i'm going to try to watch it live streaming

sunday, a time of worship, the holy of holies, the Cosmos

neet that this is being shown by Fox (the tv network that some like to hate)--mainstream tv :3

(the other 3 tv series that i look forward to are Supernatural -- like Babylon 5, its grown on me.  Hannibal -- oh, so wonderfully dark and puzzling, plus its got morpheus, clarisse & scott thompson *shudder*.  true detective -- fine wine h p lovecraft tv -- no need for supernatural monsters at all...)

Note that this is Fox TV, not Fox News (the tv network that everyone likes to hate ;) ). The reason it is on there is because the co-producer (with Ann Druyan, Sagan's widow) is Fox heavy hitter Seth Mcfarlane (Family Guy, American Dad). Apparently, he's a science geek as well as a successful producer of animated sitcoms.

Mendalla

Sagan ... "billions and billions" ... liked the series the first time round, might have to give it a whirl. 

may the love story continue

Great vid. And I'm going to have double check my pvr settings to ensure it's programmed correctly.

Yes, "billions and billions," that's what I remember from the original Cosmos series. When was that? Sometime in the eighties?

Thanks for posting this thread, Mendalla.

I'll watch it tonight and comment, and look forward to what others have to say.

Hi Mendalla,

He is a frequent guest on the Colbert Report and seems to be able to keep up with Stephen fairly well.

Depending on the script he will either have to act or just be himself.  No idea which option would be best for him or the viewing audience.

Before I heard Tyson's name associated with Cosmos all I had heard was that Seth McFarlane was going to be involved.  I thought it must be some kind of parody with the cast from Family Guy based on Sagan's original series.  

It is funny where one's mind may wander.

Grace and peace to you.

John

i think i'd enjoy neil degrasse tyson's planetarium (Hayden, in NYC) shows

i share some of his thinking

and his pointing out that dark matter & dark energy are just terms, not to take them literally...

i vote for fred :3

PVR is set to record it off Global tonight. May not get around to watching until I exercise tomorrow but we shall see.

Mendalla

I watched it, and was disappointed. Tyson may be a Sagan disciple, but he is not Carl Sagan.

What I found disappointing about last night's episode was the loud music and other sound effects during the first part. It drowned out the voice of the narrator. I am hard of hearing as it is, and loud dramatic music accompanying a narration makes it even harder for me to understand what the narrator is saying. Also, what I didn't like was the narrator's figure prominently displayed on a platform out in space. I'd much rather just see the moving pictures, and hear but not see the narrator.

I liked the animated flick and comments about the cosmic mystic, Geraldino Bruno. Reminded me of my own cosmic experiences.

The cosmic calendar was interesting but not new.

I'd rather just read Carl Sagan's Cosmos. I'll have to dig it out and re-read it! Also his sci-fi novel Contact.

The music was one of my worries. Sagan chose to go with a selection of music that hewed to either baroque/chamber music or quieter "New Age" electronic fare (it was Cosmos that introduced me to Vangelis, for instance). I owned and dearly loved the album on vinyl back in the day as I did "Heaven and Hell", the Vangelis album that Sagan nicked the theme music from. It complemented rather competed with the narrative. Given that this one is hi-def and made for network TV, I rather suspected we'd be hit with an overbearing soundtrack. Will probably be watching it on my PVR tonight.

Mendalla

i didn't get to watch it last night so when my sweetie phoned i asked her how was it and she just said YES

i've managed to find a youtube upload of it and am watching it before the copyright police take it down

i agree with my sweetie that the show is made for the big screen

My TV is a 55" HD. Big enough or are we talking theatre big here?

Mendalla

I'm a happy ape. Wonderful. Tyson's no Sagan but he handled it well. The Cosmic Address and Cosmic Calendar still hold up well (with some necessary updates due to new knowledge gained since 1980). I shall continue to watch.

Best part, though, was the tribute to Carl Sagan at the end and Tyson's own story of his first meeting with Sagan (for those not watching, Neil Degrasse Tyson first met Carl Sagan in the seventies when Tyson was a teenager and it was a big inspiration for him in pursuing his own interest in astronomy and astrophysics).

I'll probably start a thread on the spiritual/religious aspects of Cosmos in R&F later. Suffice it to say that I've read from Sagan's book at least twice in church services.

Mendalla

I've also quoted from Sagan's Cosmos in church services.

And I had a picture of Carl Sagan in my study, together with the logo of SETI. I even was a member of SETI for a while. Unfortunately, they didn't find any sign of extraterrestial intelligence.

So I decided to join STI (Search for Terrestial Intelligence) Unfortunately, there isn't much evidence of that, either.

