We, this people, on this small and drifting planet Whose hands can strike with such abandon That in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living Yet those same hands can touch with such healing, irresistible tenderness That the haughty neck is happy to bow And the proud back is glad to bend Out of such chaos, of such contradiction We learn that we are neither devils nor divines
Happy National Poetry Month! Celebrate with this stunning reading of Maya Angelou’s “A Brave and Startling Truth” – one of the most beautiful and profound poems ever written – a cosmic clarion call to humanity, inspired by Carl Sagan.
Astrophysicist Janna Levin reads Maya Angelou’s prescient humanist poem, which flew to space. Find the poem text and the story of how Carl Sagan inspired it here.
Chemistry Imagined – a lovely and unusual 1990 book by the Nobel-winning chemist Roald Hoffmann, with beautiful illustrations by artist Vivian Torrence and a poetic foreword by Carl Sagan.
Encke’s Comet was discovered on this day in 1786. Emma Converse – the brilliant woman who pioneered popular astronomy and became the poet laureate of the cosmos a century before Carl Sagan – wrote beautifully about it.
1. Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of the “facts.”
2. Encourage substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view.
Remember Carl Sagan, who became stardust 20 years ago today, with his Baloney Detection Kit– vital toolkit for our post-fact age, containing Sagan’s nine tenets of healthy skepticism (1 and 2 above) and the twenty most common mistakes in critical thinking.
Blank on Blank animates Carl Sagan’s 1985 conversation with Studs Terkel about, among other things, science and religion. The same year, Sagan addressed the subject in his terrific treatise Varieties of Scientific Experience.
The kit is brought out as a matter of course whenever new ideas are offered for consideration. If the new idea survives examination by the tools in our kit, we grant it warm, although tentative, acceptance. If you’re so inclined, if you don’t want to buy baloney even when it’s reassuring to do so, there are precautions that can be taken; there’s a tried-and-true, consumer-tested method.
