Rumi Nations

Pale Blue Dot from ORDER on Vimeo .

Russell's Teapot or the Celestial Teapot is an analogy intended to refute the idea that the burden of proof lies upon the skeptic to disprove the claims of reli gions. By using an intentionally absurd analogy, Russell's Teapot draws attention to the formal logic behind the burden of proof and how it works. The celestial teapot is similar to the more recent and perhaps equally paradoxical examples of the invisible pink unicorn, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and the dragon in astronomer Carl Sagan's garage, the latter of which can be found in his book "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark". Here Carl Sagan used Russell's teapot in the chapter "The Dragon In My Garage" in which he described the discussion as follows: "A fire-breathing dragon lives in my garage" Suppose (I'm following a group therapy approach by the psychologist Richard Franklin. I seriously make such an assertion to you. Surely you'd want to chec...

I put a long, somewhat rambling comment on a Newslaundry article . Enjoy! The 'anger' in this article may be well-founded but it perhaps mangled the economics in comparing India with Greece and in using debt-to-GDP ratio as a barometer of a nation's overall economic health. I don't know how Britain and Japan managed to have such high debt-to-GDP numbers but they are among the most developed and richest nations on Earth — both being members of the G8. How do or did Britain and Japan manage to become so extraordinarily wealthy? Well, the history aside, in the 20th century and after the Second World War, they have been at the cutting edge of various kinds of technological innovations. While Japan has been the center of the automobile revolution in many ways, Britain is home to British Aerospace, Rolls Royce, and many similar companies. I bet if we look at the data of per capita number of doctors or engineers in those countries, the ratio would be better than in Ind...

Our ancestors understood origins by extrapolating from their own experience; how else could they have done it! So the universe was hatched from a cosmic egg or conceived in the sexual congress of a mother god and a father god or was a kind of product of the creator’s workshop; perhaps the latest of many flawed attempts. The universe was not much bigger than what we see and not much older than our written or oral records; and nowhere very different from places that we know. We tended in our cosmologies to make thing familiar. Despite all our best efforts, we have not been very inventive. In the West, heaven is placid and fluffy; and hell is like the inside of a volcano. In many stories, both realms are governed by dominance hierarchies headed by gods or devils. Monotheists talked about the king of kings. In every culture, we imagined something like our own political system running the universe; few found the similarity suspicious. Then science came along and taught us that we are ...

When I happened to be hospitalized six months back, I got to experience firsthand all the aspects of privatized healthcare. I opted for one of those premium hospitals to avoid having to wrestle with the long lines and the general all-round madhouse atmosphere of a government hospital in India. I experienced the enormous cost of private healthcare which would surely be un-affordable for a vast majority of Indian families. I experienced the tricks of health insurance -- I had 2 or 3 policies but had to pay the entire cost out of pocket [in advance]. Very clever of profit-minded insurers. An example: I happened to be in the hospital for only one day and that was the deductible for one of the policies I was holding. Clearly I was not sick enough. But those are specific problems of the healthcare industry. What struck me was a personal experience which I feel I can extend and generalize.

Here's my perspective -- from 10,000 miles away. The craziness about gun possession. Who'll explain to Americans that they're not pioneers anymore nor is the West wild. Guns make about as much sense as horse-drawn buggies for commuting to the office from Brooklyn to downtown Manhattan or riding a horse to the office in sprawling L.A. The never-retiring justices of the Supreme Court. And what is it with them being so openly, politically partisan anyway? Overturning the popular vote in presidential elections, venturing into policy formulation ... let the folks retire at 70 or 75. That reminds of the crazy election in 2000 when Al Gore got more votes than Bush -- but guess what! Bush wins because he got Florida and thus more votes in the crazy Electoral College, a relic of the 18th century. And those hanging chads appear anachronistic from the perspective of 3rd world nations. India uses EVMs !! Kill the Electoral College!

        When it comes to human affairs such as love, romance … or politics, things do not change much over the centuries. Which is why history repeats itself. Surely we can find parallels in history for events occurring in contemporary Indian politics. Much is different about the electorate here. In spite of extravagant dreams and hopeful claims about the orgasmic imminence of India becoming a superpower, the dumb data points to the brutal reality. While averages may not always reveal the truth, the per capita GDP of India doesn’t paint a pretty picture. Whereas India barely makes it to the $2,000 club, wayward Russia is sitting pretty at more than $10,000. Is Russia’s average inflated because of its billionaires? Well, India has minted many billionaires in recent years too. The people of Egypt and Libya enjoy a better per capita GDP figure than India… although how much of the wealth (oil and otherwise) of those nations benefited the people as opposed to benefit...

