Information Junky

So yesterday I arrived at work and found out that we don't have an Internet connection. A colleague of mine and I tried to fix the problem but after checking everything we decided that the problem was from outside our network. We just had to wait till somebody else arrived who could fix the problem. I sat at my desk and since there was nothing I could do without an Internet connection I just started killing time doing whatever I could do with a computer without Internet.

Ten minutes later I found out I was just looking through openSUSE software catalog, reading descriptions and finding about software packages I didn't know about. I stopped for a moment to think about what I was doing. It appeared that I could do nothing else besides going through some sort of information. Had I become an addict to information? It certainly appears so. I've noticed that if I'm not reading something on the Internet, I feel numb and anxious. I have tried it. I've tried getting out of my chair, trying to practice Piano, read a newspaper, call a friend or do anything besides killing time on Wikipedia, and I immediately feel I want to get back at my computer and forget about everything else.

This can be at least part of the reason why my grades have fallen lately. I don't study, so what can I expect? My advisor and my instructors are not happy with me. I seem to need to refocus.

Alcoholics and drug addicts have support groups to help them quit. I haven't heard of a support groups for informaholics. Maybe I can find something online. :) You see even now that I feel I have a problem I'm blogging about it! There's something seriously wrong with me. I need another big dose of information to calm down!

Teabags and Cigarettes: The Legend of a Cafeteria

I spent six years of my life to get my bachelor's degree at IUST (Iran University of Science and Technology, or Elm-o-San'at). If you ask me what is the most vital part of IUST life, I will answer "the cafeteria;" there is no doubt about that. Others seem to agree with me. In just a few days the IUST cafeteria page on Facebook has more than 550 fans, and counting. (This is also a testimony to the fact that the government censorship of the Internet has practically no effect. Facebook is blocked, but everyone is on Facebook.)

We're talking about the boys' cafeteria of course. In Iran there are separate cafeterias for the boys and the girls. The girls sometimes came to our cafeteria though, but I never saw the girls' cafeteria during all those years. A female classmate of mine once told me that their cafeteria more like a dungeon. The girls never seemed to find their cafeteria very important. As to the the boys', the complete opposite was true. The cafeteria had sort of a religious importance to us. We used to joke that it's a "vajeb" (Islamic mandatory) to show up at the cafeteria everyday.

The quality of the food served at the legendary cafeteria was poor, so what was so interesting about it? I have two words for you, teabags and cigarettes. Of course, cigarettes weren't sold in there, we had to buy it from outside the campus. But then, we would come to the cafeteria, get teabags and hot water in paper cups, sit with our friends (and there were always a few people we knew in there) and kill endless time talking about trivial things.

That's all I miss now from my IUST days: a cup of tea, a bag of cigarettes and a few friends to kill time with forgetting everything else in our life.

A Crazy 50000-Word Month

A month ago I started this crazy idea to write a 50000-word novel in one month (the same idea as the one behind the National Novel Writing Month). I'm proud to announce that I succeeded. It's not a great or even okay novel, that was never the point of this practice. The only point was to write a 50000 novel (or at least a 50000 word text of fiction) and I did it.

The story didn't go exactly as I had planned it in my mind. Most of the characters just emerged as I was writing. In the whole, I think it was a worthy practice. As I said in my previous post, I didn't use Persian, my native language, but English which is my second language. I am very confident with my command of English, but I found out that I know only so much. There were several occasions that I had trouble putting what I had in my mind into words. Sometimes I had even trouble wording what I wanted to say in Persian. I didn't do this very frequently though, as I believe that during every translation parts of the meaning are lost and so if I'm writing in English I think in English. The trouble is, I have a very visual imagination. I make pictures of what I'm thinking in my mind, I see them clearly but I have trouble putting them into words, describing them as I see them clearly. If there's one thing I learned from this exercise, it was that I need a lot of more practice describing events, things and especially people. This last one has always been troublesome for me. If someone asks me how someone else looks like, I'll be totally at a loss as to how to describe them. I see the other person clearly in my mind, but I just don't know how to describe the image.

I'm not going to despair though. Many great writers wrote their first great novels in their fifties or sixties. I still have time. Who knows I might be one of them one day.

And as I promised to myself, I am not going to let anyone see what I've written. It's just embarrassing. It can wait. Maybe I'll be later able to rewrite the story in a better shape, or recycle it in another work.

