Isaac Schrödinger

So not funny

My real analysis course at university was easier to understand than the motherboard naming scheme of ASUS.

PC trouble solved

The problem: the SSD would only work for an hour and then crash.

The reason: after approximately 5,000 hours of total usage, the SSD would start to crash ever hour; something was messed up in the core drivers.

So, I updated the firmware last weekend. No issues since then.

Work and no play

Started at my job around 8 a.m. Finished after 8 p.m. 

It's amazing how much reading and blogging I used to do before my full-time job. Now, at the end of the day I just want to listen to music or watch a TV show. Thinking requires too much effort.

I feel old.

The Avengers!

I watched it. Marvel's risky strategy has paid off. The movie was immensely entertaining. There were many good parts; both in terms of dialogue and action.

The first hour can at times seem sluggish as there's a fair amount of setup and exposition that needs to be endured. And there are times during the final battle when the special effects take over and things edge toward Bay's fetishistic fascination with hardware over everything else. Yet those are isolated moments in a jaw-droppingly intense 50-minute battle royale (with cheese). Every hero gets his/her time to shine, although some shine more brightly than others.

The Hulk got tremendous applause just moments after Dr. Banner shared his secret and later the audience was laughing out loud when he faced the main villain.

Another part I liked was just before the movie had started: the new trailer for The Dark Knight Rises.

Recognizing the poison

It is exceedingly rare to find a Muslim who doesn't reflexively support the Muslim world (the ummah) over the "evil" West. Hassan Nisar is that guy. Watch the video. The audio is in the Urdu language. The subtitles are mostly correct; there are a few minor errors but none of them alter the essence of what he said.

Related: My dad worked in Saudi Arabia for three decades. Upon his retirement, the Arabs told him to go back to his country. He wasn't allowed to buy a small property in Saudi Arabia and live there in his old age. The Saudis thought it a smart idea to give a large sum of retirement cash to a law abiding fellow and then kick him out of the country.

I had been in Canada for less than 10 years when complete strangers donated money to me so that I could hire a lawyer who would fight on my behalf. After a bit over 10 years here, I became a Canadian citizen.

The contrast between the pious Muslims and the wicked infidels is very stark.

Fading lithium-ion

That's right:

According to battery-testing firm Cadex Electronics, a fully charged lithium-ion battery will lose about 20 percent of its capacity after a year of typical storage. Increase the temperature to just above 100 degrees Fahrenheit—as in a hot attic, for example—and that number is 35 percent.

I bought a laptop for work two years ago. At the time I got a nice 5 hours of battery life. Last year, the time dropped to 4 hours. This month, the battery is running out of juice in about 3 hours. A software included in the laptop states that the battery has basically degraded to around 60% of its original capacity.

It sucks but that's just the nature of lithium-ion.

Link via Instapundit.

PC trouble

My PC has been behaving most erratically since Saturday.

The pattern is simple. It crashes 60-90 minutes after boot up. I don't think I've seen so many blue screens of death (BSODs) before in my life.

I have not installed any software this month; so that's likely not the issue. I have tested the CPU and RAM and they seem to be fine. What's frustrating is that after wasting almost the entire weekend I still don't know the cause of the problem. Motherboard? Power Supply? A miserable SATA cable dying a slow, annoying death? Who knows!

I've got more work coming up at my workplace in the next three weeks and now I have to deal with this headache. So, blogging will be lighter that usual.

Mini IMAX?

It was disappointing to watch an action movie on a newly constructed "IMAX" screen last Christmas. Why? Not because the movie wasn't entertaining. It's because the screen wasn't even close to the usual IMAX size. Click the image below to get a better view.

I'm not sure of the exact size of that screen but it certainly did not feel like IMAX. Apparently, this has been going on for many years. Cinemas are putting in "IMAX" screens within approximately the same space as regular screens and then charging $5 or more for the, er, experience.

Aziz Ansari was not amused. Here one can find a google maps guide to real IMAX and the new fake IMAX locations in the US. I wonder if someone has made a similar guide for Canada ...

Update
Found a guide for Canadian IMAX theatres. 

Those crazy women

A couple of years ago, I needed to get a work-related answer from a co-worker. So, I walked over to her desk. Her intense concentration was being directed at her computer. The website which she was checking out had numerous photos of ... wedding dresses.

