by Salman Hameed

If you live in Western Massachusetts, then you are in for a treat. We have three fantastic talks coming, including our next Science & Religion Lecture.

So lets start with tomorrow (Thursday, March 5th). The Culture Brain and Development (CBD) program at Hampshire is hosting a talk by Darrin McMahon:

Pursuing Happiness in the Past and in the Present

by Dr. Darrin M. McMahon

Thursday February 28th 5:30-7:00 p.m. in Franklin Patterson Hall, Main Lecture Hall

Bio: Dr. Darrin M. McMahon is the Ben Weider Professor of History at Florida State University. Educated at Berkeley and Yale, he is the author of Enemies of the Enlightenment (Oxford, 2001) and Happiness: a History (Atlantic Monthly, 2006), which has been translated into thirteen languages, and was awarded Best Books of the Year honors for 2006 by The New York Times, The Washington Post, Slate Magazine, and The Library Journal. Dr. McMahon?s writings have appeared in such publications as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe. He is currently writing a history of the idea of genius, forthcoming with Basic Books in 2013.

Abstract: Professor McMahon will sketch some of the principal ways human beings have thought about happiness in the past. Examples will draw primarily from the Western tradition, but the discussion will open out to encompass other traditions as well. McMahon will then discuss the ?Revolution in Human Expectations? that occurred in the 18th century, and explain how its consequences--for better and for worse--are still with us today. The lecture concludes by looking at some aspects of the recent "science" of happiness to explain how a good number of its central insights are consistent with truths long understood by the world's major religious and wisdom traditions.


Then we have Glenn Greenwald next Tuesday:

Endless War, Radical Presidential Power, and a Rotted Political Culture

by Glenn Greenwald

March 5 (Tuesday) 2013 at 5:30pm

Main Lecture Hall, Franklin Patterson Hall, Hampshire College, Amherst, MA

Glenn Greenwald will be speaking at Hampshire College about the U.S.’s “Endless War, Radical Presidential Power, And A Rotted Political Culture.” Greenwald was a constitutional lawyer, and is now a columnist for the Guardian and a best-selling author who writes critically and powerfully about the war on terror, national security, the expansion of executive power, and other pressing political issues. He has published several books on us politics; his most recent book is With Liberty And Justice For Some: How The Law Is Used To Destroy Equality And Protect The Powerful. Greenwald was named by the Atlantic as one of the 25 most influential political commentators in the nation. He has won numerous awards for his investigative journalism.

After a brief talk, he will participate in a roundtable conversation with moderator Falguni A. Sheth, Professor of Philosophy and Political Theory at Hampshire College.  The event will be held on Tuesday, March 5, 2013 at 5:30 pm, in the Main Lecture Hall in Franklin Patterson Hall, Hampshire College.  It is open to the public, and members of the community are warmly invited to attend.


And next Thursday, March 7th, we have our next Science and Religion Lecture:

Spinoza's God (or Nature)

by Dr. Steven Nadler

Thursday, March 7 at 5:30 p.m. in Main Lecture Hall, Franklin Patterson Hall

Abstract:

In 1656, the young Baruch Spinoza was excommunicated from the Amsterdam Portuguese-Jewish community with extreme prejudice; by the end of his short life he was regarded as one of the most radical and dangerous thinkers of his time. Among his alleged "abominable heresies" was, according to one contemporary report, the belief that "God exists only philosophically." In this lecture, we will examine Spinoza's conception of God, whereby God is identified with Nature, and address the question of whether he is, as is so often claimed, a "God intoxicated" pantheist or a devious atheist, as well as the implications of this for his views on religion.

Speaker bio:

Professor Nadler is William H. Hay Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research focuses on philosophy in the seventeenth century, particularly issues in metaphysics and epistemology, as well as conceptions of reason and happiness. He has written extensively on Descartes and Cartesianism, Spinoza, and Leibniz. He also works on medieval and early modern Jewish philosophy. His two most recent books are a collection of his papers, Occasionalism: Causation Among the Cartesians (Oxford, 2011); and A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza’s Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age (Princeton, 2011). His new book, The Philosopher, the Priest, and the Painter: A Portrait of Descartes, will be published by Princeton in spring 2013. He is currently the editor of the Journal of the History of Philosophy.

When shopping, I like to take a quick peek at the end of the meat case where they sometimes have marked-down cuts that are past their prime. I usually stay away from the smaller, thinner pieces, as they tend to go bad faster, but once in a while I’ll find a big roast, like the one that inspired this delicious red beef curry; and as the old saying goes, the only thing better than a 3-pound chuck roast, is a half-priced, 3-pound chuck roast.

By the way, this “Reduced for Quick Sale” meat is generally fine taste and texture-wise, but the surface of the meat has oxidized, so it doesn’t look very appetizing. Other than that, it’s perfectly fine to use, especially in a slow-braised recipe like this.

I cooked mine on low, for about 7 or 8 hours, until it was fork tender, but if you’re in a hurry, you can do it on a higher setting. Conventional wisdom is that the longer slower method is superior, but in all honesty, I don’t think there's a huge difference, so suit yourself. No matter what setting you use, simply do not stop until the meat is tender.

