I AM The Universe: Random Thoughts

Some people say we see the future the way we want it to be. Some say that we paint the future in the colors of today. I agree completely with the latter.

Most of us have seen Da Vincis sketches (2, 3) of war machines and other futuristic gadgets. Fortunately for us, none of those came true in quite the same fashion as Da Vinci would have hoped. In the short story that I pointed to a few days back, the author imagined a super-powerful computing device made out of a staggering number of vacuum tubes. This blog outlines a lof of old comics (if you could call them that) that outline the future from the perspective of that era. This is what the French would have us doing in the year 2000

I think it’s all about what we think of as being high-tech. Isaac Asimov thought vacuum tubes were high-tech. Da Vinci had a similar axle and pivot fetish. But we can never imagine the future in it’s true form.

Oh look at that, it’s time for me to put on my feather-suit and go flying!

I read this (original post by T2F here)on a friends blog, and I find it equally disturbing as it is unlawful. Eh, since when did laws become unlawful? Anyway, it’s Pakistan, and I think that after this bill is passed, we will be right on track with superpowers like China. We will be one step closer to every Pakistani governments dream of control and censorship of the media. Here, the medium being targeted is the Internet and cellular networks.

The bill does not warrant internet censorship directly, but it will bring us one step closer to a form of censorship directly endorsed by the government. We have previously seen censorship in the form of banning the blogspot.com domain.

But the current issue that we have with this bill is the amount of legal access that it provides the government to email messages, mobile texts and other data of the citizens. I assume that these steps were taken to make citizens more secure on the internet, with cyber-crime seeping into our culture slowly, and our generally unaware public becoming an easy target.

But perhaps our policy makers fail to realize how to make people more comfortable with technology. I, for one, am not comfortable with anyone reading my emails – be it a malicious hacker or the government. What we need is an e-crimes bill that does not violate privacy. Especially so when this can have me convicted for sweetly addressing someone with a friendly, four letter word.

It is now tough for me to decide which is worse – internet censorship, or providing someone access to my emails and texts. Oh well, in a few years we won’t have to deal with this dilemma in Pakistan, since both these policies will probably be in effect.

EDIT: Some small tips for keeping your email messages secure.

1. Avoid using email services hosted in Pakistan, or any other country that has such laws concerning privacy (Duh!)
2. If you use webmail services like Windows Live Mail (formerly Hotmail), or Gmail, use a secure server if possible. For gmail, you can do this but using:
   https://www.gmail.cominstead of just http://www.gmail.com. Yahoo uses secure services in the background (no visible https address), but the security of Windows Live Mail remains lacking beyond the login point
3. As Zohair pointed out in the comments section, you can use GPG keys to secure your emails. For a GPG tutorial, go here. I will hopefully do a step-by-step, easy to understand GPG guide on this blog in the near future.
4. Always address the other person with respect, and treat him nicely, in case all your above efforts fail.

Allow me to go a little off topic with this hilarious parody on that Anti-Piracy Ad that we’ve been seeing so much of:

Perhaps my last-post-for-a-while post was a bit premature! I just stumbled upon this today. It shows original drawings of an ethernet assembly done at the Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), where some of the best scientific minds of the world collaborated in the early days of computing to give us wonders such as the Alto! Home to the GUI, Object-Oriented programming, Graphical development environments, and now, the ethernet! Pretty amazing to see the original art!

Don’t we all love mysteries? But it is inherent that some of us indulge more in the study than in the fascination. Then there are some who shroud themselves in reflections, sacrificing their own identities for mystery. This, in turn, becomes their new identity. Leonardo da Vinci was probably the most stylish of these men. Not only does mystery surround him and his work today, but there is a certain air of helplessness around him. Perhaps his enigma was enhanced by the 2003 mystery (The Da Vinci Code), but his work, in it’s enigmatic air, has intrigued many over the centuries.

Although I haven’t read the novel, I am greatly intrigued by Da Vinci’s divine style of expression.