I stood and watched for a few seconds and then asked her, "Why are you working so hard?"

"Oh." She grinned and clumsily minimized the browser. She was shopping around for her daughter's wedding.

Now, guys aren't angels. Usually, most of us check sports. But I've found women shopping for clothes, nail polish, shoes (what is up with women and shoes, seriously!), planning which restaurants they want to go to, checking out which vacation spots are reasonably priced, etc.

A dream

I walk into a computer store called Canada Computers. They are selling some uber high-end systems with a price tag of $6,000. I sit down with a customer service rep. I ask if they can build me a system with components chosen by myself. They say sure; it'll just cost an extra $50. I'm considering if I should go for it or just get extra RAM for my current system.

Then, I wake up.

I don't think I've ever dreamed of buying a computer before. I bought my last system in 2009. Perhaps, it's true. I'm afflicted with ... tech lust!

OMG!

I can kiss so many Asian girls.

I is smart!

Curious babies via Instapundit:

The babies were shown a video of three women who were bilingual speakers of French and English—languages the babies didn't know. Each woman was shown in turn saying sentences in one of the languages. Eventually, the baby got used to this and got bored. Then the language changed. Monolingual babies took no notice, but bilingual babies started looking at the video again. Other studies have shown that monolingual babies make the distinction until they are 6 months old.

Hmm. I wonder if I noticed that slight change between two similar languages when I was growing up. My mom speaks Punjabi but my dad speaks Urdu.

Must not nag

Alpha Game has a post on nagging.

There's no question it poisons a marriage. Just yesterday, I saw a woman nagging her boyfriend in the supermarket. They were likely in their early 20s. The guy was replying in a disgusting, appeasing manner but she just wouldn't stop berating him. I was in their proximity for a mere twenty seconds and I wanted out! 

Why do guys put up with such crap? Aren't these people interested in being partners instead of having a mother-child relationship?

To me, it's one of the things that's non-negotiable in a girlfriend or a wife: read the title of the post.

"I guess you wear red then!"

Geeks are Sexy:

Imitation is the sincerest form of annoyance.

I played this game in arcades in Pakistan. Brings back memories. The Sagat comment and Blanka dragging Balrog's drunken ass makes it hilarious.

Super cool

Earth Architecture via Instapundit:

By 400 BC, Persian engineers had mastered the technique of storing ice in the middle of summer in the desert.

Wow. That was just around the time of the Peloponnesian War.

These ancient refrigerators were used primarily to store ice for use in the summer, as well as for food storage, in the hot, dry desert climate of Iran. The ice was also used to chill treats for royalty during hot summer days and to make faloodeh, the traditional Persian frozen dessert.

No way! I didn't know that falooda in South Asia is a derivation of the original faloodeh from Persia. I've had it once in my life in the city of my birth. 

If I remember correctly, that falooda had rose syrup, vermicelli, milk, vanilla ice cream and pistachio. I consider it the Greatest Dessert Ever.

Coddled monsters

Vox Popoli links to reactions of various adults who received a Christmas gift not to their liking.

In my family the idea of gift-giving did not exist. We didn't even celebrate birthdays till my father caved in from pressure from all my siblings. Even then, on our birthdays, we would get around $50 as a gift. With my extended family it was worse. Most of my cousins don't know their exact birth day. Why? They never celebrate it. What's the point of knowing your own birthday when it's an insignificant date?

So, it's quite something to see pampered, spoiled brats who've grown up in one of the freest and richest societies in history to throw a hissy fit when they don't get their precious iPhone.

Understanding sexuality

One of the dumbest ideas paraded around is: Men and women are the same. The "differences" we see among them are imposed by the larger society.

Growing up with many sisters and brothers and then living in four countries has shown me otherwise. One of the biggest differences between males and females is in what they deeply desire. Those who're into the equality myth simply don't comprehend the complexity inherent in us.

Byron via Susan Walsh:

There are girls that I know who also get into a dark place from being alone, too, but they are hungry for a stable relationship, not sex, & in fact one night stands & friends with benefits seem to make them more, rather than less unhappy. The irony of that being, of course, that pretty much any woman reading this page right now could walk up to the nearest bar tonight & get the thing that men crave more than anything for nothing, with no work whatsoever. But they don’t, because that isn’t what they want.