Some of the most frustrating emails I get, are the ones that say, “I followed your braised-whatever recipe exactly, but the meat came out hard.” Actually, no you didn’t. Every time I give an approximate cooking time for something like this, I’ll always say, “or until fork tender.” So why would anyone stop cooking it while the meat is still hard? I find it as mystifying as I do annoying.

Anyway, assuming you don’t stop, won’t stop, until the meat is succulent, you are in for a real treat. Feel free to add any vegetables you like, and if you want, you can cook them separately and just add to the finished dish. I generally don’t serve this over rice if I use potatoes, but that's just my personal hang up, so don’t feel like you need to deny yourself that particular pleasure. I really hope you give this a try soon. Enjoy!

Ingredients for 4 giant or 6 regular portions:

2 1/2 or 3 pound beef chuck roast

salt and pepper to taste

2 tsp vegetable oil

1 chopped onion

1 or 2 tsp red curry paste, or to taste

2 tsp ground cumin

1 tsp ground coriander

2 cups chicken broth

1 can (14 oz) coconut milk
1 can (10-oz) diced tomatoes with green chilies (or any diced tomato product)

3 tbsp Asian fish sauce, or to taste

1/4 cup brown sugar

1 tbsp tomato paste

4 cloves minced garlic

1 thumb-sized piece of ginger, sliced

juice of one lime
2 bay leaves

1 1/2 pound small potatoes, halved

4 or 5 baby bok choy, sliced

1 rounded teaspoon cornstarch, dissolved in 1 tablespoon cold water

To garnish:

chopped roasted peanuts

chopped fresh cilantro leaves

View the complete recipe

by Salman Hameed

We most hear about population explosion in much of the Muslim world. This then also gets tied to factors affecting social and economic conditions in these developing countries. So it was fascinating to see an article about a study that highlights not only declining fertility rates in much of the Muslim world, but the fact that they are declining a stunning pace. And while we are seeing a youth-bulge right now (and its impact is already being felt with the changes taking place in the Arab world and elsewhere), but the situation will change dramatically in the next few decades:

Something startling is happening in the Muslim world — and no, I don’t mean the Arab Spring or the growth of Islamic fundamentalism. According to a leading demographer, a “sea change” is producing a sharp decline in Muslim fertility rates and a “flight from marriage” among Arab women. 

Nicholas Eberstadt, a scholar with the American Enterprise Institute, documented these findings in two recent papers. They tell a story that contradicts the usual picture of a continuing population explosion in Muslim lands. Population is indeed rising, but if current trends continue, the bulge won’t last long. 

Eberstadt’s first paper was expressively titled “Fertility Decline in the Muslim World: A Veritable Sea-Change, Still Curiously Unnoticed.” Using data for 49 Muslim-majority countries and territories, he found that fertility rates declined an average of 41 percent between 1975-80 and 2005-10, a deeper drop than the 33 percent decline for the world as a whole.

Here is a plot (click on the figure to enlarge it) from the paper by Eberstadt and Shah (get the full pdf paper here):

In several of the countries, the declines are more than 60%, with Iran getting as high as 70%:

Twenty-two Muslim countries and territories had fertility declines of 50 percent or more. The sharpest drops were in Iran, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Algeria, Bangladesh, Tunisia, Libya, Albania, Qatar and Kuwait, which all recorded declines of 60 percent or more over three decades. 

Fertility in Iran declined an astonishing 70 percent over the 30-year period, which Eberstadt says was “one of the most rapid and pronounced fertility declines ever recorded in human history.” By 2000, Iran’s fertility rate had fallen to two births per woman, below the level necessary to replace current population, according to Eberstadt and his co-author, Apoorva Shah.

Just as a comparison, here is a plot that looks at fertility rates of individual US states and that in Muslim countries (click on the image to enlarge it):

This is actually quite stunning. But this is not it. There is also a decline of marriages in the Muslim world, along with the rest of the world:

Accompanying this fertility decline is what Eberstadt calls a “flight from marriage,” which he described in a paper presented last month in Doha, Qatar. His data show that in many areas of the world, men and women are getting married later or remaining unmarried. Divorce rates are also rising, especially in Europe, along with the percentage of extramarital births. 

The decline of marriage in Europe is well-known but still striking: The female marriage rate fell in Germany from 0.98 to 0.59 from 1965 to 2000; it fell in France over that period from 0.99 to 0.61; in Sweden from 0.98 to 0.49; in Britain, from 1 to 0.54. 

Marriage is also plummeting in Asia: In Japan, the percentage of women between 30 and 34 who have never married rose from 7.2 percent in 1970 to 26.6 percent in 2000; in Burma, it rose from 9.3 percent to 25.9 percent; in Thailand, from 8.1 percent to 16.1 percent; in South Korea, from 1.4 percent to 10.7 percent. 

