Haitham's Aerie

Happy Darwin Day

2012-02-12T10:15:00.002+02:00

It is probably a mild hyperbole saying that almost any of the several pieces of Darwin’s writings that I came across were radiating with an overwhelming intellectual presence, of the kind that intrudes into the deepest and most private corners of your mind without permission, imposing awe and eliciting recognition of his far-reaching genius, in the highest sense of both words.

This impression stays at first inexplicable. But in taking few steps back from any of these texts, considering it in a wider context, reengaging it and disengaging again, then repeating as needed, the conundrum suddenly gives way. The answer put simply, but aptly conveying the most sobering of its implications, is that a distinguished flair for writing is only second nature to profound thinkers. In a letter to his father, Darwin seems to have been well aware of this talent when he wrote "Whenever I enjoy anything, I always either look forward to writing it down, either in my log-book, or in a letter". Yet he also showed diffidence and harshly practiced self criticism when in his correspondence with others he would occasional write things like "I find it unutterably difficult to write clearly", "I am disgusted with my bad writing", or "How I could have written so badly is quite inconceivable".

Darwin's opinion notwithstanding, two of his books, in particular, stand out together as a most vivid and exhilarating incarnation of the whole spectrum of the higher order mental processes; namely, The Voyage of the Beagle, and his magnus opus, On the Origins of Species.

The Voyage of the Beagle can be thought of as a stereoscopic visualization of Charles’ trenchant faculty for perception. This can be realized by superposing a context in which the book is a travels-journal only and another where it is viewed as a herald of the theory of natural selection. In the former, this faculty expresses itself in a unique ability to efficiently winnow down a drowning range of details that could have certainly stupefied the senses of any other naturalist. But with the eventual emergence of natural selection added to the backdrop, the token of a frightening capacity to intuit becomes the salient feature of this work.

In producing The Origins, Darwin established himself as one of the finest virtuosi of the thought process to have ever existed. Throughout the text you would find him busy not only weaving line after another of cogent arguments, preempting much of the debate spurred by its publication, but you would also find him confidently pointing out where his reasoning might go awry, acknowledging his own wants of knowledge, or describing what might constitute a destructive counter-observation to his theory.

The most telling feature of this book though is its striking consistency. This might sound odd, since a consistent structure is a strict prerequisite that any explanatory effort should satisfy before it can be taken seriously. But it is that the coherence in Darwin’s arguments can’t be a mere happenstance, only the product of a mental construct of the original phenomenon that undergirded his thinking in its regards. And since the conceptual scaffold for Darwin’s original formulation of the theory had passed largely unscathed into the modern evolutionary synthesis, we can easily infer the veracity of this mental model. Therefore, given the crippling lack of knowledge about heredity’s real substance and mechanisms that was characteristic of his time, one is bound to be overwhelmed while she is reading the book!

Put in another way, The Origins, just like its predecessor, can’t be fully appreciated without the advantage of hindsight. Darwin might have known close to nothing about the DNA, but with an unusually keen mind, he captured many of its features, even if in crude terms, and embedded them into the core of his theory. This is clearly the reason why out of all the different accounts of natural selection that were advanced by others in its wake, Darwinism was the only one conducive to the modern synthesis; with the rediscovery of Mendel’s genetic laws, and the successive conciliatory efforts of several bright minds, most notably those of Fisher's, the birth of neo-Darwinism was only a matter of course.

Since this is in a sense the celebration of a person, an extraordinary person, perhaps something about his idiosyncrasies is due. A strong affinity with science and nature ran like a dominating gene in Darwin's family, which spawned 10 fellows of the Royal Society, him included, and beginning with his parental grandfather, Erasmus, who himself was a theorist of evolution. The first expressions of this gene in Charles took the form of reveling in beetles collecting, and a more extreme one of his founding a club at Cambridge University with the sole purpose of consuming birds and animals "unknown to human palate" before. According to Darwin’s autobiography, this was the reason behind his father's utterly failed prediction when he once reproached him saying: "and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family".

But judging by this sample of his early life, it might be justifiable to claim that if it was not for the Beagle, this day would have passed unobserved. However, this celebrated expedition was not all bless on Charles. Little after its return to England, he started suffering from a mysterious debilitating illness that haunted him, albeit with frequent respites, until his death. The nature of this affliction was never diagnosed during his life, a thing that gave rise to much speculation about its origin.

To make things more complicated, there is enough evidence in literature to substantiate many different explanations for this illness. For instance, the proponents of a physical cause like to cite Darwin's descriptions of his potentially morbid encounters with disease vectors, such as the "Benchuca", or his granddaughter's memoir, Gwen Raverat, in which she notes that "it was a distinction and a mournful pleasure to be ill [in Charles' home]", possibly indicating an underling genetic disorder. On the other side, advocates of a psychological root have at their disposal an adequate repertoire of accounts on Darwin's antisocial and phobic behavior to draw on. But since this is not a crucial point anymore, there seems to be an emerging general consensus converging on a multifactorial origin of the ailment, a blend of physical and psychiatric etiologies.

I will end this on a somewhat different but related note. Natural selection has become hopelessly embroiled in the polemics of religion and science from its very first days, with the undesired corollary of a negative bias in its priorities as a part of a more general endeavor for progress in thought. This had unfortunately eclipsed much of its unmatched versatility, and sometimes even turned it into a tool for hectoring and suppressing any deviant thoughts or perspectives at either end of the debate. And while I find this to be quite typical of faith oriented establishments, I am surprised by the ubiquity of such practices in renowned intellectual circles.

On the bright side, we are lucky enough that some contemporary great thinkers did not let themselves be trammeled by this less important of a debate, and as an expected consequence, significantly furthered our understanding of how nature might be operating, Noam Chomsky and his contributions to language acquisition by children being the best example in this regard, insofar as I know.

The kernel is that a more appropriate celebration of Darwin would be to carry on with his unique philosophy of inquiry and science, rather than obsessing with how pseudoscientists might interpret, or use to the advantage of their cause, a scientific critique of his theory.

Source: www.darwinday.org (image adapted)

Amman the Morbid City

2011-12-19T20:20:00.000+02:00

There is no denying that all modern cities are morbid to one degree or another, but morbidity is of a particularly “fine” and ancient pedigree in the case of Amman.

I had previously came across few non-academic historians who puzzled over the brisk cycle of civilization rise and fall, common to all the communities that once populated this city. Several of them propounded seismic activities as the answer to this question. But in thinking that other enduring cities (Damascus, Beirut or Jericho for instance) were subject to those same disruptive forces, this proposition is weakened if not ruled out.

A more convincing hypothesis alternatively points the finger at the bodies of water that once covered Amman's surfaces. Allured by a varied profile of water sources, from eddying rivulets to crystal clear ponds, many unsuspecting settlers met dreadful ends at contracting lethal waterborne pathogens that those waters were teeming with. This might come as a surprise to most of Amman’s contemporary denizens, but what can be even more surprising is that she was dubbed “The City of Waters” during past epochs. Such a name was equally valid during the early stages of the current cycle, i.e. 40s and 50s of the 20^th Century, echoes of which still reverberate in the modern Ammani vernacular, attesting to this fact.

In current times, despite being a parched stretch of land, Amman still wields the weapon of water against her inhabitants as skilfully as she always did, albeit in different ways. Few days ago I was wandering outside my home when I noticed that the pain I had in my limbs due to a blowing cold wind was not the usual pins and needles type, but had a rather smouldering quality to it. Suspecting this was due to low relative humidity, I checked a weather forecast application expecting a reading of about 20%. But I was taken aback on learning it was a nadir of 12%. It is not the type of pain that bothers me, nor the fact that the skin around my left hand knuckles is more shrivelled than my mother’s octogenarian aunt’s, not that much. It is only the cracked bleeding skin I get if I fail to apply a moisturizing lotion the night before; a problem that I know for sure plagues many other fellow Ammanis.

The city gets even more creative with that favourite weapon of her. She also capitalizes on the fact that no water means no or very little greenery. According to evolutionary psychology, in assessing the hostility or hospitality of a certain environment, humans are most sensitive to its state of vegetation. If that was scant, some mechanism, so to speak, ensues, which in turn induces the secretion of stress hormones in the perceivers. This produces a feeling of angst that serves the purpose of urging them to move away in a bid for survival. However, since the business of survival in the Amman of our times is not related to its colors anymore, this mechanism joins the long list of misplaced, backfiring evolutionary endowments. I think this partly explains the stressful modes of interaction dominating in this city. But there is more to that than having to deal with pissed off people all day, and night, long. Prolonged stress also deprives our bodily repair mechanisms and immunity system of energy essential for their proper functioning, leaving our bodies debilitated and exposed before all kinds of sickening things, animate and inanimate.

Still, no matter how ruthless the rendition has been so far, outdoor Amman is a merciful mother when compared to its indoor manifestation. This conviction I formed during a couple of courses I took on the subject of built environment, and a subsequent short lived career in the same field. Under the rubric “Sick Building Syndrome” among some others, I learned about the havoc an ill-designed enclosed space can inflict on the well being of those who occupy it over lengthy periods. And through practicing I was introduced to the “standards” of Jordan’s construction contractors and designers.

I remember the troubles I used to get into for pointing out the necessity of sticking to the ASHRAE standards in designing indoor environments. Almost all of the seniors scoffed at the idea, and the few who did not take it as an insult to their “long careers that began before I was even born”, bantered that those standards were only for “the pansy people of the first world”, which I think was their rather churlish way of referring to the relatively pristine health states that citizens of the developed countries usually enjoy. Ironically enough though, if the ASHRAE standards were to be modified accordingly, then they should be made tighter and stricter for people living in developing countries, since they are more prone to illness and are of less robust constitutions, as research on socioeconomic pressures is already showing.

I also remember laying my hands on the HVAC schematics – pronounced “h vak” and is shorthand for heating ventilation and air conditioning – of a major mall in Amman. What I saw was so horrible that I immediately took a decision to never go there again. Since I can’t name it, due to some ethical obligations, I will only hint that it is probably the largest one in Amman, and few minutes into entering it you are likely to feel giddy and start yawning, both caused by hypoxia. A caveat is due here. The presence or absences of these signs alone is not adequate to judge if the place was ill or well designed. If air filters were not replaced per the right recommendations, for an example, they become a major source of contamination, and the first sign will most likely be a sore throat the day following exposure.

To be fair though, malls are not to be worried about as much as homes, since it seems to me that the concept of a comfortable house environment in Jordan never evolved from a rudimentary one of warm during winters, and cool in summers. There is no reckoning of humidity regulation and ventilation, despite the fact that a built space without proper air renewal and circulation can be 1000 times more polluted than the outdoors. Almost everything inside a typical compartment, including walls, generates unwholesome volatile grains that are likely to precipitate in your lungs for good, and this is probably responsible for the varied assortment of pulmonary disorders rife in Jordan.

It would be interesting to calculate the economic burden of Amman’s inappropriately designed spaces. Naturally this should include both the energy and health bills. But since this post is about morbidity, I find it more appropriate to focus on the later. However the dearth of data on the subject makes it impossible to even draw a sound conjecture, but by thinking in terms of a well defined phenomenon, such as seasonal allergies, we might come close to appreciating the fiscal strains that Jordan faces as a consequence.

From personal experience I know that a reasonable treatment for pollen allergy costs around 35 JOD per person (actually a bottle of efficient nasal spray costs around 48 JOD). Assuming 3% of the total population is afflicted with this ailment and seeks treatment, the annual cost stands at 6.3 million JOD. This type of allergy probably comprises no more than a fraction of the total aggregate of diseases, respiratory and others, caused by contaminated air. But it at least helps us imagine the total taxation on Jordan’s GDP due to our local engineers unprofessionalism.

For all of what preceded, I sometimes think that since Beirut is a variant of Aphrodite's & Adonis' daughter's name, Amman should have been the name of Eris' and Apollo's daughter, never born since they never copulated in the first place, and Amman never fall under a pure Greek hegemony for that matter. Still, I find this dark and malevolent image more appealing than that of a bride in a white wedding dress.

As We Wade Through a Morass of Modernity

2011-11-28T23:08:00.001+02:00

As is his wont, a friend surprised me with a most mundane remark and not before long deduced from it an intuitive and practical generalization, which he put forward in a reasonably eloquent manner.

