Deluge

The monsoon floods in Khyber Pakhtoonkhwa and surrounding areas are a reminder of the helplessness of the ordinary folk and the suffering they continue to endure.

I have family affected by the rising waters, the panic and the scramble for safety. Latest reports say that 400,000 are already displaced in the biggest floods in the area since 1929.

Retribution? Wrath? I don't know. We have suffered greatly - may Allah keep us all in care. It is our duty to step in now and after the waters reside to help rebuild.

pictures taken from the BBC/Associated Press

Emerging Technologies

Distance Education is the fastest-growing mode of formal and informal teaching, training and learning. Its many variants include e-learning, mobile learning, and immersive learning environments. The series presents recent research results and offers informative and accessible overviews, analyses, and explorations of current issues and the technologies and services used in distance education.

Here's a link to a download for new e-book edited by George Veletsianos, University of Texas. George, of course, has been my lecturer on the MA and a fair few of the postings here have been in response to discussions that I have had with him and comments that he has posted here.

When A Leaf Falls ...

... it tumbles to it roots.

I have incredibly mixed feelings. For years, I have tried to define myself and here I am, at the doorstep of my past. I do miss my family, so it's good to be amongst their company. It's been two years since I was here so I guess I should honour this one with a verse.

Britannia!

When Britain first, at Heaven's command
Arose from out the azure main;
This was the charter of the land,
And guardian angels sang this strain:

"Rule, Britannia! Britannia rule the waves."
"Britons never will be slaves."

... erm, sure ...

Human Connectivity 2

Continuing with the model of doubling our ancestors each generation that we go back, presents an inherent anomaly because we end up - just by going back two thousand years with a million trillion people in our immediate ancestry. That, is said to be more than the number of people who ever lived. So there must be a logical explanation.

The pyramid model means that two uniquely unrelated people came together to parent the next generation. However, a rather different model may show that two parents of one of our ancestors might not have been so distantly related and therefore there may be overlap. An individual may have cousin-parents and thus six great-grandparents rather than eight. Before the time of mass travel when people lived in small villages, individual genes came often from a tight pool .

Expand that out and people begin to connect with one another very rapidly. I think this says something very important about people in general and this challenges ideas of genetic diversity supposedly used to present ideas of superiority and racial separateness. If our ancestors were related then so are we and today we're all very much part of a continuing human web. There are plenty of overlaps and whatever our race and ethnicity, ultimately of course, we all go back to the same source.

Human Connectivity 1

An interesting thought that is touched upon in Bill Bryon's book is that of the human chain of connectivity. In exploring genetics and inheritance through Mathematics he shows that, according to a pyramid model, it becomes something of an impossibility. My interest in this means that I look upon this through a different lens - I'm more interested in what it eventually says about US as people and how, ultimately we are all connected - whatever our racial and ethnic background.

Consider the Mathematics that Bryon explores: we have 2 parents and 4 grandparents and 8 great-grandparents. 16 people were our grandparents' grandparents and this increases the further we go back. Eight generations back, we we owe our biological existence to 256 people and so on.

SELF
2 PARENTS
4 GRANDPARENTS
8 GREAT-GRANDPARENTS
16 GREAT-GREAT-GRANDPARENTS
32 GREAT-GREAT-GREAT-GRANDPARENTS
64 GREAT-GREAT-GREAT-GREAT-GRANDPARENTS
128 GREAT-GREAT-GREAT-GREAT-GREAT-GRANDPARENTS
256 GREAT-GREAT-GREAT-GREAT-GREAT-GREAT-GRANDPARENT
512 GREAT-GREAT-GREAT-GREAT-GREAT-GREAT-GREAT-GRANDPARENTS
(keep on doubling the figure to go back another generation)

Twenty generations back (about 450 years) we are related to 1,048,576 great ancestors. Five generations before, our existence depends on 33,554,432 people - another five generations before (30 generations back) and we are now counting in figures over a billion. Continue this trend and go back to the time of the Romans and the time-line by which the Gregorian Calendar is fixed (2000 years), then we have a total number of one million trillion people in our immediate ancestry.

According to those who study paleodemographics however, there is something wrong here ... because that last figure is more than the said number of people who have ever lived ...

... allow me to continue in the next instalment InshAllah ...

A Short History ...

... of Nearly Everything

There's a page dedicated to the errata, so not everything you will read in Bill Bryson's book, A Short History Of Nearly Everything, is accurate, but the book is otherwise a very interesting document that charts the journey from the Big Bang to the Rise of Civilization.

Consider this quote taken from the book:

The Big Bang theory isn't about the bang itself but about what happened after the bang. Not long after, mind you. By doing a lot of maths and watching carefully what goes on in particle accelerators, scientists believe they can look back to 10^-43 seconds after the moment of creation when the universe was still so small that you would have needed a microscope to find it.

Scientists, thus can go back in time as far as one ten million trillion trillion trillionths of a second after the Big Bang took place (that is 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 seconds) after time began, before which there was nothing - no time, no universe, no matter. The rest of the book is an interesting story of numbers, figures, scientific biographies charting major discoveries, hurdles and theories of the rise of life on earth. One major consideration is how life is said to have appeared on Earth around 3.85 billion years ago.

Considering the Earth is generally considered to be 4.54 billion years old (4.54 × 109 years ± 1%) and the surface is said to have cooled around 3.9 billion years back, life appeared early.

I feel that I must mention that as a Muslim I strongly believe that ultimately Allah is all knowing and that what we put together as knowledge here is ever-changing and only a fraction of the truth. Bill Bryson himself notes that 99.9% of life that ever crossed the surface of this planet did not leave behind fossil evidence and whilst I think this is completely possible, how does anyone know, for example that this figure is 99.9%?

The book however got me thinking about a number of things, some of which I will return to in future posts, InshAllah.

Listen to the Bill Bryon interview here.

خدا حافظ

We make plans, Allah makes plans - and Allah is the best of planners. I came to the end of a particular road yesterday. That is the way it was supposed to be. Beyond this, it's about choices and opportunities. This however, is true of every day as each moment that we live could in effect herald the end and every day that we live presents those very choices and opportunities. May we all remain protected and at peace and under Allah's guidance. Ameen.

Tareef Karun ...

One for a moment of nostalgia. Mohammed Rafi performs Ye Chand Sa Roshan Chehra (This Face with the Glow of the Moon) picturised on Shammi Kapoor and featuring Sharmila Tagore from the film Kashmir Ki Kali.

I love the line "Tareef karun kya uski jisne tumhe baniya" (let me praise the one who created you).

Oxymoron

Oxymorons, are contradictory phrases, e.g. pretty ugly, original copy, deafening silence and living dead to name a few. The poem below serves as an example of various situational oxymorons, in which every single line contains an oxymoron:

Summer Night
Nathan Alterman

One fine day in the middle of the night,
Two dead boys got up to fight,
Back to back they faced each other,
Drew their swords and shot each other,

One was blind and the other couldn't see,
So they chose a dummy for a referee.
A blind man went to see fair play,
A dumb man went to shout "hooray!"
A paralysed donkey passing by,
Kicked the blind man in the eye,
Knocked him through a nine inch wall,
Into a dry ditch and drowned them all,

A deaf policeman heard the noise,
And came to arrest the two dead boys,
If you don't believe this story’s true,
Ask the blind man; he saw it too!