the optimism that still remains here and now.

But at least back then, we had movies like this to help us, once in a while, find that optimism. This goes back to what I wrote earlier this week on the hooptedoodle of the “Pink Elephants” segment from “Dumbo.” They just don’t do things like this any more. I can’t think of any modern film that would allow for a sequence like Kubrick’s “Blue Danube” sequence from “2001.” Five and a half minutes with no dialogue, just some models, a little special effect, and some really crusty old music. But put together in a way that helped the optimism ooze out. That feeling that if we could get the rest of our crap pulled together – you know, the racism, the wars, et cetera – and put our money and time and effort and thought into something like this, we just might enjoy a more peaceful and productive future. A future that involved travel in outer space becoming commonplace.

As it is, we’re down to this.

Jeffrey Kluger writes this for Time:

If the shuttles were business class and the old Apollos were coach, the Soyuz is a little like hiding in the wheel well for a coast-to-coast flight, even if it's a wheel well with an impeccable safety record — at least recently. . .

With the Soyuz, things are a little sportier. After the spacecraft decouples from the ISS, the commander fires the reentry engines and then jettisons the docking module that's attached to one end of the crew compartment and the engine module that's connected to the other. The little pod that remains plunges into the atmosphere, encountering the first air resistance at about 400,000 ft. — or 75 mi. It falls at a brisk 492 mph until its small drogue parachutes pop out at about the cruising altitude of an airliner. The main parachute is deployed shortly after that, and at just 3 ft. above the surface, three small engines fire to brake the landing slightly. That landing, incidentally, is a thumpdown on the ground, not a splashdown in the ocean. And did we mention that through most of the reentry the spacecraft is spinning in order to maintain stability?

I’m never going to travel in space. Only this way.

Carl Sagan's Logic

NOTE: More babbling from my BYU-Idaho class.

Carl Sagan is known, of course, as a scientific populist, someone who advocates, per Wikipedia, a return to the “older Aristotelian movement of horizontal interactions among equals who are different.” In other words – Sagan is someone who wants to speak on scientific principles not only with other scientists, but with lay people who share his interest in the scientific method.

In this clip from the popular television show Cosmos (well, it was popular when I was a kid in the early 1980s) Sagan turns to the subject of astrology. Obviously, as a scientist, he is dismissive of astrology. But isn’t it interesting to consider the persuasive methods he uses to put his point across?

First, who is his audience? What approach will he take – will he use logos, an appeal to logic; pathos, an appeal to emotion; or ethos, an appeal to character or credibility?

Second, what kids of claims does he make in the following statements:

• Astrology suggests a dangerous fatalism. If our lives are controlled by a set of traffic signals in the sky, why try to change anything?

• I was born in a closed room. Light from Mars couldn’t get in. The only influence of Mars which could affect me is its gravity. But the gravitational influence of the obstetrician was much larger than the gravitational influence of Mars. Mars is a lot more massive, but the obstetrician was a lot closer.

• The desire to be connected to the cosmos reflects a profound reality. But we are connected. Not in the trivial ways that the pseudoscience of astrology promises, but in the deepest ways. Our little planet is under the influence of a star. The sun warms us. It drives the weather. It sustains all living things. Four billion years ago, it brought forth life on Earth.

Sagan, interestingly, relies heavily on ethos – or our trust in his character – as he makes his arguments. He mentions the last “scientific astronomer” Johannes Kepler in this bit, but he does not reveal anything to us about how Kepler drew away from astrology and into astronomy. Sagan presents few documented facts for us to consider throughout this clip. He is instead using ethos and pathos to convince us of his point of view.

He does, in the second example, use logos to convince us that believing the planets influence our fate at the time of our birth is absurd, given that the planet’s physical properties have such weak influence on us at the time.

In the third example, he relies heavily on pathos – drawing on our emotions, our desire to feel connected to the world around us but in real ways, not the “pseudoscience” used in astrology.

What kinds of claims does Sagan make in this clip? I believe he uses the three we discuss in class:

He makes evaluative claims, asking us to find the common assumption in the view that celestial traffic lights controlling our fate is a silly thing.

He uses definitive claims when he compares what scientific evidence-gathering has found out about the planets in comparison to the astrologers’ belief that the planets personify war, death, authority – and portent the presence of such in our lives as they rise and fall.