Some of his work colleagues, he recently discovered, read books! Ergo, he continued, each human being has limited mental resources that are either squandered on frivolous acts, such as gossiping and the likes, or harnessed effectively to climb the career ladder at rapid rates. Regardless of the narrow and compartmentalizing context in which he decided to express his generalization, which I still find to be interesting in its own right, it is hard to fully disagree.

But not a one to miss out on any chance to conduct an irony, life, as if sentient, led both of us later, through a chain of germane antecedents to contend over the value of a certain TED video. At one end, the talk was highly applauded, while on the other it was dismissed as a derivative oratory, based on unfounded claims and propped by weak arguments of the much more profound work of Jim Collins et al. When the latter position was adequately substantiated, my friend, trying to secure a draw, retorted that I still can't deny the educative value of TED Talks as a whole. To his dismay, I disagreed, but not in the categorical sense of the word.

TED’s philosophy of unfolding the principles underling a given technology in a simple and endearing way is entertaining at its climax, benign at worst. But substitute abstract ideas and success stories for technologies, and the platform starts pandering, more often than not, to the educative morality of oversimplification and entertaining. Alas, ubiquitous in our days, when it should be loathed for the mental obtuseness it encourages. - I find this moment most appropriate to point out that the matter at hand is much more deeper and trickery than it might have sounded this far, or at least this is how I feel. At any rate, I find it only behooving to approach the crux deviously, while keeping my fingers crossed that the path I chose will depict a sufficiently alarming portion of the real problem.

Historically, the notion of educating the masses can be traced back to the Enlightenment period, as intellectuals back then had unwavering faith in the emancipating capacities of logic and, by extension, thinking. But perhaps they simultaneously held that issuing from the arms of serfdom must be the concerned individual’s effort only. As such, access to all sorts of knowledge was made as easy as it could be, but it was regarded as solely the less privileged job to come to grips with inscrutable tomes, on the premise that liberty is most appreciated when it is hard-earned. Alternatively, it could be that scholars of the time were still too overawed by their perceived sanctity of knowledge to have "peddled it". Either way, the ideals were too quixotic to have had yielded any fruits or any immediate general ones at least.

Humanity would have to wait until the first twenty years of the previous century had passed for the first successful movement of knowledge humanization to take place, starting in the Anglo-American world. – There might be similar successful movements anterior to this one, but the purpose here is not writing history proper, or drawing on its authority, rather the historical context is meant to serve the function of a scaffold to the argument. – Professors would finally deign, or knuckle under the economic pressures of the period, to write in intelligible manner. Yet the readers were still expected to exert some mental effort and meet the writer somewhere along the way, though it was the writer who covered the longest distance to this meeting point.

Thus a profusion of books that try to recapitulate vast branches of knowledge or systems of thought, poured (e.g. the now classic H. G. Wells' "The Outline of History"). Professors were only too aware of the inevitability of errors in any account written in a synoptic vein, which led many of them to criticize the project from early on. But some maintained the arguably tenable argument that dividends were being repaid in whetting the average intellect of the public and in nurturing their faculty for criticism and discerning, viz., far from reinforcing parochial penchants with scholasticism, the purpose of education is to liberate people from such tendencies; hence the term "Liberal Education".

However, this form began falling out of fashion toward the end of the thirties, which might be a corollary of its very success, for after all a secular project’s ultimate achievement is attained in rendering itself obsolete. The respective trends from this point onward are harder to demarcate with precision, for any number of reasons, but generally speaking, knowledge was no longer the rarefied domain of experts, in more than one way.

One aspect of this was most clearly exemplified in the counterculture of the 60s and the subsequent cultural wars, which at the educational level yielded a long list of concessions from the side of universities, the most triumphal of which was introducing studies that had been scandalously suppressed until those times (studies of gender, equity, environment, cultures... et cetera). That makes this period's enduring contribution to humanity, aside from evincing what kind of effects a liberal education can have on the masses, a new realization of the term humanization of knowledge.

In juxtaposition with this cursory historical tour, our time seems to be extremely dichotomous. Radical scrutinized educative initiatives and open access high quality knowledge dissemination projects are proliferating ceaselessly (e.g. the OpenCourseWare concept, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Cornell's CyberTower and if I am allowed to add something from outside the cyber realm, the extremely affordable Very Short Introduction series by Oxford, to name only a few), carrying through the trend of bridging the chasm between the academic and the public spheres.

In parallel, education seems to be constantly degenerating in the minds of the public to nothing more than a set of trivially simplified formulas for success, which is reflected in how enamored they are becoming with quotes, and which is, the success that is, narrowly associated with the amelioration of economic status. If we suppose that “something” used to prick the conscience of people from time to time in the past, prodding them to grab a worthy book and read it, halting the degeneration as result. Could it be that the contemporary unprecedented flow of information we are exposed to is masquerading as education, and in the process neutralizing this “something”?

If so, a litmus test might be needed then. Could this be that true education is never a thing done in passing, or as an activity of primary entertaining value, but is rather hard and time consuming, albeit rewarding and elating in the end? Fogyish, if you'd like, but definitely on the right track.

Relativity is Intact, Our Pride is in Jeopardy

2011-10-09T19:18:00.006+03:00

Few Fridays ago, early in the morning, I received an SMS from my science apotheosizing dear friend, conveying news to the effect that the light speed barrier was shattered at the CERN. That was very interesting, but insufficient; was it, at a more precise level, the discovery of a superluminal particle, or accelerating a particle across the infamous "c" threshold? A little bit later I learned it was a possibility of the former and not the latter.

That does not defy Relativity. Yet most of the articles I read, written on popular news sites, in a most critical time to the understanding of the public, were claiming the nullifying of Einstein's theory in case the reported results were corroborated. So much for science journalism due diligence and responsibility.

The theory of Relativity does not strictly impose an upper speed limit on motion. It sets, however, a speed barrier that is not allowed to be crossed by particles with velocities on either of its sides. This means that a particle found to be always traveling at speeds higher than that of light is not, according to the theory, allowed to slow down to speeds lower than the speed of light, and vice versa.

Actually the tachyon was conceptually born as soon as Special Relativity's foundations were laid, as a theoretically predicted class of particles that might be found to exhibit superluminal velocities. But it was quickly and deliberately pushed under the table of scientific discourse because of the dilemma such particles pose for the very foundations of human consciousness, for they break away with causality. Such tenuous grounds for dismissal. But things, it seems, can get political even in physics.

To eschew the abstruse nature of proper technical language, and to express this in a more intelligible and exciting manner, superluminal particles open the possibility, at least in theory, for communications across time. An example that gets the point across effectively, even though it might not be fully sound in concept, would be downloading a file from the internet using faster than light signals. You hit "download" at this precise moment, and you got the file downloaded few hours ago. Reading this, any human being should hit a mental impasse.

What temporal standpoint should we adopt as our departure point in internalizing what happened? The second when we clicked on "download"? Or the past, when the file was already downloaded? Either way we will never comprehend such a reality. Why should I download a file when all out of a sudden I had it on my computer, brushing aside the concomitant astonishment? Yet according to the theory of concern here, you will do just that, like it or not, as under its laws the totality of reality is absolutely invariant, regardless of how you observe it. This gives you a hint about the basic motivation behind Physic's, may be partial, relinquishment of its child tachyon little after it was born.

Even though this denial of conclusions belies the spirit of discovery, that which fuels the endeavor of natural sciences, it is, by and large, expected. Modern science wise, we are only coming of age. Still dumbfounded by how it had radicalized our understanding of the universe in such a short period of time, and made too clumsy by our lack of wisdom and humility to handle with sufficient care the precarious hope it promises of furthering this comprehension. Fortunately though, the much older and wiser philosophy is there for our counsel and guidance.

A very satisfactory explanation of the aforementioned impasse was discussed some 250 years ago. A philosopher called Kant - personally, he is one intellectual I grit my teeth on the thought that I can't read any of his treatise in their original language of German - proposing to transcend the irreconcilability of two ajar schools of thought, stated reality as completely independent from the human consciousness. From that point, he proceeds to describe a set of what is known in philosophy's own parlance as a prior concepts of knowledge, which, according to Kant, are inescapably inherent in the structure of the human mind.

These a prior concepts are to our cerebration, more or less, what breathing is to our existence; both are subliminal, but essential to their relative processes. It is less than often that their existence crosses the threshold of our consciousness yet we can't conceive of a meaningful sentence that does not imply a sense of time and place, or the space and time a prior. Just as much, we can't construct even the most simple of construable statements without embedding into them some form of cause and effect, generally expressed through a subject and an object. This we call the causality a prior, and it is what pertains the most of these a prior concepts to the scope of this article.

Facing a reality where an effect precedes a cause, and Kant would nod on this, humans are somewhat like a cat in front of a highly sophisticated contraption. The cat gazes hard at the weird device trying to tease out a mate, a shelter, a predator, a prey, or a rolling ball of threads. Other higher aspects or functions of the mechanism are of no interest to the cat, simply because for it they don't exist.

But that is more indicative of the cat's inferiority than being a derogation to the splendors of reality, das ding an sich.

The Type of Honor Crimes That Goes Unreported

2011-09-06T23:14:00.019+03:00

There is a subtler aspect of our Jordanian notion of honor, through which it proves yet another time how distorted it is, and through which also, and most importantly, it seems to be seeking an extension in its operating brief to include fraying the very fabric of the society itself beyond that which it is most notorious for; wrecking havoc on personal and familial spheres.

It seems that gender based susceptibility to "desecrating one's own family's honor" is not the only bias. Faith, apparently, is also a major deciding factor in how prone a person is to committing such "desecrating conducts" as well as being "insensitive to them". This aspect revealed itself clearly, and in its most abhorrent form, when I heard some saying things like "she is feigning chastity when she is a [Christian surname]? She is Christian!". In other cases I heard some recasting this, which seems to stand as an invariable fact in these ignorant heads, in the less pungent terms of personal liberty, terms, nevertheless, that are still to my knowledge suffused with negative connotations for the vast majority of Jordanians.

I perceive this to be an undercurrent flowing in the society, and not merely a few isolated cases. From hearing women correlating bare shoulders with an increased probability in the girl "flaunting" them being a Christine, to a school teacher whom I vividly recall describing the mixed sex Church organized Christian youth excursions as orgy parties, never mind the fact that he was lecturing a coed class, to some other related incidents the frequency of which precludes anomaly as an explanation, I think calling this an undercurrent is justified.

This does not imply an impending religious strife in Jordan, for none exists, or looms in the horizon for that matter, nor does it negate the state of our society as an epitome of coexistence. But this is to spotlight an unfavorable tendency that might amount from its current latent state to become a generator of some sort of unrest when social structures shift in favor of a malignant fissiparousness. There is much to learn from the contemporary history of Mount Lebanon in this regard.

Numerous sects and faiths had harmoniously abutted on the slopes of this mountain for many centuries, but all of this was set asunder overnight and a ferocious civil war ensued. A chance, it is likely, had presented itself for some pernicious undercurrents to surface and intensify, and history took a violent course, regardless of how peaceful it was hitherto. This is not limited to Lebanon. Such patterns can be discerned to varying degrees wherever you look at in history, with a rate of recurrence that tempts one to view peaceful periods as nothing more than times when conflicts are not feasible. But despite the stench of nihilism that this view reeks of, I believe it goads us to work as hard as we can on quenching such undercurrents and tendencies when we are allotted the time and chance to.

On another level I also reckon that the tendency to debase the different other, who shares the same space in a given context, using the most circulated social currency of value, this being honor in Jordan, is a universal phenomenon. It might be a consequence of a default reflection that we are born with as humans, acquiring its content as we grow, and it seems that our society constantly fails at educating or eliminating it. On a second thought, it is nurtured and heavily drawn upon in conceiving of other biases. In times of growing hostility against Iran in Jordan, for instance, you are likely to come across someone falsely, yet boldly claiming that for a Shi'ite it is of a great honor to give any of his female relatives as a concubine for a visiting Mullah.

There is also another rich and telling fold in all of this. In a conservative society where any form of sexual expression is heavily repressed, save for inadequate few, people will still find ways to go around such circumscriptions, and do so by means that are detrimental to the well being of the society. Contempt of the different becomes prurient, and the hatred and violence it begets will be all the more so, if allowed the needed space to grow. The aforementioned teacher description is obviously an interplay of hidden desires and a rooted false sense of the inferiority of a certain other. If not rooted, then at least it came in handy for a convoluted and mischievous expression or venting of fantasies. Ironically, this repression purports, brazenly, protecting us from the decadence it induces in the first place.