One of my major reasons to undertake this crazy adventure was to quantize my knowledge of English vocabulary. I used this simple Python program to count the words.

import sys

filename = sys.argv[1]
text = unicode("")

with open(filename, "r") as f:
  text = f.read().lower()

new = ""
for ch in text:
  if ch in "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz ":
      new += ch
  elif ch == '\n' or ch == '\x0c':
      new += ' '

text = new

words = text.split()
u = set(words)
print sorted(u)
print len(u)

When I give my novel as input to this program, I get 4082 words. So how does that compare? Let's see how many words are there in some other works of fiction. To be fair, I take the first 268458 characters of these novels (that's the length of my own novel):

Lucky (my brilliant novel!): 4082

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (J. K. Rowling): 4980
Poison Study (Maria V. Snyder): 5857
Magic Study (Maria V. Snyder): 5304
Fire Study (Maria V. Snyder): 5278
Twilight (Stephenie Meyer): 5433
New Moon (Stephenie Meyer): 5421
The Door into Summer (Robert A. Heinlein): 6011

So I know about as much as 82 percent of J. K. Rowling's vocabulary, 74 percent of Maria V. Snyders's, 75 percent of Stephenie Meyer's and 68 percent of Heinlein's. Impressive! (All right, I know that's probably a very weak measure, but it's a measure anyway, and I like numbers.)

Words, Vocabulary, and the One Month Novel

I'm into languages. No doubt about that. And I am an engineer, so I have a love of numbers, too. It's been for some time that I've been wondering about words and vocabulary. How many words are there in a work of fiction for example. I mean how many unique words. Is there any difference between different languages. I've been wondering if there are more words used in English than in Persian. I'm not talking about how many words each language has, or how many words can be made, but how many are actually used.

And then, there is the more difficult question of the difference between speaking and writing. In Persian, the written language is quite different with the spoken one. It is another question I've been wondering about. Aren't there more Persian words spoken than written. It seems so to me, but being an engineer, I need proof. I need numbers and graphs.

The third question I have is my own vocabulary. How many words do I use? How many words can I use? Is my vocabulary as vast as I like to think it is?

The second question is rather difficult, and I don't have a solution for it. The first and the third are easier to approach. Of course, there are still difficulties. What is a word? Are plan and plans two words or one? What is English? What is Persian? The boundaries of languages is not very easy to define either. Still, since I want to make comparisons the exact definitions and the exact numbers are not important. I can consider plan and plans two separate words, or the same word, using the same approach for different inputs and the results remain fairly comparable.

I'm going to plan a few experiments which I might write about later, but I am going to start a related project for now which I can later use as an input to my other experiments. My current project is writing a one month novel. The same idea behind NaNoWriMo. If you are not familiar with NaNoWriMo, it is an annual competition to write a 50000 word novel in one month. It takes place every November, and since I'm not going to wait until next November, I'm doing it now on my own. I started on February 12, and I'm going to finish it by March 14. NaNoWriMo winners are all those who have finished their work. There is no emphasis on quality, just quantity, so that's what I'm going to do, too. I've written 8750 words by now. It's not a great story, but if I can finish it, at least I have a rough draft of my very first novel.

If you're wondering how the hell someone is supposed to write 50000 words in one month, you might want to read Chris Baty's No Plot? No Problem! I'm sure you'll enjoy it even if you don't want to write a novel ever.

If you're curious about my story, it's called Lucky (working title) and it's about a boy who finds out he is luckier than the average person. I intend it to be a fantasy novel (since I am a HUGE fan of fantasy) but it can go anywhere from where it is. Here's a few paragraphs from the first chapter titled The Monster.

My friends used to think that I cheat. Even I sometimes thought that I cheat. What else could it be? Luck? That was one theory, but not a very likely one. Lucky people, apart from me, are only stuff of legends. You hear people saying, my cousin Farsheed, is such a lucky man. Anything he touches becomes gold. He buys a house, and tomorrow real estate prices skyrocket. He sells his house, next thing you know we are in economic depression. But these are legends. If you get to know the said cousin, you will find him a man with great economic sense. He buys and sells not randomly, but calculatingly. Not me. For me, it happened like this. A friend would invite us to play Mensch. We would start by rolling the die, and I was usually the one who got the six first. As the game continued, my friends used to find that I'm likely to get a four, if one their pieces is four fields ahead of mine, and a five if its five fields ahead. Mensch is supposed to be a game of pure chance. No thinking is required. Nothing serious. Just play and enjoy. But when I am involved, everything changes.