Well said.

Cat ladies of tomorrow

Alpha Game:

The reluctance of women to admit that the choices they have made are responsible for the consequences they have realized is remarkable, although not surprising. But the concept is not that hard to grasp. If a woman is going to spend the 12 Prime Years from 20 to 32 chasing and involving yourself with unsuitable men, she is going to have to either learn to a) adjust her behavior and her sights or b) find herself childless and alone.

I know a woman like this at work. She's hot, single and 33.

She got a cat last year.

Nikon > Muhammed

Quite a few people are using google to search for the Nikon D800 and surprisingly my blog is showing up on the first page of links!

It's certainly an improvement over Muhammed in google images.

Unhappy liberation

Armed and Dangerous:

Women are hypergamous. They want to marry men who are bigger, stronger, higher-status, a bit older, and a bit brighter than they are. This is massively confirmed by statistics on actual marriages; only the “a bit brighter” part is even controversial, and most of that controversy is ideological posturing.

OK, so what happens when women get educated, achieve economic equality, etcetera? Their pool of eligible hypergamic targets shrinks; the princess marrying the swineherd is a fairytale precisely because it’s so rare. More women seeking hypergamy from a higher baseline means the competition for eligible males is more intense, and womens’ ability to withold sex vanishes even supposing they want to. Thus, college campuses today, and plunging marriages rate tomorrow.

That's probably one of the big reasons why I see so many miserable, single women at my workplace. They're lonely but also deeply averse to dating men who're less educated or wealthy or sometimes even at the same level of status. Such criteria rules out most men in their lives. I've seen men who're very interested in dating particular women but too often the women relegate them to LJBF territory.

It's a sad sight every time.

Anyway, read the entire post. There are many interesting comments at the end.

Is light slow?

Perhaps.

It reminds me of a lecture I attended in university. The speaker was an American astronomer. He started the talk by relaying what happened at the Toronto airport. The security person had asked him a few standard questions.

"So, what's your reason for visiting Canada?"

"I'm a professor. I teach astronomy. I'm here for a lecture series for a week or so."

"Astronomy, ay. What's that exactly?"

"Oh, I study the planets, stars and other galaxies. You know lots of peering through the telescope."

The security fellow was stunned.

"They pay you to do that!?"

Shadow and Light

A heavy blog post: ON THE EXISTENCE OF GODS.

A decade later

I went to visit my family in Saudi Arabia in December of 2001. My father worked with many Saudis in his office. He told me how they celebrated when they heard the news of 9/11. Only one Arab was not happy. My dad inquired about his sadness. This Arab said that he wished the twin towers had fallen on their side so that more death and carnage could have materialized but alas the damn towers crumbled straight down on their foundation.

Most Muslims are not and will not be terrorists but they sure don't mind in taking pleasure when the gruesome atrocities of their brothers are brought to light. Today, that moral support for terrorists and Jihad is still there.

I'm fortunate to be now living in the West where I don't have to follow their wretched religion. Here's what I wrote about my experience six years ago:

1. In Darkness

2. The Land of Trinity

3. IX . XI

4. In Delirium

A hot computer

I've been having some computer trouble in the last few days. Windows would randomly freeze for half a minute or more. Restarting the computer would take longer than usual. Internet connectivity would be an issue.

After some troubleshooting I found out that my CPU temperature was shooting over 90 degrees Celsius! So, my processor, instead of melting, was severely throttling itself which would cause the system to become unstable. I cleaned up the PC and reinstalled the CPU heatsink and it didn't help much which means that Intel provides crappy heatsinks with their processors. Not cool.

I went and bought a new heatsink from Noctua. Now, the temperatures are in the 30s. After some CPU stress testing, the maximum was ... 51 degrees Celsius.

Is God pissed?

Maybe.

I felt the earthquake at work. I knew within a second that it was an earthquake because I had felt a similar sensation in the summer of last year when we had another tremor. I was sitting in a chair and it felt like someone was slowly and methodically moving me around in a small circle. Last time it was utterly confusing, now ... meh.

Transactions in the SMP

Alpha Game:

In the majority of the blogs I have read, the dating scene is always referred to as the Sexual Market Place (SMP). This analogy is an apt one, but I never really considered its deeper significance. It makes sense as there is an exchange of goods between two people but it can be taken much further. During last night's discussion the implications of treating dating as a marketplace gained a great deal of weight.

