Rethinking Darwin

It is time for scholars of the Arab and Muslim worlds to revisit Darwin | Islamonline.net

A hundred and fifty years later, Darwin remains a source of troubles in the Arab and Muslim worlds. Darwin’s On The Origin of Species — published in 1859 and translated in full into Arabic in the mid-1870s — has been at the center of a long-running debate, albeit one with varying intensity.

The Darwin controversy is a unique one — and not just because of the powerful evolution theory and its implications. Like most protracted controversies, the one over Darwin in the Arab-Muslim worlds perhaps tells more about the debaters than the subject of the debate. In other words, the intellectual skirmishes over Darwin spanning one hundred and fifty anxious years of the Arab world’s history reflect a cautious evolution of ideas on Darwin’s theory itself, on the definition of scientific theory, on the boundaries of science, and on the bounds of interpretation of Islam’s sacred text, the Qur’an.

Biased for Science (or Thus Spoke Obama)

 World Federation of Science Journalists

President Obama was characteristically adroit with language when he declared on March 9th that he would “restore science to its rightful place.” The decision was to undo some of the restrictions on federal funding to stem cell research imposed by Obama’s predecessor in 2001.

To that, half a dozen editorials responded with praise — as did, of course, most in the science community.

That was not how I received the news. 

Kindle 2: Books in the Age of Distraction

With the capacity to carry more than a thousand electronic books, the new
e-book reader from Amazon is perhaps the computer geek’s or
environmentalist’s dream gadget. But is it the bookworm’s? |  IslamOnline.net

Clearly Amazon wants to be part of what is potentially the “next big thing” in the realm of text. Having snatched magazine-cover publicity for the first generation of its e-book reader, the Kindle, Amazon has uncovered the second iteration last week, with display and storage capacity  improvements.

The Kindle 2 offers about ten times the storage capacity of the 180 megabytes in the original gadget. It also sports 16 gradations of grey, instead of the Spartan black-and-white in the Kindle 1. This means that the Kindle 2 display (which utilizes the E-Ink technology developed at the MIT Media Lab) is getting even closer to mimicking the experience of reading paper books. E-Ink is a display technology that is different from liquid crystal technology common in laptops. The MIT-developed technology uses less power, is less bright (thus doesn’t strain the eyes as quickly as liquid crystal displays),
and is readable in daylight.

With Windows 7, Computing Goes Frugal (sort of)

Windows 7, now available as a stable trial version, is the first in the Windows dynasty to run at least as smoothly on hardware that ran its predecessor -- and that is no small shift | IslamOnline.net

Microsoft’s critics used to accuse the Windows company of forcing users to make expensive hardware upgrades with every new edition of the all-but-dominant operating system. And that was largely true. After all, Windows 98 could hardly run on the Windows 95 hardware, and the same was true of Windows Millennium (released in 2000) Windows XP (2001) and Windows Vista (early 2007).

[Thus the term "Wintel", carved out of the words Windows and Intel, to denote the perceived "alliance" between Microsoft and the microchip manufacturer in which each constantly upgraded its wares, leaving users with scarcely any choice but to buy the most recent stuff from the other company in order for their software and hardware to be compatible.]

Now Windows 7 appears to be a break with the family tradition.

The “P” Word, Thomas Kuhn, and I

 World Federation of Science Journalists

In a way, you can blame it on Thomas Kuhn. It was he who introduced too beautiful and brilliant a term in the early 1960s: paradigm shift. A term that writers of all sorts, particularly about business and information technology, have had no shame abusing since. Myself included. [I can’t help thinking that  if the editors of Kuhn’s book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, had known that the term would  be such a hit, they would have probably made it the title of the book.]

So I was reminded of my secret guilt about Kuhn’s term late in October, while attending the first conference for Arab science journalists, in Fez, Morocco. In the Q & A that followed a panel on
“Finding Science Stories in the Arab World,” a man in the audience made a comment to this effect: “This sounds to me like all you [Arab science journalists] do is market or publicize Western science and Western paradigms. Unless the departure point in your work is an Arabic and Islamic paradigm of science, he added, your efforts amount to little. 

Saudi Arabia: In Science We Trust

Saudi Arabia shows that it can go a long way in instituting policies that make the kingdom more appealing to Western academia  | IslamOnline.net

Say a Western political leader takes to heart the views of writer Ann Coulter and decides to enact an exceedingly moderate version of her recommendations – that is, to force Saudi Arabia to grant more rights to women and turning Saudi’s single-sex schools into co-ed institutions. What will it take to do this?  Nothing short of a war, and a massive disturbance to an already shaky oil market if the world’s largest producer is put out of business.

Or there is another way: help the Saudis build a university, and they may just willingly do what otherwise only an invasion might force them to.

Petrodollar Science

Can the new research and education initiatives in the Arab Gulf evolve into institutions? The New Atlantis

Oil executives are rarely assigned to establish universities. But when the unlikely call arrives, some hardly pause to ponder the unconventionality of the assignment. So, only five minutes into the meeting that brought him together with leading individuals from Carnegie Mellon University, Nadhmi Al-Nasr, vice president of Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil company Aramco, did not mince his words: “It is perhaps unusual that an oil executive is starting a university. But given your experience in Qatar, would your university be willing to help us build a new research university in Saudi Arabia?”