I've got a Golden Record

My last bit of looking into Carl Sagan info led me to the Golden Record placed on the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft. I am not the first person to be enamored with this strangely poetic and beautiful gesture -- I think that was part of the point, but here are my thoughts anyway.

I am interested in what is actually ON the record, since I only have a vague idea.

There is an article from the New York Times called The Mix Tape of the Gods which I thought sounded good too.

According to wikipedia, you can get the CD from various libraries. "A CD-ROM version was issued by Warner New Media in 1992[9]. Both versions are out of print, but the 1978 edition can be found in many college or public libraries."

Anyway, the wikipedia article about it (Voyager Golden Record) is full of really intriguing and interesting ideas.

"thus the record is best seen as a time capsule or a symbolic statement rather than a serious attempt to communicate with extraterrestrial life."

"This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.”
— U.S. President Jimmy Carter

"After NASA had received criticism over the nudity on the Pioneer plaque (line drawings of a naked man and woman), the agency chose not to allow Sagan and his colleagues to include a photograph of a nude man and woman on the record. Instead, only a silhouette of the couple was included."

Random fact:
"After the Pioneer Program, NASA put a Golden Record aboard the two Voyager spacecrafts, which included a greeting "Hello from the children of planet Earth." That was recorded by then six-year-old Nick Sagan, Carl's son." (from a blog of random facts)

Glorious Dawn - Carl Sagan

A few months ago, this fantastic video remix of various things Carl Sagan said went viral and basically everyone I knew online was talking about it. When I heard it, I immediately became mildly obsessed with it, listened to it 8 times, and then proceeded to send it to everyone else I knew, as is expected of something like this. The person who made it also made the video and mp3 available for free (bless them) so I have them in my permanent possession now :) but I also have it linked here.



Anyway, I didn't know much about Carl Sagan except for the very brief and wonderful love story about him and Ann Druyan and their work on the golden record included in the Voyager expedition from the Radiolab episode about Space. So I went on a cursory search of information about him beginning with the Carl Sagan wikipedia article.

There are so many reasons to find him and his work totally fascinating, not the least of which is his apparent talent of bringing complex scientific ideas to average people. I feel like he is a great example of someone whose passion for something exceeds that thing's natural appeal in such a way that makes it accessible to everyone else around him. For instance, take this sentence from the Wikipedia article which . . . says as much "Sagan's ability to convey his ideas allowed many people to better understand the cosmos—simultaneously emphasizing the value and worthiness of the human race, and the relative insignificance of the earth in comparison to the universe."

Also, this: "Isaac Asimov described Sagan as one of only two people he ever met whose intellect surpassed his own." I think this speaks to my general fascination with people who are brilliant and my nerd-crushes on all of them.

And also, some really interesting stuff about UFO's and . . . other things which remind me of the X-Files and are great. :) (I did find a mention of the particular episode that I was thinking of, by the way, on a wikipedia article about the Pioneer 10 spacecraft that they sent the golden record on. . . . "In the X-Files episode "Little Green Men", Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 can be heard whilst characters discuss the Golden Record.")

Here is something further about the remix that I didn't know: "In 2009, clips from Carl Sagan's Cosmos were used as the basis for A Glorious Dawn, the first video produced for the Symphony of Science, an educational music video production by composer John Boswell. Musician Jack White later released this song as a vinyl single under his record label Third Man Records.[51] Additional clips were used in the followup video, We Are All Connected, which featured Sagan alongside other noted scientists Richard Feynman, Neil Degrasse Tyson, and Bill Nye" I think this might be from Wikipedia or something. Not sure.

More on Rats

For whatever reason, I am still harping on rats. I started researching rats a little bit, as broadly as possible.

Here are some wikipedia articles that I thought were interesting as a starting point:
Fancy Rat
Model Organism
Laboratory Rat

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Rat Traps
I stumbled upon an absolutely horrific, heartbreaking video on youtube (which I refuse to link to here) that shows a rat caught in a sticky trap, choking on sticky glue and twitching as it tries in vain to free itself. That video actually makes me hate humans . . . and decide that people really are a bunch of bastards. I cant really understand how we can do things like that to other animals. I know I sound like a overly sentimental person or something, but I think the unnecessary torturous death of another living thing is objectively awful. And I'd like to see the rats get revenge. Its a nice idea anyway :)

I hate to post this one, but it makes me want to cry. I thought maybe it was a cartoony sort of image before I clicked on it, but once I realized how sad it was . . .

This leads me to following question: How can people kill rats when there are photos out there like this:

In all seriousness, though, what makes us feel like we can just kill them? Is it their size? What if they were the size of dogs and cats, how would we feel about it then? We have no problem killing insects, but the further up the food-chain we get (or rather the closer to mammals we get) the less comfortable we are with treating them as pests.

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Rat-baiting
Another thing that people do (or did anyway) with rats is throw them into a rat pit and have dogs (rat terriers, go figure, jack russels, etc.) try to kill as many as possible within a certain time frame. This is called rat baiting. This is interesting to me for a couple of reasons.

1. Again, people are bastards
2. This is a connection to dogs in an unexpected way that I tend to forget about . . . the way dogs were often used for cruel things, not just to each other, such as pit-bull fighting, but towards other animals
3. People often make a big deal about laboratory animals being treated cruelly, but it seems to me that compared to the other ways rats can die (sticky trap, being smashed in a trap and left to suffocate, or perhaps having their necks wrung by dogs in a pit), lab-rat life is not so inhumane after all. I might revise my thoughts on that if I ever actually spent time in a laboratory setting. . . but. . .

maybe the glitter blood thing can go with the rat pit. . . or maybe not.

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Rats and Garbage in NYC
I also came upon an interesting video talking about rats in New York City. It was really interesting their relationship to garbage and waste - rat expert talks about how WE provide our waste garbage on the streets in NY and then of course there are tons of rats as a result.

Some thoughts on rats

• rats have so left the naimals kingdom and are now the property of science - when you think of rats its either garbage rats or genetically engineered things living in cages. I should make a really huge one. out of scale. really smart one?
• do the rats with all kinds of crazy electrodes on them maybe all connected with glitter. :) glitter red eyes? :) ha. Ok, enough with the glitter.

Excellent use of glitter

So here is a video that I first saw because it was directed by Richard Ayoade (of the IT Crowd, and Jesse Thorn posted it of course). I don't know much about music videos, but I actually really liked this one a lot. You can watch it here: Heads Will Roll by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. I thought it was very artful. And what's more, there was excellent use of glitter. :) As we all know, good uses of glitter are few and far between, so I'm really pleased with the way the video uses confetti-type paper, glitter, etc. to evoke blood and guts without actually grossing people out with real blood and guts. :)

In case the video is taken down someday, I went to the trouble of taking a few screenshots of parts that I thought were kind of awesome and that also use glitter.

This makes me think - if glitter is meant to be cute and bright and fun, and they do a bang-up job of using it for something gross and unpleasant, perhaps I can utilize that structure in order to get some of that damn glitter into my own work. Hopefully as successfully and non-tacky as this video did.