Macroscopic World

American Soup

America's national identity?: "Have you ever felt bewildered by the question of American identity? Samuel Huntington is here to help. According to Huntington, American identity is neither racial nor ethnic. Nor is it based merely on adhering to a set of laws or democratic principles. If you think that you are American just because you have a U.S. passport, you're wrong. American identity is defined by culture, and, Huntington explains, Americans are culturally Anglo-Protestants. If you feel American, odds are that you're culturally Anglo-Protestant. Under certain circumstances, this principle may even apply to black Muslims."

Business schools stand accused of being responsible for much that is wrong with corporate management today

"In a forthcoming article to be published posthumously in Academy of Management Learning & Education, Sumantra Ghoshal argues that many of the 'worst excesses of recent management practices have their roots in a set of ideas that have emerged from business-school academics over the last 30 years.'" (More)...

Brain Has Built-in Calculator?

"Mathematical reasoning appears to be independent of linguistic abilities." (More)...

Demand soars for Arabic speakers

"Just as Sputnik spurred a surge in Russian language training a half-century ago, Sept. 11 has made Arabic the language of choice for a new generation of ambitious diplomats and academics across the world.

'Looking around, we see that we haven't been training enough qualified Arabic speakers,' said Ahmad Fawzi, director of the news and media division of the United Nations in New York. 'The language has been neglected.'

Others agree. 'Even in France, with a large population of bilingual Arab speakers to draw from, it has not been easy to find possibilities to study Arabic,' said Philippe Cardinal, chief of communications at the Institut du Monde Arabe, the Paris-based cultural center supported by France and 21 Arab governments.

That is changing rapidly." (More...)

Reaching our ecological limits

"Now to some alarming scientific research on the state of the planet: destructive climate change; the depletion of energy, food and fish stocks; a looming shortage of fresh water and social chaos. According to a detailed survey which will be launched later this month, the human race is facing extinction in a matter of decades and will run out of some critical resources in just a few years. The Little Green Handbook, which examines the ecological limits of human life on earth, warns that for the first time in human history we are approaching these limits, and in some cases have already crossed them.

But while this research is wide-ranging, looking not just at the physical environment but at social trends as well, it's been conducted by a scientist within a very specific discipline. Dr Ron Nielsen is a nuclear physicist.

Born in Poland he has worked at the Australian National University as well as research institutes throughout Europe and his work has been published in scientific journals internationally. When Dr Nielsen spoke to me from our Brisbane studio he explained to me why as a nuclear physicist he is qualified to make these warnings about the future of the human race on the planet." (More...)

Interview with Tariq Ramadan

A bridge across fear: "'I want to go beyond the perception that I am only different from you, or that difference is the beginning and the end.' In an interview of remarkable range and frankness, the influential Swiss-Egyptian philosopher, teacher and writer Tariq Ramadan talks to Rosemary Bechler of openDemocracy about his life's project: bringing Muslims and Europe home to each other."

A marvel of cooperation

A Marvel of Cooperation, How Order Emerges without a Conscious Planner: "How is that millions of people every day cooperate with millions of others to get the bagel to your corner coffee shop? There's no office or government agency or central hub where all the commerce originates. The web of connections holding the system together is unseen."

"Behold! in the creation of the heavens and the earth; in the alternation of the night and the day; in the sailing of the ships through the ocean for the profit of mankind; in the rain which Allah Sends down from the skies, and the life which He gives therewith to an earth that is dead; in the beasts of all kinds that He scatters through the earth; in the change of the winds, and the clouds which they Trail like their slaves between the sky and the earth;- (Here) indeed are Signs for a people that are wise." [2:164] (taken from Yusuf Ali's translation of Qur'an)

Far, far out...

Inventor Kurzweil Aiming to Live Forever: But who would want to live forever, anyway?

Beautiful...

"When someone behaves in an ihsan manner, in a beautiful (good) manner - the benefit is not to God, who is above all harm or benefit. Rather they do ihsan to themselves, to their own souls because such behaviour conforms with the true form in which they have been created - there is a harmonizing between what they create with their actions and the deep nature with which they have been created. 'If you do what is beautiful, you do what is beautiful to your own souls, and if you do what is ugly (asa), it is to them likewise.' (17:7)"

-- Irshaad Hussain

A Children's Story

"The Land of Forgetulness": "There was once a King with a vast kingdom. He was a very great King, good, fair, just, merciful, loved deeply by all his subjects, by all the creatures in His kingdom.

His was not an ordinary kingdom. He ruled over all of nature, the mountains, streams, skies, and the wide earth whose strength supported all of these.

The King was loved deeply by all his subjects who knew well his continuous kindness and mercy.

