Re: Galileo Day

Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
16 Feb 1999 12:03:38 +0100

Technotranscendence <neptune@mars.superlink.net> writes:

> At 03:16 PM 2/15/99 -0800, Max More <max@maxmore.com> wrote:
> >Happy Galileo Day everyone!
>
> Likewise!:)

What would the holiday greeting be? "It moves!" :-)

(shades of the slogan "The turtle moves!" in Terry Pratchett's _Small Gods_, where the heretics claim the world lies on the back of a giant turtle but the Church claims it is round)

> >A good day to contemplate the overturning of old paradigms. (To be fair, it
> >would be good also to observe Copernicus Day -- when was he born?)
>
> Perhaps, but don't you think having holidays is a paradigm that needs
> to be broken? I mean, why have special days to celebrate anything
> -- whether it is the tradition stuff or not?

Because it is easier to get many people together for a celebration. Repeated holidays also provides a practical framework for building better "holiday technology" (decorations, songs, food, games etc) that can be reused.

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Anders Sandberg                                      Towards Ascension!
asa@nada.kth.se                            http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/
GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y