Marriage rates in the Arab world are higher, but they’re moving fast in the same direction. What’s “astonishing,” says Eberstadt in an e-mail explaining his findings, is that in the Arab world, this move away from marriage “is by many measures already as far along as was Europe’s in the 1980s — and it is taking place at a vastly lower level of development than the corresponding flights in Europe and developed East Asia.
“Something really big is under way — and practically no one has noticed it, even in the Arab world,” argues Eberstadt.

I don't what will be the specific impact of these changes - but we can be sure that we will be seeing a lot more changes in the Muslim world in the coming decades. Mass education and globalization via the internet and other sources is already bringing up unprecedented questions about the nature of being a Muslim in the modern world. The traditional structures are being challenged and new answers are being tested. But, in addition, this demographic shift would mean that the youth bulge of today (more than half of the Muslim population today is under the age of 25) will turn into an aging society, and that will bring a whole set of new challenges.

Read the full article here and you can find the full study here.

As promised, here’s the recipe for the chocolate cake that was featured in the orange Crème Anglaise video recipe we did a few weeks ago. In case you missed it, here’s what happened: We uploaded a perfectly fine looking custard sauce video, which no one cared about once they saw this gorgeous looking cake.

Not only did the vast majority of the audience lose all interest in the Crème Anglaise, but they also started requesting the cake be shared in video recipe form. And by “request,” I mean they demanded under threat of grievous bodily harm. Well, it worked.

By the way, you can use any pan for this cake, even a cupcake tin, as long as you’re prepared to adjust your baking time. I’d love to give you specific times, but that will depend on the exact size/type of pan. Best to test early and often with the old bamboo skewer, until it comes out clean.

I joked in the intro that if you messed this up, you should never try to bake anything else again. The funny this is, that’s not a joke. You’ll have to try really hard for this not to come out awesome. In fact, the ganache is probably the trickiest part, and all that entails is pouring boiling cream over chopped chocolate and stirring. I hope you give this ridiculously easy and delicious chocolate cake a try soon. Enjoy!

 

Ingredients for 1 Chocolate Sour Cream Bundt Cake:
Recipe from Bi-Rite Market's Eat Good Food

2 cups all-purpose flour

1 3/4 cups sugar

1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda

2 sticks (1 cup) unsalted butter

1/3 cup high-quality cocoa powder (use the best you can find)

1 cup water

1/2 tsp fine salt

2 large eggs

1/2 cup sour cream

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

For the ganache:

4 ounces good quality dark chocolate, chopped or broken into 1/2-inch pieces

1/2 cup heavy cream

*Bring cream to a boil and immediately pour over chocolate. Wait 1 minute and stir until smooth and glossy.

رابط الحفظ

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by Salman Hameed

We just finished watching the first season of the Showtime series Homeland. While it has garnered critical appraise as well as awards at both the Emmy's and the Golden Globes, there are serious problems with the way it depicts Islam and violence. (A spoiler alert in the next sentence) Yes - it does try to make things more complicated by having American marines as potential terrorists - but they are still being controlled by an evil Middle Easterner. This might have been okay too - but there have been too many times where Muslim prayers were juxtaposed with violence or violent intentions. But the problem is that this kind of imagery is totally okay in the mainstream - even amongst the liberals here.

This brings me to Argo, which has been winning award after award, and is the front-runner for the best picture Oscar tonight. Just like Homeland, it tries to present a more nuanced picture of Iran - but instead reinforces all the stereotypes. In fact, there are no sympathetic Iranian characters in the film other than in the role of a loyal servant. This would have been okay if the movie was directed by Michael Bay and starred Chuck Norris. The problem is that it is coming from the more progressive crowd in the Hollywood (George Clooney is one of the Executive Producers) and most people that this is a nuanced portrait of Iran.

Kevin Anderson and I had a discussion about Argo and we talked about some of these issues. Here is our Film Autopsy:



Also, this point has also been made about Argo in Jingoism as History (tip from Vijay Prashad). In fact, it brings up another fascinating piece of history ignored in the film:

On November 4, 1979, radical Iranian protesters breached the walls of the United States Embassy in Tehran and took the U.S. diplomats working there hostage. They demanded that the U.S. send the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, then receiving treatment in a New York hospital for terminal cancer, to Iran to stand trial in exchange for the release of the hostages. 

On November 6, 1979, The New York Times reported that the civilian government of Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan and his 20-member Cabinet had resigned “after the Ayatollah’s advisers supported the student occupation of the U.S. Embassy despite assurances by the government that it would end the seizure and obtain the release of the hostages”. 

In resigning, The New York Times reported, Bazargan was “conceding power to the Islamic authority of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini”. The resignation of the civilian government in protest over the embassy takeover, which came after months of internal struggle between the revolutionary factions that had overthrown the Shah, was a watershed moment in Iranian history. It gave the Khomeinists unchecked power at a critical time, shaping the contours of Iran’s government for decades to come. 

Ben Affleck’s hit movie Argo carefully details the takeover of the embassy. But it leaves that critical part of the story out even though it is documented well by mainstream American news outlets. In Affleck’s film, Iranians are, for the most part, dangerous and anti-American. Only one character, a meek maid, seems to have some sympathy for the hostages; she ultimately risks her life to cover up their hiding place from the Revolutionary Guards. 

