Rumi Nations

When people are ‘lucky’, they tend to reflect on their good luck and tend to thank providence profusely for it and reach conclusions such as “Life is Beautiful.” I always wonder if life is indeed beautiful – and, even more pertinently, how valid an argument it is to reach that conclusion when one happens to get “lucky” by chance. I recall numerous instances of people who survive natural disasters thanking the Lord for letting them live while others died. Without citing any particular incident, let us just think for a moment how fair that is – to thank God for letting you live. How about the others who died? Were they at fault somehow and deserved to die? The recent serial blasts in Jaipur killed many people. Did the good Lord decide that these people were unworthy of living and so deserved to die and so the terrorists were in fact agents of God. So, why spend so much resource in trying to find them and punish them? The September 11, 2001 attacks in the US were carried out by pe...

Notable sufferers from Parkinson's Disease include: Muhammad Ali, Michael J. Fox, Pope John Paul II, Eugene O'Neill, Salvador Dali, , Billy Graham, Janet Reno, Adolf Hitler, Francisco Franco, Deng Xiaoping, Mao Zedong, and Doborah Kerr. Notable sufferers from Chronic Myelogenous Leukemia include: Kareem Abdul-Jabber. Notable sufferers from Alzheimer's disease include: Ronald Reagan, Iris Murdoch, Charlton Heston, Rita Hayworth, Notable sufferers from AIDS include: Rock Hudson, Freddie Mercury, Arthur Ashe, Magic Johnson, Greg Louganis, and Isaac Asimov. A more exhaustive list of people with AIDS is available here ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HIV-positive_people

It's a bit perplexing to see so much coverage being provided to stars' birthdays ... not to mention other aspects of their lives such as their love affairs, marriages, divorces and what not! This is the kind of brainless entertainment that people prefer and enjoy instead of "serious" stuff. Who wants to understand the complexities of space exploration when one can simply enjoy some gossip about the latest twists and turns in some star's love life? Who bothers about the complexities of biological sciences and the complex nature of the battles that scientists are fighting with diseases such as cancer and AIDS? Better to just listen to the sacharine sweet advice of some God man who advises that all is well with the world and there's an Almighty and benevolent and watchful God watching over all our actions. I wish of course that people would tire of inanities some day and focus on the real issues and realize that our destiny is shaped by the actions we take and is...

The travails of Wall Street forces one to think about some fundamental facts. Is there any specific reason why bankers and other financial industry executives should be millionaires? The New York Times has an interesting analysis about the troubles of the financial industry here ... http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/30/business/30norris.html How much pay do doctors and teachers and research scientists in the physical and biological sciences earn? Does a person need millions of dollars of pay per year to maintain a good standard of living? How does society benefit by having some people who are spectacularly rich while others live in poverty? Do these millionaires contribute anything of value to society that would justify their earning those pay packets? Of course, in a free market economy, these are difficult choices to make ... But society can come to a consensus as to what are the really important activities that a society must engage itself in and what are not so important. I do not be...

Prof. Henry Markram of the Brain Science Institute in Switzerland says that it's possible to replicate the functions of the human brain on a supercomputer in the next ten year. This has many interesting possibilities. For neuroscientistss grappling with the mysteries of the human brain and the many diseases that afflict the brain, the modelling of the brain might offer insights into its workings that in turn will help to develop treatments. On a more subtle level, understanding the neuronal mechanisms might offer some clues to understanding complex human emotions and "higer order" skills that only humans have. Might we someday understand the physiological basis of such uniquely human attributes such as fear, anger, love, envy, anxiety, hatred and many others? And how does one allocate scare financial resources to such a project with uncertain benefits? We live in times when communities and nations have to choose between conflicting priorities: some priorities seem obvious...