Indeed. Having studied economics, many aspects of life make a lot more sense.

Lucifer's torture

Vox Popoli:

I've mentioned this before, but I still laugh every time I think of my father's summary of a dinner in which he was seated between two well-known social butterflies. "Now I know what Hell is like."

About a year ago there was a department meeting at my workplace. It was supposed to be "brief". The relevant part of it was approximately five minutes long but the meeting was stretched to an hour.

Why? Because the head of the department is a female idiot. There are scores of other words I can use to describe her but that's for a post in the future. She simply kept on repeating how she tried to accomplish X but she can't because of Y and also because Z is such an ass ...

After fifty minutes of the brief meeting I looked in the direction of a male coworker. Our eyes met and we silently communicated, "WTF!"

Fear and Fantasy

Dr. Helen: Do you ever wonder what your dreams mean?

Yes, I do. I had two strange dreams last month. They seemed like tiny parts of a much larger story. Make of them what you will.

1st dream:

I am a boy in a suburb with my kid friends and we hear news that a dragon is loose in the neighborhood. Yes, a fire breathing creature is burning up the area where I live. We're all scared. My friends run back to their homes. I stand there thinking: How does one fight a spawn of Smaug?

An old man dressed like a wizard approaches me and says that there's a way to stop the beast. He shows me a tablet which is the size of a small diary. It has the look of wood and clay. He tells me that displaying the magical tablet to the dragon will terrify him and he'll go away. However, the magic can only work if the maker of the tablet were to use it.

Then he hands me the tablet. I'm like, "Whaaaa".

"You made the tablet when you were very young."

Then, like a freaking movie, there's a flashback in which I see myself as a few months old and I'm having fun making this strange little wood-clay item.

"I then kept it. Today, you have to use it."

I'm so confused and terrified. The roar of the dragon gets near. I hide behind a wall of some house. I can feel the fire getting closer and apparently only I have the power to stop it.

I summon up the courage. I take my first step from behind the wall to face the music.

Then I wake up.

2nd dream:

1st point-of-view: I'm sleeping in a room of a giant building -- kinda like the White House -- and the noise of people outside the room wakes me up. I'm pissed. A few diplomats in sharp suits have just arrived and they're discussing an alarming security situation: A dirty bomb has been smuggled into the country.

Then, there's a strange noise that makes everyone shut up. Nobody knows where it's coming from. It's like a fluttering sound.

2nd point-of-view: There are many guards outside this building who notice this sound as well. They all look up. A huge wooden cube is falling very slowly. It has a parachute attached and that's the source of the noise. Suddenly the parachute bursts and the cube falls violently onto the lawn. It splinters and compresses but one still can't see what's inside.

The crash sends out this barely visible shockwave and when it reaches the guard, he's dead.

3rd point-of-view: A few kilometers away from the building a little girl is walking in a shopping district with her mother. All of a sudden they hear terrible screaming and screeching. In front of them dozens of people are running in a direction away from that building but they can't avoid this slow and somewhat visible shockwave as it passes through them.

The confused girl focuses on a young woman in the crowd. All she sees is a zoomed in image of the face of this woman. Slowly, hundreds of invisible scalpels are elegantly tearing up her face. The skin on her face seems to be dissolving away. She won't live long.

4th point-of-view: There is chaos in the city as thousands must have died. A band of uruk-hais are viewing the city from the top of a skyscraper and would you believe it, there's a machine gun mounted there! One of them grabs the gun, aims it practically straight down into the street below and starts shooting regular orcs.

Then I wake up and go, "What the hell!?"

Ontario is hot

The Canadian Press:

Several other Ontario cities, such as London and Hamilton, also saw their hottest nights ever, said Environment Canada senior climatologist Dave Phillips.

"Back in the famous heat waves of the past you could always count on the nights cooling off so the body could build back," he said.

"What's becoming more characteristic of our kind of heat waves now is not so much the excruciating high temperatures, it's the elevated minimum temperatures."

Indeed, it does suck. Though, I have experienced far worse.