That was why I got less and less invitations to play with my friends. They didn't like to play a cheater. At first I tried to explain, that I can't explain why it is happening. “Freak accidents happen,” I used to say. I didn't add that they tend to happen around me a lot more often, and they're usually to my advantage.

They didn't buy it. “You're cheating.” They used to say, “You're not supposed to get a six right at the beginning of the game.” Not that they knew anything about probabilities. They were believers of the Murphy's Law, though they didn't like it when they were always the ones to be the victim of the Law.

But games of chance were not the only reason I got separated from my friends and classmates. At school, teachers only tended to pick me when I was prepared for the topic. It rarely happened that I was not ready and teacher would ask me a question. On the rare occasions that it did happen, I saw triumphant looks in my classmates' eyes.

So, school wasn't at all fun for me. When I started college, it was with a relief to start a new life, with new people that didn't know anything about my freakishness. Probability classes were the worse things in this new life. It was like the lecturer was deliberately taunting me. Dice and coins were always a touchy subject with me. Colored balls were soon added to the list. “There are eight red balls, five green balls, and twelve white balls in a bowl. Blindfolded, you take three balls from the bowl, one at a time and without replacing them. How probable is it that the third one is green?”

When I would see such questions, I was tempted to answer, “It depends on who is taking the balls.”

It was after one particularly nasty Probability class that I decided to quantify me freakishness. I guess that proves that I am a real freak. I took a coin and started to count how many tails I get and how many heads. I flipped the coin two hundred times. 109 heads, 98 tails. Damn it. So how is it supposed to happen? Then I notices two people coming. I couldn't hide what I was doing fast enough. Mohsen was coming towards me, with a huge smile on his face. I had tried to ignore him as much as I could, because he was a betting person. The ideal candidate to blow my new cover as a normal fifty-fifty person. But this time I decided the hell with it. Who cares what these idiots think about me. “I do,” said a small voice in my head, but I ignored it. Apparently he'd been watching me for some time and decided that I really was crazy. Not that it mattered to him. After all, he was crazy too. Beside him, was his annoyingly ever present girlfriend, Sima. I couldn't read the emotion on her face. Was it consent, curiosity, or something else? I couldn't tell.

“So who won? You or you?” said Mohsen, “Doing some lab after class? Deciding if your coin is fair or not?”

I know. It's not very good, but remember I'm after quantity for now, not quality. If it goes well, I'm gonna find out how many English words I can use in a fairly large written work. And I'm announcing what I'm doing here, so I can't back away later. Or at least I hope I won't. Wish me luck.

Westernized

I never paid much attention to the government's "westernization" (or rather, anti-westernization) propaganda and I don't make my choices based on what is Iranian and what is not. But my current situation is beyond that. English has become an indispensable part of my process of thinking. I write my notes half in English, half in Persian. I think intermittently in English and in Persian. I even frequently dream in English! Now that is a bit too much, but not quite unexpected. I'm suspecting that I'm actually using English more than my native Persian despite the fact that I'm living in a Persian-speaking country.

I took a moment to think about my daily routine. when I'm at home, I'm usually either reading (almost always in English), or listening to audio books or music (both in English) or watching movies (again in English) or study (not very much, and in English naturally). When I'm out, and I don't go out unless it is necessary, I use Persian for communicating with others, which I keep
to a minimum. I rarely talk and I almost never listen (preferring to listen to audio books or occasionally music).

I never thought such thing could be possible. I used to think that even when people live in societies with languages other than their native tongues, their going to continue to use their first language for thinking. Now I see, it is even possible to stay in the society you've been born into, and change your thinking language. Interesting.

I think I am now officially westernized!

From an Islamic Republic towards an Islamic Government

Etemad-e-Melli newspaper on its March 5, 2009 issue had an interesting report on the Religious Democracy Conference held by the Imam Khomeini Educational and Research Institute of Qom. The report correctly calls it "a conference by the critics of democracy," for almost everyone in the conference opposes democracy. The views of the holders and participants of the conference, among which are Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi and some of his students, are most illuminating especially because the coup d'etat President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is known to be a faithful follower of Mesbah Yazdi.

