The soundtrack was just horrible and the whole episode didn’t do much for me at all. Having Obama to introduce the series was cool, though. What did you think?
I didn’t like the cartoon segment. I missed Carl Sagan and Vangelis. But its heart is in the right place.
I only saw the end. Tyson’s tribute to Segan was from the heart, a
good one, I thought. 
I hope to see the whole thing soon. Good
for him, he got his show on Fox channel. In NYC, at the Rose Center,
they have a spiral walk around the Center. This walk is called the
“Scales of the Universe”, it takes you through the history of the
Universe, each step you take is measured in the time you are moving
through the Universe history. A thousand years for this step, a million
years for that step, a hundred million years for the next step you
take. In the end of the walk they have one hair, representing the
time that the humans have existed, the rest of the walk is around
a hundred feet or so, that little tiny time that the humans have
existed. It looks like he did the same idea for the new Cosmos
show. Lovely.
Oh well, romance and drama, but no math I bet. :lol:
I didn't like the cartoon segment. I missed Carl Sagan and Vangelis. But its heart is in the right place.Yes, Vangelis's music in Sagan's Cosmos was great but there was so much more than just Vangelis, all of it used quite tastefully. This had none of it. The "awe" feeling we all got from the original series must had been largely due to the music and I can't believe they would make a mistake of not trying to do it here. I feel very confident predicting this series will be nowhere as popular and the music selection is to be blamed for it.
Why is it that the people who make the trailers always get it? THIS] makes my heart beat like crazy.
I watched about five minutes in the middle of it. It’s probably great for kids and those who know nothing about science or astronomy, but it’s too basic to hold my interest.
Occam
I watched about five minutes in the middle of it. It's probably great for kids and those who know nothing about science or astronomy, but it's too basic to hold my interest. OccamI think the whole point of Cosmos is to bring in the uninitiated, the children, the average joe, who might otherwise feel too intimidated to read about these subjects. By using so many visuals and focusing on the grandeur of it all, its an attempt to take some very complicated science topics and make them attractive to people who may have very little science background. We can still sit back and enjoy the pretty pictures even if the lessons are for someone else.
Overall, I thought it was a good, if simple start. The music didn’t work for me either, and I thought the animated stuff went on too long. Still, getting the message across, and on Fox no less, is worthwhile.
I was just reading about Giordano Bruno. I find it incomprehensible what a difficult time the catholic church has learning from its own mistakes. They have formally expressed regret about the way Galileo was treated but to this day they have continued to defend their imprisonment, torture and murder of Giordano Bruno. I find it hard to come up with words to describe how insane that is.
I was just reading about Giordano Bruno. I find it incomprehensible what a difficult time the catholic church has learning from its own mistakes. They have formally expressed regret about the way Galileo was treated but to this day they have continued to defend their imprisonment, torture and murder of Giordano Bruno. I find it hard to come up with words to describe how insane that is.It's what theistic religion does. It's done worse, too. Lois
I was just reading about Giordano Bruno. I find it incomprehensible what a difficult time the catholic church has learning from its own mistakes. They have formally expressed regret about the way Galileo was treated but to this day they have continued to defend their imprisonment, torture and murder of Giordano Bruno. I find it hard to come up with words to describe how insane that is.It's what theistic religion does. It's done worse, too. Lois I agree but its just mind boggling that almost 500 years later a supposedly more enlightened church is still unable to admit that burning people at the stake because they disagree with you is not a very nice thing to do. Sex out of wedlock is a sin but burning people at the stake is just another day at the office to them.
The soundtrack was just horrible and the whole episode didn't do much for me at all. Having Obama to introduce the series was cool, though. What did you think?Funny. I friend of mine said the exact opposite. Music was awesome, but having Obama introduce the series was an insult seeing as how he's continued the gutting of NASA.
The soundtrack was just horrible and the whole episode didn't do much for me at all. Having Obama to introduce the series was cool, though. What did you think?Funny. I friend of mine said the exact opposite. Music was awesome, but having Obama introduce the series was an insult seeing as how he's continued the gutting of NASA. "As a federal agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) receives its funding from the annual federal budget passed by the United States Congress." The President has very little to do with it. All he could have done was veto the budget, which would not have added a penny to the NASA appropriations. Lois
I was just reading about Giordano Bruno. I find it incomprehensible what a difficult time the catholic church has learning from its own mistakes. They have formally expressed regret about the way Galileo was treated but to this day they have continued to defend their imprisonment, torture and murder of Giordano Bruno. I find it hard to come up with words to describe how insane that is.It's what theistic religion does. It's done worse, too. Lois
theisticor bureaucratic.
