At the ‘Beyond Belief’ discussion, Neil Tyson rebukes Richard Dawkins for his rhetorical style and Dawkins responds brilliantly. This is one of the reason I love science, if you don’t, watch what Dawkins has to say.

You’ve got a big, important report to write for work and you’re dreading it. The deadline has been weighing on your mind for weeks and so far, you’ve done nothing about it. At this point, its do or die situation. Still, you set aside time this afternoon to buckle down and get to work, but instead you’re playing Solitaire, you’re checking Facebook, you’re reorganizing your pens, you’re chain-smoking on the fire escape, and you’re feeling like crap. You’re procrastinating.

If you think you are alone in doing so, you are wrong. Everybody I know is facing the same situation. They keep delaying their important stuff. Some people think that this is not the right time or perfect time to do it, some people think let me just watch one last Youtube video before I get started on it. The reason are different but the phenomena is same, Procrastination.

The only way to make procrastination productive is to get SOMETHING done instead of EVERYTHING. This will at least get you started and starting means the hardest part if over, which is stop delaying. Let me know in comments how you deal with your Procrastination and how you make your day more productive by GTD.

Alan Watts speaking about Success. Life is like a music, there is no “meaning of life” or “purpose of life”. Life is meant to be enjoyed and cherish all little things and those moments. Its not about finding the destination, its about enjoying the journey.

Do you know how tiny we actually are? Our mind can’t really process the word “12 billion light year”. Watch this short clip to get a glance of how tiny we really are in this universe. Earth is like a dot compared to other stars in this galaxy. Our planet is just a dust in the wind.

I have no words to describe this post. “Awesome” would not be enough. You just have to watch the video. I have attached the excerpt after the video. If you like this, you will also enjoy my other post.

From this distant vantage point, the earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

– Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

I am an atheist. I don’t believe in God. I don’t believe in super natural power. I don’t believe in magical force. But I do feel some really great moments that I can’t describe. Its beyond my understanding. May be its beyond all humans. I sometime feel that I am too small to understand it. I am just a dust in the wind. Here is a video that exactly explains what is my spirituality as an atheist.

The universe is a big place. We hear about how big it is when ever we go to planetarium. But knowing something is big and being able to visualize it are two different things. We go about driving to work, cooking dinner, posting our videos on Youtube and its all too easy to forget about the rest of the universe. Afterall, we have much better things to do than think about how big the universe is.

The point here is, the universe is just so big that our brain is not made to hear and process large numbers like this. We orbit around sun, one of the 500,000 Million stars from our galaxy. This image from Hubble telescopes shows that there are billion-times-trillion such galaxies in the universe. The number is so big that the probability of not having life in some other planet is almost zero. Watch this remarkable video to be amazed.

Its too big that it makes human life too small to fight, being jealous and get angry. The things we cry about daily does not matter at all. The universe is spread across 46 billion light year and we don’t even represent a dot on it.

Link to full resolution photo (18Mb) – 10,000 Galaxies in a spot of nothing

Do you love spam emails? If you answered “Yes” to the above question, stop reading here. There is 99.99% chances that you answered “No” (Other 0.01% people are spammers).

In this post I will talk about how I effectively get around with email spam. (May be I will post about how to get rid of the snail-mail-spam in another post sometime)

The main key to get around with spam is to hide your email address. This is very difficult if you use only one email address for all your needs. Because no matter how hard you try to hide your email, it will be exposed to the spammer. I have split all my email traffic between four email accounts. Here is a summery of what email traffic goes to what account and what email is to be used for what audience.

1) Email 1:

This email account is used for your important stuff. It is mainly used for

• Job inquiries/Resume/Job search websites
• Online bank accounts/Credit card accounts
• Car Insurance/Phone company login
• Anything involving your finance login

As you can see, this email account is used for your important emails only. And the key here is NOT to share it with any humans. So you are sure that none of your friends are going to email you on this account. You don’t have to check this account frequently, once in 3-4 days is enough. Make sure that none of your friends/family/colleague  knows about this account. (Why? I will tell you later in the post) This account will not be spam-proof, as all the job-search-website will share your email with their partner site, your credit card company will share it with other credit card companies for those pre-approved-credit-card emails etc.

Account affected by spam: 40%
Frequency of checking this email: Once in 3-4 days

2) Email 2:

This email account is only to be give to humans. Humans include all your friends, family, colleague etc. Don’t use it for any online account/website/registration. If you share it with any website, there are likely 100% chance that they will spam you by one way or other.

This will be your personal account. And it will be 100% spam free for as long as you keep it. You will only receive emails that matters to you. And most of us use email for this purpose only.

Account affected by spam: 0%
Frequency of checking this email: As often as you like

3) Email 3:

This email is used for

• Social networking sites (Facebook, Myspace, Orkut, YouTube, etc)
• Your online registration to sites (Forum posting , Subscription, Netflix, etc)

Most of the email that you receive in this account is not even worth reading. It will be something like “Your friend has commented on your photo on facebook”. And you will receive a lot of social networking website invitation-to-join emails on this account. What really happens is, lets say you have added Mike as your friend on facebook. Now Mike is not so internet savvy so he ends up creating account on all social networking sites like Tagged, Xanga, Bado and what not. Now this websites will ask Mike to import his contacts from facebook and send them invitation to join. So you will eventually receive lot of these invite emails.

Account affected by spam: >50%
Frequency of checking this email: Once in 3-4 days

4) Email 4:

This account is used for one time use registration and all known spam. None of the emails in this account is meant to read. You will use this for websites that you just want to check out or want to have one time access.

Account affected by spam: 100%
Frequency of checking this email: Never

So now that you have four different emails for your different needs, you are sure that you never miss any important email between those spams. As you can see, the key is to separate human-generated emails from the auto generated emails and the auto-generated emails are further divided into important-auto-generated emails and unimportant-auto-generated emails.

The reason I told you to not share Email no 1 with any humans is like this: Lets say you are geek and you hack other people’s emails and people want to take revenge on you. They will try to reset your password and try all those crazy things. They wont be able to retrieve your password but it can lock your account for some time, like yahoo does that. And you don’t want your important email to lock down. So the best strategy for hack-proof email is not to share the email address itself.

Let me know in comments what is your method to get around with spam and what do you think about this method.

Those who know, don’t speak. Those who speak, don’t know. Explains a lot.

This image explains a lot about introverts. There is a big difference between introverts, anti-social and shy people. Extroverts really need to understand that. Image from Abstruse Goose