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Cosmos - With Neil deGrasse Tyson

No, that would be Jefferson Davis, the once exalted icon of the DNC who they desperately try to forget, thus his position rotting in the corner. There's a chance the corpse was Woodrow Wilson, who was probably more racist than Davis, but since there's been little talk about him lately, nobody would go to the trouble of hiding him like that.
 
Actually, Reagan's legacy is most abused by the current GOP, holding him up to be something he wasn't (even if one accepts he did not significantly suffer from Alzheimer's during his tenure). The current GOP might pick him out of a police lineup, but if they saw his policies without attribution, they'd decry them as radically liberal. Hence, they're the more blind ... in this scenario.
 
So if Reagan was a radical liberal, why do Democrats hate him so much? Of course, they hate anyone they're told to hate, via simple in-group out-group logic, which is why the rest of us make fun of them.
 
Can we talk about Cosmos and the science around the show, now, instead of letting this thread get derailed by someone who has absolutely no interest in actually discussing anything relevant? Because if this is the way it's going to be, it might as well be a useless, pointless, generic political thread, and there's enough of that shit in Misc. and TNZ.
 
^ Ask and ye shall receive!

The 4th volume of the Cosmos soundtrack will be released on May 27. And considering its final track is titled "DVD End Credits" I'm guessing it will be the final volume in the set (all of which are still only available digitally - no word yet on when/if there will be CDs).

As for the DVD/Blu-Ray those will be released June 10, just two days after the final airing of the show! I'm really looking forward to rewatching the whole thing, sans commercial interruptions.

ETA:
According to this site:

Both the DVD and Blu-ray carry these special features:
  • Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey – The Voyage Continues”
  • “Celebrating Carl Sagan: A Selection From the Library of Congress Dedication”
  • Cosmos at Comic-Con 2013
  • and an audio commentary on the first episode, “Standing Up in the Milky Way.”
The Blu-ray also offers the exclusive “Cosmic Calendar: An Interactive Look at the History of the Universe.”
 
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An audio commentary on a talky documentary? Weird.
Yeah, it does sound a bit odd ... but have you seen any of the behind the scenes "extras" on the NatGeo channel? It's been fascinating to see the thought process the production team had for the series. I'm hoping the commentary follows that kind of discussion, as well as maybe offering a deeper discussion on what is presented on screen.
 
I don't get the National Geographic channel, so never got a chance to see any behind the scenes stuff. Did they ever explain why they went with the crappy cartoons instead of live actors, other than they think modern audiences are more childlike so they'd prefer bad cartoons?

I could forgive them if it were only a matter of budget, but that's obviously not the case.
 
Did they ever explain why they went with the crappy cartoons instead of live actors, other than they think modern audiences are more childlike so they'd prefer bad cartoons?
This video has a LOT of information on the production of the show. If you watch from ~8:00-13:00, you hear the discussion of creating an engaging, entertaining show - of which the animated sequences were a part. And from ~31:00-34:00 there's a specific discussion of the animated sequences, why they went that route, the art design, and so forth.

I actually enjoy the animated sequences, they give the show a unique feel and do allow for storytelling decisions that could not happen with live action.

But I'd be remiss if I didn't say that I prefer the original live action.
 
Well, I could have gone with Lysenko, since many climate scientists who are bucking the current dogma are likening it the earlier period when science became politicized, and where anyone who disagreed with his genetic nonsense was branded an anti-intellectual, anti-scientific crypto-fascist who stood in the way of humanity's advancement.

Now that's fair--in that Simon turned out to be correct and Paul Ehrlich incorrect--like Climate Change, the Population Explosion was very much in vogue with scientists--but then too--the cry wolf effect has been noted in tornado warnings. People become jaded even in the face of real threats. And climate science has gotten better, too.

So Cosmos is very much a political statement -- a statement that we should let science and intelligence guide our policies as a society rather than superstition and obfuscation.

Sadly people in science are human too--as we saw from a recent NPR report:

http://cosmoquest.org/forum/showthr...arp-Findings&p=2217011&highlight=#post2217011


It started with William Jennings Bryan, who was hostile to "Darwinism" because social Darwinist ideas underlaid the military movement among German officials that led to World War I. If he'd understood the truth about evolutionary theory, that it was never intended as a justification for militarism and conquest, he might never have opposed it at all. And without his opposition, American fundamentalists would probably have never begun to see evolutionary theory as a threat to their faith, or at least not as a major one.

Well said.

He would be ashamed at Paul Ryan and his hatred for the poor. Bryan was a decent man.
He might have called for the new Pope to excommunicate anyone who signed on the Ryan budget.

Here's an idea for you--in he way the Boondocks showed MLK surviving until today--how about a short story with a revived WJB chiding the Tea Party movement?
 
That was full-throated advocacy. The skeptics and deniers will no doubt do what they do, but the episode was exceptional in the way it explained what climate change is, why it's a terrible development, and how we can minimize its effects.
 
I'm curious about that 1957 documentary clip they showed, with that literally handwaving scientist explaining the greenhouse effect. There was a brief cutaway to an interviewer who looked like a familiar actor. Who was that?
 
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