"Cosmos" and More

I watched the initial episode of "Cosmos". I was surprised that it's on Fox, for reasons that should be obvious to any casual reader of this blog.

I was also surprised at the material about Friar Bruno. I haven't gone looking, but I suppose that the Christian Talibanistas have their knickers in a twist over that. The popular focus has been for centuries on the Church stifling Galileo, while ignoring the immolation of Bruno. Yet it was the execution of Bruno that likely convinced Galileo not to go too far in pushing his ideas. Even before Bruno's death, the Church's power was so feared that Copernicus waited until he was dying (1543) to publish his heliocentric model.

As for the show itself, better to give it a few episodes to see how it builds.

Lots of schadenfreude across the blogs over Difi's late conversion to the notion that spying on Americans is a bad thing. I suppose it speaks more to her sense of entitlement, if not outright naïveté, that she and her esteemed committee would somehow be exempt from being spied upon by the security organs of the American surveillance state. She must feel betrayed to have spent all this time defending the spies only to have the CIA try to shiv her.

But whatever it took,maybe now she'll realize that those birds need to be reined in, if not outright neutered.

Windows had a pasta-gazillion megabytes of updates from Update Tuesday. Something in that must have caused Firefox some butthurt, as Firefox didn't want to run this morning and had t do some sort of internal repair work.