Personally, I think that any effective way to obviate the unfriendly consequences that this social phenomenon might surprise Jordan with in the future, should incorporate putting an end to many of the social sensibilities, which are besetting any action aiming at social change. Just like a field of mines, each waiting to be stepped on, no matter how lightly, to explode and cripple the efforts. In this particular case, this may translate to discussing such aspects of our society openly, and introducing courses and classes that provide a neutral point of view on the different cultural constituents of it, away from the ones threatening, with a god's raging fire, those who don't abide by their notions. This is directed to Jordanians from all stripes without discriminating.

On The Fringes of "Amman" (II)

2011-08-12T14:59:00.006+03:00

Five days following that Fuheis-mania incident, I was spotted and subsequently accosted by two of my friends in Rabieh. At first, I expended no effort to hide my irritation by that, which I could tell made them feel kind of awkward, but I noticed soon that this was not so courteous of me, especially given the fact that I haven't seen one of them in ages, during which, sometimes deliberately, sometimes inadvertently, I ignored many of her school-days-nostalgic and reunion-suggestive hints implied in brief sporadic periods of communication.

Trying to compensate for my early rude behavior I decided to drive each of them home after an indirect introduction to my newly found urban sanctuary, somewhere onlooking a beautiful part of Wadi Saqra street, where we chitchatted about our pasts and presents until the time for a drive to Al-Ashrafieh, where the girl lives, was due. I dusted off the mental map I have of east Amman's streets, a fairly functional one, but now that I haven't been there for many years, since the last of my relatives had "evacuated" that side of the city, it was segmented and less efficient, so I ended up taking a really long route through Jabal Al-Jofeh toward Abu Darwish mosque, or the checkerboard mosque as I call it.

That proved unpleasant at first, especially the narrow steep mountainous terrain I am not used to maneuvering on, but it was not until I came by a stunning nightly extensive panoramic view of Amman that I forgot all about that and caught myself in the process of envying the whole of Al-Ashrafieh dwellers for being able to behold such beauty every night. But what made it of extra charm to my eyes was that it shattered and supplanted another view which I had two years earlier on top of an elevated platform in Amman, which lurked in my mind undefined until it took the expressive form of "a sprawling graveyard" months later when I came across a description of Amman as a beautiful graveyard by Mahmoud Darwish.

Soon, my knowledge of the social subtleties of the area was reawakened from its dormant state, but added to it was the first time musing over the origins of the Armenian neighborhood, which as its name suggests, is the place where the majority of the Armenians in Amman came to settle in the past. But besides being fond of sewing, a thing you can easily infer from the numerous tailor shops paving the neighborhood's main street as you stroll it down, I never came to know a single thing about them. The mental stagnation induced by this humbling "confrontation" with one of the oldest neighborhoods in Amman and the fact that I knew very little about its origins was not comfortable, if not unsettling, but my namesake friend had already unwittingly paved a way out early on when he picked up and started going through an issue of Review:Amman I had.

The magazine is a nascent self proclaimed one stop point for all your needs to know about the past, present and future of Amman and its identity, a thing it has proved to be successful to some degree at thus far with its sundry articles, despite some jarring historical errors, but the catch is the narrow definition of a city identity that it embraces. Had it been a single mind effort, the narrowness would have been condonable, but, and if I am to relent from my position in this regard, in which I maintain the Sisyphean nature of such a task, for the sake of reaching some middle grounds here, then that there are eight contributors makes it culpable. It is indicative of either an editor in chief's micromanaging attitude, or the common grounds based on which the team was assembled, consciously or not.

A third and a more interesting scenario, in which R:A's conception of Amman's identity is but a byproduct, can be constructed around Municipality of Amman's attitude in the past few years. The squabble with Amman Facebook page owners about a year ago, taken at face value, might sound like a one over the proprietary rights to Amman's new logo. But below the surface lie the real intentions of the municipality to establish itself as the sole legitimate representative of the city, and the only authority to pass judgments on what constitute its identity and what not. Instead of identities rooted in the natural historic, political, cultural and economic environment of Amman, the municipality is actively promoting and supporting any identity viewed within a synthetic context framed by lifeless architectural and urban studies terminologies, which, needless to say, are wholly inadequate and will eventually yield a gamut of inchoate identities.

I perceive this to be a late phase of the grander scheme that the state has been carrying out to cull intellect from the fabric of the Jordanian society since little after the time I was born, the very same scheme that among the most notable of its causalities lies ruined the edifice of intellect that the University of Jordan once was. The municipality, it is evident, has enabling resources, the equivalents of which are untapped by any other potential rivals, save for one which I will get to in a bit, and has succeeded thus far in providing the impetus and the catalyst to the crystallization and prevalence of an identity that satisfies the state's predefined terms.

However, there is a potentially strong and competing alternative identity looming amorphous and unnoticed in the subconsciousness of the erudite and well versed in modern Arabic literature, the Levantine branch in specific, which is full of fragments of all sorts that can be gleaned and assembled into a solid base for an identity that captures a more vivid and truer reality of Amman, a one which already promises us a chance to get over the inferiority complex we felt for so long as Ammanies toward Beirut, for it might be shown at the end that most of the great manuscripts published there during the past five or six decades had at some point during their production passed through Amman, at least once, before being published in Beirut.

The fact that the memoir of the most profound literary Arab figure during the past century, Abdulrahman Munif, is titled Story of a City: A Childhood in Amman (سيرة مدينة - عمّان في الأربعينات) stands as an initial revelation of an identity, the identifying of which might be the starting point for a new batch of great Jordanian literary authors.

On The Fringes of Amman (I)

2011-07-31T17:45:00.005+03:00

Life is getting pretty much hectic and fun is becoming an elusive quarry. That would be a sufficient description of how I have been feeling lately. It is, almost, my first year working from 9 am to 5 pm, and the first without a lengthy reinvigorating university summer vacation.

With the monotony about to cross my tolerance threshold, and I almost exhausting all the recreational options offered by Amman that cater to my taste, I sat down with two of my friends in a car somewhere around the 8th circle. "What shall we do?", the most vexing of the questions seemed like the only thing they could utter that night, and, oddly enough, "Fuheis" was the only word echoing back an forth within the confines of my skull.

I frequent that town on regular basis to dine at a restaurant somewhere at the bottom of a hill on its outskirts, but I never thought about going there aimlessly, even though I walked through it once with the fast walking group last December. But that night "Fuheis" was, without prior notice, phenomenal in its persistence, yet meaningful. I swear that the word repeated 6 times meant "All the relaxation you need tonight", twice "screw Amman", and thrice "reclaim your sanity".

Trying to break what felt like an unholy spell, I turned to my friends as I was starting the engine and said "Fuheis, we are going to Fuheis". Silence fall all over the car until one of them sarcastically asked "do you know how to get there?" alluding to an almost disastrous venture into Na'ur the Friday before. This trip to Na'ur was, in retrospect, the first subtle manifestation of an urge that intensified in that mental "Fuheis" flurry. What kind of a maddening urge was that, I can't conclusively tell yet, but I can confidently link it to the uncomfortably parched Ammani nature which begets the stressful lack of greenery, besides the lack of widespread empty spaces.

Less than 15 minutes later, we were getting out of the car as I parked it at the central circle of Fuheis, though replacing "circle" with "eclipse" in the preceding statement would make for a more accurate description. There, the two main streets constituting the town meet. The city in any other day of mine, could have been an epitome of boredom, for it has nothing to offer other than restaurants and wine shops. Yet, in what seemed like an ordinary Fuheis weekend evening, a host of separate mundane backdrops to our aimless trip there fused into a mural, a benchmark, against which I found myself involuntarily comparing my life at Amman.

The cool breeze was reviving and freshening, a thing we are largely deprived of in Amman thanks to the wind shielding, air trapping, and heat storing concrete blocks that it is crammed with. The ladies walking around with bare shoulders and revealing clothes was a stunning view. Don't get me wrong, not the ladies themselves, but the fact that they were at ease and paying full attention to nothing other than their conversation while walking at a slow pace at the main and only, busy square in town is a clear sign that they are rarely stalked there. In contrast to Amman, where the widespread acts of stalking women with prying eyes and impudent tongues are being progressively joined by groping, the scene was understandably a soothing one.

Not only that, but every mediocre feature of that city that night from the kitsch public statues, to the moderately drunk market owners, who, as one of my friends puts it, on their priority list socializing with customers is anterior to doing business, to the semi-blinding darkness that besets it in almost every direction, infiltrated by few rays of light coming from Salt to the west, and disturbed by the glare to the south, emanating from somewhere in Amman, every trivial feature of that town that night had the ballast of an identity element.

But that was only part of the story of my recent dalliance with Amman...

I Use the Internet Therefore I Exist

2011-07-15T15:23:00.008+03:00

I use, and not surf, as "surfing the internet" should be dropped out of the internet experience lexicon. It is nothing but the outdated legacy of web 1.0, when the non-technical internet user role was passive, at the receiving end. Now things are different. The current non-technical internet users are potentially gods. They build and shape the internet, vindicating the Idealists' conception of our world as merely a one of ideas a, in which the internet is nothing but an extension of our thinking capabilities and realities.

At the core of internet users experience has always been the constant venturing into unknown, to them, sometimes prohibited, worlds and ideas, circumventing obstinate societal structures, that are erected for no other reasons than maintaining their own existence, and the interests of those who find their interests protected by those structures. That experience has embedded into it the potential of maturing beyond the mere circumventing of such mental chains into pressuring forces that remold, reshape, and break them in a reality where the internet itself is inseparable to our existence as societies.

More than once I caught myself thinking change in terms of demand. "We should ask for teaching hardcore evolution and not the laissez faire version they teach at our schools if they ever teach it", this is what I once wrote, reflecting how immature my experience of this online world has been thus far. A one in which I am only voicing and expressing my opinions, not realizing the potential capability that such a tool can endow me with in striking back firmly at the physical world, the potential of a promising attempt at taking things into my own hands as a user.

The well structured, experienced, and sophisticated apparatus of censorship that had been screwing with our kids brains at schools for so long now can be easily toppled with some content that goes viral, which might be, the virality that is, a matter of a year long ad campaign costing no more than one JD per day. A swift strike coming out of no pre-calculated where toward such a structure of censorship, no matter how invulnerable it may seem, can toss it into a final state of chaos from which it may never recover. Added to this is the fact that these keystones of despotism are interdependent on each others, effecting a tossing, ipso facto, of the whole status quo into one last performance before its cessation.

But this potential might be the subject of a surgical removal that is being silently and subtly carried out right now, and it won't be a surprise if the newer generation of internet infrastructure, once laid out, enable some sort of centrality that grants very few select political agencies, or commercial companies acting on behalf of those political agencies, full control over the internet, comparable, in some aspects, to that which governments maintain in the physical realm. The newer generations of search engines are already limiting your experience online without telling you that they do so (read here).

For the sake of fairness, our experience on the none user-optimized engines used to be limited by our very personal habits, and by technical matters that don't pertain to the content mapped to, but that was as far as it went; it was not a conscious limit, or a one that served conscious sinister goals, so to speak. Even if there was no sinister plots lurking beneath factoring your geographical location into your search results, which is more worrying in the case of searching for commentary on international events than for brands or commercial services, it is highly unethical, according to most of the ethical notions out there, to do such a thing without explaining it clearly enough to users, whom the overwhelming majority's conception of the internet is too primitive to fully distinguish between google and the internet.

That is, in my opinion, where anarchism finds a new lease of life. There, the anarchist vision of a world where power is distributed and never accentuated embodies itself, rightly, in the form of the not so coincidentally called distributed services (e.g. distributed search engines and social media networks, Diaspora being an example on the latter). And this is why it is a necessity that any effort seeking spreading an awareness of the internet as a tool for change should integrate the concept and importance of distributed internet services into its curriculum.

As a closing remark, I need to state that I am not fully against non-technical search engine optimization. I advocate some sort of randomness in the search outcomes of engines for the different users regardless of any personal or geographical factor. This may help in making the internet experience unique for each and every user, instead of presenting knowledge through search engines as too rigid and parochial.

Freakonomics - The "Findings" Levitt Will Never Tell You About

2011-06-19T07:48:00.006+03:00

I read this book a year ago and for some reason I liked it, and as a corollary withheld, hitherto, from writing about a major flaw in the method it heavily relies on, i.e. data mining. This flaw undermines the genuineness of the causality chains, found using data mining, that constitute the major corpus and focus of the book. May be Levitt's early admission through the introduction that he never understood mathematics made it endearing.

