Mars Polar Lander as seen from the Mars Orbiter

Source: The Planetary Society

Book Meme

Better late than never, that’s what I say. There are some posts in my drafts section which are almost a year old. iA I will get a chance to cover all these. I was tagged by IslamAtHeart for a book meme. Here are the rules of the book meme.

1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123
3. Find the 5th Sentence.
4. Post the next 3 sentences.
5. Tag 5 people

The book closest to me is “The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty.” Here are the three sentences.

In the empiricist tradition, thoughts are grounded by discovering their causal connection to the world. In other words, the content of our thoughts is more or less “keyed” as Quine says, to causal stimulations of our sensory surfaces. “Two cardinal tenets of empiricism remain,” according to Quine “unassailable.”

As for tagging five people, all of my blogging friends have been tagged so there is no one left. :0

The Many Worlds Interpretation: Super Mario

Some people have a hard time getting their heads around the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics which basically states that at every moment our universe is split into many universes. Thus if at any moment we are confronted with many choices we actually do make all of these choices but in different universes. If it is still confusing then have no fear there is no Super Mario who can help you understand what is going on. Appearently someone superimposed many runs of a hacked version of Mario. Here is the link via BoingBoing. The name for this and related series of videos in Japanese is 自作の改造マリオ（スーパーマリオワールド）を友人にプレイさせる is “Making my friend play through my own Mario(Super Mario World) hack.”

So may be there are  many universes out there, in one of them Suroor is Her Royal Highness the Queen of Kingdom of Great Britain, Ireland and Northern Brittany.

Ten Thousand Miles (Part IV)

“Even a ten thousand mile journey starts with a single step.”

- Lao Tzu

Steampunk Watch

One of my side interests is steampunk. As I have stated before it can also be characterized as an aesthetic movement inspired by the Victorian Era. Lo and behold I give you the Steampunk watch. It looks nice but you would not want to wear it all the time.

Today is Singles Awareness Day

Today is SAD or Singles Awareness Day. Wishing everyone a happy SAD day or sad SAD day. Yeah its kind of confusing.

A Forger in Cairo

Just imagine the following, you are a British writer with international fame and you hear from a friend that your book has been selling well in Cairo. This sounds innocent enough right? There is only one problem with this story – you actually did not write the book! This is exactly what happened to Robert Fisk. To get to the heart of the problem, Robert Fisk himself went to Cairo hoping to find out who the forger was. What followed was a wild goose chase from point A to point B to point C and so on and do forth. Robert Fisk’s recounting of the events is funny in its own strange ways. Here is an excerpt:

There was a slim, cigarette-smoking Egyptian in a yellow smoking jacket with black velvet lapels blocking the doorway. “I want to buy a book,” I said softly, the winning smile – I’m afraid – of an undercover policeman suffusing my face. There were two tough, beefy men inside, shop assistants as you’ve never seen them before. I asked for a well-known volume on the life of Saddam Hussein.

“By Robert Fisk?” I was asked.

“Why yes, the very one!”

I followed one of the beefy men upstairs to the “Saddam Hussein biography” section. At which point, he darted back downstairs and retrieved the book from a secret pile behind the counter. “Thirty Egyptian pounds,” he said. I paid. Yes, I paid the equivalent of £2.86 for a book with my name on it which I never wrote.

Earthrise from the Moon

Image of Earthrise taken by the Japanese Space Agency’s Probe orbiting the moon.

Bulleh Shah – The People’s Poet

One of my friends sent this translation of one of the most famous verses from Bulleh Shah who was a sufi master and a great poet of the Punjabi Language.

Summon Bulleh Shah for Shah Inayat
has brought us to the door,
Whose love do I whirl bedecked
in varied shades of green and red.
Whilst dancing rapturously
Beloved I found thee;
Love for you makes me whirl in ecstasy.

Yunus Emre

This is something I wrote a while ago but since the message of jahandosts never get old, I don’t see any harm publishing it again.

In a time where there are lots of suffering all over the world, poems of Yunus Emre are a relief. For those who do not know him, he is another sufi that Anatolia has given birth. He lived sometime from 1240 to 1320. Hundreds of villages claim to be his birthplace or claim to host his tomb. Wherever he was born or died, his message is timeless. He says:

“I am not at this place to dwell,
I arrived here just to depart.
I am a well-stocked peddler, I sell
To all those who’ll buy from my mart “

What Yunus sells is food for the soul and the buyers are people from all different faiths:

“We regard no one’s religion as contrary to ours.
True love is born when all faiths are united as a whole.”
Yunus Emre calls humans of all faiths, all nations to come together and make peace:

“Come here, let’s make peace,
let’s not be strangers to one another.
We have saddled the horse
and trained it, glory be to God.”

Yunus also tells where his message is stored:

“Books are composed by the sages
Who put black words on white pages;
My sacred book’s chapters are all
Written in the hearts that love truly”

Source: Yunus Emre and Humanism by Turgut Durduran