It is a lost opportunity for an allegedly progressive Hollywood film-maker to tell that part of the history as well. The embassy takeover was, in the view of many Iranians like myself, a most ignominious episode, a clear violation of international law and an abrogation of accepted norms of decency. Argo introduces an entire new generation of U.S. moviegoers to the Hostage Crisis. In the end, it introduces a new chapter in the larger story without fundamentally changing the narrative.
...
As of the first week of January 2013, Argo grossed over $166 million in worldwide distribution. During the Oscar season, it is bound to garner even more viewers. Those who go to see Argo may leave the theatre thinking they have just learned some history. But, really, at the end of the day, they have seen a heart-wrenching historical episode giving way to a political thriller complete with bad sideburns, car chases, and a watered-down version of history. As a reviewer in the Chicago Reader wrote, “...making an anti-Iranian action flick in Hollywood isn’t exactly a daring act”. Ultimately, whatever the film-maker’s intentions, Argo comes across as liberal jingoism.

Read the full article here.

Also - here Kevin Anderson and I express our views on best picture nominations and how to fix some of the mistakes of the Academy for our Film Autopsy on Switchboard Magazine:



And while we are on the subject of controversial and problematic films, here is our film autopsy of Zero Dark Thirty:

Lean Startups require cross-functional teams working closely together. This is especially true when designing a great product. In this excerpt from the newest addition to the Lean Series, Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden discuss the idea of collaborative design -- an opening up of the product design process to all members of the team -- and why they feel this way of working produces not just better products but better teams as well.

What follows is an excerpt from Chapter 4 (Collaborative Design) of Lean UX: Applying lean principles to improve user experience by Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden

The most effective way I’ve found to rally a team around a design direction is through collaboration. Over the long haul, collaboration yields bet- ter results than hero-based design (the practice of calling in a designer or design team to drop in, come up with something beautiful, and take off to rescue the next project). Teams rarely learn or get better from working with heroes. Instead, designing together increases the design IQ of the entire team. It allows every member of the team to articulate his or her ideas. It gives designers a much broader set of ideas to draw upon as they refine the user experience. This collaboration, in turn, breeds increased feelings of ownership over the work being done by the entire team. Finally, collaborative design builds team-wide shared understanding. It is this shared under- standing that is the currency of Lean UX. The more the team collectively understands, the less it has to document in order to move forward.

Collaborative design is an approach that allows a team to create product concepts together. It helps teams build a shared understanding of the design problem and solution. It allows them to work together to decide which functionality and interface elements best implement the feature in their hypothesis.
  
Collaborative design is still a designer-led activity. It’s the designer’s responsibility not only to call these meetings but to facilitate them as well. Sometimes you’ll have one-on-one sessions with a developer at a whiteboard. Other times, you’ll gather the whole team for a Design Studio exercise. The key is to collaborate with a diverse group of team members.

In a typical collaborative design session, teams sketch together, critique the work as it emerges, and ultimately converge on a solution that they feel has the greatest chance of success. The designer, while still producing designs, takes on the additional role of facilitator to lead the team through a series of exercises.

The output of these sessions typically consists of low-fidelity sketches and wireframes. This level of fidelity is critical to maintaining the malleability of the work, which allows the team to pivot quickly if their tests reveal that the approach isn’t working. It’s much easier to pivot from a failed approach if you haven’t spent too much time laboriously documenting and detailing that approach.

Collaborative Design in Practice

In 2010, I was designing a dashboard for a web app targeted at TheLadders’ recruiter and employer audience. There was a lot of information to fit on one screen and I was struggling to make it all work. Instead of burn- ing too much time at my desk pushing pixels, I grabbed a whiteboard and called the lead developer over. I sketched my original idea about how to lay out all the content and functionality for this dashboard. We discussed it and then I handed him the marker. He sketched his ideas on the same whiteboard. We went back and forth, ultimately converging on a layout and interaction schema that was not only usable but feasible given our two- week sprint timeframes (see Figure 4-2). At the end of that two-hour session, we returned to our desks and started working. I refined our sketch into a more formal wireframe and workflow and he began to write the infrastructure code necessary to get the data we needed to the presentation layer.

We had built a shared understanding through our collaborative design session. We both knew what we were going to build and what it needed to do. We didn’t need to wait to document it. This approach allowed us to get the first version of this idea built within our two-week timeframe.
Figure 4-2. Whiteboard sketch that we arrived at together.

Style guides

One tool that makes collaborative design easier is the style guide. A style guide is a broadly accepted pattern library that codifies the interactive, visual, and copy elements of a user interface and system. Style guides (also known as pattern libraries) are a living collection of all of your product’s customer-facing components. If it’s made of pixels, it goes in the style guide. Headers, footers, grids, forms, labels, button logic, and everything else that goes into your product’s user experience goes in the style guide. Because they capture all of the detailed elements of your design system, your collaborative work sessions can focus on customer need, business problem, interaction, flow, structure, business rules—all things that are productive to work on in a team setting.

