Rumi Nations

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...

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...

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...