Think of the spectacular imagery from the Hubble Space Telescope. I continue to marvel at all the wonders of the universe this single scientific instrument has revealed. And I think of the tiny number of humans who work at the Space Telescope Science Institute who’re responsible for this. A few hundreds of men and women whose work reveals to all seven billion of us humans on this planet the true splendors of the universe far surpassing anything contained in any mythological tales. The world owes a great deal to the Hubble Space Telescope … for opening our eyes, for expanding our horizons, for showing and proving again and again that the zaniest predictions of theoretical astrophysics are commonplace occurrences out there in the cosmos. And Hubble has also revealed phenomena that have left the theorists stunned before they started to contemplate about it and could barely believe that such stuff was really happening.

It isn't as absurd an idea as it might appear at first sight. Which is to say, it would be easy to find folks who might peddle this idea or believe in it. Of course, you better just listen to such ideas without your jaws hitting the floor and not try to argue or anything. Others blame Gandhi for the partition of India. I don't know what they wish for ... a Great India encompassing present day India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh perhaps. Which would translate to a current population of a cool billion and a  half  people. Some people praise the great deed of the great hero Godse. They do not see him as a killer or a murderer. They see him as a great scholar intellectual who had authored Great Books. So, with a few million published books out there to choose from, people seek out Godse's book to read.

Death is a good thing not merely because, as Mr. Jobs put it, “It’s probably the single best invention of life,” or “it’s life’s change agent,” but also because men of hubris are at last brought down to Earth (and indeed below the Earth) by the phenomenon of death. It’s a fate that no hubristic billionaire can escape … yet. The ordinary person can look at a hubris-laden individual engaged in some megalomaniacal activity and take some satisfaction out of this knowledge that death will conquer this villain as well just as it has claimed many other villains through history. What other areas of human activity can you think of where there’s virtual equality between all? Some path breaking inventions of medical science qualify. When a vaccine is available for polio, EVERYONE is suddenly safe from this scourge — street dwellers and penthouse dwellers. But they are few and far between. Technology seems to be one arena where this occurs more frequently. Consumer devices are at once cutt...

One can describe them as the elegant future, the fighting present, the glorious past, and the dinosaur ... Before folks turn on me in all their fury, let me explain ... I admire them all of course ... they've been the guiding lights of my life who've given me confidence that I was not some lone loony who properly belonged in the slammer of one sort or another. Those who are still unfamiliar with these names of course are merely intellectually spectacularly impoverished. How does one give a brief 'summary' of who these people are? Here, let me try. Sam Harris. He's a great scientist who knows 'everything' about science. Now, if you introduce him as such in front of an audience, I know that he will protest. He will add the caveat that he does not know about all science. Okay. He has got a PhD in neuroscience. So, perhaps I can narrow the broad tapestry of science and say that Sam is an 'expert' on neuroscience. But he has done deep research into ...

The Tevatron is going to close. The Superconducting Supercollider never came to fruition. Remember the scare when the LHC began running — all that talk about how black holes might get created at the LHC that might accidentally devour the planet. It’s commonplace to hear all and sundry pontificating about the benefits and harms of science to society. Religious people somehow feel automatically qualified to interpret god’s intentions and talk casually about the universe. Scientists however are a different species. They like to be humble and polite and mostly profess ignorance about much of the world and indeed, much of the broad tapestry of science. This is quite admirable of course and in tune with the spirit of science. But this creates a vacuum. And that vacuum is more often than not filled by opportunistic egomaniacs. It’s in this context that one must look at the lives of a few exceptional scientists. A few names stand out easily: Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins, Steven...

Hail Professor Sagan the Biologist!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! It was extraordinary to see Sagan turn into the world's best teacher of biology as he talked about the origin and evolution of life on planet Earth. The ease with which complex organic molecules can form in the atmosphere of the early planet Earth is sobering. One inevitably wonders about how can the same process not have been repeated elsewhere on other planets. The complexity of the DNA molecule is rather perplexing to understand of course but one then it's difficult to grasp the expanse of millions of years and billions. The self-replicating nature of biological molecules is fundamentally astonishing and the complexity of a single cell is truly mind boggling. It will definitely help to find life elsewhere on other planets ... even the simplest sort of life forms as that will deprovincialize biology as Sagan put it. Hence, the continued search for life on Mars. We have to develop the technologies in t...

A spectacular opening to the series by Sagan as he provides a historical perspective about ourselves. Clearly, he is doing a conscious job of not presenting a Western-centric worldview or looking at the world as merely comprising of Westerners. Sagan's knowledge of history would seem to suggest that he is a historian and not a scientist as he tours the Library of Alexandria and mourns the loss suffered as the result of the destruction of that temple of knowledge. There's a message there for those who wish to understand it. The Library was the glory of the ancient world for seven long centuries. Yes! How many monuments of the modern world can claim to have lived for that long. All that we would be able to think of as great have been built perhaps in the last one hundred years. I can think of everything from the great skyscrapers to the great bridges to the space vehicles and the great cities. But which of these will remain great seven centuries hence ... and therein lies the str...