Some companies use wikis for their style guides, which allows the collection to stay current and accessible to everyone on the team. Other teams choose to create “live” style guides. These are repositories of front-end code and design that not only define how the product looks and behaves, but actually function as the underlying markup and stylesheets for that experience. If you change the style guide, you change the product.

Style guides create efficiency. They provide a repository of ready-to-go, approved interface components that can be assembled and aligned to form a workflow. By minimizing debate over mundane elements like the placement of labels in forms or the never-ending debate over left/right placement of the “positive” action button, developers can get started creating core UI components without waiting for a designer to define and specify these assets. The assets are already designed, defined, and collected in one place.

Interaction and visual designers benefit as well. They no longer have to recreate representations of experiences that already exist. They become free to focus on new design challenges—novel interaction problems or extending the visual system to new elements. Approval cycles are streamlined because the repetitive elements (e.g., the treatment of the global navigation) are no longer up for debate. Reviews become more focused on the core product challenge and broader views of the proposed solution.

Creating a Style guide

There are two basic approaches to creating a style guide:

Big bang
In this approach, your team takes a limited amount of time (e.g., one to two weeks or sometimes months) away from their current efforts to document all of your product’s UI elements in a style guide. The benefit here is that the style guide gets created in a relatively short amount of time. The negative is that your team is not learning anything new about your product during this time.

Slow drip
In this approach, your team adds an element to the style guide each time they create or change one for the project. The biggest benefit here is that the team continues to work on the project. However, the drawback is that the style guide is rarely completed and therefore fails to provide some of the efficiencies that a complete one does.

Maintaining a Style guide

When planning your style guide, it’s important to plan for maintenance. You’re going to need to create a process and dedicate people to keeping your style guide up to date. Think of a style guide as a living process that you launch and maintain, rather than a static thing you create. When you have an up-to-date and easy-to-use style guide, you make it easy for the team to actually use the style guide—and your goal should be to make it easier to use the style guide than to avoid it. You want to make compliance easy! So plan to dedicate people and time to keeping your style guide current.

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Want to read more? Order the book.

Interested in applying these ideas but not sure where to begin? The authors are also the organizers of Lean Day: UX, March 1st, 2013 in NYC, brings together 9 practitioners of Lean Startup and Lean UX in the enterprise sharing case studies of how they put these tactics to use every day. 

by Salman Hameed

You can say a lot even in less than 8 minutes. Here is a fascinating short film, Grounded, about an astronaut landing on an extrasolar planet. What do you think is going on in here?

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by Salman Hameed

Here is a fantastic and thoughtful oped by Mohsin Hamid on how Pakistan's focus on fighting India has sowed the seeds of its own intractable sectarian problems. It is titled To Fight India, We Fought Ourselves. Of course, he thinks that the increasing cultural and economic exchanges between the two countries are a positive signs for the future relations and for the stability of Pakistan itself. But he also presents a set of challenges for both sides of the border. However, I think we should add scientific collaborations as well. I know that there were some efforts in astronomy going on - but it will be great to see more collaborative projects taking place.

The article that starts with the recent killings of Shias in Baluchistan. Mohsin makes an interesting point that the persecuted minorities combined together constitute a majority in Pakistan:

Minority persecution is a common notion around the world, bringing to mind the treatment of African-Americans in the United States, for example, or Arab immigrants in Europe. In Pakistan, though, the situation is more unusual: those persecuted as minorities collectively constitute a vast majority. 

A filmmaker I know who has relatives in the Ahmadi sect told me that her family’s graves in Lahore had been defaced, because Ahmadis are regarded as apostates. A Baluch friend said it was difficult to take Punjabi visitors with him to Baluchistan, because there is so much local anger there at violence toward the Baluch. An acquaintance of mine, a Pakistani Hindu, once got angry when I answered the question “how are things?” with the word “fine” — because things so obviously aren’t. And Pakistani Christians have borne the brunt of arrests under the country’s blasphemy law; a governor of my province was assassinated for trying to repeal it. 

What then is the status of the country’s majority? In Pakistan, there is no such thing. Punjab is the most populous province, but its roughly 100 million people are divided by language, religious sect, outlook and gender. Sunni Muslims represent Pakistan’s most populous faith, but it’s dangerous to be the wrong kind of Sunni. Sunnis are regularly killed for being open to the new ways of the West, or for adhering to the old traditions of the Indian subcontinent, for being liberal, for being mystical, for being in politics, the army or the police, or for simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. 

At the heart of Pakistan’s troubles is the celebration of the militant. Whether fighting in Afghanistan, or Kashmir, or at home, this deadly figure has been elevated to heroic status: willing to make the ultimate sacrifice, able to win the ultimate victory, selfless, noble. Yet as tens of thousands of Pakistanis die at the hands of such heroes, as tens of millions of Pakistanis go about their lives in daily fear of them, a recalibration is being demanded. The need of the hour, of the year, of the generation, is peace. 