The first presenters while believing that literal obedience from the principals of democracy is against the teachings of Islam, continue to say that its possible to domesticate democracy into the Islamic state. Then comes Mesbah Yazdi himself. He says those who talk about domesticating democracy are talking from "an ugly extremistly submissive" point of view. He believes the complete accepting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is against Islamic judicial instructions such as execution and amputation (of hands), and hence not acceptable. He continues that Ayatollah Khomeini did not believe that the the government needs popular support to be legitimate. He says that while Khomeini has argued that the pre-1979 Imperial regime of Iran was unpopular and hence illegitimate, he used the popularity argument only for the sake of the argument and did not believe that Islamic government should have popular support. Those who come after Mesbah Yazdi are (if possible) even more extremist. Hojjat-al-Islam Haji Heydar argues that popularity is not even acceptable for the purposes of an argument. Asserting that Velayat-e Faqih is not the democratic pillar of our government, he says undemocratic institutions should outrank democratic ones. There should be a high council of 45 faqihs that outranks the popularly elected "lower" parliament.

This is only a sample of the beliefs of those who are gaining more and more power in Iran. Mesbah Yazdi is believed to have issued a Fatwa permitting election fraud. And this is only one of the horrible things attributed to him. But all of the dreadful rumors aside, the mere opinions of his presented here is enough to know what kind of person we're dealing with. And these are not the kind of people that stop at the borders of Iran. Their goal is global domination as is the goal of Islam. If they are not stopped right now, there might come a time soon that is too late.

There's one last thing that I owe to the Ayatollah to mention here. As much as I despise this man, he is at least frank about his beliefs on democracy. There are many others in the ranks of the Islamic Republic that more or less believe in the same things but try to hide their beliefs under the masquerade of their sham elections.

Voice for the Voiceless

I hear that rajanews.com and farsnews.com, two government-funded hardline Iranian news agencies, are not accessible from non-Iranian IP addresses. I tried to verify this by using a few proxy servers I have access to outside Iran and it seems to be correct. But why should a news agency limit its audience on purpose? Not unless, of course, because they have different recipies for the news they "make" for people inside and outside Iran. The lies they easily sell to Iranians with severed accesses to the outside world would not sell so easily to people who have access to all the news sources in the world. They need more delicacy, which leads me to my point: Press TV.

Press TV is an Islamic Republic funded news network for the English speaking audience. If you're reading this outside Iran, I beg you, do not fall for their seemingly independent point of view. I have seen people who, in search of an alternative news source besides the mainstream media, fall for Press TV. This is a mistake, it's jumping out of the frying pan into the fire. Consider this: Press TV advertizes itself as "the voice for the voiceless." While the seventy million people of Iran, the people whose country's wealth is being spent on PressTV, has no voice in any of the Islamic Republic media, how they can "give voice to the voiceless?" You want a news source better than the mainstream media? It's fine. But go somewhere else. Anything else would be better than the Islamic Republic's "news making machine."

Update: Iain Dale and Nick Ferrari have decided not to appear on Press TV ever again. Read about their reasons here and here.

Now I'm officially an owl

I go to sleep in the morning and wake up at night. I start with a meal which is more like dinner, and a few hours after that a breakfast like meal and an hour or two after that, something like an "afternoon tea." I might have an ice cream too, while starting studying around 3:00 AM. Maybe I should start making up more proper names for my meals. Crazy life, isn't it?

This deserves a Guiness World Record

Ahmadinejad seriously deserves the world record for the most blatant remarks in the history of human kind.

As IRIB News reports (IRIB is the Islamic regime's gigantic media machine), he told Sunday Times reporter, "In Iran, women have more rights than men."

Even much worse than that, also reported by IRIB News, is what he told the Economist reporter, "The freedom here is nearly absolute because people can tell anything they want."

I may vomit.

Call your parents every two hours!

I went to university today, only to find that the exams have been postponed. Our university is actually one of the last to do so despite the announcement by the Ministry of Science that no exams are to be postponed.

I met one of my professors though, and after a few moments of talking he suddenly asked me if I live alone or with my parents. When I told him that I live alone and my parents live in another city he said, "You know your parents are very proud of you -you're not a father so you may not understand now- and they care so much about you. You should call them every two hours and reassure them that you're safe."

That's what he said. The situation is grave!

Partly Blocked

I just noticed that when I try to open my post about Mohammad Ali Fardin, I get the infamous "Access to this website is blocked" message (that's a loose translation of the Persian message). It's weird. I mean I've written worst things about the regime and none of my other posts are blocked. I thought that this might be because of a "forbidden word" in the URL (weird blocking cases can happen when a URL has forbidden words in it), but this doesn't seem to be the case since I can view the page in Google cache. My only conclusion is that that single page for some reason has been blocked.

