Akram's Razor - Reflections on Islam, Muslims & America

Local activism from abroad

This is quite random (not to mention old, as it's dated Nov 3, 2008), but having a background in ICT4D I found this report on a technology blog intriguing. It goes without saying that the Internet allows people to keep in touch in radically new ways while on the go and Skype is so widespread that its very name has become a handy verb for millions of Internet users, but who would've thought you could use the Internet to volunteer in a political campaign back home while sitting on another continent?

Wendy’s Blog: Skype for Obama, from Cairo to Colorado

I’m spending this election season in Cairo, Egypt, attending an ICANN meeting. Thanks to the Internet, that hasn’t stopped me from some final get-out-the-vote efforts. The time zones mesh up so that after meetings conclude here, I’ve been able to log in to my.barackobama.com, find a list of voters and a calling script, and call via Skype to remind them of polling places and encourage them to vote.

Isn’t the Internet grand? I’m at the ICANN meeting trying to keep ICANN from interfering with the flexibility that allowed that unexpected political outreach.

Lucky McCain's campaign didn't get wind of this. I can hear Palin's inevitable slogan now: "Obama campaign gets support from Al-Qaeda member."*

*  Swiftboat-ese for a person residing in the Middle East.

Report on the Arabic Blogosphere

Dustin over at His Peace Upon Us, a thoughtful and recommended new Christian blog dedicated to dialogue between Christians and Muslims, reports on  a very interesting study of the Arabic-language Blogosphere.  Its title is "Mapping the Arabic Blogosphere: Politics, Culture, and Dissent" and its authors are Bruce Etling, John Kelly, Robert Faris, and John Palfrey.

Dustin writes:

The Berkman Center for Internet Study and Security did a massive study on the Arabic blogosphere. Who blogs? What do they blog about? You can read the summary of the report at the Berkman Center site.

I found it interesting that they blog more about human rights than they criticize Western culture and values. That’s probably not what most would expect.

Very interesting indeed.

Haven't read all of the report, but 3 interesting details jump out at me:

• I'm not suprised that Saudi bloggers hold a decent sized chunk of the Arabic Blogosphere--They've got money, a strong sense of national idenity, and fewer distractions during their leisure time (e.g., cinemas are still verboten in ABBR title="Kingdom of Saudia Arabia">)--but judging by this report Kuwaitis seem markedly more active online than their fellow GCCers in Qatar, UAE and Bahrain. Forget the populations and populations' citizenship/foreigner breakdowns, but it surely this is disproportionate. (A prediction, given the Khaleeji Consumption Disorder epidemic: Soon we will hear of Gulf states rushing to  buy cutting-edge bloggers from Africa to write under their flags, like they do Olympic athletes.)

• Arabic Bahais. Not the first thing you think of, but they're out there, and very legitimately speaking out against the discrimination they face. (Speaking of which, there is something pathetic about the need some feel to harass these peaceful people. If you're offended by their rejection of Islam or concerned about the message its sends, try focusing your energies on giving them less reason for doubt instead of seeming to prove them right.)

• I might've overlooked something in the complete report, but I don't see any discussion of Arab Christian bloggers. I wonder what the explanation is for this apparent disparity. Are they not as active online? Did the researchers perhaps give inadequate attention to their networks?

What I'd really like to see is a study of the contemporary contours and groupings of the Salafi/Wahhabi corner of the Blogosphere, which has gone through a lot of changes (not to mention a huge amount of in-fighting) since their heyday online in the early days of the Internet, when it claimed or influenced some of the best known Islamic websites and fora.

I'm sure there are oodles of somewhat relevant "threat assessment" reports in the intel/security arena, but doing this right would be a very difficult undertaking even experienced researchers who master Arabic fully, as the ideological and doctrinal nuances are so fine (and, to many outsiders' eyes, trivial). The background required to really understand the changes isn't likely to be picked up just by lurking in their forums. (Perhaps Berkman needs to hire Umar Lee as a consultant.)

Update (2009-07-21): Had a typo in my excerpt from His Peace Upon Us. Wrote "KSA" instead of "Berkman Center site" at the end of the 1st paragraph.

Latest pseudo-science inspired by this blog's title

I see it more of a quirk of the unexpected workings of Internet media than anything else, but as I've mentioned before, despite my blog's quite modest traffic every now and again a contributor to an online forum will refer in all seriousness to the famous philosophical principle of, ahem, "Akram's Razor." The actual precept is called, of course, Occam's Razor. (I explained the reasoning behind my pretentious neologism when I set up the blog in 2005.)

Here are the two latest examples I've come across.