Data mining is an interdisciplinary, somewhat nascent branch of computer science - it is Usama Fayyad's specialty by the way - that deals with massive sets of data impenetrable by the human brain. The sole purpose of this field of science is the utilization of computational power to detecting patterns of interest in a given database.

The most substantial flaw in this method is that the computer is already told what types of patterns it should look for, pretty much like a researcher who can't come up with a theory by the mere act of reading data without a certain presupposition of what to look at and/or for, even if it occurred to her during a quick sift. This presupposition is, in essence, an implicit hypothesis already formed and is likely to lead to a next step and what comes after, and so forth in what will ultimately evolve to become a program of inspection and research grounded in and influenced by that initial implicit hypothesis - philosophically known as the problem of induction, attributed to David Hume. It is worth noting that studies concerned with complex phenomena, such as those found in social and medical sciences are the most plagued by this problem.

When such patterns of interest are detected, they are fleshed with speculations regarding the nature of the relationship among the parameters that were found to correlate - e.g. the enactment of a law that legitimize abortion in a certain state and the rate of crime sometime later in that same state. But what if it was a coincidence? Human intuition will fool us into thinking that a probability of pure coincidence being the relationship is unlikely.

Classically, the narrowness of human intuition province in such cases is exposed using the birthday problem. Through the simplest of the probabilistic notions we were introduced to as 5th graders, we can easily tell the chances that any two randomly picked human beings share the same birthday are ~1/365, and, on the other extreme, calculate the odds to be 100% when we are talking about finding at least a pair who have the same birthday from a randomly chosen group of 366 - as you can see I didn't acknowledge leap days as possible birthdays because that will make the problem more complicated. Instead, I will deem them, those born on the 29th of February, soulless bastards and move ahead. Stereotyping and bigotry make life easier for dumps as you can see. - What lies in the middle though is where our intuition fails us.

There, the problem can't be solved analytically. Instead we use computational methods, or, as it is sometimes called, brute force. You can think of analytic methods as humane investigations that put extra emphases on finding general forms of solutions, while the computational ones are more like bloody interrogations, where we, lousy engineers - engineers being lousy in nature, and not that there are breeds of engineers who are not - sometimes get fed up with a problem, and crack it open to get numerical answers. No wonder it is dubbed "using brute force" then!

Anyways, solving our problem computationally, it will yield 99% as the odds of finding at least a pair who share the same birthday in a randomly chosen group of 57 people, and 50% when we are talking about a group of 23. Very counter-intuitive. Isn't? For the records, this problem haunted me and made me doubt my understanding of the probability theory since I was a 5th grader until I found its solution in a book. I was relieved. I still doubt my understanding of the theory though!

The kernel here is, when we think about huge sets of data using our daily experience intuition, we will severely underestimate the odds that a strong correlation exhibited by a group of parameters, found in that set, can be the outcome of a mere coincidence. Practically, this means that Levitt found many other "dazzling" relationships that can be as absurd as a one between the iris colors of newborns and the percentage of German cars owners, in any given society. Could he find something entertaining and reasonable to write about such a relation, it would have definitely made it into the book or any of his other publications.

But again, his stated indifference to the profound branch of epistemology, and the confession he explicitly makes early on, that he does not understand math, and, it seems to me, not even the tool he chiefly relies on in expanding his program of economy as the study of human incentives, disarm the reader of her critical mindset from the very beginning, make her drop her guard off, relax, and enjoy as she reads on. Add to this that a recurring theme in the book is exposing cheaters and analyzing crimes, which makes one condones the not so scientific method he uses. In this sense, Levitt becomes some sort of an academic Robin Hood.

The true value of Freakonomics, however, lies in its daring attempt at breaking the tyranny maintained by prestigious academic institutions and mainstream currents of thought over the course of knowledge production and development, from the heart of one of those institutions: Chicago School of Economics.

Don't Listen to Mama! Be an Iconoclast!

2011-05-08T20:56:00.006+03:00

In what seems like a pleasant coincidence, I recently stumbled upon a rare remark made by Edward Said on the American culture, where he laments its "moralization of reductiveness".

And while Said's particular concerns revolve around a certain manifestation of this American penchant, namely what he calls formulas of what not to do and read and what to consider culture and what not, I will be using it as a starting point for voicing another more general concern, in which the American society is but another society, albeit a one in which the symptoms are more apparent; the human tendency to seek an understanding of what is going on around.

One might be wondering, understandably, what can be of concern here. That will be got into in a bit, but at this point it is most appropriate to introduce the two concepts of Confirmation Bias (which belongs to a larger family of biases termed Cognitive Biases) and Cognitive Dissonance (attentive attendees of TedxRamallah should be familiar with both terms). The former describes the human tendency to seek what affirms her narratives and views on life, and to ignore what does not, while the latter refers to a feeling of pain caused by holding contradicting ideas in the mind at the same moment.

By the mere act of evocation, a connection between the two phenomena is established, which is best viewed within an evolutionary framework. The human brain, it had been frequently shown, is more of a haphazard collection of heuristics and biases selected for optimal operation in a Savannah like environment, than a centralized logical inference machine designed to deal with a sweeping pour of all types of data and information insulting its sensory receptors. From this chaotic brain constitution, what had been previously called a natural affinity for narrative construction arises.

The brain handles this aforementioned besiegement by the flux of information by constructing narratives (generalizations and chains of causality, which are not necessarily true), assessing these information presented against its own narratives and neglecting what do not get along (Confirmation Bias), and if the contradiction was intractable by means of ignorance, then Cognitive Dissonance ensues until the narrative is amended to accommodate or resolve the conflict.

This is a very simplified explanation of how a human brain perceives the world around it, but a one from which serious consequences flow. Most of the time, what we perceive as reality is nothing more than a way of our brains to sift through and be able to retain select parts of the world external to the senses.

That said, it does not mean our understanding of the globe is flawed beyond redemption, but rather that we should always be critical of our own views and narratives as much as we can, challenging them on every possible occasion presented, reviewing our collective and personal pasts constantly and never committing ourselves to any idea or ideology, let alone venerating.

Failing to do so, history taught us by countless examples, is a menace, and no where this menace is capable of reaching devastating potentials than through the political agency and its sphere, both of which, alas, have been resting on nonsensical commitments and the emotional mobilization of masses ever since the first polis was formed!

Sowing the Seeds of Pluralism in Jordan

2011-04-25T18:02:00.003+03:00

Among the various voices I came across about the preparedness, or lack of it, of Jordan to join the league of democratic nations, there was this one somewhat valid opinion, which claims that Jordanians should first learn how to be democratic before asking for democracy.

Propounding a solution in such an abstract and condescending form is not good enough; one can expect more, and I find the use of “learn” unsuitable, if not absurd, in such a context. It can spur a lengthy debate over the nature of democracy:

How can a person learn to be democratic? Is the idea of teachable democracy principles valid and compatible with the notions of freedom? If yes, does the awareness of such principles lead, inevitably, to practicing democracy? If these principles exist, are they particular or universal?...

We can ask many more questions, but let’s stop here. The point is that the idea of teaching democracy needs to address some serious shortcomings and caveats in its logical structure before it can be taken seriously as a solution for its supporters’ initial concern about Jordanians. Nevertheless, I reckon that the idea of satisfying certain prerequisites before democracy can sprout in Jordan, was betrayed and buried deep down within this view by an improper use of words.

I will take this idea one step further, add to it a bit and say that the appreciation for pluralism is what matters, and not democracy, for the latter is a mere application of the former to the political realm, or at least, to some extent. But the road to appreciating the plural can be quite tricky, especially in a region where demonizing the other had been sanctioned and practiced for centenaries, and is still being, though at escalated rates.

There is something else that worries me in this regard. We have a lot of work to do in order to catch up with the rest of the world on too many levels (e.g. economic, technological…etc), and I am afraid that this will somehow lead us to downplay the importance of other human endeavors (e.g. arts) noncontributing to this materialistic growth, but which are nevertheless needed for a proper social change and growth.

One also have to consider the Jordanian system of education which segregates science, literature and arts, feeding in the process an already existing tendency in the society to stigmatize anyone with a literary bent, and producing graduates holding degrees in philistinism and parochial thinking! A setback, if you consider the high quality education provided by schools in the Levant during the late nineteenth century.

There are reasons to show some optimism, however. Any keen observer of the Ammani scene must have noticed the recent increase in the number of organized forums and events springing around (or may be their presence was brought to our awareness through the “power” of social media?) which target the layman in a multitude of topics. Technology related events attract the largest audience, even though I doubt the heterogeneity of the attendees’ backgrounds. Science, philosophy and arts events, on the other hand, attract meager audiences, who are highly heterogeneous in their interests as well.

Hence a logical next step would be holding forums and events with pluralistic themes, where art intermingles with science, and philosophers perplex technologists with their impenetrable questions. If this could not provide a good starting point for nurturing and sustaining an appreciation for pluralism within the society, it might attract more tourists, at least!

Our Last Best Chance [Book Review]

2011-03-24T10:00:00.009+02:00

”Our Last Best Chance”, King Abdullah II’s new book, discusses that the two-state solution in its Arab Peace Initiative formulation should be pushed for during Obama’s current presidential term, urgently. This message is expressed in explicit and sharp terms in the preface to the book, but never fails to show up in virtually every chapter of the 27 that follow, even in the acknowledgment, although in different expressive forms.

The book takes of King Abdullah’s II life a chronologically ordered backbone, and the Arab-Israeli conflict a backdrop. The conflict is also depicted as the mother of all troubles in the Middle East and the Arab and Muslim worlds, with subsequent tremors felt in the West. Actually the book is a selective narration of the memories which pertain to this context, mostly. Although to be fair, I felt there was a higher level of conscious selection within this first one.

Each chapter is written in a way that aims to an arrival, from the side of the reader, at the logical conclusion that by settling this sensitive issue, which can only be achieved through a fair two states solution, extremists on both sides of the conflict equation will be culled, and the region will prosper like never seen before. Failing to do so, according to the King, will only mean dealing with diabolical consequences, the direst of which is an "inevitable" devastating regional war.

However, it does not go without some criticism from my side. First of all, and although the King seems to be extremely furious with the Israelis, accusing them of killing almost every precious chance of peace that came their way in the past few decades, he sounds a bit too apologetic on behalf of the Americans. I mean if a Martian who has no idea about Earth read the book, she will come to conclude that USA is Earth's ultimate superpower, but which is unfortunately plagued by a dysfunctional intelligence agency; USA is claimed to have been easily fooled by Israel during critical previous historical moments.

I am also expecting that the King will draw heavy criticism for his support of the American goals in the region; if not support, he at least seems not to mind them, even though he makes it clear that he is against the Iranian "expansionist policies" in the Arab world. I think King Abdullah's handling of this issue of the Arab states sovereignty (a main generator of vicious previous conflicts in the region) was not given considerable thought.

My third take on is the obvious lack of references, except in two separate instances. It is understandable that the book is not written for an academic audience, and that it is personal in essence and thus expected to have a subjective tone, but when one is intertwining his own memoirs with propounded interpretations of what seems to be one of the most highly pluralistic realities in the history of humanity, it is necessary that these claims be backed up if the book is to be taken seriously.

I will conclude this post with pointing out a factual error in the book by saying that the Late King Hussien's Jubilee school is the first coeducational boarding school for talented students in the Middle East - Not King’s Academy - unless King Abdullah II does not consider Abdoun and Shafa Badran to be part of the region.

The Leader Dilemma

2011-03-18T09:12:00.009+02:00

There was a time in my life when I was obsessed with the subject of leadership; an interest that pushed me in the process to consume numerous and diversified accounts and treatise discussing the concept. This had its roots in a full year course I took during my high school. The course main materials were "Animal Farm", a novel, and "Chicken Run" the movie. The common denominator between the two was the depiction of leadership in times of revolutions.

I came to believe, in retrospect, that this classical approach to teaching the subject (i.e. presenting leadership in the context of revolutions) can be attributed to the accentuation of the leader role during such times, the ease of defining the process and the outcomes, and the short time scales, which in combination make such examples more tangible compared to, say, a company stewardship under a CEO for 15 years.

Nevertheless, with a bit of contemplating, one will most likely notice that there are fundamental differences between the characteristics we associate with leadership in the varying contexts (e.g. what is common between a leader of a revolution and another who leads an army?). Also, one might observe that leaders are not necessarily the best we can find around to fit the role. I think these two points were the main generators of my obsession.