What a rousing climax to this episode as Sagan imagines being on a planet somewhere about the central disk of the galaxy and how each morning on that planet, the inhabitants would witness not a sunrise but a galaxyrise. What a soaring imagination to cover in one episode everything starting with Chemical Elements 101 from the Cavendish Laboratory to talk about white dwarfs, neutron stars, super novae, red giants, pulsars, and black holes. Not much needs to be revised in this generation old series from his descriptions of the interior of the atoms to his descriptions about the lives of the stars. And oh, he talks about how black holes might be worm holes through which we might be able to journey to different parts of the universe. The usual science fiction stuff of course but I can hardly wait to fall into a black hole. It occurred to me that in the time since Sagan made this series, no one else has dared to venture onto this territory and try and improve on Sagan. Seems like an impossib...

Sagan covers so much ground in this episode ... which is what he does in all the other episodes as well! Sagan explains relativity to the general audience — I would never have thought that possible. Perhaps, an audience that is not trained in science would not be able to make much of this really. The spectacular ideas originating with Albert Einstein that the speed of light is the ultimate speed in the universe, that the speed of light stays constant in all frames of reference, that there are no privileged frames of reference, that time slows down as you travel close to the speed of light, all these concepts are such basic concepts of modern physics and yet very little known to the general public. Sagan talks about the original thinker that Leonardo da Vinci was and how Einstein's special relativity opens the door to the possibility of long distance space and time travel. Sagan shows sketches of spaceships of the future that utilize nuclear fusion as their power source — surely som...

Sagan is in his element in this episode ... well, really he is in his element in ALL the episodes! Sagan talks about the Voyagers ... those robotic spaceships ... traveller's from Earth as far as Sagan is concerned. Sagan goes back and forth in time effortlessly ... from the world of Christian Huygens to the strange worlds discovered by the Voyagers ... Sagan talks about the Jovian satellites and their wonders. Sagan daringly conludes this episode like the true visionary that he is imagining the day that people on Titan will look up at the sky and see the wonder that is the ring planet Saturn. I am sure that day will come to pass perhaps 500 years from now ... long after we are gone from Earth. The Cassini mission that Sagan talks about has come to pass of course. How sad it is that Sagan did not live to see the spacecraft landing on Titan ...

It's not that I am unfamiliar with the topics that Sagan covers in this series. In fact, I've read Cosmos and many of Sagan's other books. So, I guess the reason why I am lovin ' it so much is because it has been quite a while since I touched base with all these concepts that are so close to my heart. In this episode, Sagan daring touches upon what one might describe as the somewhat treacherous and murky grounds of UFOs and extraterrestrial intelligence. It was instructive to see him emphasize and repeat that ' extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs .' The way he categorically ruled out that all the sightings of UFOs are anything but figment's of people's imaginations showed the essential spirit of scientific inquiry at its best — one might almost have concluded that Sagan doesn't really think that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe at all. But in fact Sagan and most other scientists do believe in the existence of extraterre...

It's going to be tough to write about Cosmos because I will run out of superlatives pretty soon. Anway, we'll see about that when we come to it, I guess! It was breathtaking to see Sagan start this particular episode talking about whales with all the confidence and panache and more of a marine biologist. He talks about the amount of information in our genes and then moves on to our brains — one particular theory posits that the brain evolved in layers: the brain stem, the Reptilian-complex, and then the cerebral cortex. He lucidly shows how the brain contains more information than contained in our genes and how that accounts for all that we have accomplished as a species and he extrapolates about species that might have more neurons and neuronal connections than are present in our brains. He speculates about intelligent life forms whose neurons may not be physically connected like they are in our brains. What creative thoughts! Astonishingly enough, Sagan draws parallels betwee...

It was amazing to see Sagan touch upon such a vast array of topics and present it all with his exquisite and unique poetic touch. This episode is all about the large scale structure of the universe. Sagan talks about the types of galaxies and the origin and fate of the universe. Sagan tries to explain the possibility of the existence of a forth dimension. He wonders if there might be enough matter in the universe to stop the present expansion of the universe. Oddly enough, he seamlessly weaves Hindu philosophical stuff into this story of modern scientific cosmology. He talks about how only the timescales mentioned in Hindu mythology come anywhere close to the timescales revealed by modern cosmology. It was wonderful to see Sagan visit South India and talk about the Pongal harvest festival in the same episode that he talks about the Very Large Array in New Mexico. And he visits both South India as well as the VLA. He gives eloquent voice to the speculations about whether our universe mi...