One day the King called all of His subjects to come before Him. They all came willingly and from among their numbers each group chose a representative to stand before the King. The mountains chose the firmest and mightiest among them to go forward as their representative. The skies chose the strongest wind and in like manner each group sent forward their chosen representative.

The King said He had a task, a test, 'a trust', a difficult undertaking, and He wanted to see who among His subjects would undertake this task.

The task was to journey through a faraway land known as the land of forgetfulness.

Anyone who entered this land forgot who they were, where they came from, even why they came to that land.

And even though that land was also part of the kingdom, the visible signs of the King were concealed and disguised in that land. Those who entered there became so forgetful and distracted that they forgot their beloved King and forgot that He had set them a task.

Only those who were able to look deep into their hearts would be able to remember their King and their task, because the forgetfulness was like a thick fog that clouded their minds."

(by Irshaad Hussain)

"Venture Capital Largely Missing for Muslim Entrepreneurs"

"First, a startling fact: Though the United States is not an 'Islamic' country by conventional definition, in spirit and in real terms, its financing institutions offer more Shariah compliant financing and investment than that provided by all the Islamic banks combined." Read more...

"One Small Step (For Men) In Saudi Elections"

"In Riyadh, Saudi Arabia's capital, many were celebrating the historic multi-party elections that took place in that city Wednesday, elections that the desert kingdom hadn't seen (in any form) since brief experiments in the 1960's. However, this vote was restricted not only to men, but also to half the seats available on the municipal councils (the others to be appointed by you know who), leaving voter registration sluggish. Despite those glaring shortcomings, this electio in other ways resembled those outside the Arab world, with expensive campaigns and ubiquitous posters and literature (some even arguing for the right of women to drive cars). Though Saudi Ambassador to Britain Prince Turki Al-Faisal explained to the BBC that women's suffrage could come about within 4 years (some reports say sooner), he has described in the past that limitations on voting for women was a practical matter (the identity cards required to vote had only recently been made available to women and not widely distributed). 'When you exclude 50% of the society and allow criminal prisoners to vote this is an insult to 9 million women,' said Saudi historian Hatoon Fassi. 'Their message to us is that we're not citizens, we're not worthy, that we don't exist.'" More....

The credit card industry revealed...

Secret History of the Credit Card (via Mere Islam)

Conduct Unbecoming

"The complexities of fraud in science are highlighted in The Great Betrayal, Horace Freeland Judson's new account of the subject. As he points out, it is extremely difficult even to define what the term scientific fraud actually means. Where, for example, is the line drawn between extreme sloppiness and genuine intent to deceive? Scientists, like many creative people, are not always blessed with attractive personalities. When does poor management or harassment of young people in research teams cross the border between bad behavior and genuine scientific misconduct? Considering the bumbling attempts on the part of universities, grant agencies and even governments to reach any consensus about how misconduct of this type should be investigated, and the difficulties for the legal profession in putting it into a framework that is consistent with other fields of law, how are we to investigate, let alone control, this kind of behavior in the future? And how are we to protect the reputations and careers of whistleblowers in this increasingly messy scene?" (Read more)...

The Secret Life of Lobsters

"All the ingenious men, and all the scientific men, and all the imaginative men in the world could never invent, if all their wits were boiled into one, anything so curious and so ridiculous as the lobster."

- Charles Kingsley (1819-1875)

Hmmm...

Older people get the big picture

"Psychologists from McMaster University have discovered that the aging process improves certain abilities - the ability to grasp the 'big picture'. The study, published in the journal Neuron dispels the myth that older people perform slower and worse than younger people.
'Going into the study, we knew that ageing changes the way people see the world,' says Allison Sekuler, one senior author of the study. 'But these results are an unusual twist on the standard 'ageing makes you worse' story, and they provide clear insight into what is changing in the ageing brain.'" (Read on)...

Saudis Vote in Historic Election

"February 10 will go down in the books as the day Saudi citizens exercised their voting rights. In the first-ever elections held in the country, citizens over 21 headed to polling centers early in the day to choose their representatives for the Riyadh Municipal Council." (More...)

A Vote Grows in Saudi

"Saudi society is deeply conservative and inherently suspicious of change. But the elections show that a substantial part of that society is now prepared to espouse change - albeit in homeopathic doses." (More...)

The seven deadly sins have been knocked for six

"Stay in bed all day, gorge yourself on chocolate and lust as much as you want. Most people believe the seven deadly sins are out of date, and that traditional transgressions such as sloth, gluttony and lust should not stop you from passing through the Pearly Gates.