Pakistan is in the grips of militancy because of its fraught relationship with India, with which it has fought three wars and innumerable skirmishes since the countries separated in 1947. Militants were cultivated as an equalizer, to make Pakistan safer against a much larger foe. But they have done the opposite, killing Pakistanis at home and increasing the likelihood of catastrophic conflicts abroad. 

Normalizing relations with India could help starve Pakistani militancy of oxygen. So it is significant that the prospects for peace between the two nuclear-armed countries look better than they have in some time. 

But he is right about the challenges as well on both sides of the border:

 India and Pakistan share a lengthy land border, but they might as well be on separate continents, so limited is their trade with each other and the commingling of their people. Visas, traditionally hard to get, restricted to specific cities and burdened with onerous requirements to report to the local police, are becoming more flexible for business travelers and older citizens. Trade is also picking up. A pulp manufacturer in Pakistani Punjab, for example, told me he had identified a paper mill in Indian Punjab that could purchase his factory’s entire output. 

These openings could be the first cracks in a dam that holds back a flood of interaction. Whenever I go to New Delhi, many I meet are eager to visit Lahore. Home to roughly a combined 25 million people, the cities are not much more than half an hour apart by plane, and yet they are linked by only two flights a week. 

Cultural connections are increasing, too. Indian films dominate at Pakistani cinemas, and Indian songs play at Pakistani weddings. Now Pakistanis are making inroads in the opposite direction. Pakistani actors have appeared as Bollywood leads and on Indian reality TV. Pakistani contemporary art is being snapped up by Indian buyers. And New Delhi is the publishing center for the current crop of Pakistani English-language fiction.
A major constraint the two countries have faced in normalizing relations has been the power of security hawks on both sides, and especially in Pakistan. But even in this domain we might be seeing an improvement. The new official doctrine of the Pakistani Army for the first time identifies internal militants, rather than India, as the country’s No. 1 threat. And Pakistan has just completed an unprecedented five years under a single elected government. This year, it will be holding elections in which the largest parties all agree that peace with India is essential. 

Peace with India or, rather, increasingly normal neighborly relations, offers the best chance for Pakistan to succeed in dismantling its cult of militancy. Pakistan’s extremists, of course, understand this, and so we can expect to see, as we have in the past, attempts to scupper progress through cross-border violence. They will try to goad India into retaliating and thereby giving them what serves them best: a state of frozen, impermeable hostility.
They may well succeed. For there is a disturbing rise of hyperbolic nationalism among India’s prickly emerging middle class, and the Indian media is quick to stoke the fires. The explosion of popular rage in India after a recent military exchange, in which soldiers on both sides of the border were killed, is an indicator of the danger. 

So it is important now to prepare the public in both countries for an extremist outrage, which may well originate in Pakistan, and for the self-defeating calls for an extreme response, which are likely to be heard in India. Such confrontations have always derailed peace in the past. They must not be allowed to do so again. In the tricky months ahead, as India and Pakistan reconnect after decades of virtual embargo, those of us who believe in peace should regard extremist provocations not as barriers to our success but, perversely, as signs that we are succeeding. 

Read the full article here.

I just heard that today is National Margarita Day (thank you, Twitter), and so I thought I’d repost this ancient video recipe I did for About.com. Please keep in mind that this isn’t a Food Wishes video, so there’s a few things you may not be used to. I had to be under 3 minutes; it couldn’t contain inappropriate humor; and maybe worst of all, I was forced to show my “face for radio.” In fairness, I do get better looking after a few of these. Enjoy! 

I took a few things for granted in this cheese straws video. I assumed you could tell how delicious they were as I crunched into them, which is why I never said as much. I also assumed you’d figure out how, where, and when to use them; as I failed to give my usual serving suggestions. I was so taken by the sound and texture of these cheesy sticks, that it just never occurred to me to state such obvious facts.

So, for the record, let’s make this official. These really tasted great, and that’s without any embellishments whatsoever. There are so many things that will work with this technique, including, but not limited to garlic butter, fresh herbs, crushed nuts, and/or literally any dried spice. As far as approved uses, it’d be easier to list things this wouldn’t work with.

Any soup, stew, or bowl of chili would look substantially better with some of these alongside. A few cheese straws will make that sleepy bowl of leftover pasta suddenly seems special again, and substituting them for toast at breakfast is a proven crowd-pleaser. Dipping toasted bread into a runny egg yolk is nice, but dipping with a warm, crispy cheese straw? That goes way beyond nice.

As long as you use some nice, grate-able pungent cheeses, and cook them long enough to get crisp, there’s no way these won’t be great. I hope you give them a try soon, and report back with all your brilliant adaptations. Enjoy!

