Egypt
oracknows | November 6, 2015As a surgeon, I find Ben Carson particularly troubling. By pretty most reports, he was a skilled neurosurgeon who practiced for three decades, rising to the chief of neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins. Yet, when he ventures out of the field of neurosurgery—even out of his own medical specialty—he routinely lays down some of the dumbest howlers I've ever heard. For example, he denies evolution, but, even worse, he's been a shill for a dubious supplement company, Mannatech. Worse still, when called out for his relationship with Mannatech in the last Republican debate, Carson lied through his teeth…
oracknows | March 30, 2015As I sat on my couch last night, laptop sitting in front of me, I awaited the Ken Burns adaptation of Siddartha Mukherjee's excellent book The Emperor of All Maladies into a three part television documentary to air on PBS. I'm not sure whether I'll blog the show or not, but if I do I'll probably wait until all three episodes have aired. In the meantime, this seems as good a time as any to go back to a story that I saw a week ago but somehow, thanks to grants, traveling to Houston, and other distractions that I wanted to blog about more, never got around to. Since The Emperor of All Maladies,…
milhayser | August 12, 2013Water may be the most abundant molecule on the surface of the Earth, but more than 99% of it is frozen, underground, or too salty to drink. Only .007% of the planet's water runs in rivers and lakes, yet this precious amount sustains massive populations worldwide. Agricultural societies have long gone to war over water, and as the Earth's population balloons toward 10 billion, global warming destabilizes weather patterns, and pollution sullies what little is left to count on, the conflicts will only get worse. On Significant Figures, Peter Gleick traces Syria's civil war in part to "drought…
pgleick | June 2, 2013The Nile River – river of legend – is not just a river in Egypt. It is the lifeblood of 11 different African nations and the longest river in the world, extending over 6,500 kilometers long and draining a watershed of over 3 million square kilometers. The eleven nations that share the Nile are Egypt, Ethiopia, the Sudan and South Sudan, Kenya, Eritrea, the DR of Congo, Tanzania, Uganda, Burundi, and Rwanda.
The river is really two major rivers: the White Nile and the Blue Nile, which meet near Khartoum and become the mainstem of the Nile, flowing north to Egypt and the Mediterranean. The…
jtoney | November 29, 2011This article was co-authored with Dr. Morad Abou-Sabe', President of the Arab American League of Voters of New Jersey.
CNN's Ivan Watson talks to John King from Cairo about his exclusive interview with Egyptian activist Wael Ghonim. {February 9, 2011}
The Egyptian revolution of January 25th, 2011 created widespread euphoria of the kind only wide-eyed optimists enjoy. It was a moment in Egypt's history that should never be forgotten. It evolved naturally after six decades of oppressive military rule of Egyptians who had - almost - given up hope of any chance for change. Increasing…
sastyk | March 2, 2011If you want to see it in color, all you have to do is google image up a history of the price of oil and superimpose it on the price of various staple crops. Take a look at oil and then rice, soybeans, wheat and corn. Look closely at 2008, and at the present. I will put up a visual presentation of this material myself later this week, but if you'd like to see it sooner, it is right there to look at, no great challenge.
What we see is fairly simple - and incredibly complicated. The intertwining of markets, of energy and food, tied by biofuel production and national policies, and the fact…
stoat | February 22, 2011
(ht What's Happening In Libya? Ctd.)
Exciting times indeed. And just for once, it looks like We could actually do something useful: establish a no-fly zone over Tripoli. But, we'll prevaricate and do nothing until too late, so a few more Libyans will die. It will still be worth it for them, though.
Refs
* Egypt's Mubarak resigns as leader!
stoat | February 11, 2011 Some good news for a change. Well done chaps! Now, how about that dictatorship we're propping up in Saudi Arabia?
I didn't actually do anything useful in all this (other than copy-editing the wikipedia article, I'm sure that boosted their revolutionary fervour) but I was rooting for them.
Brian was more useful.
On a lighter note: don't try this at home: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEjiw1VcPGU
Refs
* Egypt's Mubarak resigns as leader (BBC)
sastyk | January 31, 2011Stuart Staniford has a terrific piece that offers a little visual clarity about food, energy, unemployment and the Riots in the Middle East and North Africa:
Tunisia is a minnow in the global oil market, Egypt slightly more important. Algeria, however, matters a lot as its oil production is probably close to total demonstrated OPEC spare capacity. Thus serious social instability in Algeria would have major effects on global oil prices. If instability spread to bigger oil producers than that (eg Kuwait or UAE), the effects could be very dramatic.
