4th season, just as good as the past two (didn't see the first).

Well...I'm slowly making my way through PBS Frontline's documentary on the Mormons that I bumped into on the T.V. a few weeks back.
http://www.pbs.org/mormons/view/

I don't watch T.V. regularly, to many crappy commercials and crappy 'reality' shows on. I will stop and watch the Family Guy when I serf. (gigidy-gigidy...allriiigghhttt)

who was a Russian merchant's son in the 1790s who said he wanted to study science. His family told him to burn those books, get married, and work as a merchant like his father and grandfather. He wrote popular science surveys and world histories in hsi spare time as a bookkeeper. He entitled his autobiography "A Russian Candide": see http://ideashistory.org.ru/a26.html.

This story can be compared to the autobiography of Friedrich W. Bessel, most recently treated in a work translated from Russian into German: Kasimir K. Lawrynowicz, Friedrich Wlihelm Bessel, aus dem Russischen uebersetzt von Katya Hansen-Matyssek, Birkhaeuser, Basel, 1995.

Bessel also was in a merchant house, in the North German city of Bremen, also in the 1790s, but the response of his employer was quite different from that of Ertov's family. He was encouraged in his effort to calculate the orbit of Halley's Comet according to a newly-discovered historical sighting published from a manuscript found in England by the Austrian exile Franz Xaver von Zach in the papers, in an abandoned room of the castle of Lord Egremont in Sussex, of Thomas Harriot, who lived from 1550 to 1621.

Von Zach was an exile from Austria because in his first position out of high school he worked as assistant to a defrocked Jesuit priest whom he accused, correctly, of publishing false data -- the Jesuit was too sloppy to do the work properly. The Jesuit was promoted, von Zach was fired, and he couldn't get another job (he was able to prove his charges but it didn't matter).

As for Bessel, he was helped in his spare-time endeavor by having access to a municipal library stocked with classic mathematical texts. Ertov had to borrow books from a merchant friend, and none of them, even if they did discuss recent scientific work, went into mathematical detail.

Suffice it to say, that while Bessel was working his way through the astronomical textbook of Lalande, Ertov proposed to improve the explanation of the origin of the solar system in Count Buffon's Natural History.

When Bessel gave his manuscript calculation of the orbit of Halley's comet to the medical doctor and accomplished astronomer H. W. Olbers, who lived in Bremen, Olbers said the only criticism he could make was that Bessel had carried out the calculation to a higher degree of accuracy than the data warranted; von Zach published the result in his journal Monatliche Correspondenz zur Befoerderung der Erd- und Himmelskunde for 1804, with the comment,

"Fifteen years ago the noted French astronomer Mechain for a quite similar study of the famous Comet of 1661 won an academic prize. BESSEL has won no prize, but nonetheless deserves one: the gracious acknowledgement of an OLBERS is its equivalent."

When Ertov submitted his 1797 thesis on the origin of the solar system to the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, it was rejected for publication, with the advice, that he read more widely in the literature. When he reworked it, and published it as a book, by subscription, in 1805, it didn't sell.

She dwelt among untrodden ways
Beside the springs of Dove,
A maid whom there were none to praise
And very few to love;
A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eye!
Fair as a star, when only one
Is shining in the sky.
She lived unknown, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her grave, and oh!
The difference to me!
Wordsworth, 1800

some excellent scifi reading in addition to Baxter and Wilson (both of whom I agree are great):

Alastair Reynolds is my current favorite author. He's got a very H.P. Lovecraft, "creepy, incomprehensible aliens," quasi-gothic horror feel to his relatively-hard science fiction. For stand-alone books, I'd recommend Chasm City and Pushing Ice. He's also got a trilogy out set in the same universe as Chasm City.

...but still read anything by RC Wilson, Sherri Tepper, Connie Willis, Ian McDonald. Guitar: An American Life by Tim Brookes is an absolutely delightful read, as is Reflections on Bullough's Pond by Diana Muir (a bit more substantive, but very well written). For literature that's still fun to read, Mark Helperin is great.

Last summer I greatly enjoyed SciFi channel showing Eureka and Dark Angel, but other than Family Guy and maybe some Robot Chicken or Futurama I rarely find it worth sitting through the ads (even with the mute button under my finger).