Joking aside, I think we are an intelligent species. Unfortunately, we haven't always made good use of our intelligence. I think all we need to do to remedy that is become aware of our innate divinity, and think and act directly from that awareness. Then we will put our considerable intelligence in the service of a noble cause that is worth living and dying for.

I think Carl Sagan acted in that service, and lived and died for it. He is one of my great heroes!

Cosmos was one of my most favourite books and I loved the series.

You might enjoy this website too with it's many documentaries on it.

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/category/science-technology/

"Come the singularity!" eh?

here's a reaction video i found fun

I really enjoyed Episode Two last night, but I thought that the narrator, Neil Tyson, did not speak clearly enough at times. He speaks in a casual, conversational manner, slurs his speech at times, or mumbles a bit or runs his words together, and I did not always understand what he said. The music was great, and did not drown out the narration, as it did in parts of Episode One.

I am, of course, hard of hearing, even with my hearing aids in. A person with normal hearing probably has no trouble understanding Tyson. But it bugs me to no end when I understand the commercials clearly, but not the program that I am really interested in. If the speakers in those commercials can enunciate clearly and pronounce distinctly, why can't Tyson? Maybe he needs some speech therapy?

There is, of course, closed captioning for the hearing impaired. But I did not try it because looking at the subtext takes one's attention away from the pictures, and not understanding the narrator was not really a problem. I got the gist of what he said.

He does have a rather soft voice with a bit of an accent. I don't have a problem but I can see why you would.

I loved Episode 2 as well. Evolution and the whole mystery of how life began and how it might exist elsewhere is one of my favorite wonders of the Cosmos.

Apparently some station in the States managed to "accidentally" slip in an commercial over the one reference to evolution in Ep. 1. Wonder if they even ran this one.

Mendalla

Never got around to posting about Ep. 3. This one looks at Newton but from a rather interesting perspective - his friendship with Sir Edmund Halley (of Halley's Comet fame). Together, these two represent probably the most influential dynamic duo in science of their day, possibly in history.

Newton gave us his theories on motion and gravity, light and how it splits into colours, and invented calculus. And those are just his well-known feats.

Halley not only used his friend's work on mechanics and gravity to prove that comets were celestial bodies with predictable orbits (rather than "omens from God") but worked out how to calculate the distance from the Earth to the Sun, proved that stars move, invented a diving bell and used it to run a salvage company, and, perhaps most importantly for the history of science, was the one who arranged and paid for the publication of Newton's Principia Mathematica, the book that put Newton's theories out to the world and that is to astronomy and physics what The Origin of Species is to biology.

Terrific episode that shows the human side of science and demonstrates, once again, just how influential Sir Isaac Newton remains even today (Want to know how to navigate your spacecraft to another planet? Newton. Want to know how a rocket or jet engine works? Newton. Want to calculate/predict the orbits of planets in other solar systems? Newton. And so on.).

Mendalla

I have to get around to watching this. I have the first three saved.

I do like that creationist are going berserk over it. Clearly, the worst thing to them is opening the eyes of their young people to what we know about the universe and our place in it. Once you open eyes, you can replace the dogma with knowledge and curiousity.

Here's the thing: Once young creationists realize they've been lied to, what else are they going to question that they've been told on authority? If you teach creationism, and through education like Cosmos or other exposures to real science teaching you lose your young audience, you're not just losing creationists - you're probably losing Christians.

I rarely keep stuff on my PVR after I've watched it but I've been keeping Cosmos. I'm PVR'ing it in HD, though, so may eventually get complaints about the space (though Bell's last major software update improved compression so you can get more on the disk). I'm hoping to give it another pass at some point and maybe finally convince Little M to give it a go.

Mendalla

I got a brand new state-of-the-art pair of hearing aids yesterday. I now hear better than I did in decades! I really look forward to watching episode 4 this Sunday.

Actually, 4 was last Sunday. This Sunday will be 5.

Episode 4 starts with talking about the great English astronomer William Herschel and how he first realized the immense distances to the stars. He was the first to realize that the light we see from the stars left them years, if not centuries, ago and that we are seeing "ghosts" of the real stars. Commenting on how this effectively means we are looking back in time when we look at the stars, Tyson then moves on to look at other forms of "time travel" found in physics and astronomy including time dilation from relativity, the effects of intense gravity fields (e.g. black holes) on time, and so on, before returning to Herschel to give some more information on Herschel's son John, also an astronomer of note. Another episode that does a good job of balancing the science with some human insights into the scientists. The bit on relativity and time dilation was a bit too cursory, though.

Mendalla

See my latest post in the Netflix recommendations thread for more Degrasse Tyson goodness.

http://www.wondercafe.ca/discussion/popular-culture/netflick-recommendat...

Mendalla

Not their best, but I thought I should include it here.

http://FunnyOrDie.com/m/8u6b

here are some roasts of the series