When I was eight years old in Saudi Arabia, I had to take a bus to school -- a Pakistani institution of cruelty to be honest. The school bus assigned to my route was not air conditioned. Along that route was a giant electronic billboard which displayed the time of the day and then the temperature in Celsius and then the time and so on.

One ultra hot day, the bus stopped at a traffic signal. I had my seat window open and I could see that billboard.

The time was 2:49 and then the "2:" disappeared!

Hating Those Who Are Impure

Thanks to Tambi Dude who emailed this link:

Ten days before he was assassinated in January, my father, Salman Taseer, sent out a tweet about an Indian rocket that had come down over the Bay of Bengal: "Why does India make fools of themselves messing in space technology? Stick 2 bollywood my advice."

My father was the governor of Punjab, Pakistan's largest province, and his tweet, with its taunt at India's misfortune, would have delighted his many thousands of followers. It fed straight into Pakistan's unhealthy obsession with India, the country from which it was carved in 1947.

My grandparents were born in what's today called India. They migrated with their children to Pakistan. In hindsight, it wasn't a smart move.

Pakistan's existential confusion made itself apparent in the political turmoil of the decades after partition. The state failed to perform a single legal transfer of power; coups were commonplace. And yet, in 1980, my father would still have felt that the partition had not been a mistake, for one critical reason: India, for all its democracy and pluralism, was an economic disaster.

That's strange to read because all my life Pakistan has been deteriorating relative to India but before 1980 quite a few people would go to Pakistan for work. I've met many in Canada who once worked in Karachi -- the largest city in Pakistan with a view of the Indian ocean.

The reversal in the fortunes of the two countries—India's sudden prosperity and cultural power, seen next to the calamity of Muhammad Iqbal's unrealized utopia—is what explains the bitterness of my father's tweet just days before he died. It captures the rage of being forced to reject a culture of which you feel effortlessly a part—a culture that Pakistanis, via Bollywood, experience daily in their homes.

I can't remember a single Pakistani movie but I know the story lines of hundreds of Indian filims. Pakistan never had a unified culture. It was based on the foundation of a decrepit religion and that it seems is all they have. "We are Muslims, therefore we're awesome!"

Embrace The HUL

Alpha Game:

What the gamma needed here is Indifference Game, which is all about letting the wookie win. Did it matter what she said happened or didn't happen? Did he care one iota about the matter before she brought it up? It's hardly unheard of for women to say absolutely stupid and provably false things for no reason. So let them. You are not the Reality Police. Unless a woman has asked you to refine her mind or is showing an active interest in improving her capacity for reason, always leave her to her Happy Unicorn Land.

Wow. I've been doing that for quite a while -- leaving them in the HUL. Works like a charm.

The Gift of Sight

It takes me too much time to read a book than I initially think it would. Why? Work -- some of which I have to bring home, viewing blogs, keeping up with tech news, and so on eats a lot of time.

But now I have a few weeks off. I've been meaning to read a few books during the summer. I will go through some of Neal Stephenson's earlier work, for example, Snow Crash and The Diamond Age. I've read good things about John Keegan but haven't decided on which book to start with.

Earlier this year, I read The Lord of the Rings and now I want to start and finish The Chronicles of Narnia. Though, strangely, there's a lot of debate about in what order the series ought to be read. I'll stick to the publication order of the books.

Not-So-Solid SSD

Anand Lal Shimpi:

Let's start with the elephant in the room. There's a percentage of OCZ Vertex 3/Agility 3 customers that have a recurring stuttering/instability issue. The problem primarily manifests itself as regular BSODs under Windows 7 although OCZ tells me that the issue is cross platform and has been seen on a MacBook Pro running OS X as well.

How many customers are affected? OCZ claims it's less than two thirds of a percent of all Vertex 3/Agility 3 drives sold. OCZ came up with this figure by looking at the total number of tech support enquiries as well as forum posts about the problem and dividing that number by the total number of drives sold through to customers. I tend to believe OCZ's data here given that I've tested eight SF-2281 drives and haven't been able to duplicate the issue on a single drive/configuration thus far.

Well that sucks. A few people are having a problem with this expensive bit of technology but nobody knows exactly what's causing the problem. Ergo, it can't be fixed.

