What I’m Reading, March 18, 2014

By JPL [Public domain], via Wikimedia CommonsNick Sagan Speaks About His Father Carl, Hemant Mehta, Friendly Atheist, March 17, 2014

Dad was a difference maker. He reached out to people. He took them by the awe and wonder we feel over the most important questions we can think to imagine. He pulled them away from blind faith, away from pseudoscience, toward a deeper, richer understanding of the universe.

Russian Aggression Deserves a Response, But U.S. Lacks Credibility to Lead It, Stephen Zunes, Yes! Magazine, March 17, 2014

As someone who has spent his entire academic career analyzing and critiquing the U.S. role in the world, I have some news: While the United States has had significant impact (mostly negative in my view) in a lot of places, we are not omnipotent. There are real limits to American power, whether for good or for ill. Not everything is our responsibility.

This is certainly the case with Ukraine.

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Editing Cosmos for Comfort

The new Cosmos miniseries, hosted by the heir to Carl Sagan’s science-communicator skills, Neil deGrasse Tyson, premiered last Sunday. The series is off to a great start, I think, but others seem to have their doubts about the show’s overt bias towards science. In fact, a Fox affiliate in Oklahoma allegedly edited out the fifteen seconds of the hour-long episode that discussed devil-spawning evolution, in favor of an evening news promo.

The following weeks are going to be an interesting time for that station if they’re going to stick to their guns on this. I hope the editor gets paid overtime. I’m sure I’m not the only person to think of posting this, but there’s really only one appropriate response to the station’s editing decision, and it is this:

My sincerest apologies to all Oklahomans who aren’t into this sort of thing. Believe me, you have kindred spirits down here in Texas.

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Grains of Sand and the Universe

People who know me know that I’m a somewhat obsessive Carl Sagan fan. (We don’t need to go into too many details, but while some people imagine their lives having theme music, mine has voiceover narration.) I was therefore excited to see that we have an effort to investigate Carl Sagan’s claim that there are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on all of the Earth’s beaches. The answer (well, estimate, really), via Fraser Cain at io9, is that yes, there probably are more stars than grains of beach sand (I’m not sure what Carl Sagan had against deserts.)

The total number of stars in the universe might be somewhere between 10 and 200 sextillion (that’s 1×10^22, or 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000). The number of grains of sand on beaches (bear with me here) is somewhere between 2.5 and 10 sextillion. So Carl Sagan was right, maybe.

Also, in case you think 10 sextillion is a big number, you might wonder how much space that many atoms would occupy. Per io9, “about four times smaller than a dust mite.” Ponder that, but watch out for the existential dread.

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The Cosmos is full beyond measure

How lucky we are to live in this time

The first moment in human history

When we are in fact visiting other worlds


Via xkcd.

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