Cruelty is considered the worst sin anyone can commit nowadays, followed by adultery, bigotry, dishonesty, hypocrisy and selfishness. Of the seven deadly sins Thomas Aquinas enumerated in the 13th century, only greed is still viewed as a reliable passport to eternal damnation." (More...)

In the Valley of Life, oil is death to the art of a lost civilisation

"It is hard to imagine how dry the desert is until you have gone for a stroll in the Sahara. After a couple of hours' walk across this lunar landscape, tracking along the steep escarpment of the Messak Settafet plateau, a paste of salt, sand, and sweat forms on every square inch of exposed skin.

Halfway up the slope, picking his way through a giant's playpen of boulders, Hassan Ahmed Breki stops, unwraps his long, white headscarf, and runs a finger along lines carved into a rock surface. Here, out in the open for all to see, is one of Libya's national treasures: rock engravings, some possibly dating back 9,000 years or more, created by a mysterious, prehistoric culture.

The graceful forms that emerge beneath Hassan's hand - humans among elephants, crocodiles, giraffes and hippopotamuses - reveal what scientists have now confirmed: rather than barren and dessicated, it was once lush and green here at Wadi al-Hayat (the Valley of Life, also known as Wadi al-Ajal) in the Fezzan region of south-west Libya." (More...)

Our Godless Constitution

"It is hard to believe that George Bush has ever read the works of George Orwell, but he seems, somehow, to have grasped a few Orwellian precepts. The lesson the President has learned best--and certainly the one that has been the most useful to him--is the axiom that if you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it. One of his Administration's current favorites is the whopper about America having been founded on Christian principles. Our nation was founded not on Christian principles but on Enlightenment ones. God only entered the picture as a very minor player, and Jesus Christ was conspicuously absent." (More...)

Shopping is helping Dubai shift the global dynamic

"The Dubai Shopping Festival (DSF) is one of the world's largest celebrations of the culture of consumerism. From the airport to the glitzy 'Global Village' outpost, the festival, with its elaborate marketing ploys and promotions, is weaving a shopping ethos into the fabric of the city. Ten years after the first DSF was held, Dubai has undergone a huge construction boom, luring tourists and foreign investors with its 'folklore of shopping.' The ever-mounting costs of these opulent displays, as well as concerns about the sustainability of Dubai's economic miracle, have caused some critics to forecast an end to the boom. But as long as shoppers from around the world continue to flock to this Gulf Emirate for its enormous retail offerings, the naysayers will be confined to mere grumbling. Will Dubai's meteoric rise continue?"
(More...)

The Econ 1 Guide to Life

"Economists have a rather dismal reputation for being selfish, venal egoists, especially among those who look in from the outside. With all due respect to the fact that a little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing, I have always believed that at least one economics class should be part of any proper liberal education, and not just because economics is essential to the understanding of government policy. I have recently come to realize that economics can offer a framework for a good and moral life." (Read on...)

Smoking Causes Memory And Cognitive Impairment In Adolescents

"Adolescents who smoke show impairment of memory and other cognitive functions, according to a Yale study in Biological Psychiatry." More...

Guantanamo: Stories From the Inside

Horror Stories: "They would say, 'The world doesn't know you're here. Nobody knows you're here. All they know is that you're missing, and we could kill you and no one would know.' "

Who's Who in the Arab Media

"Most debate in the Arab world remains behind closed doors, but Arab satellite channels and newspapers have managed to bring some of it into the open. With a $100 satellite setup, the average Arab citizen can now tune into at least three satellites, each carrying hundreds of channels. Most are simply official government channels that made the leap from broadcast to satellite, or entertainment channels that beam music videos and reruns of old Arab and Western shows. But a growing number are so-called independent news channels. Because they can originate anywhere, they are difficult to censor." (More...)

Interesting website

The Word Spy: "This Web site is devoted to lexpionage, the sleuthing of new words and phrases. These aren't 'stunt words' or 'sniglets,' but new terms that have appeared multiple times in newspapers, magazines, books, Web sites, and other recorded sources."

Interview with Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf

Islam and America, Three Years After 9/11: "Far from being incompatible, Islamic values and American values are very similar, says a Muslim leader."

The Abu Ghraib Scandal You Don't Know: "American soldiers often have a tough time with Arabic names, so to guards, he was just 'Gus.' To the world outside Abu Ghraib prison, he became an iconic figure, a naked, prostrate Iraqi prisoner crawling on the end of a leash held by Private Lynndie England, the pixyish Army Reserve clerk who posed in several of the infamous photographs that made the name Abu Ghraib synonymous with torture. Now, it emerges, there may be another dimension to Gus' story and certainly to the horrors of Abu Ghraib. In what amounted to a perversion of the traditional doctor's creed of 'first, do no harm,' the medical system at the prison became an instrument of abuse, by design and by neglect. As uncovered by legal scholars M. Gregg Bloche and Jonathan Marks, who conducted an inquiry published by the New England Journal of Medicine, not only were some military doctors at Abu Ghraib enlisted to help inflict distress on the prisoners, but also the scarcity of basic medical care was at times so severe that it created another kind of torture."