I was thinking of upgrading from my Vertex 120GB to a Vertex 3 240GB drive. But after reading a lot of horror stories I'm now reluctant. There seems to be an incompatibility issue with the new SSD and the overall system of those who are affected. So, going back to a store and exchanging the drive won't solve the problem!

The new solid state disk from OCZ kicks butt but needs to be more reliable given its huge price premium. I'll wait for the next generation tech that'll likely debut in 2012.

Testosterone Zone

The Gender Guesser guessed correctly! Via Vox.

Genre: Informal
Female = 127
Male = 840
Difference = 713; 86.86%
Verdict: MALE

Genre: Formal
Female = 109
Male = 365
Difference = 256; 77%
Verdict: MALE

I used the "The Blood Soaked Partitions" section from this essay.

Amusing

Searched for "women are idiots" on Bing. This post of mine shows up as the fourth website link.

Independence

Meredith F. Small:

How competent are 4-year-olds? They are competent enough to work. By “work,” I don’t mean on the factory line, or forced labor of any kind. Instead, I mean tasks that are, by any cultural standard, age-appropriate.

Look outside Western culture and watch children, even very small children, as they gather firewood, weed gardens, haul water, tend livestock, care for younger children and run errands. And no one complains because they are mostly outside and usually with other children.

Furthermore, child labour laws in the US set the minimum working age at 16. What exactly is wrong about a 13-year-old working at Walmart for a few hours during the weekend? I think too many conjure up an image of an oppressed, miserable child slaving away for 12 hours a day making not a penny more than minimum wage when "child labour" is mentioned.

I would have not mind working a little when I was young -- around 10-14 years of age. The problem was that I lived in Saudi Arabia. Only my dad could work in that foreign land. After hearing my complaints, my father offered me a small deal: wash the car, wax the car, then wipe off the wax; all under the blazing sun in the brutal Arabian heat.

My wage? $1.33. It would take me two hours to complete the work. I sure did understand the value of money a lot more after that.

The Duke Returns

After 14 years of development hell, next month Duke Nukem will come again.

I used to play basically three computer games when I was in high school. Doom, Quake and Duke Nukem. Ah, the pixelated glory days of gaming. Anyway, it'll be fun to see just how more uncouth the character has become.

The Morning Star

Most Muslims surveyed would answer, "THE JOOOOS" in answer to the question in the title here.

Seriously, it's a very interesting post. It reminds me of a wretched woman at my workplace who once went to India to visit her relatives. Her teenage daughter upon witnessing grinding poverty for the first time gasped and asked, "Why mom, why! How can God be so cruel!? Waaaaah."

Her logic boiled down to: The world is not nice. Ergo, God is evil -- which quickly morphs into God doesn't exist.

The Curse of Credentials

100 Reasons Not to Go to Graduate School:

The problem is that the number of available jobs is vastly outnumbered by the number of people applying for them. There are simply too many PhDs produced every year for the higher education establishment to absorb them all, despite the absurd degree to which it has absorbed them into jobs that have nothing to do with traditional research and teaching. Today, universities hire doctors of philosophy to be in charge of their dormitories, alumni associations, and police departments.

I wanted to do a Master's degree in my field when I was an international student in Canada. I talked to a professor at my university who I respect very much. He was quite candid. He told me that the university has a certain number of spots, let's say 25, for Canadian students in that specific Master's program every year. However, there's one or maybe two spots for all international applicants in that program.

This meant that my competition would be mighty tough and indeed it was.

Later, I talked to him again. My grade in his advanced fourth-year course was an A+ and I didn't make the cut in the Master's program. Yet, in order to fill all the Canadian slots, the university had accepted a female student whose grade in the same required course was a B-. Usually, they rejected students who had below A- in that very important course.

I do wonder about the trajectory of my life had I been accepted ...

Link via Instapundit.

Extreme With Fine Print

Great:

The Extreme 105 Mbps service, which also offers up to 10 Mbps upload speeds, is available for new or existing customers at an introductory rate of $105 per month for 12 months as part of their Triple Play bundle.

Totally lame:

Of course, with that same 250 GB bandwidth cap still there, it just means that you can hit that limit faster than you could before.

My current connection is 5 Mbps down with unlimited bandwidth. To me, that's a superior service than what Comcast is offering.