I didn't like the cartoon segment. I missed Carl Sagan and Vangelis. But its heart is in the right place.Yes, Vangelis's music in Sagan's Cosmos was great but there was so much more than just Vangelis, all of it used quite tastefully. This had none of it. The "awe" feeling we all got from the original series must had been largely due to the music and I can't believe they would make a mistake of not trying to do it here. I feel very confident predicting this series will be nowhere as popular and the music selection is to be blamed for it.You can blame that on the exorbitant rates folks get for music royalties these days. Additionally, Vangelis wasn't nearly as well known as he is today, nor was the original series as highly anticipated as this one was, so they would have gotten the music for cheap. The guy doing the music for the new series does have serious nerd cred, however.] The first episode was written by Sagan's widow and directed by one of the Star Trek: The Next Generation producers who took over after Roddenberry died. Has anybody rewatched the original series recently? I watched the first episode not too long ago, and it doesn't completely hold up. Much of just seems to be long shots of Sagan staring out at the ocean, with no voice over. And he didn't always get his science or history right, either. His explanation of evolution with the story about the crabs, is more a demonstration of selective breeding than evolution (though, of course, selective breeding wouldn't work if there was no such thing as evolution), the story of the burning of the Library of Alexandria is a simplification of what happened there, with it having been burned multiple times (and as we've recently discovered, so no fault of Carl's for not mentioning it, much of the material in the library was lost thanks to budget cuts, because nobody wanted to pay to keep up the place). And while Sagan the TV personality would have been touched that they spent so much time remembering him, I'm not sure that Sagan the scientist would have wanted that. After all, science has moved on considerably since Carl left us, and the last thing we should do as a society is replace religion with a cult of personality around someone else. Sagan also got a few things wrong, and demonstrated a stubbornness nearly as great those in the religious community. When computer models showed that his dreaded "Nuclear Winter" would be more like a "Nuclear Autumn" than another Ice Age, he continued to support the concept of "Nuclear Winter." He had an affair with Ann Druyan for a number of years before he divorced his second wife and married Ann. (Fun fact, the recording of the human heartbeat on the Voyager record? Ann's heart. She's said that she used her heartbeat, because she wanted to capture the sound of the love that her and Carl shared. Carl didn't divorce his wife until 1981, Voyagers 1 & 2 were launched in '77, so the recording would have been made prior to the launch by some number of months or years. Of course, Ann could be lying about this, since the interview I heard with her talking about it was recorded after Carl's death.) He visited Timothy Leary in prison, and smoked pot (not necessarily bad things, but certainly not generally known to people). Additionally, he sold the government on the idea of paying for the SETI program by showing them that the equipment used to scan and analyze the radio band known as "the water hole" could also be used to monitor things like Soviet radio transmissions and phone lines (in a way, Sagan shares part of the blame for the whole NSA domestic spying business).
I was just reading about Giordano Bruno. I find it incomprehensible what a difficult time the catholic church has learning from its own mistakes. They have formally expressed regret about the way Galileo was treated but to this day they have continued to defend their imprisonment, torture and murder of Giordano Bruno. I find it hard to come up with words to describe how insane that is.I'm sure Bruno's charred corpse would appreciate an apology by the church, but if they wanted to show that they were sincere about learning from their mistakes, they'd shutdown the office of the Inquisition, which is still around. (And turn in the baby diddlers, sell off a bunch of their art to have money to help the poor, stop being jerks about gay marriage, birth control, IVF, etc., etc., etc.) In a perfect world, the new version would probably rate a "C" at best, however, the fact that its on Fox, and its the first time in decades that I can remember a commercial broadcast network doing anything so ballsy (no doubt the fact that Seth MacFarlane has a pair of hit shows on Fox had a great deal to do with this), makes it an "A+." Oh, and Nielson is now counting online viewings of shows on Hulu for three days after its posted, even if the house watching it isn't a "Nielson family." They put the episodes up on Monday morning, so I ran the first one as background noise as often as I could until today to bump the numbers up a bit. If it does well, we'll get more TV like this, and its certainly what we need.
I loved it! Mainly for the scenes of the “spaceship of the imagination” soaring through the solar system. I didn’t like the animation, but I was a bit surprised at the story of Giordano Bruno. After hearing about him half my life held up as a martyr to free thought, I expected him to be, if not a “scientist”, at least a serious scholar. The animation made him sound like just another crackpot who saw visions! Sure that was still no reason to burn him at the stake, but it doesn’t make him a hero in my book.
I loved it! Mainly for the scenes of the "spaceship of the imagination" soaring through the solar system. I didn't like the animation, but I was a bit surprised at the story of Giordano Bruno. After hearing about him half my life held up as a martyr to free thought, I expected him to be, if not a "scientist", at least a serious scholar. The animation made him sound like just another crackpot who saw visions! Sure that was still no reason to burn him at the stake, but it doesn't make him a hero in my book.From my limited reading about Bruno I still would think of him as a hero. It seems to me that unlike Copernicus and Galileo, Bruno was more of a philosopher. I get the impression that he had some revolutionary ideas although he did not have the science and the math to back them up like Galileo. despite that he felt strongly that his ideas made sense and he stood his ground even in the face of a death sentence. You have to give him a a lot of credit for having the integrity to go to the grave for what he believed in. Patrick Henry said "give me liberty or give me death" but Bruno actually accepted death rather than surrender his freedom to speak what he believed. How on earth can we not see that as heroic.
The soundtrack was just horrible and the whole episode didn't do much for me at all. Having Obama to introduce the series was cool, though. What did you think?Funny. I friend of mine said the exact opposite. Music was awesome, but having Obama introduce the series was an insult seeing as how he's continued the gutting of NASA. "As a federal agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) receives its funding from the annual federal budget passed by the United States Congress." The President has very little to do with it. All he could have done was veto the budget, which would not have added a penny to the NASA appropriations. LoisI didn't say my friend was right ;) Though I don't think Obama has been exactly space-friendly.
The soundtrack was just horrible and the whole episode didn't do much for me at all. Having Obama to introduce the series was cool, though. What did you think?Funny. I friend of mine said the exact opposite. Music was awesome, but having Obama introduce the series was an insult seeing as how he's continued the gutting of NASA. "As a federal agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) receives its funding from the annual federal budget passed by the United States Congress." The President has very little to do with it. All he could have done was veto the budget, which would not have added a penny to the NASA appropriations. LoisI didn't say my friend was right ;) Though I don't think Obama has been exactly space-friendly. Maybe he has other things on his mind. Lois
Cosmos, episode 2: okay, that was a lot worse than last week. I think this might be the end of the journey for us. They really thought it would work to cover natural selection, artificial selection, evolution of the dog and eye, and extinction (did I forget anything?) in one hour? Well, forty minutes actually, as commercial take up around twenty minutes of one episode. My kids had no idea what was going on and I was bored to death. Who is the intended audience here?