And so, I set to collect and read every book I could lay my hands on that tackled the issue. The majority of the books I ended up reading are considered to be the staple references for MBA students (e.g. The Eight Habit, Good to Great, The Art of War,... etc).

But there was something unsettling about all of the theories propounded within the pages of these books. Now aside from the fact that they were rife with baseless platitudes and infested with wishful thinking, or worse, marred by normative approaches to the problem, the most unsatisfying thing was the elusive concept of Charisma, which, to my tasting, seemed to be conjured and interpreted differently, in an inconsistent manner from an author to another, for the sole purpose of concealing the shortcomings of their own theories.

Charisma, unlike entropy for instance (the most elusive concept in the history of physics thus far) does not seem to have a central logical form which can be consulted to resolve contentions resulting from its vagueness. So I gave up and thought that may be this was one subject which refuses to lend itself to theories and books.

However, my interests were recently revived upon a serendipitous landing on one of two separate findings that converged rapidly to give what I feel is a proper starting point in tackling the problem. Regardless of the story order, I decided to see what the anthropology of contemporary hunter gatherer societies (e.g. aboriginal Australians, and bushmen of Africa) has in store for us, and lo and behold! In these societies there are no leaders! What?

In such societies, it seems that anyone, even a kid, is entitled to participate in the process of decision making, but with more weight given to the opinions of the experienced in what is being at stack. What might come as a surprise is the system's stressing on the genuinity of the expertise regardless of any other factor (e.g. age or sex). This is to say that, while someones suggestions might be taken seriously when it comes to hunting rabbits, based on a long record of successful rabbits hunted, hers on warfare might be deemed irrelevant, with no personal offense taken on her side! These people, unlike us in the societies which are largely shielded from selection pressures, don't have the luxury of screwing up or acting irrationally, lest they be ousted from the next round of life at the jungle!

The other finding, which I read a bit about in an unrelated book, was the relationship between specific types of sociopathy and leadership in its vertical paradigms (e.g. the ones you find in our civilized societies). It seems that most of the leaders, who seek authoritative positions are sociopaths. Though they still find very little satisfaction in bonding with others, they think that humans make for good pawns in their grandeur designs.

All of this might lead one to conclude that leadership being delegated to a single powerful entity is an alien concept that humans might not be well equipped to rationally play its roles at both ends, the leader's and the followers'. But at the same time, a pressing question of whether the lack of a distinctive leading role can be imported to our civilized societies or not comes to mind. It might be correct that we need a form of leadership, but this does not necessarily mean that the types we came to adopt are optimal.

But it gets more exciting. The story of Adam and Eve is interpreted by many as a metaphorical documentation of mans' transition from a hunter gatherer style of life to a civilized one. Simultaneously, the Jewish Mythology, talks of a plot carried out by a narcissist and manipulative god called Yahweh, noting that these are two traits of the sociopath, who cunningly and deceptively aimed at overthrowing and stripping other gods of their ranks until he became the only deity around to be worshiped.

So could it be that humans were aware of these shifts from the very beginning?

#B4JO - Green Jordan

2011-03-12T13:11:00.011+02:00

With all the turmoils going on around these days, whether on a regional level or a local one, I find it hard to write something positive even though I promised 5hadz last year to write something so about Jordan this time .

So I decided to shed some light on the concept of green architecture by posting a video. Actually, I believe that if the Nile was God's gift to Egypt for real, then passive solar design is definitely his gift to Jordan. By simply positioning the buildings in the right direction, and installing cheap shades, we can save up to 60% of our energy bills. It is that simple. No need for futuristic technologies or piles of money.

For the records, Aramram's green channel has a good collection of green related videos presented in a Jordanian context with a slick digestible style. You will be able to understand what they are talking about regardless of your background, as long as you understand Arabic, the Jordanian colloquial to be more accurate. I hope you enjoy Hina's presentation.

If You Don't Respect Me, Soon You Will Tremble Before Me!

2011-03-09T20:40:00.017+02:00

As a "heretic" socialist/leftist who gives the middle finger to classical leftists (i.e. advocates of fake sophistication who perpetuate BS in guise of rigor) I am already aware of May 1968 revolution of the French youth. That was a series of students and wildcat strikes which lasted for about 18 days, challenging and, almost, toppling De Gaulle's government of the time. It stopped short of an ensuing civil war (does this remind you of anything that has been happening for the last three months in a stretch of arid land we call the MENA?).

This event to me was a mere black box, which I did not know much about other than the role it played in the evolution of socialism, and the emergence of new lefts. However, I was recently introduced to a very interesting aspect of this revolution revolving around the youth dissatisfaction with the norms and culture of the French society back then. Regardless of their political affiliations, they just did not want to comply with whatever the society and their parents expected of them, and found it hard to fit into the "pre-tailored" role a young person was supposed to play in that dull state.

They roared and the society took them light no more. 18 days were sufficient to initiate a shift from conservatism to liberalism (freedom and not the liberal ideology). Just another evidence that flies in the face of conventional wisdom. And you know what, we do not need such events to take place in order to understand that real changes in any society are abrupt in nature; they are too transient, the structures of societies, to be changed one step at a time.

Now, as is always the case with fake intellectuals, be those classical left or "celebrity and commercial" intellectuals, many books were written in the aftermath of the 1968 revolution in an attempt to theorize and provide explanations for what happened, something, I am afraid, is already being done to the Tunisian and Egyptian equivalents. Luckily, the French youth produced graffiti and posters during these 18 days which still resonate in our days preserving and capturing the essence of the revolution vividly. Here are the ones I liked the most (you can find many others here):

Meanwhile everyone wants to breathe and nobody can and many say, “We will breathe later.”And most of them don’t die because they are already dead.

We demand the right to contradict ourselves!

Run, comrade, the old world is behind you!

No replastering, the structure is rotten.

Don’t liberate me — I’ll take care of that.

Already ten days of happiness.

A Review of Bookshops in Amman

2011-02-24T23:42:00.016+02:00

I reckon that guides or reviews are swayed by the biases and preferences of those who write them, and this one is no exception. However, you have my word that I tried the best I can to keep the subjectivity to a minimum.

The review will be exclusive to the bookshops I frequent the most (once every 2 or 3 weeks), which means that my assessment is based on first hand experience, and nothing that I heard of or a friend told me.

The scale of assessment will be relative; that is the order is descending from the one that measures the highest (leftmost) in any given category. Inside brackets, the quality is comparable regardless of the order. If I drop the name of a bookshop in a certain comparison category, then simply it means I don't have adequate experience to judge it. So here goes nothing:

Topics [Diversity]: (Virgin Megastore, Readers), (Books@cafe, Prime), The Good Bookshop, Titles
Topics [Classics]: Virgin, (Readers, Prime), Books@cafe, The Good Bookshop, Titles
Topics [Controversiality]: Virgin, (Books@cafe, Prime), Readers, (The Good Bookshop, Titles)

Staff [Amicability]: Titles, Virgin, (Books@cafe, The Good Bookshop, Prime), Readers

Staff [Helpfulness]: Titles, Virgin, (Prime, Books@cafe, The Good Bookshop, Readers)

Search-ability: Books@cafe* (Readers, Prime, Virgin), Titles, The Good Bookshop
Shelves Renewal Rate: Virgin,... (Readers, Prime), (The Good Bookshop, Titles)

*Using their online catalogue, on the premise that it is always up-to-date, which is something I can't tell for granted.

[Update: in case you were wondering about the contact details of any of these bookshops see this link]

[Update 2: Prime is defunct]
[Update 3: Virgin Megastore is introducing Spanish and French books now, albeit in scant quantities]

Socialism The Way I Read It

2011-01-07T12:56:00.011+02:00

The word "Socialism" might sound dull, no doubt, with all of the emphasis put in our modern times on individualism, and for some Arabs, as a special case, it is likely to invoke some memories of oppression, let alone the "negative" connotations attached to it (e.g. Atheism). For many of its young proponents it's a mere way of expressing a revolutionary lifestyle; hormonal teens who found their arrogance and contempt for the conventional embodied in a t-shirt with the infamous depiction of Chevara, posing defyingly (not like I hate those kiddos, on the contrary).

But Socialism is not to be reduced to revolutions, not even the books of Marx, or Marx himself, and no, it is not the opposite of capitalism; simply put, it is the belief in an egalitarian society, complemented with actions geared toward building this society. It is the top of a mountain, and you are left to pick the route; Social democracy, Communism, Marxism... etc, it is up to you, but just do not mistake the route for the destination.

Christianity, based on this definition, can be regarded as an early form of socialism in the sense that it sought eliminating one of the detrimental social gradients in the Jewish societies of the time, caused by unrestrained polygamy, or the restriction on access to sex imposed on men of lower socioeconomic status, whichever you like (sorry ladies for making you feel like commodities but I am talking in the context of that time). Mother nature favors the 50% males, 50% females in most of the sexual reproduction strategies. This means that pre-Jesus times, in the Jewish societies, many men died without ever touching a single woman.

Jesus did not, definitely, come out of the blue. He surely was the culmination of brewing upheavals in the Jewish societies which were not historically registered, as they were eclipsed by the added holiness on the story, but, anyways, the whole point to mentioning this, is to show you that socialism is not against private ownership in "person", or not into bloody revolutions, but more against what makes people feel inferior to each others, and that socialism, in many occasions, prevented revolutions by means of peaceful reforms; you can not call yourself a socialist if you do not believe in the humanity of humans.

I also have another purpose for using Christianity as an example here; to strip the concept of socialism from what became, in the minds of people, inseparable to it: Economy. Marx writings are considered by many, mistakingly, to be the holy texts of socialism, but they are not, they are merely the textbooks of Marxism. The way Marx puts his ideas into written words is so charming that you have to put extra mental efforts not to fall in the critical fallacies he fail in, the fragility of his definition and expectations of the Proletariat in particular, and to resist this urge he invokes in us to reduce the whole of the social theory into a major Economic dimension, and a secondary dimension that sums all of the other aspects of a society.

In the 60's, other movements of socialism, in what some socialists refer to as enrichment and fragmentation, forced their official existence amongst the mainstream socialist parties and movements of the time; the emergence of Feminist, LGBT, and Green movements amongst others came to shatter and supersede the dull image that the more conservative parties gave to Socialism. It was time to celebrate the difference, appreciate the local, and add colors.

What caught my attention lately, is the growing evidence on the adversity of what is called social inequalities, or as I understand it, respect inequalities. It seems that human beings evolved psychological mechanisms to assess their social environment and act accordingly; the lower on the social ladder a human being is, the more he is likely to prefer short term goals over the long term ones, i.e. depleting his biological resources faster and dying younger. It comes as no surprise to me that men are more prone to this than women (remember Jesus story at the beginning). And we actually can not blame capitalism on this, more than the innocent Disney movies based on those fairy tales that teach young girls not to settle for less than an idle prince, and a young boy to try or, literally, as the studies on social inequalities showed, die trying.

This means that capitalism is not to be blamed directly, even though I have my takes on it as an economic system, especially inheritance and what relates to it, but we are to blame the social inequalities that use their economic kins as criteria for defining who is the most respected, and who is not. Sweden, for instance, is a country with the highest concentration of capital in the western world, yet it is the most egalitarian (e.g. everybody is respected and granted the same quality of life and entitlements regardless of their social stature).

At the end of the day, you do not really have to be Feminist, or leaning Green to be called socialist; all it takes to be one of those is feeling disgusted by the sight of politicians who speak in the name of a supernatural authority, while in effect aiming at maintaining archaic hierarchies and superficial distinctions to protect the exclusive "rights" of those on top of an unjust pecking order.

Reflections at a Traffic Light in Amman

2010-12-24T19:46:00.006+02:00

Like most of those who work for a private company in Jordan, 5:00 PM is my zero hour. I leave the office I work at, on the outskirts of Amman, and head back home, somewhere in the busiest district in all of Jordan. Endowed with a good geographical sense, the memory of an elephant when it comes to routs, and being clairvoyant enough to invest in the future by trail and error I can easily find less congested roads most of the times. But still, escaping certain points in the way back home is impossible, like this traffic light, within a walking distance from my home.

It is not uncommon for crossroads controlled by traffic lights in Amman to get jammed. Two years ago, many of these were marked with white lines all over and signs, which told the drivers not to drive into the marked area if jammed. It was a complete failure, as if that needs to be said. Even worst, if drivers could not drive through the traffic light while it was green, because of the jam, they will still cross it red and fight to do so as if that was their lawful right.