A Cursed Land

One of the best articles I've ever read about the ugly nature of Dubai:

The Gulf is the proof of Carnegie’s warning about wealth: “There is no class so pitiably wretched as that which possesses money and nothing else.” Emiratis are born retired. They waft through this city in their white dishdashas and headscarves and their obsessively tapered humorless faces. They’re out of place in their own country.

Almost the entire Arab society in Dubai is like this -- spectacularly spoiled.

Westerners go there for the money. Then there's the largest population group in Dubai:

The workers. The Asians: Indians, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans, and Filipinos. Early in the morning, before the white mercenaries have negotiated their hangovers, long before the Emiratis have shouted at the maid, buses full of hard-hatted Asians pull into building sites. They have the tough, downtrodden look of Communist posters from the 30s—they are both the slaves of capital and the heroes of labor. Asians man the hotels; they run the civil service and the utilities and commercial businesses; they are the clerks and the secretaries, the lawyers, the doctors, the accountants; there isn’t a single facet of this state that would function if they didn’t maintain it. No one with an Emirati passport could change a fuse.

How are these Asians treated in Dubai?

They can’t become citizens, though some are the third generation of their family to be born here. They can be deported at any time. They have no redress. Many of the Asian laborers are owed back pay they aren’t likely to get.

My father legally lived and worked in Saudi Arabia for over three decades. Upon his retirement, the company gave him his pension and told him that he had a few months to pack up and leave the country. Such a warm and wholesome bunch these Arabs.

Link via Instapundit.

Free Will

Dr. Helen:

A reader (thanks!) sent me this interesting video with a panel of female students from the University of Georgia talking to a reporter at MSNBC about college guys and their slacking. When the conversation turned to their personal lives, the women talked about how hard it was to find a high-level guy, how guys had the advantage and just didn't care and showed up for dates in a dirty t-shirt holding a bag of condoms while they were taking their time trying to dress up and look nice for the date.

This was one of the most confusing aspects of my early life in the West. I was around 15 and studying at an American high school. There were a few wretched resident kids there who smoked not just tobacco, drank, broke curfew, reeked like a party of skunks and yet had some of the best looking girls in their orbit. I just didn't understand how and why so many girls would choose such horrible characters as their boyfriends.

Then there were the hard working students who took Advanced Placement courses, were members of the National Honor Society, earned numerous awards and yet most girls treated them like lepers. (Awww, you belonged to this group, didn't you? -- Ed. Shut up! -- Isaac.)

Today, I understand the "logic" more clearly but still it's a sad state of affairs.

No Fun in Islam

Mike T left a link to my blog in the comments at What's Wrong With The World. Thanks!

However, the subject matter is very depressing: child abuse. I lived in Saudi Arabia for over a decade and in that time I attended a Pakistani school. Beatings at home and in the school were the norm.

In Darkness:

... the teacher had had enough. He got up. The entire class went silent. He went over to the student and started slapping him. The student covered his face. The teacher started to slap and punch him on the neck and the back with each hit more forceful than the last. The kid sitting next to the student got up from the desk and stepped away. The teacher kept on brutally beating the student. The student started crying and fell to the ground within the desk. The teacher grabbed the front of the desk with his left hand and the back with his right. He then started to kick the bawling student. He kicked him for about 20 seconds. He then went to his desk while swearing. No-one said a word.

The whole process of learning is associated with physical pain. Most of my classmates, myself included, would simply memorize material to avoid beatings. We didn't understand or comprehend much of anything.

This is one of the many reasons why the Muslim world is an intellectual wasteland.

Windows Overload

Upgrading through every version of Windows.

It's quite something. I started with Windows 95. Oh, to be a noob. It took me a while to understand DOS, ROM, RAM, VGA, pixels, motherboard, video card, sound card, etc. Now, I can buy the physical parts and assemble the beast myself.

Society Pays

Vox Popoli:

Chivalry in the modern sense presumes that women are of intrinsically more value to men. This was true when most Western women were serious about fulfilling their primary role as propagators of mankind. But since women have by and large abandoned that role and given priority to their self-esteem, education, and occupation instead, there is no longer any justification for chivalric behavior applied broadly to the female sex in general. Each woman must be judged worthy or unworthy of such treatment on her own merits, and in the absence of any information, the assumption must be that she is unworthy.

