Missing Mary Road

Using “favorite books” data from Facebook and the average SAT/ACT scores from the colleges the people in the data set attend, Virgil Griffith plotted a graph of “books that make you dumb”. Lolita, 100 Years of Solitude, and Crime and Punishment were the “smartest” books while the Zane erotica books are the “dumbest”.

Ottawans who remember August 1999 and Parliament Hill will know the name Shirley Phelps-Roper, and the woman who has been called The Most Hated Woman In America is back in the news again with her anti-homosexuality crusade, this time over the death of actor Heath Ledger, but she has some new shots against Canada as well.Reached on the phone to explain the link God Hates Canada on the website of her Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas — headquarters of her war against the homosexuality she and church members say is destroying the world — Phelps-Roper, 50, lawyer, mother of 11, says: “Canada is like the United States, a filthy, perverted, immoral, nation. America is doomed. The Bible prophesied all of this, the end time. God chose America to show the way, the Christian principles, but it’s over, America is collapsing from within. Canada is doomed, too. I was so thankful to get out of your sick country. It has no hope.”…

Ledger’s sin? He played a homosexual in the movie Brokeback Mountain. Phelps-Roper: “God hates the sordid, tacky, bucket of slime, seasoned with vomit, known as Brokeback Mountain, and He hates all the persons having anything to do with it.” (God watches movies? I wonder if he puts butter on his popcorn

Keep reading.

via Huma,

From Dawn:

    US authorities have threatened Pakistan’s most respected citizen Abdul Sattar Edhi with deportation, he said. “I just received a telephone call from someone, telling me that I am being deported,” Mr Edhi, who is now in New York told Dawn.

He said he was stopped at the airport in London when he tried to board a plane for New York on Jan 8. Mr Edhi then contacted the US Embassy in London who gave him a letter which allowed him to proceed to New York. The letter also advised him to see US authorities on Feb 18 to clear whatever misunderstandings they may have about him.

Mr Edhi arrived in New York on Jan 9 and was detained at the airport for eight hours.

“They were questioning me why I look the way I look,” said Mr Edhi who has a long beard and always wears traditional Pakistani dress along with a traditional cap.

“They also wanted to know why I visit the United States so regularly,” he said. “I told them I am a social worker. What else I do? I only do social work,” said Mr Edhi who has branches of his trust in several US cities.

“If they do not let me work here, I will work somewhere else.”

Fact: Edhi has the largest ambulatory volunteer service in the world as per the Guiness Book of World Records and also the man who has gone the longest for having worked without taking a holiday.

Ozymandius

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said–”Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandius, King of Kings,
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Sonnet 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

William Shakespeare

Dulce Et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!– An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.–
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,–
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Wilfred Owen

glad to know that pakistan doesn’t have a failing grade in everything.

Very interesting paper on the economics of prostitution by Steven Levitt and Sudhir Venkatesh.

The transaction-level data we collected suggests that street prostitution yields an average wage of $27 per hour. Given the relatively limited hours that active prostitutes work, this generates less than $20,000 annually for a women working year round in prostitution. While the wage of a prostitute is four times greater than the non-prostitution earnings these women report (approximately $7 per hour), there are tremendous risks associated with life as a prostitute. According to our estimates, a woman working as a prostitute would expect an annual average of a dozen incidents of violence and 300 instances of unprotected sex.

The authors also noted that a prostitute was “more likely to have sex with a police officer than to get officially arrested by one”.

via kottke

Researchers from the University of Tokyo have teamed up with members of the Japan Origami Airplane Association to develop a paper aircraft capable of surviving the flight from the International Space Station to the Earth?s surface.

Seriously.  A super-paper-aeroplane that can withstand re-entry.

in case anyone is interested.

From Science:

Donated hearts for lifesaving transplants are scarce, but now researchers may have hit upon a way to generate the blood-pumping organs in the lab–at least in rats. The approach, which involves transplanting cells from a newborn rat onto the framework of an adult heart, produced an organ that could beat and pump fluid. Further refinement will be necessary before the technique is ready for people, but it could also generate other organs.