Ingredients:
frozen puff pastry

about 2 tsp olive oil , or as needed

about 1/2 cup total finely grated aged cheddar and Parmigiano-Reggiano, or more as needed

salt, pepper, and cayenne to taste

by Salman Hameed

Well, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds are back to their top form with their new album, Push the Sky Away. It reminds me of The Boatman's Call and yet it is quite different (Murder Ballads and The Boatman's Call were two amazing back-to-back albums). Nick Cave usually writes about death/murder, love and God (yes, he is inspired by Johnny Cash, Leonard Cohen and Tom Waits), but this time he also has a spectacular song related to science, Higgs Boson Blues. Well, no - there isn't any science in it. Instead, it seems like a surreal romp on a drive to Geneva. Here it is:

There are a lot of meandering pop culture and historical references. One reference is about a cone-shape Jewish hat, that was enforced - among others - by one of the Abbasid Caliphs. In another excellent song, Mermaids, he mentions seventy-two virgins (along with his belief in God, mermaids, and the Rapture). And on a completely unrelated topic, do check out the video Jubilee Street (the uncensored version here - hey you better be over 18 to view it!). This video is directed by John Hillcoat, who has directed two Nick Cave written films - the fantastic The Proposition and the not so good Lawless (also see our Film Autopsy here).

Well, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds will be performing in Boston on March 24th - but the show is sold out. Don't hesitate to let me know if you have tickets to the show and don't want to go...  :)

And while we are on the subject of awesome aging singers, here is the spectacular new song and video from David Bowie: Where Are We Now?

by Salman Hameed

Perhaps, appropriately, Persian polymath Nasir al Din Tusi (1201-1274 CE) decided to have his birthday on February 19th, a day before Copernicus. Google then decided to have a Tusi doodle on the 18th, but kept it away from the non-Arab world. Here is Tusi doodle that appeared only on Arabic Google (tip from House of Wisdom):

So why care for Tusi? Well, like other natural philosophers of his time, he contributed to many different fields. He even waded in on idea of the development and evolution of species, including that of humans. But it is his Tusi-Couple that ended up changing the face of astronomy (he also formed the important Marageh Observatory in 1259 CE). Something very similar was used by Ibn al-Shatir in his geocentric model and Copernicus in his heliocentric model. Historians now believe that Copernicus must have known about the Tusi-Couple and adapted it for his model (for clarification, al-Tusi or Ibn al-Shatir did not place the Sun at the center of the solar system).

Here is the Tusi-Couple:

And on queue, February 19th was the 540th birthday of Copernicus. Here is the Google doodle for that:

Happy belated birthdays!

رابط الحفظ

من هنا

by Salman Hameed

This is from the recently concluded Karachi Literature Festival. Unfortunately, he is right about nuclear weapons. It will take a tragedy to wake people up on the indiscriminate evil of the bomb. Here is a sobering clip from Pervez Hoodbhoy:

 

Too Good not to Re-Post!!

Yet another recipe I found while spending way too much time on Pinterest!  This is a delicious chicken recipe.  I put the BAKED in quotes because even though the chicken does bake in the oven covered in the sweet and sour sauce you do still have to pan fry the cornstarch/egg battered chicken first.  My 9 year old daughter loved this the most.  I've never seen her eat so much in one sitting.  I really loved it too although I did think that the "sour" part of the sweet and sour was very prominent in this dish.  Still totally delicious though and I will definitely be making this again soon.  I may try to reduce the amount of vinegar by a tablespoon or so to see if that changes the flavor at all.  You can find the orginal recipe at the blog Life as a Lofthouse. (*4/30/13) I just recently learned that this recipe was created by Mel at Mel's Kitchen Cafe

Ingredients:

3-4 boneless chicken breasts

salt and pepper, to taste
1 cup cornstarch
2 eggs, beaten
1/4 cup vegetable oil

3/4 cup sugar (I used 1/2 cup)

4 tbs ketchup

1/2 cup white vinegar (I used 1/4 cup of apple cider vinegar)

1 tbs soy sauce

1 tsp garlic salt

Preheat your oven to 325 degrees. Rinse your chicken breasts in water and then cut into cubes. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Dip chicken into the cornstarch to coat then dip into the eggs. Heat the 1/4 cup oil in a large skillet and cook your chicken until browned but not cooked through. Place the chicken in a 9x13 greased baking dish. In a small bowl using a whisk mix together, sugar, ketchup, vinegar, soy sauce and garlic salt and then pour evenly over the chicken. Bake the chicken in the sauce for one hour turning the chicken every 15 minutes or so. (I forgot this step and it came out perfectly fine).  

The Great Hero of ISLAM:
HAZRAT UMAR FAROOQ (R.A)
was the 1st man in the world,
who:
1-Made Army & Navy as a state department,
2-Introduced police system,
3-Introduced intelligence system & agencies,
4-Introduced disaster management cell,
5-Introduced Ehtisab council,
6-Introduced system of Districts,
7-Used fast horses 4 improving Post Office Services,
8-Introduced self support financial schemes,
9-Introduced revenue department,
10-Introduced idea of food, cloth, shelter etc;

Cambridge University U.k has placed Hazrat Umar (R.A)
as the most genius Ruler of all times.

كتاب الحرب على الكسل لــ د /خالد أبو شادي
موجهة لك لتطلق طلقاتك على الكسل وتعدو في ميدان الحياة نشيط القلب
إلى ربك سريع العمل الصالح في دنياك لتسعد في دنياك وآخرتك.

