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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

Happy Newton’s Day!

Posted on Monday, Dec 25, 2006 12:11AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by S. Abbas Raza

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…

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Monday Musing: Aptitude Schmaptitude!

Posted on Monday, Dec 4, 2006 12:00AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by S. Abbas Raza

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…

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Monday Musing: Cocktail Party Conversation Permit

Posted on Monday, Nov 13, 2006 12:00AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by S. Abbas Raza

It is a frequently observed phenomenon that the less educated and intelligent people are, the more they tend to have decisive and strong opinions on the most complex political, philosophical, economic, and other pressing issues. You know the kind of person I am talking about, the one who is eager to quickly diagnose and solve…

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Five Years Later

Posted on Monday, Sep 11, 2006 12:28AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by S. Abbas Raza

Today 3 Quarks Daily is exclusively devoted to original reflections on the attacks of exactly five years ago. We thank all our contributors. Their various pieces are listed alphabetically below by author’s last name (and linked) for your browsing convenience: Eating Our Popcorn While We Weep, by Karen Ballentine Brief Reflections on 9/11, by Akeel…

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How We Became Important

Posted on Monday, Sep 11, 2006 12:10AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by S. Abbas Raza

Five years seems like such a long time ago. Among other things, both my parents were still alive. (Neither is now.) I was not yet married. I had never heard of blogs. I had never been to Finland (a regular destination for me in recent years because of my friend Marko). I had never been…

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Monday Musing: Eqbal Ahmad

Posted on Monday, Aug 21, 2006 12:01AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by S. Abbas Raza

Eqbal Ahmad was a shining example of what a true internationalist should be. Eqbal was at home in the history of all the world’s great civilizations. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of states past and present, and he knew that states had a rightful role to play. But he also knew that states existed to…

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Monday Musing: Zidane and Racism

Posted on Monday, Jul 10, 2006 1:22PMFriday, December 8, 2017 by S. Abbas Raza

Asad Raza has written an excellent commentary here at 3QD today on the Zidane headbutt incident at the World Cup final, and I just want to add my two cents now. We still don’t know exactly what Marco Materazzi said (and did) to Zidane to make him lose his trademark cool, but out of the…

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Talking Pints: 1896, 1932, 1980 and 2008–What Kenny Rogers Can Teach the Democrats

Posted on Monday, Jun 5, 2006 12:03AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by S. Abbas Raza

by Mark Blyth “You got to know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em, know when to walk away, and know when to run.” Kenny Rogers may seem an unlikely choice for the post of Democratic party strategist, but the advice of ‘the Gambler’ may in fact be the single best strategy that…

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Monday Musing: Frederica Krueger, Killing Machine

Posted on Monday, May 29, 2006 12:00AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by S. Abbas Raza

It is a warm, languorous, late-spring day here in New York, and I don’t feel like thinking about anything complicated. So, I’m just going to tell you a cat story today. A couple of months ago, my wife Margit’s friend Bailey asked us to look after her cat (really just a kitten) while she was…

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Monday Musing: The Palm Pilot and the Human Brain, Part III

Posted on Monday, May 8, 2006 12:00AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by S. Abbas Raza

Part III: How Brains Might Work, Continued… In Part I of this twice-extended column, I tried to explain how it is that very complex machines such as computers (like the Palm Pilot) are designed and built by using a hierarchy of concepts and vocabularies. I then used this idea to segue into how attempts to…

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Monday Musing: The Palm Pilot and the Human Brain, Part II

Posted on Monday, Apr 17, 2006 12:00AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by S. Abbas Raza

Part II: How Brains Might Work Two weeks ago I wrote the first part of this column in which I made an attempt to explain how it is that we are able to design very complex machines like computers: we do it by employing a hierarchy of concepts, each layer of which builds upon the…

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Monday Musing: The Palm Pilot and the Human Brain

Posted on Monday, Apr 3, 2006 3:23PMFriday, December 8, 2017 by S. Abbas Raza

Today I would like to explain something scientists know well: how computers work, and then use some of the conceptual insights from that discussion to present an interesting recent model of something relatively unknown: how human brains might work. (This model is due to Jeff Hawkins, the inventor of the Palm Pilot–a type of computer,…

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Monday Musing: On Shaving and Peacocks

Posted on Monday, Mar 6, 2006 10:32PMFriday, December 8, 2017 by S. Abbas Raza

My father, whom I called Bhayya, grew up in the early part of the last century in the city of Lucknow in northern India. This intersection of period and place was perhaps the acme of Urdu-speaking culture, known ever since all over the subcontinent not only for its sublime literary achievements and the refinement of…

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Monday Musing: Good Reason, in Good Faith

Posted on Monday, Feb 13, 2006 11:26PMFriday, December 8, 2017 by S. Abbas Raza

A review of Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon by Daniel C. Dennett. Isaiah Berlin resurrected the line “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing” from the ancient Greek poet Archilochus, and famously used it to divide thinkers into two camps: The first kind of intellectual and artistic…

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Mohammed Cartoon Madness and Understanding

Posted on Monday, Feb 13, 2006 12:00AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by S. Abbas Raza

Imagine this: a small group of white supremacists collects in Strauss Park near where I live in New York City, and then marches up Broadway, past 125th Street, into the heart of Harlem, all the while chanting anti-African-American slogans of the vilest kind. They have a permit from the city for their march. They use…

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Monday Musing: A Moral Degeneracy

Posted on Monday, Jan 23, 2006 12:00AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by S. Abbas Raza

One of the few vices I have always had an extreme aversion and almost allergic reaction to is gambling in all its multifarious incarnations. So much so, that I have never even learned to play a single card game, because they are all somehow indissolubly (and probably unfairly) associated with gambling in my mind since…

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Monday Musing: In the Peace Corps’ Shadow

Posted on Monday, Jan 2, 2006 11:37PMFriday, December 8, 2017 by S. Abbas Raza

A couple of weeks ago the travel writer and memoirist Paul Theroux published an opinion piece entitled “The Rock Star’s Burden” in the New York Times. It is an article full of bitterness and bile where, in a display of almost unbelievable hubris, Theroux basically expresses a thinly disguised disappointment that the country of Malawi,…

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Happy Newton’s Day!

Posted on Sunday, Dec 25, 2005 12:00AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by S. Abbas Raza

Despite the fact that December 25th happens to be the birthday of a number of important historical figures (for example, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, which is where I am from), last year we at 3 Quarks Daily thought we would celebrate Newton’s birthday on this date. Unbeknownst to us, Richard Dawkins had…

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Monday Musing: Richard Dawkins, Relativism and Truth

Posted on Monday, Dec 12, 2005 12:30AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by S. Abbas Raza

[Please see NOTE at end of this post.*] Richard Dawkins has been an intellectual hero of mine since college, where I first read The Selfish Gene. Though I thought I understood the theory of evolution before I read that book, reading it was such a revelation (not to mention sheer enjoyment) that afterward I marveled…

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Monday Musing: Reexamining Religion

Posted on Monday, Nov 21, 2005 12:55AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by S. Abbas Raza

Pervez Hoodbhoy is a well-known physicist who teaches at the Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad, Pakistan. He is also well-known for his frequent and intelligent interventions in politics. In an article entitled Miracles, Wars, and Politics he writes: On the morning of the first Gulf War (1991), having just heard the news of the US attack…

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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.