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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

Monday Musing: Posthumously Arrested for Assaulting Myself

Posted on Monday, Oct 31, 2005 1:01AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by S. Abbas Raza

Those of you who have never taken 20-24 hour flights can probably scarcely imagine the vertigo-inducing fatigue involved. I have taken one of these flights fairly regularly for decades now, from Karachi to New York, and find it hard to understand how my elderly parents ever survived them. In addition to the sheer length of…

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Monday Musing: Be the New Kinsey

Posted on Monday, Oct 10, 2005 12:00AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by S. Abbas Raza

Last week my wife and I saw the biopic Kinsey in which Liam Neeson plays the entomologist turned pioneering sex researcher, Dr. Alfred Charles Kinsey. It’s a pretty good movie. Rent the DVD. Kinsey spent the early part of his career as a zoologist studying gall wasps, on which he became the world’s foremost expert.…

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Planks from the Lumberyard

Posted on Monday, Sep 26, 2005 9:44PMMonday, January 7, 2019 by S. Abbas Raza

Spider Holes & Spider Goats: Tuning in the (White) Noises from the Margins As if anyone needed further reason to become even more paranoid (or is it “perceptive”?), a marine involved in the capture of Saddam Hussein tells us that the “spider-hole” scenario was a carefully contrived spectacle directed by a “military production” unit; apparently…

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Monday Musing: General Relativity, Very Plainly

Posted on Monday, Sep 19, 2005 12:00AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by S. Abbas Raza

[NOTE: Since I wrote and published this essay last night, I have received a private email from Sean Carroll, who is the author of an excellent book on general relativity, as well as a comment on this post from Daryl McCullough, both pointing out the same error I made: I had said, as do many…

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Planks from the Lumberyard: Bathroom Pastoralism, or, The Anecdote of the Can

Posted on Monday, Sep 12, 2005 11:43AMMonday, January 7, 2019 by S. Abbas Raza

First, a note to the reader about wood. “Lumber,” a word that we now associate with the Home Depot and deforestation, once denoted the contents or printed products of the mind, which, in turn, was sometimes known as the “lumber-room” (see, for instance, page 54 of Tristram Shandy ). The title of my column, then,…

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Monday Musing: Regarding Regret

Posted on Monday, Sep 5, 2005 3:54AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by S. Abbas Raza

[Abbas Raza is filling in for Morgan Meis, who is indisposed.] Recently someone asked me one of those highly meaningful questions, the answers to which, if shared, are supposed to tell both persons very important things about each other. The question was: “Is there anything you really regret in your life?” I didn’t know how…

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Monday Musing: Three Dreams, Three Athletes

Posted on Monday, Aug 29, 2005 12:00AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by S. Abbas Raza

Sports figures have always held great fascination for me, and over the years I have regarded various athletes with an almost worshipful awe. When I was a child, there was the legendary cricket batsman, Hanif Mohammed, who still holds the world record for most runs in an innings in first class cricket: an unbelievable 499.…

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Lives of the Cannibals: Rage

Posted on Monday, Aug 22, 2005 12:00AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by S. Abbas Raza

It is 10 pm on Wednesday night and a man is screaming on the 1/2/3 platform at Times Square station. His voice gives no clue as to age or race. It’s impossible even to determine the man’s trouble: his tone is shrill and his words are stretched and twisted to accommodate rage. Walk down the…

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Monday Musing: Rocket Man

Posted on Monday, Aug 8, 2005 12:00AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by S. Abbas Raza

It has never been fully clear to me why rocket science has become such a popular trope for intellectually challenging activity. Brain surgery makes more sense to me as a metaphor (as in, “It ain’t brain surgery, you know!”) since it is rather obviously very intricate, requires dexterity in addition to knowledge, decades of training,…

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Monday Musing: Francis Crick’s Beautiful Mistake

Posted on Monday, Jul 18, 2005 12:00AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by S. Abbas Raza

Many scientists don’t know what they are doing. That is, they are so immersed in science, that they often do not step outside it for a wider philosophical perspective on what it is they do, while remaining convinced that science is somehow more correct than other ways of doing things. For example, a scientist might…

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Monday Musing: The Man With Qualities

Posted on Monday, Jun 27, 2005 12:00AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by S. Abbas Raza

Sahabzada Yaqub Khan is the father of one of my closest friends, Samad Khan. He is also probably the most remarkable man I have ever met. All Pakistanis know who he is, as do many others, especially world leaders and diplomats, but to those of you for whom his name is new, I would like…

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Monday Musing: Special Relativity Turns 100

Posted on Monday, Jun 6, 2005 12:00AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by S. Abbas Raza

One hundred years ago this month, twenty-six-year-old Albert Einstein published a paper entitled “Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper“ or “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies”. As we all know by now, 1905 was Einstein’s annus mirabilis, the miraculous year in which he published four papers in the Annalen der Physik. The first was a paper on…

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Monday Musing: Vladimir Nabokov, Lepidopterist

Posted on Monday, May 30, 2005 12:00AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by S. Abbas Raza

[Abbas Raza is filling in for J.M. Tyree, who is on vacation this week.] As in the case of many sciency types, my mostly informal education in the humanities has been somewhat arbitrary and certainly very spotty. I can reliably amuse and horrify more erudite friends by reciting lists of authors and books I’ve never…

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Monday Musing: Stevinus, Galileo, and Thought Experiments

Posted on Monday, May 9, 2005 12:00AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by S. Abbas Raza

Late on a rainy night some years ago, a few blocks away from home on Broadway, I happened to give a homeless man a dollar or two. In gratitude, he handed me a book. It was very dark, so I had to wait until I got home to see that it was a wet, worn…

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3QD Monday Musing: Cake Theory and Sri Lanka’s President

Posted on Monday, Apr 11, 2005 12:43AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by S. Abbas Raza

Even though we are for the most part a “links” blog, the editors of 3 Quarks Daily have decided that we will take turns writing a short column each Monday, where we can talk about whatever we feel like. No one else wanted to do the first one so it has fallen to me by…

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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.