Even Bacteria Age: "Long assumed to be immortal, bacteria have been found to age like other organisms, suggesting that no life strategy is immune to mortality."

How Malcolm X's letters were saved

The arrival of Satan

Saudi Who Rode 'Satan's Horse' Tells His Story: "'Satan's horse' is not a myth. As narrated by an elderly Saudi, it is the name local residents of Buraidah, Al-Qasim, used to call a bicycle some 47 years ago at a time when new inventions were unacceptable to the majority of people there and ignorance prevailed.

In the 1940s and early 1950s, ignorance made people reject anything new, particularly a device of any sort. History tells us that many Saudis rejected the telegram, the radio, the car and other inventions that the late King Abdul Aziz, the founder of the Kingdom, was keen on using to be in tune with the times and to serve his people."

Creating peace....

Koranic duels ease terror: "When Judge Hamoud al-Hitar announced that he and four other Islamic scholars would challenge Yemen's Al Qaeda prisoners to a theological contest, Western antiterrorism experts warned that this high-stakes gamble would end in disaster.

Nervous as he faced five captured, yet defiant, Al Qaeda members in a Sanaa prison, Judge Hitar was inclined to agree. But banishing his doubts, the youthful cleric threw down the gauntlet, in the hope of bringing peace to his troubled homeland.

'If you can convince us that your ideas are justified by the Koran, then we will join you in your struggle,' Hitar told the militants. 'But if we succeed in convincing you of our ideas, then you must agree to renounce violence.'

The prisoners eagerly agreed."

Infinite

These solitary hills have always been dear to me.
Seated here, this sweet hedge, which blocks the distant horizon opening inner silences and interminable distances.
I plunge in thought to where my heart, frightened, pulls back.
Like the wind which I hear tossing the trembling plants which surround me, a voice from the inner depths of spirit shakes the certitudes of thought.
Eternity breaks through time, past and present intermingle in her image.
In the inner shadows I lose myself,
drowning in the sea-depths of timeless love.

by Giacomo Leopardi

Animal-Human Hybrids

Animal-Human Hybrids: "Is there a limit to how far bioscientists are willing to go?"

"Are American Mosques Promoting Hate Ideology?"

"A new study entitled "Saudi Publications on Hate Ideology Fill American Mosques" (download full .pdf version here) was recently released by the conservative watchdog organization Freedom House. Whether the study is accurate or not, it will certainly invite greater governmental scrutiny on the American-Muslim community.

The stated purpose of the study is to "probe in detail the content of the Wahhabi ideology that the Saudi government has worked to propagate through books and other publications within [U.S.] borders." Its conclusions and recommendations are of vital concern to the American Muslim community. The American-Muslim leadership in particular needs to analyze the study and to respond quickly and effectively.

If this study's conclusions are accurate, then the American-Muslim community needs to undertake a monumental overhaul of its institutions and the management of its resources and infrastructure. On the other hand, if there are errors, inaccuracies, methodological problems or additional relevant facts not considered in the study, then it behooves the American-Muslim leadership to correct the record. In either case, the failure to act by American-Muslims will be extremely deleterious to the community's safety and well-being." (More here...)

"There is a tolerant, pluralist tradition in Islam. We can't afford to ignore it..."

Getting to Know the Sufis: "Just four months ago, thousands of mourners thronged the Grand Mosque in Mecca for the funeral of a famous Sufi teacher. This was an extraordinary event, given the discrimination against all non-Wahhabi Muslims that is the state policy of Saudi Arabia. The dead man, 58-year-old Seyed Mohammad Alawi Al-Maliki, had been blacklisted from employment in religious education, banned from preaching in the Grand Mosque (a privilege once enjoyed by his father and grandfather), and even imprisoned by the Saudi regime and deprived of his passport. That so many Saudi subjects were willing to gather openly to mourn him--indeed, that his family succeeded in excluding Wahhabi clerics from the mosque during the memorial--says something important, not just about the state of dissent inside the Saudi kingdom, but also about pluralism in Islam."

Therein are lessons to be learned....

Learning from Our Elders: "The Iroquois Confederacy long ago devised the rules of peace-making and negotiation after centuries of war and vengeance. What crucial lessons can we learn from them as we face a world torn apart by hatreds?"

