Rumi Nations

October 15: We inch towards (or gallop towards -> depending on how you feel about this year) the closing of 2012. I don't know if the present month of October has been more frenetic than the rest of the months. But it feels to me as if it has been. So I am inclined to do a running summary of the month as a diary entry for future reference. Among the many October surprises have been the *win* attributed to Romney in the first Presidential debate as we approach the quadrennial presidential election in the U.S. Felix Baumgartner jumped from 40 kms up in the atmosphere and thanks to the magic of TV, perhaps billions of human beings -- sitting in their drawing rooms, waiting at the airport lounge, drinking beer in the bar or elsewhere -- were witness to the successful accomplishment of this feat of superhuman dare-devilry. There are not many records to be made left to make - this was one of the last for the forseeable future and the door is now closed on this one as well. U...

Theodore Roosevelt's lasting legacy as a President is perhaps what he did to preserve and protect the extraordinary wilderness of America for posterity. The role he played in bringing to an end the war between Russia and Japan is open to interpreations. It may have indirectly led to Pearl Harbor. Woodrow Wilson's exertions in forming the League of Nations are known. However, the eventual outcome of that endeavor might have been war rather than peace. Nobody can argue with the true greatness of some of the other winners: King or Mandela. Gandhi of course remains a jarring omission from that roster of winners. But overall, if one thinks of all the winners over more than one hundred years, does the list comprise of mostly great men and women with a few ordinary folks, or is the list mostly populated by ordinary people and even some very controversial winners such as Henry Kissinger? In a hundred years from now, Obama would become a footnote in the story of human civilization and w...

Physics geeks at Yale University have found tiny currents ... really tiny!!! ... flowing in tiny rings of metal wires perpetually. This is like superconductivity but what we are talking about here is normal temperatures and normal materials - not superconducting stuff... This is of course a quantum phenomenon and the kind of stuff which might win the researchers the Nobel Prize at some point in the future. Way to go!!!

I was wondering if it's a bigger achievement to win a Nobel Prize or to become an astronaut. Hundreds of people have won the Nobel Prize while only a dozen astronauts have landed on the Moon and two dozen in all have left Earth orbit. Even the total number of astronauts who have been to space numbers in the hundreds -- I guess, in time, space travel will become commonplace once the technology for that is developed and then rocket travel might become as common as air travel.