1. A comment (posted only a month or so ago, fetched from Google's cache since the link's now broken) in a discussion on an engineering magazine's online forum on, I kid you not, the feasibility of Cold Fusion:

Regardless of PERSONAL OPINIONS, there remains the fact that Neutrons just dont get up and move because they don't like their neighbours and that Helium just doesn't appear out of nowhere! Highly regarded laboratories around the world are providing some evidence that there is excess heat.
(please see Thermodynamics for the morons that are to silly to realise that they can be wrong ) I believe that Galileo was wrong and so were some very great scientist in history that funnily enough we now revere and quite happily tout as the greats. No matter how we want to put it there is evidence pointing straight towards Cold fusion being somewhat of a reality. ( please see Akram's Razor and  once again for the morons, if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it probably is a DUCK!
The truth is that no one understands the process and it will take some time for physics to meld the process into their thought processes but no matter how you want to take it something is happening that is reported to give us Helium, Stray Neutrons and Gamma Rays and all of this from good old water..... HMMMMMMMM!!!

2. Then there's this contribution from last year to the Heroes forum on Tv.com (emphasis also added). TV.com Forums - I think I know where Sylars Power of Freezing comes from. Possible Spoilers.

On wikipedia and a bunch of other sites it says that Sylars power of Freezing is unkown where he gets it from. I think it is quite obvious where he got his power from Molly Walkers father. When we first see him he is frozen with his head cut-off eating cereal. Whenever Sylar gets a new power he always tests it out as soon as he gets it. When he got his Telekinesis he showed Mr. Suresh, Precognitive Painting from Issac he paints himself as the President, Liquification from Zane Taylor he melts everthing in th Apartment, Enhanced hearing from Dale everything is super loud and Radiation Manipulation from Ted Sprague he is on the roodtop making explosions in the palm of his hand. So why wouldnt he freez Molly Walkers dad after he cut of his head and stole his power because he killed her Mom by stabing her with household objects. Also we know Powers run in the Family, Hiro's Dad had a power, Parkman's Dad. Peter/ Nathans Dad/Mom, and Claires Dad and Mom. So what do you think is my theory correct or am I way off??? Akrams razor states the most obvious answer is usually the right one.

Thanks, dudes, but with all due respect I think you need to get your head out of your twitter and read some, like, books. Especially that first guy. Sure wouldn't want to use any technological device designed by an engineer so careless as to cite my blog in a scientific discussion!

As online typos go, this case seems unique in that, so far as I can tell, there is no other possible source for this mistake. An interesting and ironic index of  influence in the New Media.

I wonder how many other instances there of this weird slip.

How to do a search & replace in MP3 title tags

Thought I'd share a solution to a technical problem that had consumed a good bit of my time to resolve since there are surprisingly few discussions of it (much less fixes) in online fora.

I have a lot of MP3 files in lecture series the titles of which are identical except for the number at the end. In cases with long titles this is a hassle on an MP3 player display, as the number is off screen or you have to wait for the display to scroll to the end of the title, ticker tape-style, and reveal the track number. So I wanted to do a simple search and replace to abbreviate the more verbose titles (e.g., replace "The Lord of the Rings" with "LotR" to eliminate scrolling).

Now, this is easy to do for file names using various excellent freeware MP3 editors like Lupas Rename 2000 and  NodeSoft's MP3 Rename, but the feature is conspicuously absent in the case of title tags from all the standard freeware apps I tried save one, Mp3tag. (Though perhaps the paid versions of the other apps can do it, though I doubt it judging by the absence of relevant info from their help files.)

In a way, it makes sense that  most programs don't allow one to make this kind of a change, since in most cases MP3s are songs tracks where it makes no sense to do global edits on the title. Once a title's deleted, it's gone and becomes indistinguishable from your other songs. Still, there are at the same time many cases where the only unique element in a MP3 file's title is the track number at the end and where it would be handy to abbreviate. You'd think that feature would be available to power users, even if it ought to be disabled by default.

After a lot of experimentation and research, I discovered that Mp3tag does it. As this FAQ explains, you just create a custom "Action", choose the REPLACE function and target the TITLE tag.

Judging by the dearth of queries on title tag editing, most people don't mess with that, but in the case of people who do need to monkey with their titles this tip might save save a lot of time, I think.

If this sounds like a trivial task that any robust MP3 editor must be able to do--as I assumed--try to doing it yourself with the other well known free apps. Pack a lunch, though, because you're going to be surfing fruitlessly for a while.

P.S. If you've arrived here after a search engine query on this topic and this tip does the trick, please leave a comment. I'm curious how many other people have struggled with this seemingly trivial issue. (Do most people just give up and live with the long titles?)

Buy electronics at Walmart at your own risk

I made the mistake of buying a cheap (in every sense of the word) ILO MP3 player from Walmart a while back.