Hooray! I finally pissed them off. It won't be long they will be coming to my door to arrest me. Time to go into hiding!

Back to Revolution

I hear cries of crowds from some distance. At first, I thought it's the neighbor's TV. The Islamic Republic loves to show lengthy footage of its fake demonstrations. "Damn it. Why don't they turn it down?" I told myself, but then I realized it's not just from one direction. It comes from all around me, and from the roofs. I listened trying to distinguish what they were saying. Then I realized what I'm hearing; "Allah-o-Akbar!" which means "God is great." Now this is a religious chant, but every Iranian knows of the last time this happened: during the 1979 revolution, the chanting now is a sign of resistance. And this time, the chanting is against the Islamic regime itself.

I'm not religious at all, and in fact I very much dislike religious chantings, but this time I was deeply touched. Many times during past few years, and especially yesterday after the result of that fraud of an election was announced, I've told myself that there is no hope of change for Iran, but maybe I am wrong. I still look at it with great skepticism, but I can't help thinking "Maybe there is still hope."

We can go on and slit our wrists

I haven't had a good day. I didn't get to sleep enough, I couldn't study enough for tomorrow's exam, and I was, and am, so angry, so mad, so furious that I could hardly concentrate on what I've been doing. And now, I just can't go to sleep.

Last night, I was awake, following every piece of news that I could lay my hands on how the election result was going on. From the first minutes, Ahmadinejad was ahead with more than 60 percent of the votes. This came as a shock. It couldn't be. But it was. My first impression was that this was the natural result of the fact that the first results published belong to rural areas and small towns where Ahmadinejad has most of his supporters. When I got to sleep at about 6:00 AM though, half of the votes had been counted and there was no change. Ahmadinejad kept his margin. I was quite uneasy. So I got to sleep with deep suspicions and when I woke up what I saw was Ahmadinejad declared winner, with almost the same result as last night.

So what happened? Were we actually deluded to think that Musavi had enough supporters to win the election, as The Guardian's Abbas Barzegar suggests so? Were we just tricked into generalizing what we saw in Tehran to all of Iran? I don't think so. As a matter of fact, I'm willing to bet anything that the result they published had nothing to do with what people put in the poll boxes. Musavi and Karrubi have already published a list of the violations they saw during the election. I'm not going to reiterate them here. I'm only listing the most important reasons that make me sure the whole election was a joke.

• I had read in Musavi's website that his election code was 77. When I came at the polling station I saw a list of candidates. Next to Musavi's name I saw the number 4. I was going to write that number actually, but then I asked one of the present officials and he showed me another list, a smaller and less noticeable one, which showed the code numbers. The list started with Ahmadinejad, whose code was 44 and ended with Musavi, 77. I'm sure many people just wrote 4, and the Interior Ministry officials where more than happy to correct 4 to 44.
• During last night several preliminary results where published. At one point Mohsen Rezaee's votes actually dropped from 633048 to 587913!
• Mehdi Karrubi's campaign organization is said to have more members than the his votes in the election results. Are we supposed to believe that even his own people didn't vote for him (while Karrubi, was very much popular at least within the universities).
• Musavi's campaign has announced his representatives have been denied (in various ways) overseeing the process of election in half of the polling stations.
• The ratio of votes for Musavi over that of Ahmadinejad's at any given announcement was following a straight line with very very little divergence. This was also true for the ratio of votes for all pairs of candidates.
• Even those who believe we've been deluded admit that in Tehran Musavi had many supporters. Since the Tehran metropolitan area consists of more than one fifth of the population of Iran, it is only natural to think that after adding Tehran votes, the results would change even if it is for a few percents. But the ratios remained pretty much the same way as before.
  
• And the last and most important reason: The turn-out in yesterday's election was 85 percent, while 48 percent voted in the run-off poll four years ago --the reason Ahmadinejad was elected in the first place since the number of people who didn't vote was more than those who voted for him. In Iran, voting and not voting are both political decisions. Many people don't vote since they don't want to legitimize the regime. So it is easy to see that those who do not vote, are not the type to go and vote for Ahmadinejad after many years of not voting. After all, voting is our "religious and sacred duty" as the Supreme Leader and other Islamic Republic supporters tell people. Ahmadinejad's god-fearing supporters simply cannot have committed such sins in the past. They have always been voters. In the end, there is no way, this 38 percent part of the constituents had had voted for Ahmadinejad. That means he couldn't have had 63.62 percent of the votes.