Taylor’s team started with a heart removed from an adult rat. The researchers soaked it in chemicals to remove the living cells, leaving behind a “skeleton” composed of the heart’s nonliving structural tissues, which are made of proteins and other molecules. Onto this scaffolding the researchers placed heart cells from a newborn rat, which are not stem cells but can give rise to multiple types of tissue. The cells took to their new home and after 8 days had assembled into a functioning heart that beat and pumped fluid, the researchers reported online 13 January in Nature Medicine. The new organ had only 2% of the pumping force of an adult heart, but Taylor says that she and her colleagues have since repeated the procedure with about 40 hearts and found that they can produce a stronger organ by adding more cells and giving them more time to grow.

More here.

The mosques of the medieval Islamic world are artistic wonders and perhaps mathematical wonders as well. A study of patterns in 12th- to 17th-century mosaics suggests that Muslim scholars made a geometric breakthrough 500 years before mathematicians in the West. Peter J. Lu, a physics graduate student at Harvard University, noticed a striking similarity between certain medieval mosque mosaics and a geometric pattern known as a quasi crystal—an infinite tiling pattern that doesn’t regularly repeat itself and has symmetries not found in normal crystals (see video below). Lu teamed up with physicist Paul Steinhardt of Princeton University to test the similarity: If the patterns repeated when extended infinitely, they couldn’t be true quasi crystals.Most of the patterns examined failed the test, but one passed: a pattern found in the Darb-i Imam shrine (seen in the first video above), built in 1453 in Isfahan, Iran. Not only does it never repeat when infinitely extended, its pattern maps onto Penrose tiles—components for making quasi crystals discovered by Oxford University mathematician Roger Penrose in the 1970s—in a way that is consistent with the quasi crystal pattern. Among the 3,700 tiles Lu and Steinhardt mapped, there are only 11 tiny flaws, tiles placed in the wrong orientation. Lu argues that these are accidents possibly introduced during centuries of repair. “Art historians always suspected there must be something more to these patterns,” says Tom Lentz, director of Harvard University Art Museums, but they were never examined with “this kind of scientific rigor.”

More at discover magazine. Do check out the video. It’s worth it.

i like treadmills.

thought i’d quote a friend of mine who wrote an email to me today. thanks kami. his thoughts are fairly similar to what i feel.

I get to work this morning and the first thing my Indian friend says to me is that he has a gift for me.  He then hands over the latest Economist edition to me and tells me I can keep the copy.  I look at the edition and see cover page with a large green dynamite and title “Pakistan:  The World’s Most Dangerous Place”.   A few seconds later, the same friend sends me a BBC link where Tata Companies announces mass scale production of world’s cheapest car (not to mention their last week’s news of potential acquisition of Jaguar and Land Rover).   I surf through BBC news and see the headline that there was yet another suicide bomb in Pakistan with 22 killed and that last year was Pakistan’s worst year in millitant suicide bombings with over 800 people killed.

While our neighbours are set to become an economic superpower in the next ten years, our nation continues to grow backward.  Dictatorship is feuling militancy whereas our so called democratic promoters install (not elect) a 19 year-old college freshman as the next potential leader to run the country.  Our people do not understand democracy and continue to support the Sharifs and the Bhuttos despite knowing that these same people took Pakistan to verge of bankruptcy in previous decades.

My Indian friend is so proud of his nation and tells me he cannot wait to go back and work in India.  On the other hand, for me the mere thought to return to my country makes me cringe.

I can sit here and blame the politicians, the feudals, the military, and the millitants.  I may not have stolen any money from Pakistan or deprived my nation from any civil rights. However, I am probably no better.  I am one of those millions of non-resident Pakistanis who complain about Pakistan but never did anything to help out our own nation.  We are nothing more than cop-outs who have deserted our country to make our personal lives better, and it makes me sad that we may potentially see the demise of our nation sooner than we can imagine.  Not sure how many of us would then feel guilty to see, it this happens, or would we then also blame our leaders for a few days and then get back to our daily lives of working to contribute to the western economies.

am i the only one i know not on facebook?

Why are diamonds so shiny and beautiful? A Japanese mathematician says it’s because of their unique crystal structure and two key properties, called ‘maximal symmetry’ and ’strong isotropic property.’ According to the American Mathematical Society (AMS), he found that out of all the crystals that are possible to construct mathematically, just one shares these two properties with the diamond. So far, his K4 crystal exists only as a mathematical object. And nobody knows if it exists — or if it can be synthesized