Life, Dreams and Reality -- Sohel's Blog

At least on the surface, the opportunistic disaster capitalism's steam rollers the Freedmanites and their greed frenzy ideologies are in retreat. As the financial markets roil and toil while massive bailouts plan is in the work to rescue the economy from tumbling further into irreversible whirlwind of very real "doomsday" scenario that mostly caused by "excessive and poorly regulated mortgage debt", the long shelved Keynesian economics is dusting off thickened layers of accumulated dirt and the echo of saneness is getting back in the wild: "while capitalism is the most dynamic and productive system ever conceived, it is most efficient over the long term when there is another delicate balance -- between private incentive and government oversight. " There are indeed inquiries to be made like Senator Harry Reid's precise observation : "Today we face what economists call the gravest economic danger since the Great Depression, We’ve come to this...

Check a few "Math Tricks" from this link .

Here is a quotation from Susan Sontag' s Illness as Metaphor: "The use of cancer in political discourse encourages fatalism and justifies "severe" measures - as well as strongly reinforcing the widespread notion that the disease is necessarily fatal. The concept of disease is never innocent. But it could be argued that the cancer metaphors are in themselves implicitly genocidal" Sontag's warning made in 1977 is more than ever applicable in today's hyper inflated fibbed political landscape around the globe.

What is America by Ronald Wright A Book Review by Mahbubul Karim (Sohel) 2008-09-16 When anointed Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin stumbles but quite efficiently shrouds her astounding lack of knowledge in American and world history and current events with invoking such words of deep religiosity, “we are on God’s side”, Ronald Wright’s timely published book What is America slashes this purported ignorance and traces back the roots of never ending Frontier state of mind, where the everlasting motto is: “good times don’t last; get yours while you can.” Get yours while you can by any cost. Ransacking and pillaging nation from indigenous population, branding them as savages and wild animals, and when necessary making promises and breaking them later at earliest conveniences, are the melancholic parts of this deeply moving book. There are nine chapters in What is America. Each of them are compressed but sufficiently elucidating observations of past backed up by ...

Sometimes, she can hear John Donne in head. A new nurse who was an English Professor before. Now she works in hospital, in the middle of "unsettling" deaths, "profoundly sad" experiences accumulate and repeatedly show: "the only antidote to death is not poetry, or drama, or miracle drugs, or a roomful of technical expertise and good intentions. The antidote to death is life." Link to this profound article: Perhaps Death is Proud; More Reason to Savor Life

Here is the link, some of these food items I've never heard of, and some of them are very popular in many parts of our world: 100 Things You Should Eat Before You Die

Don't know who is the writer of Michelle Obama's speech at Democratic Convention or whether she is the one who has penned down her own words, but the passionate way that she delivered words of compassion and the vivid description of "the world as it is" and "the world as it should be", is memorable.

I try to stay away from sly politicians' sly remarks and podium lectures. But something about Ted Kennedy's feeble, shaking but surprisingly rousing voice tonight, that slithered through political dis ingenuity reverberating resounding words: "The hope rises again. And the dream lives on. " Perhaps it is due to Kennedy's recent battle against brain cancer, and his life long support for progressive causes without a hint of relinquishing fight for just causes to political pressure from the right, his somber presence and words of wisdom still invoke ideals of an America that is for many around the world has always been altruistic and that has been fighting the asphyxiation and stranglehold of vicious wolves. "The hope rises again. And the dream lives on." America the humanitarian, not the naked aggressor, moves and shakes from prolonged forced unconsciousness.

"An "ordinary brave man" could decide "not to participate in lies, not to support false actions." But "it is within the power of writers and artists to do much more: to defeat the lie! For in the struggle with lies art has always triumphed and shall always triumph!" Solzhenitsyn was not the first witness to speak truthfully about the gulag. But because he was an artist, he was the first one able to make us all hear it and believe it. There is no answering "the many-throated groan, the dying whisper of millions" that he transmitted." An article to read about the great Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, here is the link: Solzhenitsyn, Optimist .

Advancement in computer technology for more than hundred years is simply breathtaking. Check these links: Forgotten PC History and Early Card Punch Machines , that show how far collectively human beings have progressed from the early days of computing technology to modern computing marvels.