The election was a fraud, and a blatant sort of fraud that could only be expected from Ahmadinejad. It was a coup, a silent coup which of course was finally approved by the Supreme Leader (or more probably he had given them the permission from the beginning).

Now what should we do? When George Bush was reelected in the US for his second term, Michael Moore wrote a letter, "17 reasons not to slit your wrist." Unfortunately, we in Iran cannot think along the same lines as he did. Unlike Bush, Ahmadinejad can be reelected for one additional term, for example, though not in another consecutive term. I've heard he has expressed discontent at the two/three term limitation. He has four years to try to change the constitution. Of course, changing constitution is not that easy, but I'm sure "the favorite president of the Iranian nation" can achieve anything he wants.

Even if he is not going for a change of constitution, he has four full years to make our lives as miserable as he can, and after his term is finished, I'm sure many Iranians (including myself) are not going to show up in future elections which will make their task of "electing" another administration like this one even easier. Yeah, we're stuck. There is no good news. We can as well go on and slit our wrists right now, or be more sensible and get out of this disappointment of a country as soon as we can.

The Last Thing

May 30 issue of Iranian daily, Hamshahri, page 2, "The Statement of the British Foreign Secretary about Iran Election":

"The British Foreign Secretary, pointing to former British activities in Iran, talks in a way implying that the option of London interfering with Iran election is on the table."

This is ridiculous. So what has David Miliband said, really? You can find it here on Times Online by yourself, but I quote the relevant part.

"... given the British history in Iran, the last thing I am going to do is start interfering in their election campaign."

And the stupid members of Hamshahri's Political Group, think that implies an intention to interfere, because although it's the last thing, he still may want to do it! Now, this could be an intentional mistranslation of the phrase "the last thing I want to do" or it could be unintentional. Personally, I think the latter is the case, but still someone in the Political Group should know enough English to comment on a British official's statements, or (s)he should just shut up and talk only about domestic issues (if they know enough Persian, of course).

Moderate newspapers are generally supposed to be a better way to get Information in Iran in comparison to the widely viewed channels of the state run TV, and although Hamshahri is a more or less a conservative newspaper, still it is preferable to many other alternatives. I cannot help thinking about the poor people who rely on such reports for their perspective of the world outside Iran. Given that the image Iranians hold of the West is very much distorted by state run TV, we do not need more distortions by a popular newspaper like Hamshahri.

Internet Filtering and the Prosecutor General

The most annoying thing about Internet filtering in Iran is the seemingly random nature of it. You cannot predict what is going to happen tomorrow, or even an hour later. A website could be blocked for only a few days, or it could be blocked for the rest of its life. Internet users meanwhile, are in a constant worry about their online activities since their favorite social networking or blogging website could be blocked at any time and they have to migrate their work to somewhere else, waiting for the next ban.

But why is that so? One might argue that the question is fundamentally wrong, since everything happening in Iran is chaotic and non-deterministic in nature, and Internet filtering is not an exception. Well, that's right. The reason behind the chaotic way everything works in Iran is that there it's not the law that governs actions, but the will of a certain person. How that person feels at the present can steer the whole country to another direction. In case of Internet filtering, this person is none other than the infamous judge Mortazavi who have never lost an opportunity for restricting freedom of expression. He has always been going way past the line, especially when it comes to persecuting journalists and Internet users, but who is to battle the Prosecutor General of Tehran? While the Iranian law clearly states that Internet filtering is to be carried out by a committee supervised by the Cultural Revolution High Council, Mortazavi is his own law. His method can only be described as blackmail. He orders ISPs to block websites, threatening (implicitly or explicitly) that they will be shut down if they don't cooperate.

The dual nature of Internet censorship is one of the reasons Mortazavi can act like this. Some websites are blocked by the Iranian Telecommunications Company (the company that ISPs get their data links from), while others (most of them actually) are blocked by ISPs that are far more manipulatable by the Prosecutor General.