Not only are its features really subpar--e.g., no support for playlists--but it's impossible to find any information, much less support, for the product online.

Walmart does not appear to understand the standards of customer support that are basic to the technology industry. You literally cannot find the word "support" on its main page or even its "Contact Us" page. It's really pathetic. Even low-end hardware manufacturers that don't give their customers a support knowledgebase or FAQ at least list an email for support.

And good luck finding any--and I mean any--official information online on ILO and its products. It's beyond amateurish and unprofessional.

I should be able to bill them for the time I've wasted experimenting with their crappy, undocumented player in the vain hope of getting it to function quasi-normally. The least they could do is list the thing's capabilities somewhere online so their customers don't end up wasting their time.

Yet another reminder of why it's best not to give this bottom-feeding chain your money if you can avoid it.  (Unfortuately, at the moment I live in a small town whose closest thing to a department store is a Walmart.)

The case of the purloined curly quotes.

I'm making final revisions to a masters thesis that's had stuff pasted in from many sources.

What I generally do is choose to Paste Special and choose Unformatted Unicode to avoid importing any formatting that will clash with my doc and require cleanup later.

 For example, if you find a great reference on somebody's personal website:

Ephrat, Daphna. “In Quest of an Ideal Type of Saint: Some Observations on the First Generation of Moroccan Awliya' Allah in ‘Kitab Al-Tashawwuf’.” Studia Islamica. 94 (2002): 67-84.

but find red Comic Sans MS a bit much, you could paste it in as unformatted text and get

Ephrat, Daphna. "In Quest of an Ideal Type of Saint: Some Observations on the First Generation of Moroccan Awliya' Allah in 'Kitab Al-Tashawwuf' ." Studia Islamica. 94 (2002): 67-84.

When you do that, you lose italics, which I don't find much problem generally. The real nuisance is the replacement of curly quotes (i.e., “ ” or ‘ ’ ) with soulless straight quotes (i.e., " " or ' '), which then have to be fixed manually (or handled at the end with several needlessly complex search & replace operations).Or so I thought.

Just came across this on the M$ site. Turns out all you have to do is enable the replace-as-you-type feature for quotation marks and then you can replace all instances of " with " and Word handles the rest. D'oh!

I've been writing macros in VBA, mapping keyboard shortcuts to all sorts of stuff, and using Autocorrect to finish words for me for more than a decade and I didn't realize I could do this simple thing. Sad.

WD2000: How to Replace Smart Quotes with Straight Quotes

Replacing Existing Straight Quotes with Smart Quotes
Use the following method to replace existing straight quotes with smart quotes in a document.
1. To turn on smart quotes, follow these steps:
a. On the Tools menu, click AutoCorrect, and then select the AutoFormat As You Type tab.
b. Under Replace as you type, click to select the "Straight quotes" with "smart quotes" check box, and then click OK.
2. On the Edit menu, click Replace.
3. In the Find what box, type a quotation mark.
4. In the Replace with box, type a quotation mark.
5. Click Replace All.

Ignore messages from FanBox

Judging by my inbox over the last few days, a lot of people I know seem to have been taken in by the spammongers at FanBox, one of the more disreputable sites out there that masquerade as legitimate social networking services.

If you get an email involving FanBox, just delete it. Don't click on any of its links (least of all, one for unsubscribing, which merely lets them know your email works and will ensure yet more emails coming your way). It's most likely not an attempt by a real human being to communicate with you, but rather an attempt to suck you into its network (in fact, this applies to most messages from websites you've never heard or signed up for). If you sign up for this "service" will spam everybody in your address book with similarly useless and annoying messages, the purpose of which is to harvest functioning emails for various slimy marketing schemes.

The company appears to be really exploitative of its employees, too, so yet another reason not get suckered by these guys.

If you've already signed up, add a filter to delete all messages from them. Here are instructions for doing it with Yahoo Mail.

Sometimes you DON'T get the best deal online

I've found this rather counterintuitive, so I thought I'd share for bargain hunting posterity.

Since I spilled a cup of coffee on my laptop (a Lenovo 3000 N100) recently, a few of my keys either stopped working completely or began to stick something fierce. As a result, I've been living without easy access to the '-' key in most programs (exception: MS Word, where I was able to map an autoreplace shortcut to get it; for others I've either gone without or pasted in the dang thing from a text file that I keep at hand), which has been quite irksome at times (you don't realize how many words are hyphenated until your hyphen stops working) and has resulted in a lot of unsightly tildas (i.e., '~') clogging my file names and Del.icio.us account.

Anywho, I googled this quite a bit in search of a bargain for the replacement keyboard. A few places offered it for $40~60 (note the tilda~~my replacement has yet to arrive), and others demanded an absurd amount (highest: $225). None of the former outfits turned out to have it in stock (contrary to their website's claims) and I'll be damned before I pay the other prices.

