Why do we [dis]like Carl Sagan?

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I do not want anyone to leave the forum. Although the zoo in Helsinki is quite adequate there are still entertainments here that can be vastly amusing.
I never had the thought that all humans are idiots. You are something quite special.

Dear me. I would not have selected that as his most likey substance of choice. Not that one is amazed.

Perhaps he also enjoyed an occasional glass of wine. I wonder what your excuse might be.

Sometimes I cannot help myself.

Since the First Forty, I do indeed enjoy an occasional glass of wine No more than one per occasion. Dry, complex white - red, sweet, and especially "sparkling" wines do not agree with me.

Why, pray tell, would I need an excuse to enjoy an occasional glass of wine? Why do you and my not totally obnoxious and unreasonable brother feel I want or neecd to excuse "my begavior"?

If you are implying chemical misbehavior to Sagan I was just curious as to how you might drug yourself to felicitate your output. It certainly would be an extraordinary mental feat to condition your output unassisted.

Not exactly. The movie 'Contact' was a liberal adaptation of Sagan's novel Contact.

If you have to make an idiot of yourself, you COULD do it actually READING what you are talking at.

I am not the one who imputed - which is what an English speaker would use here rather than implying - "chemical misbehavior" to Herr Kaahsmows. IF you take the trouble to check a fact before you impute idiocy, you MIGHT just note that that was relayed to us by JakobVirgil. Maybe the fact that normally I do not respond to you - for obvious reasons - makes it easier for you to do the buzzard thing at me.

They also say: billyuns and billyuns.

ruveyn

I like the guy and I find the fact he was stoned off his gourd half the time endearing.
And not all that uncommon for mathematicians and physicists in my professional acquaintance.

So, I try to forget as much of that period of my life as I am allowed to.

+1
He's like a Carl Sagan concentrate, but without a Kermit the frog voice.

Sand is not what his head is buried in, I fear.

I find Sagan and Chomsky [very differently] problematic. You find Chomsky and Sagan [likely also differently] to be positives. I have no reason to hold either of those opinions against you, and trust you will not hold mine against me. In fact, I have little against anyone who has open eyes, ears that work, a willingness to talk rather than dictate or spew, and a touch with a quip.

As for Sagan, what he ingested in what proportions, so he did no harm, I should care. He is what he is, and what I have seen of the pentadactyl herb's effects tends to indicate that like alcohol it brings out what you are, whether peacenik or assassin, more often than putting someone else in,

Both substances are not unknown to linguists, historians, lit types of MY professional acquaintance. I knew one historian in particular who was more often sloshed than not - he being of a pre-herbal generation - in the lecture hall or not, and the only way to tell was he was or was he weren't was to count the empties.

Since this has developed into a urinating contest with Sagan as the target it might be worthwhile to note Sagan's accomplishments which I feel confident none of the pissers can come close to attaining in any direction.

Sagan's contributions were central to the discovery of the high surface temperatures of the planet Venus. In the early 1960s no one knew for certain the basic conditions of that planet's surface, and Sagan listed the possibilities in a report later depicted for popularization in a Time-Life book, Planets. His own view was that Venus was dry and very hot as opposed to the balmy paradise others had imagined. He had investigated radio emissions from Venus and concluded that there was a surface temperature of 500 °C (900 °F). As a visiting scientist to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, he contributed to the first Mariner missions to Venus, working on the design and management of the project. Mariner 2 confirmed his conclusions on the surface conditions of Venus in 1962.

Sagan was among the first to hypothesize that Saturn's moon Titan might possess oceans of liquid compounds on its surface and that Jupiter's moon Europa might possess subsurface oceans of water. This would make Europa potentially habitable for life.[9] Europa's subsurface ocean of water was later indirectly confirmed by the spacecraft Galileo. Sagan also helped solve the mystery of the reddish haze seen on Titan, revealing that it is composed of complex organic molecules constantly raining down onto the moon's surface.[citation needed]

He further contributed insights regarding the atmospheres of Venus and Jupiter as well as seasonal changes on Mars. Sagan established that the atmosphere of Venus is extremely hot and dense with pressures increasing steadily all the way down to the surface. He also perceived global warming as a growing, man-made danger and likened it to the natural development of Venus into a hot, life-hostile planet through a kind of runaway greenhouse effect. Sagan and his Cornell colleague Edwin Ernest Salpeter speculated about life in Jupiter's clouds, given the planet's dense atmospheric composition rich in organic molecules. He studied the observed color variations on Mars' surface and concluded that they were not seasonal or vegetational changes as most believed but shifts in surface dust caused by windstorms.

Sagan is best known, however, for his research on the possibilities of extraterrestrial life, including experimental demonstration of the production of amino acids from basic chemicals by radiation.[10]

He is also the 1994 recipient of the Public Welfare Medal, the highest award of the National Academy of Sciences for "distinguished contributions in the application of science to the public welfare."[11] He was denied membership in the Academy, reportedly because his media activities made him unpopular with many other scientists.[12]

A CORRECTIVE:

I cannot, alas, control what Sand does with his spittle and other efflivia.

I can reiterate:

I did not start this to diss Sagan. I do not continue it to diss Sagan nor to elicit illiterate rantings.

My sole purpose was and is to be enlightened to who amongst us finds Sagan positive, negative, or neutral and why.

Everybody but one has been pleased to go along with that.

Hypocrisy allows one to slink away from reality.

Carl Sagan made me laugh. Every time he said "stuhr stuff" or "billyuns and billyuns" I had a good laugh. Also I shared his favorable impression of the Dutch and the were in the days of Huygens.

I found his simpering over the Library of Alexandria quite comical. He admired the Hellenes and the Ancient Greeks quite a bit. Unfortunately he overlooked their bad habits --- like slavery .

ruveyn