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S. Abbas Raza

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

The Mad Race for London Mayor

Posted on Monday, Apr 28, 2008 6:18AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by S. Abbas Raza

by Ahila Sornarajah Stuck in a traffic jam in hot, dusty and dynamic Chennai (formerly Madras) recently, I started thinking about the far away elections for the Mayor of London and what this will mean for Londoners. While America is obsessed with the groundbreaking race for the democratic nomination between Clinton and Obama, we’re proud…

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Monday Musing: The Greatest of All Time

Posted on Monday, Feb 18, 2008 12:00AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by S. Abbas Raza

I HAVE WRESTLED WITH AN ALLIGATOR, I HAVE TUSSLED WITH A WHALE If I could meet one person in the world, it would without question be Muhammad Ali, and I would probably collapse in a pool of blubbering tears at his feet, such is my worshipful admiration of the man. The first time I remember…

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Monday Musing: Replying to Euler

Posted on Monday, Jan 28, 2008 12:00AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by S. Abbas Raza

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…

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3QD gets serious about poetry

Posted on Tuesday, Jan 22, 2008 4:29AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by S. Abbas Raza

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…

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Monday Musing: A poem by Bahadur Shah Zafar

Posted on Monday, Jan 7, 2008 12:00AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by S. Abbas Raza

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…

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Mortals! Rejoice at so great an ornament to the human race!

Posted on Tuesday, Dec 25, 2007 12:00AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by S. Abbas Raza

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…

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Facebook Poetry – Oxymoron or Hamburger-Chain Art?

Posted on Monday, Dec 3, 2007 1:11PMFriday, December 8, 2017 by S. Abbas Raza

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…

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Monday Musing: Ich bin Brixener

Posted on Monday, Nov 5, 2007 12:00AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by S. Abbas Raza

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…

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Monday Musing: Pets and Persons

Posted on Monday, Sep 24, 2007 3:36AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by S. Abbas Raza

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…

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Monday Musing: Pinker’s Thinkers

Posted on Monday, Sep 3, 2007 11:27PMFriday, December 8, 2017 by S. Abbas Raza

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…

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Monday Musing: Tribute to Farrokh Bulsara

Posted on Monday, Aug 13, 2007 12:00AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by S. Abbas Raza

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…

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Monday Musing: The Grey, and the Gold

Posted on Monday, Jul 23, 2007 12:01AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by S. Abbas Raza

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…

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3QD Interviews Craig Mello, Medicine Nobel Laureate

Posted on Monday, Jul 2, 2007 1:00AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by S. Abbas Raza

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…

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Baseball, Apple Pie, and Bathtub Gin

Posted on Monday, Jul 2, 2007 12:15AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by S. Abbas Raza

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…

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Did Bernard Kouchner really endorse the Iraq War?

Posted on Monday, Jun 25, 2007 12:03AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by S. Abbas Raza

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.…

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Monday Musing: Why There Are So Many Men

Posted on Monday, Jun 11, 2007 11:15PMFriday, December 8, 2017 by S. Abbas Raza

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…

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Imaginary Tribes #4

Posted on Monday, May 28, 2007 12:03AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by S. Abbas Raza

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…

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Monday Musing: Taking Sides in the Recent Religion Debates

Posted on Monday, Apr 9, 2007 8:57PMFriday, December 8, 2017 by S. Abbas Raza

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…

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Shia and Sunni, A Ludicrously Short Primer

Posted on Monday, Jan 29, 2007 2:36AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by S. Abbas Raza

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…

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Web of Lies

Posted on Monday, Jan 8, 2007 12:02AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by S. Abbas Raza

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…

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3QD Design History and Credits

The original site was designed by S. Abbas Raza in 2004 but soon completely redesigned by Mikko Hyppönen and deployed by Henrik Rydberg. It was later upgraded extensively by Dan Balis in 2006. The next major revision was designed by S. Abbas Raza, building upon the earlier look, and coded by Dumky de Wilde in 2013. And this current version 5.0 has been designed and deployed by Dumky de Wilde in collaboration with S. Abbas Raza.

3 Quarks Daily

3 Quarks Daily started in 2004 with the idea of creating a curated retreat for everything intellectual on the web. No clickbait, no fake news, not just entertainment, but depth and breadth —something increasingly hard to find on the internet today. If you like what we do, please consider making a donation.