While the very nature of censorships laws in Iran is immoral, we could probably get along much better if there was a clear formula by which everything worked. The recent blocking of Facebook, while disastrous and most probably illegal, was expectable. People were connecting to each other and encouraging others to participate in the coming election and vote for anyone but the current president, and the last thing the Ahmadinejad administraion wants is a high turnout in the election, because then he will certainly lose. But then there are other blockings that still seem random and chaotic and one wonders that probably the Prosector General has not been feeling well lately, and he's probably ordered a few more websites blocked just to feel better.

The Free Content License They Used 1800 Years Ago

In my Pahlavi (also called Middle Persian) classes we've started reading a new text called "The Book of Wars (or Works) of Ardeshir-e Bābakān" which belongs to some 1800 years ago. Here's my rough translation of its first paragraph:

In the name, power, and help of the Creator Ohrmazd, the Glorious, the Great, wishing health and long life for all good-doers especially those who have this (text) (re)written.

Imagine if we had something like that last phrase in the GNU FDL (or other licenses)!

A note about the text for the curious:

Although the book is very interesting from a historical or linguistic perspective, it's not the most honest kind of history. To the contrary, it is part of a grand struggle by the Sassanid Empire, not only to legitimize their government, but also to remove their predecessors the Ashkanians (the Parthians) from the face of history. Interestingly, the government they were trying to remove from history is, to this very date, the longest ruling government in the history of Iran, having ruled more than 460 years. You will be surprised to know that they succeeded in this quest to a very large extent. The Ashkanian Empire is hardly ever mentioned in later texts. This fact, along with the fact that Sassanids destroyed almost everything their predecessors had built, makes it very difficult for us to get to know about what was probably the coolest government we've had in our history: a federal (and to a large extent democrat) empire.

Update: I did a little bit more research and found out that my assumption that the book is written 1800 years ago may not be correct. Apparently, for all that we know, it is written some times during the reign of Sassanids, which make it any time between 1800 and 1400 years ago. Still I guess it is old enough!

Of the Confusion, and of 3D

You know what my problem is? It's having two many interests. Well, at times it can be in an advantage, but generally it means I'm divided between doing all the things I like and learning about them.

One of these many interests of mine which I had forgotten for many years is drawing. As a kid, I used to take drawing classes. Once my teacher told me, "you know what, you're quite good at drawing. Do you like drawing?" I answered, "I don't know!" He looked at me in some strange sort of way, like it's the strangest thing in the world not to know if you like something or not.

Now that I come to think about it, at that time I was feeling quite the same way that I do now. I knew I liked drawing, but I didn't know if it's the right thing to like. It's a few months that I'm thinking about this again. And now, I have more problems. I have already channeled my abilities to other fields. But since I am already confused about what I'm going to do after graduation, maybe a little more confusion is not much important.

My other fields of interest are programming and computer science (especially formal language theory, compiler theory, data storage, and graphics), and linguistics. To add to the confusion, my current field of study is computer hardware!

Back to the drawing problem, I'm beginning to feel like Saint-Exupéry in The Little Prince. Since it seems too late to pick drawing again, lately I've been trying to remedy my situation by studying about computer graphics (from a programmer's perspective) and also 3D modeling and animation. These subjects have turned out to be very fascinating. The following is one of my first attempts to model something non-trivial. It may not be great, but I'm pretty much proud of it! It's my own pair of eyeglasses modeled using Blender, a great piece of Free/Open Source software.



But, yet still, the confusion remains.

The Mighty Fortress

Do not lose your faith. A mighty fortress is our mathematics. Mathematics will rise to the challenge, as it always has.

Stanislaw Ulam

I've not been able to post anything new to my blog for a long time. My mind has been quite busy to think of anything to write. I also haven't had enough time, nor it seems I'm going to have for a while. Anyhow, I was reading this thought provoking article today, when I saw the above quote from Stanislaw Ulam which I really liked. I thought I would post it here, even if it is only as a reminder to myself.

I never thought I would admit this one day, but I really love math!

He Does Exist

If you look at a watch, you can easily tell that it was designed and built by an intelligent watchmaker. Now, what would you say if there has been no power failure in your area for a long time, you are ripping your favorite Lord of the Rings DVDs to your hard disk so you can easily watch them several times a day (skipping parts from time to time) and the operation is supposed to last about three hours and only a few minutes before it is finished the power goes out only for a few minutes? What do you conclude? If you are smart enough to see that the watch has a watchmaker (so God exists!), you can easily see that Murphy does exist, too. It is as clear as daylight!

Bad Place for an Error Message

When a traffic light goes mad!