Robert J. Sawyer, Pakistan, Synchronicity and Last Minute Changes

Sohaib Athar1 Comment

Robert J. Sawyer, winner (and multiple times nominee) of Hugo and Nebula awards, has become one of my favorite science fiction authors recently. I was reading one of his novels "Flashback" last week, and noticed a small mistake where it said:

"Islamabad, Pakistan (autotranslated from the original Arabic): In my vision, I have two arms-but today, I have only one (I am a veteran of the India-Pakistan ground war)."

The above sentence implied that Arabic (and not Urdu) is the language spoken in Pakistan, which comes as no surprise as a lot of Americans think we are part of the Middle Eastern Arab nations (I've been called a towel-head in jest more than once before I corrected their misconceptions).

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Interview at PakSpectator

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The Pakistani Spectator interviewed me last week, you can find the interview here [link]. Though I repeatedly denied being a blogger of the interviewable sort, they wouldn’t listen. Thanks for interviewing me TPS and Ghazala, you made me actually think about things – my brain can use whatever exercise it can get.

The word ‘spectator’ reminds me, I am spectacularly spectacled again. I kept hoping the headaches and blurred vision was somehow Microsoft’s fault (the Visual Studio default font does suck, and the Microsoft Reader font isn’t much better either, ClearType and all) but the ‘bug’ was at my end. I and got myself a new pair of eyeglasses today. Unlike Seth Godin, I just went out and bought the first frame that looked half-decent to me.

Happy Birthday LOGO

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It was LOGO’s 40th birthday a couple of days ago. Interestingly, last week, I installed the free version from Microsoft on my laptop and played for a few hours with my son (who is four, has his own computer and prefers playing games to watching TV). We made lines, triangles and squares with turtle graphics, and he grasped the idea of turning and moving the turtle quicker than I expected – I hope its in his genes.

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Can we bury the politicians?

Sohaib Athar1 Comment

<RANDOM_THOUGHT> 

I am neither a linguist, nor do I care much for politics, but when ever I think about the events scheduled for this nation in January, the term 'selection' rather than 'election' comes to my mind. Infact, I don't get democracy (as practiced in Pakistan) at all. Whoever devised the whole democracy/voting process probably wasn't an internet user (umm.. yea… hmmm).

As far as I'm concerned, if I am provided with a set of choices, and have to select the one I hate the least, I'd rather opt out of the whole fiasco by NOT voting for anyone. That's a 0 vote… for each such 0 vote, there will probably be two +1 votes. So if 90% of the nation doesn't like any of the candidates, the worst that they can do (besides turning into a candidate) is to NOT vote.

I wish the concept of 'democracy' had a negative vote, so I had the option of a +1 vote to 'dig' or a -1 vote to 'bury' whichever 'candidate' I disliked the least/most respectively. It would have been a big motivation for a lazy  person like me (and others as well, I hope) to go out and (un)vote the most likely winner. It would have been fun to learn that the MNA in my area was selected by getting -5 votes.

</RANDOM_THOUGHT>