Soma Purana

I have just begun to learn Kant, an 18th century philosopher. Kant emphasized reason and freedom. What is freedom? If I suddenly have an urge to drink soda and have before me Sprite and Pepsi, and I chose Pepsi, did I exercise freedom? I chose Pepsi on my own accord. But, what drove me to look for soda in the first place? Freedom is not acting in a free manner to chose the means to achieve a given end. Freedom is in choosing the end itself. Oftentimes we are instruments rather than authors of the purposes we pursue. This freedom to choose the end itself is what gives us dignity. Kant's conception of morality: What makes an action worthy? What makes an action worthy is not the end result but the motive behind the action, the quality of the will that led to the action (doing the right thing for the right reason). Kant says "a good will shines like a jewel even if fails to accomplishes nothing." Motive confers moral worth of an action. Kant gives an example. ...

I want to approach this question differently. Rather than make a subjective pronouncement based on what comes to my head right away, I want to start with the notion, I have no clue, but let me try to figure it out. Suppose people are allowed to sell their one kidney. We have two kidneys, presumably, for a reason. May be it is for redundancy, if one fails the other one is sufficient to maintain life. Or for the proper function both kidneys need to be working and with only one kidney, may be life is deficient. If we consider the redundancy reasoning and if we assume failure of kidney is highly likely after a certain age, then there is the question of seller's remorse. But unlike seller's remorse where the seller sold his stock in stock market at a low price and later the price doubled, here we are talking about life and death. The stakes are high. If we didn't have flood insurance and our house is washed away in a tsunami, we say, well it is only the house. But, we can...

Military recruitment is going down in US. There are three ways of increasing the recruitment. Increase pay Implement conscription Hire mercenaries. During Civil War, US adopted a combination strategy conscription and mercenaries. Andrew Carnegie who was drafted could hire a substitute mercenary and send him in his place. He paid the mercenary a few hundred dollars which was less than what he would spend in a year for his fancy cigars. Strange system but that was allowed during Civil War. Even voluntary army has an element of coercion. Those who are economically poor and cannot get any job opportunity are "coerced" to join the military. I like conscription. I would like to combine that with increasing pay, may be double it. Conscription forces the society to think carefully about what wars we should engage in and limits the wars to truly what is essential to defend the borders. This should reduce the size of the military, not increase it. I was highly moti...

When I registered, I accidentally chose audit. The EdX webpage was done in such a way that it gave the impression that you had only two options. One was audit or another was paid verified certificate. I didn't want to pay, so I chose audit. But there indeed was free honor certificate option as well but it was not clear how to sign up for it. Later I found out how to navigate to sign up for that option. In any case, I sent a mail to EdX and they couldn't reverse my audit status. I added a comment on the discussion board. The professor intervened and I got the certificate. I spent so much time on this course and it felt good to receive certificate acknowledging my accomplishment. 

I am planning to take computer science courses this year. I did biology related courses mainly in 2013. Comp Sci is hard. I learned some Python programming - want to improve my programming over the year. Programming is essential for pretty much all Comp Sci courses. I just started Stanford's "Algorithms: Design and Analysis Part 1". Lots of lectures. I am sure this course is going to be overwhelming. Let us see how it goes.