Rumi Nations

That so many people responded to Phil Plait's tweet is a sign of hope for humanity IMO. Here's Phil Plait's article .

The maestro has made his choice. Who am I to protest? So, click here and read and see and learn.

Here comes Professor Sagan, the Great Astronomy Teacher!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! It was great to see Sagan launch into astrology with the elegance that only he is capable of. He pretty much demolished astrology in about five eloquent minutes. He pointed out the many incongruities and inconsistencies in the logic of astrology. Of course, the apologists for astrology will find counter-arguments to his arguments but that's a futile exercise. Sagan enriched my knowledge of history as usual as he talked about how the size of the Earth was first calculated by the director of the Library of Alexandria ... or, perhaps he did that in another episode of Cosmos. Sagan talked about the Anasazi people of Southwest America who had built a place where the Sun shone at a particular place on only the Solar Solstice. Sagan went into European history and how Johannes Kepler's orbit intersected with that of Tycho Brahe. Seeing Sagan explain Kepler's Laws of Planetary Motion, I was remin...

The other day, my boss referenced a speech by Prince Charles wherein he talked about 'cabuncles.' That was a speech the Prince had made in 1984 - as I later found out. I didn't know about that speech. I have fascination for the decade of the sixties. The reason for that being that the 60s were a tumultuous decade. That decade saw a lot of turbulence but turbulence is often the fountainhead for human creativity. People need to have tumult in their lives for them to question conventinal wisdom and accepted truths. Every generation should try to 'reinvent the wheel'; indeed, think of it as a sacred duty to do that. I am thinking of the values of life or what is handed down to us as revealed truth. In the India that we live in today, there's too little of the kind of questioning that took place in the United States during the decade of the sixties. So, we see this younger generation of Indians so at ease with their cellphones clinging on to some very old and meaning...

Time to ride my hobby horse ... Nothing perplexes me more than people's extraordinary level of faith in the almighty ... or, should that be Almighty? I always wonder what are people's motivations for holding on to such an archaic structure ... Anybody with a modicum of common sense and a rudimentary knowledge about the history of the world would appreciate that all of these major world religions were 'invented' about 2,000 years ago ... Christianity and Islam were founded by prophets belonging to small settlements or kingdoms in what is now known as the Middle East while Hinduism and Buddhism were started in the region that was home to what is broadly known as the Indus Valley civilization ... Why were no religions invented elsewhere? Well, the answer to that is simple — couple of millenia ago, planet Earth wasn't home to 6 billion humans ... or a billion humans. The Americas were probably entirely dominated by wildlife ... Some might ponder as to why it is that all...