Self-Determination for Arabs

Self-Determination for Arabs: Will West Accept It?: "What now for democracy in the Middle East following the weekend elections in Iraq? To listen to President Bush in his state of the union address last night, you would think that the elections were a triumph of American arms that would now shine as a beacon throughout the region. Today Iraq. Tomorrow the world, or at least the Arab part of it.

Some exaggeration is understandable from a president whose support for the war amongst his own electorate is sliding fast. And no one should gainsay either the real enthusiasm for the vote amongst Iraqis or the courage of those in Baghdad and the Sunni areas who did turn out to vote. But what bedevils all discussion of Iraq and its role in the Middle East is the dogged determination of Western politicians and commentators to see it only in their own terms. A successful vote has to be acclaimed as a justification for invasion, just as continued violence has to be seen as the proof against it."

"The Faith-Based Encyclopedia"

Writes Robert McHenry, former editor in chief of the Encyclopædia Britannica: "Away back about 1993, '94 -- in retrospect, the last of the halcyon days when a relatively small and rather homogeneous group of people around the globe could reasonably consider themselves as constituting the Internet community and could take a strongly proprietary view of its future development -- back then, I am recalling, a cluster of enthusiasts coalesced in an online discussion group devoted to the creation of an encyclopedia on the Internet, an Interpedia, as they called it. As one of the proponents described it..." (More)

haitus

Haj break...be back in a week!

on a full stomach (and that other voice in my other head)

"How good one feels when one is full - how satisfied with ourselves and with the world! People who have tried it, tell me that a clear conscience makes you very happy and contented; but a full stomach does the business quite as well, and is cheaper, and more easily obtained. One feels so forgiving and generous after a substantial and well-digested meal - so noble-minded, so kindly-hearted."

Jerome K. Jerome
--Three Men in a boat

Man has a brain in here...(I must try to resolve this issue with the other voices in my head): "In the past six decades, gut science has revealed the stomach - and the rest of the digestive tract - to be much more subtle and interesting than suggested by Hill, who went on to chair the BMA.

For a start, the gut has a 'brain'. Nerves and nerve pathways wrapped around it are sometimes referred to as the little brain in the gut. 'The nervous system of the gut has all of the types of nerve cell that the brain has,' says anatomist Professor Michael Gershon of New York's Columbia University. It also has every type of chemical messenger found in the brain. In the case of one of them - serotonin, closely associated with depression - it has the greater part of the body's entire store.

'The gut can make its own decisions,' Gershon adds. In fact it has to. Different foods require different responses: is this meat or veg coming through? Its layers of muscle have to choose the appropriate programme of complex co-ordinated movement: mix the gut contents; move them on; do both at once. No time to wait for signals from central control."

Coalition admits 'the battle for Iraq may never be won': "After months of arguing that they had the situation under control, senior US commanders have finally conceded that they are not facing a bunch of 'dead-enders' and fanatics but a highly trained and motivated resistance movement of around a quarter of a million fighters who are capable of mounting 'spectacular' attacks ahead in the fortnight before the election.

One high-ranking army officer was even moved to admit that the coalition is losing the fight and told the Sunday Herald that the battle might never be won."

The Neurobiology of Mass Delusion: "History is replete with examples of social organizations, whether a business or a nation, that failed to perceive the realities of a changing environment and didn't adapt in time to prevent calamity. Hubris and a self-reinforced dynamic of mass delusion characterize the waning phases of these once powerful groups. In hindsight we ask, 'What were they thinking? Wasn't the situation obvious to everyone? The evidence is so clear!' Here's the question we should ask next: 'Is history now repeating itself?'

Anyone familiar with the concepts of overshoot, resource depletion, global climate change, mass extinction, and related ills, wonders why the media, church groups and political leaders do not vigorously discuss these topics. By contrast, those unfamiliar with these issues assume that because they are not covered closely, the problems must not be too worrisome. My view is that science and history are correct, and that we are headed for a major planetary disaster as far as humans are concerned. I've tried to understand why the human brain, on a collective level at least, is apparently incapable of dealing with obvious problems. Here's what I've learned."

The Reality of the Two Americas: "Generosity of spirit, empathetic to the extreme: that's who we are. Arrogant in the use of power, insensitive to the plight of our victims-that, too often, is also how we operate."

Empty Quarter - Exploring Arabia's Legendary Sea of Sand: "Spilling across four Arab nations, the world's largest sand desert has been defined as much by Bedouin tradition as by geography. Now oil and politics are changing the definition."

How red tape and poverty prevented warnings going out to battered shores