Presumably, the regimes in those countries…
razib | June 1, 2009Family axes wedding plans, Egyptian cuts off organ:
A 25-year-old Egyptian man cut off his own penis to spite his family after he was refused permission to marry a girl from a lower class family, police reported Sunday.
This kind of reminds me of self-castration for religious reasons. It is a reality that in many parts of the world children are property a very tangible way. Their marriages are arranged for the benefit of the lineage, as determined by the pater familias. Honor killings in fact show a face of this reality which comports with the most grisly functions of the classical Roman…
neurophilosophy | December 29, 2007
The mosque of Muhammed Ali, with its slender and elegant twin minarets, is one of Cairo's most prominent landmarks. It is visible in the two photographs of Cairo that I've already posted.
Muhammed Ali was appointed as the Ottoman Viceroy of Egypt in 1805, by the Sublime Porte. He commissioned this mosque, which was built between 1830 and 1848, and is situated on a 12th century citadel built by Salah-el-din al Ayyubi, the Kurdish military leader who ruled over Egypt and who defeated Richard the Lionheart in the second Crusade.
In the early years of his rule, Muhammed Ali's power was…
neurophilosophy | December 9, 2007
It actually rained very lightly while we were walking along this small beach in Alexandria about three weeks ago. Generally though, the weather in Egypt was warm and sunny - in stark contrast to the wet and windy weather we're having in London at the moment.
neurophilosophy | November 25, 2007
I'm back in London after a hectic - but fantastic - week in Egypt. Of the hundreds of photographs that I took on the trip, this is one of my favourites. It shows part of old Cairo as seen through a peephole in the minaret of a medieval mosque. I'll be posting more of my photos (of both this extraordinary city and of Alexandria) at weekends.
neurophilosophy | September 19, 2007
Coptic leaf from the Gospel of Mark, Egypt, c. AD 500. (Southern Methodist University)
Nearly half of the world's 7,000 languages are likely to become extinct over the course of this century, according to an article in the NY Times which discusses a recent study of endangered languages. (See this interactive map for more details of the study.)
One language that is not mentioned in the article or in the study, but which is also on the brink of extinction, is Coptic, the ancient language of Egypt's indigenous Christian population.
Coptic is a modified Greek script that includes a…
neurophilosophy | September 3, 2007Abdel Monim Mahmoud, an Egyptian journalist and blogger, has identified (in Arabic and English) a prison officer who allegedly tortured him for 13 days at a state security headquarters back in 2003.
27-year-old Mahmoud is a member of Ikhwan Muslimin (the Muslim Brotherhood, MB). The MB is the world's first Islamist movement - it was founded in 1928 - and its early ideology is what inspires most of today's Islamists, including al-Qa'eda.
The MB has always been, and remains, Egypt's biggest and most popular opposition party. It is officially illegal, but is tolerated by Egyptian president…
neurophilosophy | August 30, 2007
A caricature of me, aged about 4, by Bahgat Osman (1931-2001).
Osman was Egypt's most prominent political cartoonist during the 1960s and '70s. He was a close friend of my father's, and I have vivid memories of him from my early childhood in Cairo. I even vaguely remember posing for this portrait, which was completed in a matter of minutes.
Both my father and Osman were members of the diaspora of Egyptian intellectuals. My father was imprisoned and tortured under Gamal Abdel Nasser in the mid-1950s, and came to London in the early '70s for medical treatment. At around that time, Osman…
neurophilosophy | July 12, 2007
Most people recognize Tutankhamun as the boy-king of ancient Egypt. He is the most well-known pharaoh because his tomb was discovered apparently intact* and, more importantly, because it contained the magnificent gold mask that has become an icon of Egypt.
Tutankhamun was otherwise unremarkable, as was his mother Nefertiti, who is renowned only for her beauty. Of far greater interest, and importance, than both Tutankhamun and Nefertiti was the pharaoh who some believe was Tutankhamun's father: Akhenaten, the so-called "heretical" pharaoh.
Akhenaten was an eighteenth dynasty pharaoh…