One of the most intriguing facts about Leonardo da Vinci is that he was left-handed, and wrote in mirror writing. One theory behind this is that because he was left-handed, his hand smeared ink as he wrote.

Another interesting fact is that although much of his work has been studied from a philosophical point of view for a long time, such as The Last Supper, and The Vitruvian Man, other more subtle works came under critical dissection as late as the 20th century, such as the Mona Lisa:

“Her hair, shoulder length, is wrapped in a translucent veil. She wears a sober, dark dress. Her left shoulder is adorned by a thickly pleated mantle. Her neckline reveals the inception of her breasts. She wears no jewels. She Smiles.”
- Donald Sasson in ‘Becoming Mona Lisa’

Da Vinci once said:

“Do you not see that, among human beauties, it is a very beautiful face and not rich ornaments that stop passers-by?…Do you not see beautiful young people diminish their excellence with excessive ornamentation?”
- Leonardo da Vinci

Thus the search began for the true meaning of the painting. Lisa’s husband was known to be a wealthy merchant, and for people in this class in the Renaissance era to pay well-known artists to make portraits of their wives was common. Then why is she not wearing any jewellery? Contrast this with Raphael’s portrait of another wealthy woman – clearly inspired by Leonardo’s portrait of Mona Lisa.

Along with the Portrait of Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, there was another Leonardo masterpiece (considered by many to be the masterpiece of all masterpieces of the time) that was once believed destroyed. Recently, in 2002-03, a group of art researchers noticed the words Circa, trova (Seek, and you shall find) painted in a fresco in the council hall Florence’s Palazzo Vechhio. It has been discovered that there exists a cavity behind that fresco. Could it be that Da Vincis best artwork lies in that cavity!? The research group is currently trying to press authorities to grant them the permission to seek the painting. Then again, why would Leonardo hide his most precious piece of art!? Classic Leonardo.

Additional External Links:

• Leonardo da Vinci: Renaissance Artist and Inventor
• The Inventor’s Workshop
• Mona Lisa Mania
• The Real da Vinci Code

Now this is very interesting.
In the early 1970’s, the political scenario was buzzing with the term black gold, Oil. Oil was scarce, but it ran the American/European machine, and the Arab world. . . had a lot of it.

The Western world was pressuring Arabia to produce more and more, at the cost of less and less. The Arab-Israel war had been fought, and it became clear to the Arab leaders that US was not a friendly player for the Arabs, especially when it came to Israel.

King Faisal, of Saudi Arabia, threatened to cut off oil supplies to the West on account of any further mischief. The United States, in return, threatened to land their forces on Arab soil in such an event. Now here comes the interesting part. After the US’s counter threat, King Faisal invited Henry Kissinger (then in servise to the US Foreign Office) to a lavish dinner in Saudi Arabia.

The dinner was organized in the middle of nowhere – the dark, cold deserts of Saudia Arab that the Arab lands are so famous for. The dinner, however, showed no sign of remoteness to civilization, with every imaginable luxury and the most delicious meals at hand! It was, afterall, a Royal dinner!

In his autobiography, Years of Upheaval, Dr. Kissinger writes that during the meal, King Faisal leaned over to me, and in a calm tone said (give or take a few words as I write only from memory):

“You must have noticed, nothing in this dinner tonight carries foreign mark. The meat on the table comes from locally hunted camels. The delicacies all made on Arab land, from Arab resources. The lamps that give us light tonight, burn on fuel extracted from camel fat. If you dare come here, we would set our wells on fire and wander into the deserts. We, as you see, would survive. What would you do?”

At this, Kissinger writes, I realized that this was a very dangerous man.

As innocent as is may sound today, it was knee-weakening then. Well-quenching technologies didn’t exist, and setting a well on fire meant almost complete depletion of that well. Even if recovered, a quenched well would give less than half the output of a normally operating well. It ironic how things have gone downhill since, and two Muslim nations have been beaten up severely in the manner that made Kissinger go pale three decades ago.