A woman at my workplace was talking about the dating process last year. I vividly remember one thing that she said: You know, I'm a feminist, but when a guy takes you out on a date, he'd better pay.

I've Been There!

I was at this station after my hearing in front of the Refugee Board was over.

The Islamic Teaching Method

The Guardian via Jihad Watch:

Police have arrested a man concerning alleged assaults on children at a mosque after viewing a Channel 4 documentary screened on Monday.

Dispatches, Lessons in Hate and Violence, secretly filmed a man apparently hitting and kicking children during Qu'ran lessons at a school in the Markazi Jamia mosque at Keighley, West Yorkshire.

An Islamic school in Birmingham in the same documentary, where a preacher was filmed making offensive remarks about non-Muslims, said it would close early for half-term, amid fears pupils could be the target of far-right groups.

Muslims throughout the world preach how infidels hate Islam and wish only to hurt Muslims. Yet, everyday, countless Muslim children are brutally beaten up by their instructors and not a fuss is made by the parents, the schools or their broader culture.

I know. I lived in such a society for a decade.

Our Urdu teacher was once talking to a few students in the front of the class. A few rows back, a student was causing a ruckus. The bearded teacher told him to shut up and he piped down for a few minutes. The teacher called him by name the second time and again he was quiet for a short while.

Finally, the teacher had had enough. He got up. The entire class went silent. He went over to the student and started slapping him. The student covered his face. The teacher started to slap and punch him on the neck and the back with each hit more forceful than the last. The kid sitting next to the student got up from the desk and stepped away. The teacher kept on brutally beating the student. The student started crying and fell to the ground within the desk. The teacher grabbed the front of the desk with his left hand and the back with his right. He then started to kick the bawling student. He kicked him for about 20 seconds. He then went to his desk while swearing. No-one said a word.

Drawing The Line

Kafir leaves a comment:

I am surprised that you can still support pak cricket team despite what goes on in that country and despite the pak cricket team being so religious.

I've been watching, following and reading about Pakistan cricket for twenty years. I do not think that by continuing to do so that I'm somehow supporting their views or religious beliefs. It has simply become a habit. The only manner in which I "support" them is by pointing out their idiocy and by commenting on their players and matches.

In a related way, my favorite music composer is a Muslim guy: A. R. Rahman. I've been listening to his music for over fifteen years. I've supported him more than any cricket team by buying dozens of his movie soundtracks. Am I supporting his views or beliefs if I buy stuff from him?

I'm unsure about where to draw a line. I just think that it doesn't go through cricket or music.

Usage Based Billing II

Well, that was quick:

Canada's government will block a regulatory ruling that effectively stops small Internet providers from offering unlimited downloads, the industry minister said.

Smart move from Prime Minister Harper and the Conservatives.

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper ordered a review of the CRTC ruling on Tuesday, a day after the opposition Liberals said they would raise the issue in Parliament. The left-leaning New Democratic Party also complained.

Excellent.

Usage Based Billing

I'll be following this evolving story very closely:

A recent ruling that changes how the country's largest Internet service providers charge their customers is raising hackles in the online community amid fear it could lead to higher bills for heavy users.

Joining that chorus of concern Tuesday was none other than Prime Minister Stephen Harper — on Twitter, no less.

I've been using an ISP that charges a flat monthly rate for unlimited bandwidth. However, starting next month this company will be forced to limit the monthly bandwidth at a certain amount (25 GB) and if I wish to download or upload more, then I've to buy additional bandwidth blocks in advance or pay hefty charges for going over the limit.

Today, it's quite easy to go over that limit in one day, let alone a month:

Some lower-end high speed accounts offered by Canada's large ISPs include only 25 GB of downloading a month, the equivalent of about 12 hours of Netflix viewing in high definition, with additional usage charges that can be as much as $5 per GB for the cheapest plan, depending on the provider.

I've been living in Canada for over ten years. I've yet to see a significant improvement in the internet service where I live. It's not that I can't afford better service -- it's simply not available. Now, the whole enterprise is actually being made worse!

Netflix chief executive Reed Hastings recently said the download caps set by Canadian service providers could be "a significant negative" for his company.

Of course. A lot of the ISPs also provide cable TV service. They'd be cutting into their own profit if they offered unlimited bandwidth. It's easier to limit bandwidth and thus smash the online competition.