That does not surprise me at all. Most of our laws, on this planet, grant the common good of societies, in utopias only; it is naively assumed, when laws are made, that the denizens, subjected to them, are selfless people, and that the very few who are not, can be effectively dealt with by giving power to "selected" people, whose job is to maintain order, not considering the fact that those selected ones are nothing but human beings in positions that make them extra-prone to be corrupted by power they wield.

Selflessness is rare, yet it is assumed that we all think altruistically, and practically speaking, even if the majority were, the few who are not are capable of throwing the whole system into chaos, but we never come to acknowledge this in our laws. In the case of this traffic light I am talking about, following the laws would grant everybody getting to their destination in around the same time spent per a distance. But apparently people do not give a damn if others reached their homes or not as long as they can cut their journey time by few seconds and get away with it.

What I want to say here is that laws and preventive measures should not be assessed based on what they promise to deliver If followed, but rather on how robust they are when enforcement fails. Men of law should accept selfishness as endemic to nature, and not an anomaly. This does not mean changing the status of acts deemed criminal to normal, on the contrary. It is merely a new more enabling legal framework, even though I admit that the legalizing institutions themselves are not immune to any of the aforementioned human "flaws", let alone the many restrictions imposed on the whole legal system by the old and conservative ones making up the legislatures themselves.

Ever since I was a kid, I felt sympathy toward many of those fictional characters whom were straight in pursuing their goal of creating perfection or order but then gone awry in their methods, though not goals, not because I agree with them, but because of the feeling of agony they project into you. The one I like the most is called Sargeras, a titan that features in the lore of Warcraft. He was amongst the ones who created a universe and fought relentlessly against the "anomalous evil" that came to plague it. But no matter how hard he tried to eliminate this evil, it just kept crawling back from nowhere, even though it was no match for him, which pushed him to believe that malignancy was intrinsic to the universe they created, and so he sets to destroy everything, the good and the bad, and recreate it once again without any "flaws".

The moral of the story is that a normative approach can be the source of the perceived evil itself. We should instead prefer robustness over utopias. The only practical thing I came to learn from the highly theoretical in nature mathematical models, is that the more realistic the assumptions we build our models on, the better the results are, but the more resources it takes to build and run them. Robust laws will make our lives safer, but they need some creativity no doubt; a thing we pride ourselves on, as a species, even though we rarely exhibit.

Cocky, Now Snobbish Jordanians

2010-12-17T16:35:00.032+02:00

I once asked a Lebanese friend, after noting the complicated relationship between Jordanians and the Lebanese, what do Lebanese people think of Jordanians? That friend lived in USA for the longest part of her life, so her answer was not really hers, but her parents', who lived in Lebanon for a longer time. She told me that Jordanians are Cocky.

Cocky! I was surprised a bit, I won't deny it. I thought it all had to do with the grumpiness of Jordanians. But after some thinking, it made complete sense. I mean, don't we take pride in being full of pride? Pride for reasons that exist only in our collective imagination, or that were completely out of our control? Not like they justify, in their own right, a fraction of the cockiness we display either.

But, for the sake of what's to come next, I will say it is very typical of Jordanians to be cocky; regardless of their class, they "always got everything under control". Lets assume it is the genes, and pretend like we can not help it. What is quite new to our society then is the sense of elitism complemented with snobbery.

Before delving any deeper into this, lets differentiate between two types of Elitism: Behavioral, and Intellectual. Elitism implies a claimed air of superiority and vanity, but I will consider intellectual elitism a good thing, for the sake of chasing that which is peculiar to our society and more detrimental.

Very few, however, would disagree with the fact that behavioral elitism is detrimental to the well being of a society. And unfortunately this is the kind of elitism that has been growing recently in Amman. So do we blame the internet? The spoiled generation that did not suffer like their parents did? The newly-rich? Not really, and I don't think that these are answers to the question as much as they reflect the dull conservatism of our society. (The majority of the rich in Jordan are newly-rich! All of our grandparents came either from villages or the desert, and even the ones who were rich had to abandon all of their property and flee barefooted to Jordan)

There was a time in the past (late 60's to early 8o's) when different developed states contributed to human capacity building in Jordan. A decent percentage of the young Jordanians and Palestinian refugees were sent to complete their studies at different countries, such as USA, Western Europe (UK mainly), and the USSR. Being the Macho men they were, who couldn't prepare the simplest of recipes, and for other religious reasons, many of them were wedded to young Jordanian girls, and their kids were born abroad.

Many of these kids, especially the ones born in western states, acquired dual citizenships; the Jordanian one, and that of the country they were born in. The fathers, in many cases, proved competent, and found themselves a place in the flaring western economies of the time (or in the westerner compounds of the Arab Gulf countries) so they lived there for a while with their families, and the kids were raised in decent conditions. They started returning back in the mid-90's, importing many new concepts to life in Amman, and contributing to its modern day identity (e.g. Malls, the IB curriculum, gyms... etc)

How old are their kids right now? In their 20s-early 30s. Most of them do their studies in USA, UK or Canada, and then some of those come back to work in Jordan. Actually the financial crisis sent many of them back to Amman, regardless of their preference. I met some of them. They are good people, like other people, spoiled, like most of of our generation in Amman is, though they still retain some responsibility. Sincere, candid, they blow their nose while around you, they prefer speaking in English, but don't mind Arabic, some of them are abusing their wealth no doubt, but that is not exclusive to them; locally raised kids of the rich philistine merchants do much worst than that.

However, despite the fact that these are not a majority, they are setting, unintentionally, a new standard of living in Amman; the behavior is changing to be more westerner, without a change in mentality, which is quite worrisome, because this is turning people into brainless zombies or behavioral replicas that are too shallow. Nothing can be more dangerous than shallowness, and we are not even importing the good behavior. What you get at the end is snobbish people, like my uneducated aunt who lived in a rural area for the most part of her life (nothing wrong in this) but who now acts like she had been to Harvard Law School for no obvious reason other than that life now "necessitates" having a Facebook account, throwing a couple of English words while speaking in Arabic, and listening to Hip-Hop songs to be called modern! (that is the definition of modernism in Amman and not worldwide)

Another thing to add is that even though most of those born-in-the-West kids are not into reforms, the few of them who are, got it completely wrong. They think that Jordan can be reformed as fast as their trip is from Heathrow to Queen Alia airport. They saw the "solutions" already, so it is a matter of imposing them on the society, with minimal modifications, forgetting that it took long times and sacrifices for the West to reach what it already had reached, that solutions evolve, and are rarely imported. And I am afraid that the motivation behind most of what they do is some form of self interest.

It was really absurd to see some of those calling themselves "prominent", or "genius" and they did nothing significant yet, other than getting a Bachelor degree from a University in UK, or being popular among a small clique of their likes!!! That is again, what I call unjustifiable snobbery and elitism. This can never help, in a positive way!

The Levant Union?

2010-12-07T09:27:00.008+02:00

It is extremely weird that the Jordanian media did not mention anything about this, but it seems that Turkey had given up on the idea of the European Union; to be more accurate they gave up on the "European" but not the "Union".

According to Hurriyet daily news: Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan, this last Friday in Istanbul, had signed an agreement to form a "Levant quartet", a step that aims to foster integration between the four countries on economic, cultural, and political levels, that might evolve into an economic and monetary union in the future. The agreement, it seems, is taking into consideration, and looking forward accommodating many countries in the region, including Iran, but excluding Israel, by the year 2015.

A couple of days ago, I was in Istanbul, and I came across many Turkish people, who when heard the group of peers I was with speaking Arabic, started speaking to us in whatever Arabic they could manage. They expressed their love to Arabs and Muslims, and even their hatred to Europe, as if that was a way to prove their hospitality. It might be that they wanted to demonstrate their skills in Arabic, nothing more nothing less, or a feeling of sympathy that grew in the aftermath of the flotilla raid, but, politically speaking, it is widely accepted that Turkey's attitude toward the Arabs had changed dramatically lately from Arabs are traitors to Arabs make good potential allies.

However, a prominent Turkish lady told me an interesting story; Recep Tayyip Erdogan is of a gigantic ego, and is a dictator. When she told me that, I felt stupid, I mean how come that I did not notice it. Arabs liked him, and Arabs do not like rational leaders, they are naturally endowed with an affinity to demagogues. Erdogan, it seems, is imprisoning anyone who opposes him, and his son started making a fortune out of nowhere ever since he became the president of Turkey.

But that is not the point; the "scary thing", according to that lady, was that he had made some referendums to change the constitution in a way that grants him more control. In light of this, I came to conclude that, logically speaking and away from the convolutions of politics, this Levant Union is one of four things:

A trick that Turkey is playing on the EU
Erdogan (as the head of his ruling party) wants to create a Neo-Ottoman Empire
Turkey wants to sustain its economy in these harsh times
The countries in the region want to form a Union for real (after digging a bit deeper, I found that Iran has been trying to do something like that lately, but the WikiLeaks, it seems, will have adverse effects on its relationships with the Arab states in the region)

Anyways, the story unfolded nonlinearly, befor me, while I was in Turkey, and what added to the thrill of it were two questions that I had been pondering about in the last couple of days: what would this region look like in 20 years? And will any of these young nationalities that were formed in the past centenary hold any longer? We can not predict, but we can observe, so lets take a seat, and watch as history comes out the way she is.

P.S.

6 days ago, before learning about this story, I decided to start calling my self a Levantine from Jordan, in the hope that in few years saying that I am a Primate from planet Earth won't sound like treason, so the thrill of it all is justifiable.

Link to the story in Hurriyet official website.

So You Wanna Get in Touch With the Artist Within?

2010-11-26T15:52:00.017+02:00

Do you remember that girl or boy in your class who draw really good that they made your drawings look as if they were toddler scribbles? On a second thought they really were so, but anyways, was not that such a bummer?

It is not that you suck at drawing, like your drawing teacher used to tell you, but it is only that you use the wrong brain mode. Now, if I told you to draw a human being, the chances are that you will draw the same exact sticks man whom preschoolers draw. These scribbles were most probably what preceded the first alphabet, if not the first spoken language, and some of them are certainly universal.

Preceded the first alphabet: It might be that the first alphabet was an evolution of scribbles. You can scribble a man (or a woman, that would be a sticks man with boobs, long hair, and, in modern times, a skirt) but you can not scribble "town" or "good" in away that everyone else can understand. So we had to find a new way to convey our thoughts. And that is when we started writing or may be even speaking.

Convey our thoughts: This means that your scribbles are symbols, just like "a", or "!". They are abstract representations of the real world when your brain is running in the analytical mode. To be more accurate, they are the transition between the visual and the analytical modes of thinking, albeit more analytical than visual.

Visual and analytical modes of thinking: When we are born, and before learning a language, we think in pictures. It is not like we stop thinking in pictures completely after that. Actually, your ability to predict the trajectory of a thrown ball is not analytical at all; predicting it analytically means solving a set of differential equations, a skill that you can not develop before hitting your 20, unless you were a math prodigy, and even when you can, the method is too slow and cumbersome to catch the ball in time.

Your dreams are "visual thinking" as well. But it seems that we, as babies, soon face a very complex life, and thus seek reducing this complexity by reverting to analytical thinking, which strips an object of all its unnecessary details, reducing it to a word or a scribble that corresponds to a thought in the back of your head! (Before we developed spoken languages, it seems that adults kept thinking visually, but then, how complex their world was? Predators, prays, water and honga honga? Google "the great lakes of East Africa", these are our natural habitats, the shores around them of course)

Reverting to analytical thinking: and that is to be blamed for your scribbles. When you want to draw a human, you will always draw that stick man (or woman if you were a pervert or feminist). What you need to draw, is lines, spaces, colors, depth... etc, and not a man. But it is easier said than done. Now look at the following statement and try to see it as lines only, stripped of its analytical information content:

"Green cats are cool!"

It is very hard, not impossible though. And if you started imagining that each letter is another object (e.g. the "r" looks like a street lamp) then you are still doing it wrong, but you are on the right way. You should see them as lines, and spaces. It is hard because we are so used to operating in that dull analytical mode of thinking which tries to pick on analytical information (e.g. meaningful patterns) from anything it sets "eyes" on, and reduce it to that. But you can do it.

You can do it: Practice! Look around you and try to see the visual elements in that monitor, and not its function or name. If you are a parent who want to teach her kids drawing, then 8 is the proper age. Why 8 and not any younger, because before that they are still busy crunching the world around them into "words", and can not process certain visual elements, yet.