Someone on a Lenovo forum agreed that this price was ridiculous and suggested I call them and inquire. I was sceptical of the use of that, but I did.

I tend to assume that you're always better off cutting big companies out of the process and scouring the Internet for bargains, but to my shock Lenovo not only had it in stock, but was charging less than them all.

The moral: Check traditional sellers when bargain hunting, too. I tend to use the big box shops and major websites for scouting and then order from places like NewEgg.com, but that didn't work here. Don't automatically assume the big guys will charge more and leave them out of your search. In this case, the big guy can charge a lot less become it keeps a lot of these in stock for repair shops. Had I followed my gut instinct that the part was just rare now, I'd have ended up paying 400% of its normal price ($200 instead of $50).

P.S. NewEgg.com is a place you can still order Windows XP to escape the bloated and buggy Windows Vista malfunctioning system ...sorry... "operating system".  We just, to use Micro$oft's parlance, "downgraded" Shabana's new but sluggish Dell XPS laptop to XP Home.  Runs much better faster and smoother now. (Note: Some customers who got had the misfortune of getting Vista preinstalled can even make this switch for free, though not us. Check with your seller.)

The power of HTML: The Synoptic Gospels Primer

It's rare that I see web page that so perfectly captures the power of HTML to make complex ideas accessible as this wonderful website exploring the Two Documents Hypothesis in New Testament studies.

Take a look at the Synoptic Gospels Primer's color-coded analysis the Synoptic Gospels' various renderings of the Parable of the Mustard Seed in the Gospels to see what I mean.

The power of strategic use of color and smart hyper links.

Past writings & the dangers of Internet procrastination

Having grown weary of the chore of googling myself every time I want to find past writings, I've added to each page a list of links to past writings available online. It's called "My writings elsewhere".

Here's the current list, for those interested:

• 2008-01-23: "MLK's 'Dream' Unrealized and Undigested"
  Religion Dispatches
• 2007-12-31: "UK Muslims & the 'War on Christmas'"
  Religion Dispatches
• 2007-11-01: "Jyllands-Posten and the Otherization of Europe's Muslims"
  THE CARTOON DEBATE AND THE FREEDOM OF THE PRESS (book chapter)
• 2006-07-06: "Theme Park Segregation: The Problem with 'Muslim-only' days"
  alt.muslim
• 2006-05-29: "Muslim Stereotypes: Understanding Muslim Language"
  alt.muslim
• 2006-02-01: "Comprehending Catastrophe"
  Islamica Magazine
• 2005-12-06: "Progressive Islam: Lessons learned from the PMU Experiment"
  alt.muslim
• 2005-06-02: "Politics of Hijab: Should Muslim women be on Mt. Everest?"
  alt.muslim
• 2005-06-01: "There ain’t no mountain high enough"
  Q-News
• 2005-04-01: "Voting is not enough"
  Q-News
• 2005-01-01: "That's right, he's back"
  Q-News
• 2004-08-30: "How Not to Fight Muslim Anti-Semitism: The Revocation of Tariq Ramadan's Visa Fuels Bigotry"
  MuslimWakeup!
• 2004-03-31: "Hijab hysteria: France and its Muslims"
  openDemocracy
• 2003-11-01: "Promise & Peril: Prospects for Democracy in the Muslim World Today"
  Muslim Democrat

I've left out a few things, but it's thought provoking and even a bit depressing to survey such a short list when you've contributed a gazillion posts to all sorts of mailing lists as much as I have over the last decade and a half.  (Unlike most of you whippersnapper new jacks  out in the Blogosphere, I was scrappin' with people over Islam, politics,  and all sorts of other things, way back in the early 1990s when the World Wide Web was text-based and had yet to catch on outside techie circles. I still remember the excitement of downloading my first file--the Bhagavad Gita in plain text--via not the Web but rather the now extinct Gopher network. )

Sure, for many years my goal was simply to participate in an exciting new medium, a new "town hall meeting".  I often found the exchanges enjoyable and stimulating--and I even made a good number of friends and useful contacts that I otherwise probably would never have known--but I can't help but groan, Man, I had a penny for every long, carefully thought-out post that was painstakingly constructed and then hurled into the ether of the Internet debate, never to be seen again....  It was a life style or hobby of sorts, and this was participation in the dawn of an exciting new dimension of modern life, but the uncomfortable question remains:  But what do I (or most other early Internet users) have to show for all those endless discussions and debates? 

Oh well. As someone once wrote, God loves the lazy rainbow no less than the laboring sea.

The scary thing to me is that Internet today is far more addictive.  It's far easier (and tempting) today to fritter away one's intellectual energy and spare time online.  Facebookers take note!