************

التحميل

I realized after watching the finished video for this raw kale salad that I used the words “tough” and “bitter” about a dozen times. Not exactly a ringing endorsement. I used those words because kale is tough and bitter, but when properly prepared, those are valuable assets, not liabilities.

If you slice it thin, and toss it with other tasty treats, the kale mellows out, and serves as a perfect foil for other vegetation. The sweet, wet crunch of raw apple counters the bitterness, and the texture of the leaves elevated from opposite directions by juicy orange and crunchy nuts. It’s quite a scene.

I’m going to do a video for the orange cumin vinaigrette, but in the meantime, the ingredients are listed below. Feel free to copy my salad formula, but this is more of an idea video than an actual recipe. You know what you like, so whatever that is, add it to some raw kale, and see what happens. Enjoy!

Ingredients for 2 big or 4 small Raw Kale Salads:

1 head green kale

1 persimmon, sliced

1 apple, sliced thin or matchstick cut

2 seedless oranges, cut into segments aka “supremes” (click here for video)

handful of chopped nuts

For the dressing:

1 rounded teaspoon Dijon mustard           

1 rounded teaspoon orange zest

1 tsp cumin, or to taste

1/4 tsp red pepper flakes, or to taste

1 tbsp orange juice

1/4 cup rice vinegar (or white wine or sherry vinegar)

1/3 cup olive oil, or to taste

salt and pepper to taste

(Note: the card representing Christ was meant specifically for use in introducing the song "If the Savior Stood Beside Me."  Please use the Spirit in deciding whether or not to use this card for any other activities.  For a note on using cartoon pictures of Christ in teaching, please visit here.)

These cards are meant to review any song.

I plan to introduce them as we learn "If the Savior Stood Beside Me."  Before we learn the song, I will have the children choose several cards, one at a time, and think about how they would act if that person were in the room with them.  What would they do?  What would they wear?  How would they feel?  What would they say?  Then I will show them the card with Jesus on it and ask the same questions.  

I'll teach the song, using the activity found here and when they know it, we will review the song using these same cards.  One at a time, I will have the children choose a card and we will sing the song as the person on the card would sing it.

On the last week of the month, I plan to do the review/understanding activity found here.

Ballerina: turn in circles while you sing.

Drummer: gently drum the beat or the rhythm on the chair in front of you while you sing

Cowgirl:  sing with a country twang.

Opera Singer:  sing with a strong vibrato, like an opera singer

Race Car Driver:  sing really fast.

Robot:  sing in monotone, like a robot voice

Diver:  Move your finger up and down over your lips while you sing, like you're under water.

Tight-rope Walker:  balance on one foot while you sing.

Soldier:  march while you sing

Jesus:  sing super reverently.

(For another set of cards, see the post here. Also, if you have ideas for other cards you'd like me to make, leave suggestions in the comments. I plan to have a second set ready in a few weeks.)

This game is generally too difficult for the Junior Primary, so I mainly use it as filler on weeks when Senior Primary is finished learning the new song and Junior Primary still has lyrics to learn.  This gives JP time to catch up.

Sometimes if the song is short or familiar, I do try the game with Junior Primary.  Although the younger kids have a hard time keeping up, they enjoy watching me and the older kids stumble through it :)

To play the game, you simply replace all the vowel sounds in a song with long A, then E, I, O and U.  For example, if you were reviewing the song "I Am a Child of God," You would begin with the long-A verse, which would sound like this:

Aye aim a chaild aif Gaid
Aind hay hays saint may hair...

Then you would sing the long-E verse

Ee eem ee cheeld efe Geed
Eend he hees seent mee here...

Then long-I

I ime I child ive gide
Inde hi hise sinte my hire.... 

And so on.

Have fun, and if you do try the game, let us know in the comments how it went!

بطاقة الكتاب:

عنوان الكتاب: التفسير الإسلامي للتاريخ
المؤلف: الدكتور عماد الدين خليل
دار النشر: دار العلم للملايين - بيروت
رقم الطبعة: الطبعة الخامسة 1991 م
عدد المجلدات: 1
عدد الصفحات: 334
حجم الملف: 4.55 ميغابايت

للتحميل:

الكتاب, صفحة الأرشيف

روابط الحفظ

http://www.archive.org/download/book...eth/sndqs1.pdf
http://www.archive.org/download/book...eth/sndqs2.pdf

by Salman Hameed

This winter has been brutal! After several storms and cold spells, we again have temperatures plunging tonight to 8F (-13C) and with windchill, it will feel like -10F (-23C). Noooooo! Oh I mean - Khaaaannnn! I protest.

And the prettyness of snow is just not enough to overcome these inhumane temperatures. This is how our house looked like after last week's snow-dump, Nemo:

And the backyard "winter wonderland" after another few inches of snow on Friday night (this is a color picture - but because of the clouds and snow, it looks B&W):

And here, one of the trees is pondering about its existence in the northeast: