As the title of the blog hints, a lot of the design inspiration for this rag came from Carl Sagan, the famous popularizer of astronomy and astrophysics, yes, but also of science in general. He is perhaps most famous for Cosmos, the TV miniseries from 1980 with a lot of entertaining graphics and set designs, but its greatest virtue was Sagan himself and his voice, that bizarrely ethereal tone he had that made every word seem slightly poetic, even spiritual.
Carl Sagan died in December of 1996 after an arduous battle with myelodysplasia and something like three bone marrow transplants in an attempt to cure it. He was 62. Sagan's professional associations were mostly with Cornell University (he is buried in Ithaca), but he did his undergraduate work here at the University of Chicago, walking many of the very same halls that I walk now. I was five when Sagan died, but this year my room here at the U of C is the first room Sagan had in his undergraduate career; this box I live in currently was his box, for a while.
I'm taking astronomy/astrophysics for two quarters here for my physical sciences requirement. It's a class designed for nonmajors, aka people like me, but the subject matter is really interesting, and there's a happy kind of harmony in reading my astro textbook in a room where Sagan probably first started seriously studying astronomy himself. I like to think sometimes that he went through the same core curriculum, maybe read some Marx and Smith and Weber in this room, just the same as I currently do.
Carl Sagan was no god and no prophet and no priest; he was much humbler and more honest than that. He was, however, profoundly intelligent, profoundly entertaining, and profoundly able to communicate both science and practical philosophy in a way that conveys both the wonder and the humility entangled in our universe. For that, Carl Sagan has earned my immense respect and has helped to shape how I view the cosmos and my own tiny life within it, how much more beautiful the universe is when stripped of supernatural mysticism and left to its own natural glory.
"We are connected, not in the trivial ways that astrology promises but in the deepest of ways."
Monday, November 29, 2010
Welcome to version 2.0!
Hello and welcome to Composed Chiefly of Nothing, version 2.0 of my blogging attempts. For any old hands around, know that Any World (That I'm Welcome To) still exists; I simply chose to privatize its contents. If you desperately want to read the archives and whatnot, however, let me know and I will add you to its list of readers allowed to see them.
Why did I want to start over? I feel like I have changed rather a lot, in subtle ways, since I first began Any World over a year ago, that its title and content no longer fully fit what I wanted to say. Also, Blogger has changed such a lot since I first began blogging, and I wanted to go at its new features on a clean slate, so to speak. Finally, Any World, although not private at the time, was not bandied about the internet at all; with CCoN, I'd like to try opening this humble space up to a wider sect of the internet, and that means trying out this whole new concept of professionalism, saying nothing I wouldn't say in real life, etc. Any World was never inappropriate, but it lacked direction and, above all, interest, and yet I am loath to kill it fully, since a lot of entertaining musings were recorded there.
What will CCoN and it posts look like, then? Well, like any piece of the internet, its content will be a bit dynamic, fluid, maybe slightly hard to pin down, all that good stuff. However, in general it will be, like many blogs, a bit like a slice of me: random YouTube videos and links on my mind, anecdotes from Chicago or New England, random pictures, updates with some slightly more academic and personal stuff going on, all that good stuff.
The design will be fluctuating for a bit as I try to find something suitable; my CSS skills are nonexistent, so I have to play around with Blogger's template designer, which can be somewhat time consuming. Please bear with the at-times haywire design this space will have for a bit. In the meantime, however, until I get the first few posts up, feel free to read the background info pages linked at the top.
Welcome and enjoy the ride through the cosmos of the internet!
Why did I want to start over? I feel like I have changed rather a lot, in subtle ways, since I first began Any World over a year ago, that its title and content no longer fully fit what I wanted to say. Also, Blogger has changed such a lot since I first began blogging, and I wanted to go at its new features on a clean slate, so to speak. Finally, Any World, although not private at the time, was not bandied about the internet at all; with CCoN, I'd like to try opening this humble space up to a wider sect of the internet, and that means trying out this whole new concept of professionalism, saying nothing I wouldn't say in real life, etc. Any World was never inappropriate, but it lacked direction and, above all, interest, and yet I am loath to kill it fully, since a lot of entertaining musings were recorded there.
What will CCoN and it posts look like, then? Well, like any piece of the internet, its content will be a bit dynamic, fluid, maybe slightly hard to pin down, all that good stuff. However, in general it will be, like many blogs, a bit like a slice of me: random YouTube videos and links on my mind, anecdotes from Chicago or New England, random pictures, updates with some slightly more academic and personal stuff going on, all that good stuff.
The design will be fluctuating for a bit as I try to find something suitable; my CSS skills are nonexistent, so I have to play around with Blogger's template designer, which can be somewhat time consuming. Please bear with the at-times haywire design this space will have for a bit. In the meantime, however, until I get the first few posts up, feel free to read the background info pages linked at the top.
Welcome and enjoy the ride through the cosmos of the internet!
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