So acquiring the ability to switch between these alternative modes is the first step, substantial step, nevertheless. Next, take some drawing classes or read a book, you are not expecting me to teach you everything about drawing, or are you? ;)

Why Entrepreneurship? Why not Microfinance?

2010-11-12T14:39:00.016+02:00

I do not claim being an economy expert, but, I think I understand the basics of such a complex phenomenon, or at least I understand the fact that a free economy is self feeding with some inertia, which means that once it starts falling down it will fall to its death unless some, usually deliberate, interventions are made.

Forecasts for Jordan economy, shortly after gaining its independence and joining the UN, were gloomy, and the country was expected to crumble down soon due to its “sever lack of resources”. But that was not the case. We found our own resources in the form of Jordanians working in rich oil states nearby, and financial support from other Arab countries, to help the Arab state with the longest borderlines with Israel in its military conflict.

In the 80’s the economy in Jordan was doing exceptionally well until the end of that decade, when it was discovered that the source of this fantastic performance was not real economic growth, but loans from the World Bank, leading, along with other factors, to the financial crises during the early 90’s.

The point is our economy was always highly dependent on the money that our expats in the Arab gulf sent back to their families, and the large doses of cash injected into the market every while and a then, through loans or foreign support.

But it seems like these are not quit sustainable resources and are hardly controlled by our own policies; The oil rich Arab countries are creating their own qualified workforces, and applying policies geared toward reducing capital migration to other countries, while the world is sinking into the biggest economic depression ever. So the only way out is Entrepreneurship? Or is it?

The term “Entrepreneurship” found its way to the Elite strata in Jordan as a byproduct of the sudden wide scale exposure to the Western culture, facilitated by the advent of the internet and exported books at the beginning of this decade. It stayed inert for sometime, and later was solely confined to the activities of “DART” club in PSUT.

Recently, it was brought under light after the beginning of the contemporary harsh economy period in Jordan. It has been hailed as the only way out, by its proponents. Hype is to be expected, no doubt, but not to such extreme degrees, for Entrepreneurship is the story of the 10000 who drown, for every one who crosses the river and see the sun on the other side.

The economy of a country can never depend on such a type of gambling, but lets assume for the sake of the argument that it can. Entrepreneurship is the commercial exploitation of niches that technology opens for us, and technology does not come by chance you know, it builds on R&D, which in turn builds on the proper infrastructure with Universities at the core.

Speaking the language of numbers, we, as a country and not Jordanian scientists in USA and Europe, publish only 2400 papers per year, with very little technological significance, and our R&D expenditures are among the lowest in the world (UK's R&D expenditure per capita is roughly 40 times ours).We can expand the analysis to include the dynamic attributes of technology, which given the level of our experience as a nation in technology production, will not be in our favor.

Put in another way, this whole “Entrepreneurship is the holy grail of the Jordanian economy” is rhetoric in nature, and builds on naïve assumptions. How much does Entrepreneurship, not innovation, contribute to the economic growth, or income per capita, whichever is greater, in the country it contributes the most? Fractions?

So what about micro financing? A small company can be registered for as much as 1 JD now. This can be a good starting point. And while its contributions to economy's growth are of marginal proportions as well, it still grants some income distribution within the society, which is something that had been neglected for quit sometime, and with the rapid economy growth in the last decade, the inequality in Jordan had been aggravated like never before.

Very few civil organizations are working toward empowering the underprivileged in the society, and may be even less are seeking empowerment on an economic level. The whole concentration is on empowering the already empowered, while leaving people in rural areas, or to be more accurate who are not Western Ammanis, languishing in tribalism and the likes.

I would really like to thank anyone who is promoting Entrepreneurship, for they love Jordan by actions and not songs, but they should also be more realistic about their pursuit, and adjust the resources they are expending on it, appropriately. While I really wish that we get to see more and more initiatives like “Zikra initiative“, for such initiatives works toward narrowing the chasm between the rich and the poor; which should be assigned a much higher priority, if you ask me.

[Conflict of interest: I had my own adventures before in entrepreneurship, which ended before getting on the boat, so my objectivity is not granted here]

A Critique of the Jordanian Blogging “Scene”

2010-11-07T09:06:00.005+02:00

Unlike in Syria and Egypt, where the blogging movement was to some extent an extension of a relatively active political life, the Jordanian blogging movement found its roots in a rapidly developing IT sector, and a growing “Elitism” in the society, be it of the intellectual or materialistic flavor. This, I am afraid, had resulted in a somewhat impotent blogging movement on the developmental and political levels.

Reforms, according to Marx, and more importantly common logic, start when specific forms of consciousness begin evolving and subsequently pervading the society. Social media as a whole, and blogging in particular, have the potential to accelerate the forming of such types of consciousness if not give them the impetus to start. At this point it would be appropriate to turn into musing about two distinct, but strongly connected levels of consciousness; personal, and societal.

My experience as a young man tell me that youth in Jordan take personal consciousness for granted, and that is, in my opinion, a special case of a more general pitfall that human beings are prone to. I will not talk much about the problem itself, as I think what I already wrote is pretty much self explanatory, but I want to point to a very simple fact; blogging is a very efficient modern way when it comes to developing consciousness on a personal level.

When you translate what is going on in your mind into written words, you are immediately becoming aware of your thoughts from a more neutral point of view. It does not stop here. The feedback you get in the form of comments, and the “out-of-personality” experience you go through when you read one of the posts or comments you wrote sometime ago, will force you into developing some sense of self scrutiny.

A societal consciousness, on the other hand, would be trickier to define. To avoid losing the main focus of this article I will instead point to certain prerequisites that should be satisfied by a blogging scene if it is to serve in awakening and spreading a type of this consciousness. The first is accessibility. This is restrained by two unrelated constraints: internet availability and the language. I will only comment on the later by saying that posts written in Arabic are more likely to contribute to the forming and evolution of any kind of societal consciousness.

The second prerequisite, second only in order but by no means in importance, is the society awareness of this medium’s uniqueness and capabilities. I am concerned that for the majority of those who are involved in social media, it is perceived as a mere extension, or substitution for the traditional forms of media, in the sense that it is still serving, mainly, as a medium used in propagating and documenting events of interest for people, with a bit of commentary.

I will attribute this, partially, to the charming effect of certain elements that made the whole of social media as a news medium more convenient, less mechanical (or more personal), and more courageous in comparison to the timid forms of media we had been familiar with in Jordan, which resulted in eclipsing the real potential of the this medium in the process. This was exacerbated by some Arabic news website and blogs that quickly rose to fame, and I am afraid that the forms of demagoguery these had contributed thus far had done more damage than helping in this regard.

If blogs are to help in establishing and sustaining this societal consciousness, people should be aware of its cerebration abilities, as much as they are aware of its propagation and storage capabilities. And while I believe that personal consciousness of the bloggers will definitely precede the societal one, I would be extremely cautious to say that the societal consciousness will naturally flow from the personal one. In all reality, I do not even think that social media, the way it is practiced in Jordan, will contribute, by natural means, to building any forms of consciousness, neglecting the very fact that only a fraction of people in Jordan are aware, in the first place, of the existence of such a medium.

In the light of this critique, which is limited by my experiences and cognitive abilities, I would like to invite any entity that is positively interested in social media in general, and the blogging scene in specific into joining efforts, or working separately, whichever is more convenient for them, on restructuring the whole thing in a manner that gives it the necessary freedom to evolve into a major component, if not the backbone, of the personal and societal consciousnesses.

That, I bet, will constitute the first few substantial steps toward building a Jordan that we all want to see and be proud of.

This is it...

2010-10-08T09:13:00.005+03:00

When you are a young Jordanian man living in Jordan, then you most probably know that customer service is not really a pleasant experience. Be it the incompetent employees, or the customers who are too chaotic to stand in a queue, or try to take your turn. Not like the rest find it good. But at least, anything that is not a polite young man, are more likely to be met with a smiling face, or a friendly explanation for the inconvenience, when they complain about it.

It is, I admit, something I try to avoid as much as I can. However, this week I had to go through such an experience again (last time I had to, was a year ago or more). I was kind of worried. But then it occurred to me. Why should I take a passive role, and do nothing about it in the name of politeness? Now I do not wanna be a troublemaker. But I can be petulant about any incompetency in a "reasonable" way. And they just can not do anything about it. They will be pissed off, but forced to put up with that. I have nothing against them as human beings, but only as employees.

So I went over to this place, where I had to do something. There was a queue. And when it was my turn somebody jumped in. Now the lady sitting behind the glass asked the guy for what he wanted. I interrupted saying that he just walked in and it is my turn not his. The guy backed down. I stepped forward and she proceeded with my "transaction". She suddenly stopped and told me that she needs the approval of a senior in the company, and asked me to go to him. I went. There was a queue. It was taking too long, but that was fine, until an old man with a lady came in and interrupted the order, had their thing done and left. People saw that and rushed to do the same. I got pissed off. And as if this was not enough, I saw that customer service lady talking to the senior about a case like mine.

So I left the queue and went over to her. She did not know me at first (or pretended to). I asked her to go to that manager desk and ask him about my case, and before she could even say a word, I told her that I just saw her doing so. She was put in an awkward situation. So, she did. And it turned out that my case was kind of complicated (haha, see, I was right about doing so). She came back and told me that this will take 24 hours before being done. I left. Next day she is calling me:

She: Haitham, your transaction is done. But would you please come and take [something that is not related to that transaction]

Me: Ok [me went and did not find her. Another employee promised to help. But there was no order. I left pissed off]

Three days later, she calling me again:

She: Haitham, would you please come and take [that thing]

Me: I came and you were not there.

She: I am sorry. But it is very important that you come and take it.

Me: Important for the company?

She [walking right into the trap]: Yes.

Me [politely]: Then the company should do something about it. Why should I do your job?

She [perplexed]: No, it is also important for you.

Me [still politely]: Will, I then renounce my right in it.

She [still perplexed]: But you can't.

Me [kind of laughing]: On what basis?

She [very perplexed]: [pause for 5 seconds] Ok, I am sorry. have a good after noon.

Me: No problem. You too. (the call ended and I fall on the ground laughing like crazy)

I really have nothing against that lady. But it is only that I am fed up with this shit. So if you relate, I invite you into a new campaign, where we just try to do something about this incompetency and low level of customer service, politely. ;p

Jordan And Nissan Sign a Memorandum of Collaboration, or Whatever!

2010-09-16T23:55:00.016+03:00

This has been in the news for some time now, but no blogger in the Jordanian blogsphere commented on it, or at least I do not know of any who did. So I said to my self, may be I should do that? Anyways, it has been always my job to comment on energy related issues, and I honestly feel like I was getting lame with my latest 5 or 6 posts, discussing human nature and stuff like that, so it is time to go back again into my anti-governmental-bullshit stance!

I read the Arabic articles published on Jordanian online news websites, and as usual, they made no sense, and were full of mistranslations, so I went after articles written in English, and, will, I have to say I am impressed not! If you haven't already heard about the news, here is what was going on in a nutshell: Nissan's corporate vice president and our Minster of environment signed a document to help Jordan become more energy independent in the form of creating electrical sustainable mobility solutions.

So Nissan wants to aid our "ambitious" minster in fulfilling his dream of a green Jordan. That sounds great but smells fishy. Mind you, electrical cars looks as if they were zero emission machines but they are not; the electricity you use to charge your car was generated in a thermal station, somewhere in Jordan, that burns fuel and emit green house gases. Believe it or not, compared to hybrid cars, they might emit even more CO2. Hybrid cars are ultra low emission machines that have very small ecological footprint when it comes to fueling, with a very important advantage when compared to electrical cars: they do not need new infrastructure.

To be honest, the articles say something about Nissan considering the use of solar energy to power these cars someday in the future, but one have to know that this is a far fetched goal even for a technologically advanced country like Japan. Bottom line, Jordanians won't be powering their electrical cars using solar refueling stations anytime soon. But why is Nissan interested in helping Jordan becoming more eco-friendly, and signs a memo of collaboration with the Jordanian government when the only thing that the government did was promising Nissan to consider buying 300 cars for its public sector? Amongst the multitude of lame statements made by both sides in that meeting, which sounded more like advertising than real discussions, there was this one interesting statement made by our minister.

