links for 2009-02-20

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Dr. Rivka - How many US Supreme Court decisions can you name off the top of your head? (tags: law US politics) Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy / Blog posts / Bloat: threat or menace? A defense of long books. (tags: books writing literature SF blogs) Dynamics of Cats : why are grades…
BOOK EXPO AMERICA LUNCHEON TALK "The Future, capital-F, be it crystalline city on the hill or radioactive post-nuclear wasteland, is gone. Ahead of us, there is merely...more stuff. Events. Some tending to the crystalline, some to the wasteland-y. Stuff: the mixed bag of the quotidian. Please don…
Slate's 80 Over 80: The most influential octogenarians in America (2010). - - Slate Magazine "For the second year in a row, Mormon President Thomas S. Monson stands atop the list. As the divine prophet, seer, and revelator for 5.5 million Americans and more than 12 million people around the world…
Hugo Nominees: Introduction | Tor.com | Science fiction and fantasy | Blog posts "I haven't, of course, read every single book nominated for the Hugos since 1953. (What have I been doing with my time?) If I haven't read it, I shall say so, and I shall say why. Otherwise I shall talk briefly about…

Yes, more people should know what Galileo did.

Oddly, the reason I remember one of the key dates associated with Galileo is because in one of my German classes as an undergraduate we read Bertolt Brecht's Leben des Galilei (Life of Galileo). In that play, a narrator introduces each scene with a couplet. The couplet I remember:

Sechszehn hundert zehn, zehnte Januar
Galileo Galilei sah, daß kein Himmel war

Rough translation: On 10 January 1610 Galileo Galilei saw that there was no heaven.
That was the date on which he realized that Jupiter had satellites.

By Eric Lund (not verified) on 20 Feb 2009 #permalink