They have named you for a reason, so that everybody can call you by that one name to uniquely identify you from the other person. If you are sitting next to a person, I call you by your unique name to distinguish you from the other. That is how naming works.

With introduction of nick names, the classic functionality of names is endangered. If I call Robert, Bob, its one more name that I have to remember. And there are likely to be more people similar to the name Bob than Robert. I don’t want to address Nathanial by Nate. If your parents have named you Nathanial, they wanted everybody to identify you with that, not as Nate. I get confused. Moreover, I have to think twice on how to store your name in my address book. And if you are on social network like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, you have different names for the same person. It even makes smartphones like Android* and iOS dumb. And I get even more confused when different people refer to you by different names. It even makes it difficult to search you on Google, Picasa or YouTube.

Why do we need all that mess? Why cant we have one and only one name associated with a person. Nick names/Pet names are inefficient, useless and they in fact invalidate the real purpose of names. If you don’t like your name, man the f* up. Live with it.

 *Android has a built in feature to merge Robert with bob and Nathanial with Nate

Carl Sagan’s wife, Ann Druyan, talked about his death, their immense love and the afterlife. I think you can love someone the most when you both are aware of the fact that there is no second life, its all here and now. You can give and receive all your love while you exist in the life form for a tiny fraction of time, knowing that there is no tomorrow. The words she said below are magical. You can watch this video if you want to know who Carl Sagan was.

“When my husband died, because he was so famous & known for not being a believer, many people would come up to me — it still sometimes happens — & ask me if Carl changed at the end & converted to a belief in an afterlife. They also frequently ask me if I think I will see him again. Carl faced his death with unflagging courage & never sought refuge in illusions. The tragedy was that we knew we would never see each other again. I don’t ever expect to be reunited with Carl. But, the great thing is that when we were together, for nearly twenty years, we lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief & precious life is. We never trivialized the meaning of death by pretending it was anything other than a final parting. Every single moment that we were alive & we were together was miraculous — not miraculous in the sense of inexplicable or supernatural. We knew we were beneficiaries of chance… That pure chance could be so generous & so kind… That we could find each other, as Carl wrote so beautifully in Cosmos, you know, in the vastness of space & the immensity of time… That we could be together for twenty years. That is something which sustains me & it’s much more meaningful…

The way he treated me & the way I treated him, the way we took care of each other & our family, while he lived. That is so much more important than the idea I will see him someday. I don’t think I’ll ever see Carl again. But I saw him. We saw each other. We found each other in the cosmos, and that was wonderful.“

– Ann Druyan, talking about her husband, Carl Sagan

Mind blowing fact: Ann Druyan is the president of NORML.

Universe is a scary place. It is big, beyond your imagination. Sometimes, it screams on your face, do you know what I am, how grand I am, how old I am, can you even comprehend what I am, what are you compared to me? And when you know enough science you reply, dude, I AM you. Just look up at dark sky, the star you see, thousands of light years away, the light emitted hundreds of years ago by that star is detected by your eyes. Even if you can never touch that star you feel a connection to universe by that narrow photon beam. Your eyes are made from same material as that supernova. You are stepped out from the supernova. I feel safe being in the universe despite of the massive force and energy flares surrounding me.

Religion promotes fear in you, fear of death, fear of going to hell, fear of burning for eternity. People who understand science do not fear from it or from the vast universe. Instead they are amazed by it, they are curious about it. Astronomy is humbling and character building experience. If you appreciate universe, you won’t have fear of death. You don’t have to know the ultimate answer or solve any puzzle. I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose which is the way it really is as far as I can tell possibly, but it doesn’t frighten me.

Secular student alliance has started a new bus ad campaign. Their message is very clear, you don’t need to believe in invisible man sitting in the sky to be Good person. You can be good without your imaginary friend.

Bill Gates, after creating the most successful company around, must have asked himself “Now what”? He started philanthropy foundation in 2000 and he did the best that he could with all his power. You got to love this man for his noble work no matter if you are Apple fan or Microsoft hater.

Warren Buffett decided in 2006 that he would donate almost all of his fortune to charity, all $40 billion of it! Buffett’s children will inherit a tiny fraction because he believes that money rightly belongs to the people, and should not be used to construct a familial corporate dynasty.

Donating large sums to worthy causes is not the only or even most important way a person might be “Good” but it is undeniably one of them. Perhaps for some people religion really does inspire them to help others and if it does, great. Just don’t imagine it is a requirement. Some people are good with God. Some, like Gates and Buffett, are just as good without God. So its not about where you are getting your morals from but how good your morals are.

Bill Hicks

Bill Hicks (1961 – 1994) was an American stand-up comedian. His humor challenged mainstream beliefs, aiming to “enlighten people to think for themselves”. This is a clip from his show “Revelations” which he closed with “It’s Just a Ride”, one of his most famous and life-affirming philosophies. This is something that I always supported before I came across Hicks and will support it forever. You can find excerpts after the video.

The World is like a ride in an amusement park, and when you choose to go on it you think it’s real, because that’s how powerful our minds are. And the ride goes up and down and round and round, and it has thrills and chills and is very brightly colored, and it’s very loud. And it’s fun, for a while.

Some people have been on the ride for a long time, and they’ve begun to question, ‘Is this real, or is this just a ride?’, and other people have remembered, and they’ve come back to us and they say ‘Hey, don’t worry. Don’t be afraid, ever, because this is just a ride.’ and we KILL THOSE PEOPLE.

“Shut him up! We have a lot invested in this ride! SHUT HIM UP! Look at my furrows of worry. Look at my big bank account, and my family. This just has to be real.”

It’s just a ride.

But we always kill those good guys who try and tell us that. You ever noticed that? And let the demons run amok. But it doesn’t matter, because … It’s just a ride.

And we can change it anytime we want. It’s only a choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings of money. A choice, right now, between fear and love. The eyes of fear wants you to put bigger locks on your door, buy guns, close yourself off. The eyes of love, instead see all of us as one.

Here’s what we can do to change the world right now, to a better ride:

Take all that money we spent on weapons and defense each year and instead spend it feeding, clothing, and educating the poor of the world, which it would many times over, not one human being excluded, and WE CAN EXPLORE SPACE, TOGETHER, BOTH INNER AND OUTER, forever … in peace.

– Bill Hicks (1961 – 1994)

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