He uses advocative claims when he works to convince us to take the course of action that leads us to believe we are connected to the world and our own sun through real, physically-measurable ways.

Ignorance

NOTE: From time to time, I will post a bit from my FDENG 101 class here. Is for fun.

A good part of our discussion this week has focused on two things:

1) How do we express our ignorance without saying we’re stupid?
2) How do we counteract our own ignorance?

First, ignorance without stupidity.

These are not synonyms.

• Ignorance, per the American Heritage Dictionary, is defined as “The condition of being ignorant; lack of knowledge.”
• Stupidity, per the same dictionary, is defined as “The quality of fact of being stupid, or a stupid act, remark, or idea.”

So we now turn to the root words:

• Ignorant: Without education or knowledge; exhibiting lack of education or knowledge; unaware or uninformed.
• Stupid: Slow to apprehend, dull, obtuse; showing a lack of sense or intelligence.

To me, this implies that when we speak of ignorance, we speak of a lack of education – whether through lost or missed opportunity, laziness, distraction, or what have you. Stupidity, conversely, is a lack of the mental or spiritual means or drive to obtain knowledge. We may be at the same time both ignorant and stupid – we can lack knowledge, of, say, cosmology – the study of the universe – while at the same time lacking the mental or spiritual faculties necessary to attain that knowledge and erase our ignorance.

In contrast, we may be ignorant of cosmology but at the same time not stupid – we have at our fingertips the tools, the guidelines, the raw data, the imagination necessary to convert our ignorance into knowing.

I speak of cosmology because of this wonderful example of an ignorant, but not stupid, man turning his ignorance into a great pool of knowledge:

When the Mount Wilson Observatory was under construction at the turn of the 20th century in the hills above Los Angeles, a man by the name of Milton Humason worked there as a mule skinner, tending some of the many mules used to haul construction equipment and supplies up the mountain to where the observatory was being built.

After the observatory was finished in 1917, he got a job there as a janitor, partly to impress his father-in-law, who looked down on a potential son-in-law who had no formal education past the age of 14 and worked as a ranch hand.

Shortly thereafter, however, he changed jobs at the observatory and became a “night assistant,” or an astronomer’s helper. His patience, skill, and diligence, per Brian Vertrudo, writing for the Christian Science Monitor, brought him to the attention of George Hale, head of the observatory. Recognizing in Humason only a lack of knowledge, evidenced by his stunted education – but not stupidiy – evidenced by his dedication to his new duties – Hale appointed Humason to the scientific staff of the observatory in 1919.

Humason went on, with fellow astronomer Edwin Hubble, to describe the “red-shift” of stars and galaxies, a key component to the Big Bang theory.

There’s a bit more about Milton Humason here, from Carl Sagan’s Cosmos episode “Edge of Forever”:

I recommend you watch the full episode here, but especially the final few minutes, where Sagan, years after the show first aired in the early 1980s, updates the science he spoke of in the show. Here we see a man confessing his past ignorance without expressing a single iota of stupidity.

That brings us to another of mankind’s vices, from stupidity to pride. Do we, then, as educated, non-ignorant people, have the right to brag about our lack of ignorance? Not really. I know some very intelligent people, whose intelligence ranges from knowing how to interact with people to the intricacies of nuclear criticality safety. They have in common something Eliot Butler points out in his essay “Everybody Is Ignorant, Only On Different Subjects”:

I am sorry to say that one cannot always detect whether someone recently met has graduated from a university. But one can soon tell if one is speaking with an educated person. Mark Van Doren points out correctly that nobody who is will ever admit to being educated, but only that he or she is so conscious of many areas of gross ignorance. Will Rogers saw it clearly: “Everybody is ignorant,” he said, “only on different subjects.”

Our Father in Heaven wants us to attain knowledge and imagination and to help those around us. Elder David A. Bednar said in a Sept. 11, 2001, devotional BYU-Idaho:

Each of us must also appreciate the roles of faithfulness and diligence and obedience in the Lord’s pattern for receiving help from heaven. Please turn with me again to 2 Nephi 28:30. “For behold, thus saith the Lord God: I will give unto the children of men line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little and there a little; and blessed are those who hearken unto my precepts and lend an ear unto my counsel, for they shall learn wisdom; for unto him that receiveth I will give more; and from them that shall say, We have enough, from them shall be taken away even that which they have.

