Originally from Karachi, Pakistan, Abbas has an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering & computer science from Johns Hopkins University, and a graduate degree in philosophy from Columbia University. He lives with his wife, Margit Oberrauch, and their feline friend, Frederica Krueger, in the small, very beautiful city of Brixen in the Italian Alps. Email: s.abbas.raza.1 [at] gmail.com
Review of Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up by John Allen Paulos You may know the (almost certainly apocryphal) story of an 18th century encounter between the brilliant Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler and the French freethinking encyclopaedist and philosopher Denis Diderot: Diderot had been invited to the court…
You may have noticed that I have been posting more poetry recently at 3QD. This is not because I have suddenly become more literate, but because my friend Jim Culleny has been sending me poems almost every day. In addition to having exquisite taste in poetry, Jim is himself a distinguished and fine poet. In…
A couple of days ago I had posted a video of the famous Pakistani singer Habib Wali Mohammed singing a poem written by the last, and ill-fated, Mughal emperor of India, Bahadur Shah Zafar. Earlier today my wife was listening to it and asked me what the words mean. I told her I would translate…
The title of this post is a translation of a Latin inscription on Sir Isaac Newton’s tomb. This is the fourth year that we at 3QD celebrate the auspicious 25th day of December as Newton’s Day, an idea that we coincidentally came to independently on the same day as Richard Dawkins proposed it. (Newton was…
by Tolu Ogunlesi Social Networking and Serious LiteratureCan never share the same Posture – Poetry Police Manifesto Recently I got a phone call from a friend. He needed a mutual friend’s phone number. Then, just before the call ended, he chipped in: “Yeah, regarding the Facebook Prize, I don’t know whether to congratulate you or…
All cities and towns in the Südtirol (South Tyrol) have two names: a German and an Italian one. Indeed, the Südtirol itself is called Alto Adige in Italian. The largest city in the province (and its capital) is Bozen in German, Bolzano in Italian. The second-largest is Meran (German) or Merano (Italian). The third largest…
There are two kinds of people: there are the kooky kind who will spend $4,000 on dialysis for their cat whose kidneys are failing (substitute some significant expenditure of resources for individuals in differing financial circumstances—you know what I mean), even if only to extend its life briefly; and then there are the kind who…
A review of The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, by Steven Pinker One of my favorite science books… no, wait… one of my favorite books altogether, is a shortish volume by Steven Pinker entitled Words and Rules. (I cannot remember how many copies of that book I have bought for…
Farrokh Bulsara was born in 1946 in the British colony of Zanzibar (now part of Tanzania). His parents were Zoroastrians (Parsis) from India. As a boy he was sent back to India to attend boarding school in Bombay. He did very well in studies, was a competitive boxer, and also learned to play the piano–even…
If you don’t have TiVO, get it. (I have DVR from Time Warner Cable, which is pretty much the same thing.) If you don’t even own a TV, and especially if you like to proudly announce this fact every chance you get, which is every time normal, sane people are talking about the Sopranos or…
Harvey David Preisler died of cancer six years ago. He was a well-known scientist and cancer researcher himself. He was also my sister Azra's husband, and she wrote this about him here at 3QD: Harvey grew up in Brooklyn and obtained his medical degree from the University of Rochester. He trained in Medicine at New…
by Beth Ann Bovino A sailing trip touring the Croatian islands in the Adriatic Sea began with a gift from family. The skipper, a Slovenian man, brought out a 2 liter soda bottle to celebrate our sail, saying “it was made by his cousin”. The label and color of the drink seemed like we were…
by Alan Koenig Two prominent Liberal hawks recently celebrated the arrival of Bernard Kouchner as French Foreign Minister, for here was a heroic humanitarian, the founder of the noble Doctors Without Borders, a tireless champion of the oppressed, who has risen to command the foreign policy of a nation that cravenly opposed the Iraq War.…
Confusion reigns in many popular discussions of evolution, and 3QD is not immune. I was inspired to write this Monday Musing today at least in part by a comment left by Ghostman on a post about autism a few days ago. In it, among other things, he theorizes that: …autism, far from a brain disorder…
The Qyzyk Nomads Justin. E. H. Smith It was not much in the way of pillow talk, but after a night like the one we’d just spent, nothing could surprise me. “Do you want to hear a folk tale?” Tanya asked. “I heard it when I was running a polyclinic in Nebit-Dag a few years…
Look, no matter whether you are religious or an atheist or some other thing, no matter what you believe, I expect you’ll agree with me about the importance of this question: why do so many people believe the wrong thing? The reason I can be fairly sure that this is a question which has deep…
Even now, many people who hear these terms daily on the news are confused about what the real differences are between Sunni and Shia Muslims, so I, having been brought up in a very devout Shia household in Pakistan, thought I would explain these things, at least in rough terms. Here goes: It all started…
by Beth Ann Bovino [For information about 3QD and what we are all about, click here, or here for our main page. Also, after appearing on 3QD, this story was picked up by several news organzations, and even the FBI commented on it. For example, see this from the front page of the NY Daily…
Two years ago we at 3QD as well as Richard Dawkins independently decided to celebrate December 25th as Newton’s Day (it is Sir Isaac’s birthday). You can see my post from last year here. So here we are again. This year I will just provide two interesting things related to Newton, who some argue was…
Like most people, I have no special gift for math. This doesn’t mean, however, that I am mathematically illiterate, or innumerate, to use the term popularized by John Allen Paulos. On the contrary, I know high school level math very well, and am fairly competent at some types of more advanced math. I do have…