Sesquipedalianist

This post addresses the topic of "science". If you are in strong opposition of anything that is remotely scientific, I advise you to not continue reading any further. Doing so will only result in infuriation, on both my part and yours. Let us all live happily and close this browser window (or tab). On another note, learn to tolerate other points of views and read on. Now that that's out of the way, I shall begin. Several days ago I was sitting in class, staring at my iPad, oblivious to what the professor was attempting to teach me. I spend the rest of the class scrutinizing two tables, trying to make sense out of them. By the end of the class I finally understood. See them for yourself: Now, these two tables don't quite look right do they? You might have seen either or both of them before, of course, because I've been going around showing people how awesome they are. In any case, in what world does 1 + 6 equal 10? In a septimal system where the base is 7!...

So now that I have a chance to breathe a bit and take a break from all that back-breaking university workload, I've come back to share my perspective on things. There are two points I have on my mind which I wish to discuss, but I wouldn't do either of them justice if I put them together in one post. No one would want to read the long post that would result from my attempts, and, quite frankly, I'd probably get lost in my own thoughts. So lets just hope I don't forget to write a second post sometime soon. I've had several books shipped for me literally from the other side of the world. They are all in Arabic. What am I to do with seven Arabic books? Well, use them to write up a research paper. In English. For a course in an American university. If you care to know why I'm using Arabic sources and not English ones, you will soon know why. I'm honestly much more comfortable with English than I am with Arabic, at least in an academic setting. You can probabl...

One of my direct relatives got married lately, and that got me thinking about a lot of different things. That, and the fact that I go to a university that doesn't really feel like it's in the UAE. It is as if you have gotten a small sample of the world's population and made them live in one location. Sometimes, that makes you reflect on who you are. Only after I'd finished my last exam of the semester, did I see a non-Emirati student in make up. You cannot tell the difference between relatively rich and poor students, because everyone dresses almost the same. And they dress down, not up, when they go to class. Sometimes you see the random person that is dressed up all nice and formal, but when you start a conversation with them you'd soon discover that they either have an important class presentation, meeting, or interview to attend to. I love living amongst them, because there's nothing that dictates how a person should dress or act. There is no standard e...

Its been so long since I posted. It's not because I've been busy, because I guess I could've always found the time, like I am now. It's because my priorities have shifted; or you could just say that I've realized that I actually have to study hard in order to pass in university.  Having taken a step forward in life, from school to university, I must say I should've expected many aspects of my life to change. But I didn't. Approaching the end of my first semester -which I'm very happy about- I've begun to put together how things have gone wrong, and how things have gone right. Life is all about experience, and with that comes trial and error, which is an inevitable part of life. Things aren't always so clear, and thus I have written this poem which I wan't you all to read and give me feedback on. I haven't written much since June, so you really can't expect much from me at this point. I'm back to square one, Wherever that squ...

We all love summer. Every time a new academic year starts, our brains start their own subconscious countdown for summer. I mean, we kind of have the right to do that. Nobody likes doing homework -at least I think- and certainly no one loves studying for exams. No one likes the sleepless nights where you're trying so hard to finish up the project you've been neglecting for about a month. Its hard, its intense, and you don't really like that. You just want to sit there, relax, do nothing, and sleep. I've never sat at home idly doing nothing for an entire summer, until this summer came along. My excuse? I could possibly get away with saying that it's a relatively short summer and I need a break from studying to mentally prepare for the transition to university... but that would be some sort of a lie. I could just say I was too lazy to do anything. And that nothing much else happened. I always did some sort of thing in summer if I wasn't traveling. Doin...

Disclaimer: This post is based on nothing more than mere observation of the past five days. Okay, so first of all I would like to say that I do not think of myself any better than you are. I'm not perfect, but after all, no one is... We can safely say that a sixth of Ramadan, the most important month of the calendar to all Muslims (I hope), has passed. It has passed quite fast as well. We can also safely guess that the rest of the month will pass quite quickly as well. And before we know it, we will all be thrown back into out hectic lives of school, university, work, or whatever usually keeps us busy. How would the normal person react to this small piece of information? He would take advantage of this month of course, right? Well then maybe.. most people aren't "normal".. The month of forgiveness has arrived, the time where the devils are chained, the time where the gates of heaven are opened, and the gates of hell are closed. Its just one month. Sadly, this holy mon...

It seems that my addresses to this topic are endless, maybe because I think it is a subject which is very crucial to discuss and examine. I heard that once, in America, people observed a certain (unwanted?) characteristic in people of the same age. What did they do? They studied their school curricula, and they found something that triggered or built this trait in them, in a third grade text book! Now I'm sure the UAE's education system is far from even realizing that maybe, the cause of many of our major weaknesses come from something triggered by something taught to us in school. One of the main things that I observe to be clearly present in most Emiratis is our excessive passiveness. Maybe, that is not the result of a "gene"; after all, is it reasonable to suggest that this gene is present in, and affects, 95% or more of our population? Maybe, and this is just a guess, this could be a result of the poems in our Arabic textbooks? I might be picking on them mainly be...