He goes on to say:

[A]s we mature spiritually, we begin to develop a sound judgment, a refined and educated conscience, and a heart and mind filled with wisdom. It is not just that we have grown older, nor have we simply become smarter and had more experiences on which to draw, as important as those experiences are. Rather, the Holy Ghost has over time been expanding our intellect, forming our feelings, sharpening and elevating our perspective, such that we increasingly think and feel and act as the Lord would under similar circumstances.

Here we see the pattern for counteracting our own ignorance: Humility. We humbly seek knowledge and inspiration and sparks of imagination from our studies, from the books we read, the programs we watch, the thoughts we have individually and as we discuss things with others. Wee see the fruition of what Butler writes of:

[O]ne quickly detects when one speaks with an educated person. Matters learned last evening, and being pondered and developed, books recently read, an essay just encountered, an argument still going on, a book just purchase to be read tonight as soon as another is finished -- one hears of such from an educated person.

Over several years I have spoken with many graduating seniors in one program here: with several there was the pain of learning that not one book had been read since they entered the university except the required books. By others a few had been read. But the educated men and women in the program all had books just finished, others being read, and a growing list of books that they could hardly wait to get into.

Further, author CS Lewis had this to say about humility when he offered his sermon “Learning in War-Time,” in 1939:

As the author of the Theologia Germanicai says, we may come to love knowledge -- our knowing -- more than the thing known: to delight not in the exercise of our talents but in the fact that they are ours, or even in the reputation they bring us. Every success in the scholar's life increases this danger. If it becomes irresistible, he must give up his scholarly work. The time for plucking out the right eye has arrived.

Acknowledging our ignorance is the first step in erasing it. And if we pursue that erasure with humility – expressing thanks to those who have gone on before us, as Albert Einstein says:

Bear in mind that the wonderful things you learn in your schools are the work of many generations. All this is put in your hands as your inheritance in order that you may receive it, honor it, add to it, and one day faithfully hand it on to your children.

we will attain what President Gordon B. Hinckley said:

Anyone who imagines that bliss is normal is going to waste a lot of time running abound shouting that he's been robbed. The fact is that most putts don't drop, most beef is tough, most children grow up to be just people, most successful marriages required a high degree of mutual toleration, most jobs are more often dull than otherwise. Life is like an old time rail journey . . . delays, sidetracks, smoke, dust, cinders and jolts, interspersed only occasionally by beautiful vistas and thrilling bursts of speed. The trick is to thank the Lord for letting you have the ride.

Beautiful Vistas and Thrilling Bursts of Speed

There's still a big part of me that would love to work for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. To be part of a team that sent a probe to a neighboring planet, to send a probe out to the stars.

NOVA may be the closest I get.

I wanted to be an astronomer, thinking the thoughts Carl Sagan thought as he put together his television show COSMOS. Then I encountered algebra, trigonometry and such in junior high, in high school. The Ds and Fs I got in those subjects, consistently -- I did better in geometry, but I'm at a loss to explain why -- steered me away from that dream.

But I can write. So I've been working on that.

But there are a lot of writers, a lot of science writers, a lot of technical writers, who also want to work for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, so the competition is fierce. And living in Southern California is expensive.

So I can watch these shows. I can read a lot about science, and space exploration. And do my little bit of technical writing for those guys in the Lost River Desert digging up the leftovers of nuclear weapons production.

"Anyone who imagines that bliss is normal is going to waste a lot of time running abound shouting that he's been robbed," says Gordon B. Hinckley, former president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. "The fact is that most putts don't drop, most beef is tough, most children grow up to be just people, most successful marriages required a high degree of mutual toleration, most jobs are more often dull than otherwise. Life is like an old time rail journey . . . delays, sidetracks, smoke, dust, cinders and jolts, interspersed only occasionally by beautiful vistas and thrilling bursts of speed. The trick," he says, "is to thank the Lord for letting you have the ride."

These JPL guys in the video know all this. They work through it. As do I. I'm not working at JPL, but I am working on other stuff that takes me, maybe, to those beautiful vistas and thrilling bursts of speed Hinckley talks about.

And go to the stars in my mind, every time I listen to this: