- published: 03 Jun 2015
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Ann Druyan (born June 13, 1949) is an American author and producer specializing in productions about cosmology and popular science. She made substantial contributions to the PBS documentary series Cosmos and was the wife of late scientist and educator Carl Sagan.
Along with Carl Sagan and Steven Soter, Druyan was one of the writers for the television series Cosmos and a producer for the film Contact.
She is the CEO and co-founder of Cosmos Studios. In 2007, she was said[by whom?] to be working on an IMAX film on global warming as well as a sequel to Cosmos. In 2009, she released a series of podcasts entitled At Home in the Cosmos with Annie Druyan in which she describes in detail the life of husband Carl Sagan, her works, and their marriage.
In 2011, it was announced that she would be part of the writing and production teams for a sequel to Cosmos, Cosmos: A space-time Odyssey, which was expected to air in 2013.
Druyan and Sagan co-wrote the books Comet, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, and sections of The Demon-Haunted World. She also wrote the updated introduction to Sagan's The Cosmic Connection, the epilogue to Billions and Billions, and her solo novel A Famous Broken Heart.
Carl Edward Sagan ( /ˈseɪɡɪn/; November 9, 1934 – December 20, 1996) was an American astronomer, astrophysicist, cosmologist, author, science popularizer, and science communicator in astronomy and natural sciences. He published more than 600 scientific papers and articles and was author, co-author or editor of more than 20 books. He advocated scientifically skeptical inquiry and the scientific method, pioneered exobiology and promoted the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI).
Sagan is known for his popular science books and for the award-winning 1980 television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, which he narrated and co-wrote. The book Cosmos was published to accompany the series. Sagan wrote the novel Contact, the basis for a 1997 film of the same name.
Carl Sagan was born in Brooklyn, New York, to a Ukrainian Jewish family. His father, Sam Sagan, was an immigrant garment worker from Kamenets-Podolsk, Ukraine; his mother, Rachel Molly Gruber, a housewife. Carl was named in honor of Rachel's biological mother, Chaiya Clara, in Sagan's words, "the mother she never knew." Sagan graduated from Rahway High School in Rahway, New Jersey, in 1951.
Clinton Richard Dawkins, FRS, FRSL (born 26 March 1941), known as Richard Dawkins, is a British ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, and was the University of Oxford's Professor for Public Understanding of Science from 1995 until 2008.
Dawkins came to prominence with his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which popularised the gene-centered view of evolution and introduced the term meme. In 1982 he introduced an influential concept into evolutionary biology, presented in his book The Extended Phenotype, that the phenotypic effects of a gene are not necessarily limited to an organism's body, but can stretch far into the environment, including the bodies of other organisms.
Dawkins is an atheist, a vice president of the British Humanist Association, and a supporter of the Brights movement. He is well known for his criticism of creationism and intelligent design. In his 1986 book The Blind Watchmaker, he argued against the watchmaker analogy, an argument for the existence of a supernatural creator based upon the complexity of living organisms. Instead, he described evolutionary processes as analogous to a blind watchmaker. He has since written several popular science books, and makes regular television and radio appearances, predominantly discussing these topics. In his 2006 book The God Delusion, Dawkins contends that a supernatural creator almost certainly does not exist and that religious faith is a delusion—"a fixed false belief." As of January 2010 the English-language version has sold more than two million copies and had been translated into 31 languages.
Over in Killarney
Many years ago,
Me Mother sang a song to me
In tones so sweet and low.
Just a simple little ditty,
In a good old Irish way,
And I would give the world if I
Could hear her song today.
Chorus:
Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral, Too-ra-loo-ra-li,
Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral, hush now, don't you cry!
Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral, Too-ra-loo-ra-li,
Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral, that's an Irish lullaby.
Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral, Too-ra-loo-ra-li,