Who knows what will happen tomorrow? All the modest to screaming warnings aside, these photos of Large Hadron Collider in Boston Globe are must see. Here is the link: Large Hadron Collider nearly ready http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/08/the_large_hadron_collider.html

It seemed came from a horror novel crafted master writer like Stephen King. The sheer violence, fear and coldness in this bizarre news story published in The Globe and Mail show how reality sometimes can be more crude and raw than the pages of genre fiction. Here is the link: A Quiet Ride - Then Carnage

"Robocars are essentially a computer project. There's lots of cool automotive engineering to be done, but the real wizardry will come from hardware and even moreso from software. The hardware needed includes cheap, powerful sensors, faster processors and specialized hardware for machine vision and pattern recognition. The software needs to drive all that, and combine machine vision, awareness and navigation with many other factors to produce the solution. It's an Artificial Intelligence (AI) problem, but it's what is sometimes called a "weak AI" problem. It doesn't need a self-aware human equivalent being. It needs the more basic tools we're already getting good at. It's the sort of problem skilled computer wizards were born to solve." Link to full article: Click here .

Here is a clip from Al Jazeera. Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WB4BWPeyMpQ Richard Dawkins talks about evolution, spirituality, Darwin's theory, answered a few skeptics' questions regarding "point of origin", Adam and monkey, relation (or no relation) between Darwinism and 2nd world war. He tackled questions like "Can evolution and religion coexist?" Richard Dawkins repudiates creationism and Intelligent Design, a "total non starter as explanation". How will we end up millions years down the road? Asked the interviewer. Dawkins answered, "whole lot different species, which will be doing pretty much the same thing as present species are, but all will be different,............a different settings, what you can't predict, similar range of species, doing similar range of things, you can't predict in detail what one species will be doing............." Richard Dawkin's interview is interesting and stimulating.

This poem is about God and dog. A man's angst, anger, frustrations and depressions in the moment of his approaching death are sprinkled deftly in this free flowing poem written by Tom Sleigh for Ploughshares . Here is the link: The Chosen One The Chosen One by Tom Sleigh The embarrassment of wanting to pray to God, the demand that God give a good Goddamn had made him pretty nutty by the end; a lifelong Marxist, he took up with Ouspensky, then spent all his money (and he had tons, all those years in the bank when Das Kapital and the Wall Street Journal vied for subway reading time) on learning Gurdjieff Sufi dances, spinning round and round in an ecstasy of sweating, chanting, his happiness making him call you on the phone to tell you in a way that made you wince that he loved you for your holiness, regardless of your failings that he would then go on to list in rigorous, half humorous detail. But now, he was dying, ...

Their usage of energy is so little that they may be called as "undead" rather than living organism. This is an exciting time for biologists as "Our whole concept of microbial evolution is up for grabs," Lake said. "People are realizing there is lots of exchange and gene transfers between organisms, and I think the whole area is about to explode." Here is an interesting excerpt: "Subseafloor microbes are genetically distinct from life on Earth's surface and oceans. The Archaea the Penn State researchers found might look like bacteria, but they don't eat or work like them. While E. coli might double its numbers in 30 minutes, Archaea could take hundreds or even thousands of years to accomplish the same amount of growth." Article Link: Barely Alive, Seafloor Microbes Might Resemble Exo-Organisms

Read this beautifully crafted poem by a great poet of our world, Yehuda Amichai . I got introduced to his melancholic poetry of truth and metaphors about five years ago. A poet and his poetry transcend man made artificial national boundaries. Poetry is indeed universal. Here is the link to New Yorker where this recently translated poem was published: Link Summer Evening by the Window with Psalms By Yehuda Amichai Close scrutiny of the past. How my soul yearns within me like those souls in the nineteenth century before the great wars, like curtains that want to pull free of the open window and fly. We console ourselves with short breaths, as, after running, we always recover. We want to reach death hale and hearty, like a murderer sentenced to death, wounded when he w...

This process does need "careful consideration" as it has the potential of reversing global warming. Here is an extract: "The process of making lime generates CO2, but adding the lime to seawater absorbs almost twice as much CO2. The overall process is therefore 'carbon negative'. 'This process has the potential to reverse the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere. It would be possible to reduce CO2 to pre-industrial levels...'" Article Link: A Dash of Lime

Improper sit-ups technique can cause more harm than good. Here is a demonstration video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygmgGqzsSiU

An inspiring video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4B-r8KJhlE