This Nissan electrical car called LEAF will be exempted from customs duty. But still it makes no sense; the car is too expensive, 8 hours charging time for 160 kms (like a Jordanian would be satisfied with that), not for a mountainous terrain (do not be fooled by the performance they state in their ads, this performance is the best case scenario which is attainable only in labs under ideal conditions) and I do not think that any cars merchandiser will fall for the exemption trick again; they lost a lot to do it one more time that soon.

Here is what I think this thing is all about: Nissan is touring the world marketing their new car, but the car have a one big flaw, will, not a flaw but more like a trade off that is not in favor of hot regions; its battery is not well cooled and that can be quite problematic in the Middle East. If the weather was too hot, which is usually the case in summer, your car might explode! The Arab gulf is one of the hugest markets of cars on earth, so it is definitely a very important target for any sane car company management team. And now that there is a strong tendency toward green energy and sustainability in oil rich Arab states, Nissan hopes that by signing this memo with Jordan, they will start an electrical cars fever in the region, and may be get the needed funds to overcoming their overheating problem.

I want to believe what they say, but the story told is really unrealistic; why would a car company that have been on a losing streak for a long time now amid a global recession that took its toll on cars companies the most, be interested in helping Jordan, the country that added costume duties on hybrid cars, which can be more Eco-friendly compared to electrical cars, in attaining their "Green" dream for free? May be because green is the color of dollars for both sides. Whatever the reason is, I doubt that Nissan is stupid enough to do such a thing before studying the Jordanian market, which is right now, thanks to the government, more resistive toward any new types of cars, and will most probably stay like this for the coming 10 years. Can you smell fish now?

Grandiose Delusions & Sheep-phrenia!

2010-08-13T18:05:00.008+03:00

In an attempt to spread awareness of two very common personal disorders in Jordan, and due to the hyper active state you are in while fasting, Aerie's productions presents: Your very valuable guide on the prohibitively dangerous conditions of grandiose delusions and Sheep-phrenia.

Grandiose Delusions:

Overview: This disorder infects at least 78% of the Jordanian population. It starts mildly, at an early age, but have very high progression rates, that some patients feel like they should retire at the age of 18 and write a book about their lives.

Symptoms: Quoting yourself more than quoting Twain, Mr./Ms. know it all is your nickname, your omnipotence is second only to God, you have dreams of people stalking you for an autograph, you wonder why they forget to mention your name in most influential people lists, Galileo was wrong; the center of the universe is you, when you first heard Stallone saying "I am the law drop your weapons" you felt humbled that you were the source of inspiration for such a great movie, you brag about the insignificant (99% of your life), you join groups such as "the most elite families of Nablus" on Facebook, you believe that the bachelor degree in political sciences you hold from an American university is the key to a better Jordan, to name only a few.

Causes: Low I.Q., low self esteem, a recessive gene that became dominant in the Jordanian population due to high rates of inbreeding among relatives, liaisons in the ego-suppressing part of the brain, head traumas at an early age, and other unknown factors that are yet to be studied.

Risk factors: Growing up with plenty of Sheep-phrenics around (see below what sheep-phrenia is). The disorder can stay inert for relatively long times but gets suddenly triggered by a lucky shallow success (the lucky bastards type of success in particular). Being a senior official, a professor, or a guard on a godforsaken gate at the university of Jordan, increases the chance of developing this disorder by at least 300%.

Treatment: The disorder is terminal, but some urge that it can be cured, one bullet at a time.

Sheep-phrenia:

Overview: "Sheep-phrenia" as you can see is made of two parts, sheep which means a sheep, and phrenia which means a state of mind. The term is used to describe a certain type of human beings who exhibit the behavioral traits of sheep to a large extent. They are fascinated by, support and believe in the superiority of the grandiose delusions patients.

Symptoms: Maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

Causes, Risk factors and Treatment: It might surprise you to know that both disorders discussed in this post have the same causes and risk factors, which pushed some active researches in this field to postulate that these conditions are in essence the same. In an attempt to support this hypothesis, a group of prominent professors from the university of Jordan and JUST demonstrated that sheep-phrenics can suddenly develop symptoms of grandiose delusions under certain conditions, albeit temporarily, and visa verse. However, until these researchers "pile up" enough evidence for their theory to become mainstream, the common wisdom stays that the relationship between these two types of patiences is a symbiotic parasitic relationship, with the sheep-phrenics being the hosts. Treatments for Sheep-phrenia are controversial and unethical most of the time, but they left us no choice, what should we do then?

No offense people, I mean we all show some of these symptoms from time to time ;) but we should always remember that we are all human beings, if you are privileged over others then remember that with this privilege come duties, the least of which is not to look down on the underprivileged.

Al-Jazeera: Channel of The Mobs

2010-07-16T15:24:00.004+03:00

What really bothers me about this channel are:

The selective and biased coverage: I really never knew that Qatar was an utopia! And you can not air religious programs on a news channel. Create Al-Jazeera Islamic channel and air as much Islamic programs as you want, but you can not shove Zaglol's nonsense down our ears as if that was real news.

Demagoguery and intolerance is what they promote: While they claim to be promoting freedom of speech and other things that make them sound civilized, they really do the opposite of that. Programs such as "The Opposite Direction" are all about shouting and slandering, I mean where on earth do you find a news channel where people call each others "traitors" while discussing their different opinions?

Irresponsible journalism: The channel deliberately mistranslated and added to a paper that was published in 2009. The paper recommended a small change in the twig of hominins in the tree of life, but Al-Jazeera claimed that this paper nullified the theory of evolution. (I wonder how many times this theory was nullified according to Arabs and Muslims?) This journalist blasted into smithereens any faint hopes of accepting this poor theory in the Arab world for the coming few decades, and the channel never apologized for this mistake. Not like this is the only scientific or historical mistake they committed.

The suckiest sport commentary on Earth: During the world cup, I was really shocked by some of the comments I heard from this channel; lamenting Mussolini's days, calling the whole of South Americans irrational, and labeling Japan as a developing country, to name only a few. Makes you thank "God" for the option of muting in TV sets.

Who Protects Them?

2010-05-27T23:31:00.007+03:00

The story of the poor girl from Zarqa is a story that I will never forget! Indeed if there was a small chance of forgetting it, then it evaporated after reading the heart rending details of the slaughter. Her father raped her for 5 years, opened her belly with a carpet cutter, killing the baby inside, and then stitched the wound?

By the way he is not nuts, as they are claiming, or something. He learned the procedures through the internet, and as soon as she died he went to the police station and turned himself in. Which means he is trying to get a light sentence for what he did.

This is not the first case of a father raping his daughter in Jordan. Such cases have been popping up every 6 months or so for some time now. In one case, a girl was rapped by her father, brother and uncle. So what the heck is going on? Btw, here we are talking about extreme cases, which were destined to surface up and be exposed, but what about the other ones that are not reported? I am 100% sure that there are even boys who are rapped by their relatives.

I am still shocked, but I think this is very normal in a society that does not give a damn about kids who are abused by sick parents, and where a woman is treated like a cattle, and can be killed just because her cousin doubted that she had a relationship with her husband before she married him.

We are talking about 5 years here, and nobody got to know? Do you know why? Because this father could anytime kill both of his daughter and wife and say that they committed adultery. It is this "privacy" of families, and the laws that can be broken in the name of fake honor that renders our legal system inefficient. Not to forget the social screwed up mentality that forces women to shut up and put up with the injustice they face from their purported "protectors".

We should soon have a hot line for reporting any abuses, and deal with them seriously and strictly. Females and kids are to be protected by any means, and this should be the highest priority item on the agenda of the government, NGOs and human rights movements in Jordan.

God bless her soul! She was raped and killed by the one who should have protected her. That is the mother of all miseries. (For more details, Read here.)

What Natives of the Gulf think of Jordan?

2010-01-14T14:06:00.003+02:00

When I was in UAE, I met this Bahraini guy, who when tried to approach me I felt like he suffers a a crippling inferiority complex. He had this idea that we, people of the Levant, hate them very much. I honestly do not hate anybody, but I later had to treat this guy like shit, because the polite way of saying am not interested did not get to him through polite means.

Anyways, I remember him once asking me, what's with queen Rania? And I was like what's with her? He told me that she is quite active promoting Jordan. Although I have my own take-ons on the way she does it, I think I was happy hearing that. I told him that she is a young queen and she is living her role as she thinks she should, and that she is in away supporting or trying to give the underprivileged some of their rights.

His second question was, what's the story of honor crimes in Jordan? I was shocked. A guy who knows nothing about Jordan was asking me about honor crimes in here?! I gave him some sort of a diplomatic answer, because I don't know why are we the only country that is known for this type of shit. Not like it does not happen elsewhere, but why are we the stars?

The thing that bothered me the most, is that in Gulf they call the people of the Levant "zalmat" because we say "zalmeh" for man. It is a kind of a racist designation, just like a "nigga" or "baljeeki" or whatever. The funny thing, all of the natives over there say that in the Levant, only the native Jordanians or the Bedouin of Jordan are good and white hearted, while the rest and especially the Palestinians are "as mean as Jews". I have to admit though that the "Shamis" are acting odd enough over there that we can not really blame the natives.

I think racism will never seize to exist unless one day humans have to identify themselves as humans, and humans only. That would be most likely when an alien race comes to invade us!

Nuha and Guantanamo

2010-01-11T10:54:00.003+02:00

Nuha is the name of an English teacher who screwed the hell out of my life when I was a tenth grader. She was such a bad teacher, using antediluvian methods in teaching and the problem is that she used to think that she was a good and modern teacher.

Unfortunately, I was one of the firsts to be taught by her. She forced us once into writing an apology letter to Mr. Georg Bush. Why? Because of the 9/11 attacks. Why the heck should I write a one? Really? I was just 15 years old, and I never gave a shit about politics.

She was quit aggressive. When I refused to write that letter of apology because I do not remember being a plotter in the attacks, she turned into a frenzy of shouting and screaming. Her English classes were politics classes. But again I was, and all of the class were 15 years old!!!

I remember her once entering the class and telling us how humane prisoners were being treated in Guantanamo. That was in 2002, just after the announcement of the prison. Shows what a shallow and worthless human being she was. I never held any grudges against the people of USA, yet if I ever had, that would have been her fault.

Later I discovered that in Guantanamo they do not just humiliate humans, they humiliate arts as well. When they use music to break down the resolve of prisoners, then this is both, a humiliation for the artiest and the fans.

Nuha is not really the name, you just need to change one of the letters, and you will get the correct one. And teacher I wish you will read this one day so that you be repaid a little bit of the torture you caused me back then.

On The Last Four Months of My Life!

2010-01-02T22:57:00.002+02:00

They sucked big time!

I have to say this, but I never knew that isolation is a killer. It was no choice for me, it was the only logical reaction to the situation. Being surrounded by that endless void of... do not know how to say this. May be endless void of people that are just as dump as hell.

Never knew that such type of people existed. Honestly! Yet, I can not say that life was fruitless. May be cultural wise it was the worst in ages, but I got a new idea, and learned a big deal about my future options.

The new idea is pursing a master degree in Chemical engineering rather than Mechanical. My first semester in the master of mechanical engineering revealed it all. The masters degree I was pursuing was in a way, something that I can do on my own, so why not to go for a different type of engineering? I can do that by myself too, but as am into research then graduate studies are almost a must. Then why not chemical engineering? Mechanical+Chemical means a better preparation for research at the molecular and meso scale+one more step toward a jump into natural sciences!

I also got to develop new passions toward some old enemies of mine, and I think that me and Ms. Mathematica are in deep love now as she is the only key toward a better chance of decent contributions in the future. Just for the sake of completeness, this was not the only reason for this new passion.

One of the most devastating experiences was the break down of my self proclaimed psychological invulnerability and depression immunity. I take full account for this failure. I thought that the dark side had lost its battle against me for good, some 5 years ago. Yet isolation was more than enough to revive that side. At the beginning I did not see that, but soon it was very obvious. The manifestations were endless, but most remarkable was the dark songs frenzy I went on.

5 years ago I decided that there were no more dark songs. No more NIN, no more creed, no more nothing of this shit. Yet the carving I had for those songs was too much to handle and at the beginning it was overwhelming. Everything got screwed up. Took some time to get things back under control. I figured out that if I am to make it out I should just live side by side with that element of darkness within, especially that accessibility to such types of madness is made much more easier now. Before, it was just tapes and cds, break them and get rid of that shit.

Now it is youtube with VIDEO CLIPS! Just as if the lyrics were not enough to drive you mad!