tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-51157982011-04-21T23:51:29.292ZCircles within circles...MYGnoreply@blogger.comBlogger321100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5115798.post-61392252109441532822008-11-07T22:04:00.004Z2008-11-07T23:20:19.614Z

Last week T and I went to watch the new Bond movie, Quantum of Solace. Despite all the criticism I've seen and heard, I actually liked the film.WARNING: Spoilers below! Go watch Casino Royale and then see Quantum of Solace before reading on...I can see how it deviated wildly from the usual 007 recipe, and how this could cause rage amongst die-hard fans. James came out battered and bruised

MYGnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5115798.post-63273513906674780992008-11-04T22:30:00.007Z2008-11-05T23:10:27.561Z

Ok, I know it was a long long time ago (in a galaxy far far away) when I last posted to Epicycle. I did actually move the site for a while onto a Freedom2Operate hosted site, and used Wordpress, but sadly that blog stagnated and died as Freedom2Operate expanded.In the last few years bandwidth has become cheaper, web standards have become richer and the rise of social networking has made personal

MYGnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5115798.post-1096283650305887152004-09-27T11:14:00.001Z2008-11-04T23:42:44.395Z

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

MYGnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5115798.post-1096025192038440482004-09-24T12:37:00.002Z2008-11-05T10:56:57.552Z

The fortnight gone has been really overcast, so despite the bitter cold, the clear sky last night was a welcome change and provided me with a chance to partake in one of my favourite hobbies: gaping at the Universe. (It's big!)With this, last night was the first time I got to try out my new(ish) camera (pictures below!). The great thing about this camera (the Canon Powershot S1 IS) over my last

MYGnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5115798.post-1094480362672079572004-09-06T15:20:00.002Z2008-11-08T15:16:22.585Z

Earlier today I was on my way across the college walkway to buy some lunch when I walked past Prof. Stephen Hawking going in the opposite direction. Neither of us were travelling at a velocity close to light speed so please do not draw any Einsteinian analogies from that last sentence. ;) I think Prof. Hawking is here for the conference on quantum gravity in honour of Prof. Chris Isham's 60th

MYGnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5115798.post-1093994502191719422004-08-31T22:49:00.001Z2008-11-08T15:16:54.058Z

Today we came to Nottingham, UK, for the annual e-Science All Hands Meeting. All my recollections of this city are as a pre-teenager, when we'd often come up during holidays to visit my parents' friends, Fizza and Inayat Emadi.During these visits (from what I can remember of them) we'd drive out on lazy Sunday afternoons to Nottingham Castle and Sherwood Forest, or we'd spend the days indoors (

MYGnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5115798.post-1091626017325326012004-08-04T13:06:00.001Z2008-11-08T15:17:34.045Z

BookCrossing sounds like a really neat idea. Basically you buy a book, read it, and then register it with BookCrossing. They provide you with a unique BookCrossing identification number (a BCID) and let you write a little review of the book on their site. You then write the BCID and the BookCrossing URL somewhere in your book, and leave it somewhere for some random person to find. Starbucks,

MYGnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5115798.post-1091580115218815722004-08-03T23:04:00.001Z2008-11-08T15:18:32.743Z

It took me 4 hours to travel the typically 40 minute journey home today. 4 hours! All because of the rain.The weather in London has been pretty hot (about 30C) and humid over the last few days, so it wasn't very surprising that it was so muggy this morning. You could tell it was going to rain. And rain hard at that. However, it was dry all day until about lunch time when the special effects

MYGnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5115798.post-1091294698038832962004-07-31T17:05:00.001Z2008-11-08T15:19:28.919Z

I suck at this bloggin' malarky. It's been over a year since my last post. Opps. So much has happened in the last year I don't know where to begin... The beginning would probably be the best place to start, but as with all cycles (and epicycles!) the beginning is ill defined. Ack.I'm currently in a state of flux, severing ties with my Yahoo! email account and moving over to GMail. Being the

MYGnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5115798.post-955508012003-06-11T14:57:00.001Z2008-11-08T15:23:11.294Z

Abdul Taiyab sent me the graphic below. Apparently it's from a Coke advert being shown in Israel (can anyone confirm this?). Time to boycott coke, me thinks. Anyone for Mecca Cola?

MYGnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5115798.post-946818892003-05-21T12:27:00.001Z2008-11-08T15:25:01.445Z

One thing that has always annoyed me is the way that the mass-media constantly misinterprets or misconstrues science and scientific knowledge in order to bring sensationalism to their stories. In The Demon Haunted World, the late Carl Sagan describes how governments and public institutions have also often been guilty of this, such that, in his opinion, some societies have become increasingly

MYGnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5115798.post-941971122003-05-12T11:40:00.000Z2008-11-08T15:26:07.026Z

Some books on my shelves that I have yet to read (maybe, perhaps): Infinity And The Mind by Rudy Rucker. I bought with a book voucher that I won as part of a mathematics prize in high school. I think I bought this because of the (then) alluring subject. I'm not so impressed by infinities any more though. The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. I bought this after an argument I had with Richard

MYGnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5115798.post-940745822003-05-09T21:30:00.001Z2008-11-08T15:26:25.944Z

Where is Raed? is back! Woo-hoo! Yay!:)

MYGnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5115798.post-940732462003-05-09T21:01:00.001Z2008-11-08T15:27:29.269Z

A riffle shuffle is when you shuffle a pack of playing cards such that the top half of the deck is interleaved with the bottom half. If you are able to do this perfectly, that is you can perfectly interleave the two halves of the deck of cards, then for a deck of 52 playing cards you would only need to perform 8 perfect riffle shuffles to put the deck back in the same order as you had originally

MYGnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5115798.post-939523262003-05-07T22:07:00.000Z2008-11-08T15:28:04.671Z

Today I found myself in Cambridge for a workshop regarding grid applications in the UK (remind me to tell you all about my work one day). The meeting took place at the newly built Centre for Mathematical Sciences. The centre displays a strange yet appealing architecture consisting of a number of "pavilions" where each pavilion looked like a stylised pagoda made of glass and steel. These were

MYGnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5115798.post-934561132003-04-29T09:51:00.000Z2008-11-08T15:28:28.853Z

I just registered myself to Blogshares, a fantasy stock market for weblogs. When you register you are awarded $500 of fictional capital to invest in "blogshares." These are shares in a particular blog, whose value corresponds to the number of links to that blog. It's a neat concept because blog linking is probably more determinant upon social and cultural forces rather than macroeconomic ones.

MYGnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5115798.post-934068262003-04-28T16:26:00.000Z2008-11-08T15:28:55.286Z

So this morning I found myself invigilating the first exams of the year for the students of the Department of Computing at Imperial College London. There is nothing more mentally and physically demanding than invigilating undergraduate exams. Nothing! Not even sitting the paper itself (in this case a natural language processing paper) could be such a calorie burner. It's so tedious and boring

MYGnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5115798.post-933520072003-04-27T18:23:00.000Z2008-11-08T15:29:22.134Z

I haven't written for a while, I know. There used to be a time where I felt like I had to somehow catalogue my life in immaculate detail. I was never one for keeping a journal so this habit would usually be fulfilled by a handful of e-mails to friends and family around the universe, telling them of my day, my thoughts and anything else I felt it was important to record. I'm not sure why I felt

MYGnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5115798.post-920633712003-04-06T00:33:00.000Z2008-11-08T15:30:09.153Z

Today I found myself in Waterstones. That was a mistake. I'm such a book junky, I only went in there to look for Barabasi's Linked, but ended up spending an hour just browsing. An hour! Just browsing. Just looking at each and every shelf, seeing what I've read, what I'd like to read and what other people are currently reading. I found myself ooh-ing and aah-ing over the latest fiction and

MYGnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5115798.post-919071432003-04-03T11:19:00.000Z2008-11-08T15:30:43.127Z

Whilst googling the web this morning, I found this "alternative" to all those webcounters you find dotted around the net: the Iraq Body Counter. I have a huge distrust for the statistics that are presented by normal webcounters, and no doubt the results of the Iraq Body Counter are questionable too, but I have more faith in it simply because maximum and minimum limits are

MYGnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5115798.post-918493512003-04-02T15:59:00.000Z2008-11-08T15:31:29.984Z

There's a great article by Arundhati Roy in today's Guardian, where she brings together alot of anti-war sentiment. I didn't much like Roy's God Of Small Things because her prose was so embelished, and this made it hard for me to follow. So I never finished it. But her emotion (and sarcasm!) comes through graphically in this article, which makes it thought provoking and readable, whatever

MYGnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5115798.post-917001892003-03-31T10:26:00.000Z2004-07-31T17:37:03.106Z

Ooh ooh! I forgot to mention! Last Thursday, Tasneem (the wifey), delivered my new glasses. So it's out with my iconoclastic green plastic (watering can*) frames and in with my new Police gunmetal rimless spectacles. Woo-hoo! I'm not sure whether it's because my prescription has changed or whether my new glasses are indeed new, but it certainly feels as if I can see much clearer in them.

MYGnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5115798.post-913409632003-03-25T12:24:00.000Z2004-07-31T17:37:22.073Z

The last few days have been reasonably linear and I don't really have any "news" to share. I've been trying to make sense of this war, and trying to figure out what is actually happening out there in the "real world." I can't help but feel that we're being lied to by the media (on all sides of the socio-political-geographical spectrum). I don't blame them, however (Chomsky gives a good

MYGnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5115798.post-911171322003-03-21T11:10:00.000Z2004-07-31T17:37:48.016Z

My sister, Tasnim, gave birth to a baby boy this morning at 05:38. Woo-hoo! Yay! :) It's her fourth one, so she's somewhat of a superwoman already. But I just wanted to share the joy of being an uncle... for the fourth time. ;)

MYGnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5115798.post-910583582003-03-20T14:10:00.000Z2004-07-31T17:38:09.420Z

I received the following mail from Travis today, which, although shocking, brought a big smile to my face. It's a shame I don't believe in luck. ;) Date: Tue, 18 Mar 2003 08:36:23 +0000 From: Yuen, Travis Subject: feeling luck today? Sometimes, you just have to feel lucky when nothing in particular happens to you. I wear a seatbelt most of the time even when I am in a taxi. The only exception

MYGnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5115798.post-910541752003-03-20T12:19:00.000Z2004-07-31T17:38:37.606Z

I received some interesting pieces of snail-mail this morning (for a change). As well as my weekly subscription to New Scientist (more about that later), and a letter from NTL informing us that we will soon be subscribed to their services (sorry BT), there was my monthly Amnesty International newsletter. Together with the (aptly timed, considering that a state of war has just been declared)

MYGnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5115798.post-910057222003-03-19T18:47:00.000Z2004-07-31T17:39:00.596Z

It looks like we're going to war. I wonder if anyone has considered the outcome if Saddam Hussain wins? The general consensus appears to be that this outcome is not likely. I agree that the probability of Hussain winning a war against the Western Allies is very small, but it exists none-the-less. Furthermore, there have been other battles in history (i.e. Vietnam) where the technologically

MYGnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5115798.post-909842112003-03-19T10:57:00.000Z2004-07-31T17:39:32.656Z

So I wanted to write something about my Ashara Mubaraka 1424H, but since Yawm al-Ashura was last week, it all feels a little too late, and my thoughts and feelings about the event have become somewhat diffused. Ack. Anyhow, I will just say that although I could not be in Mumbai, India, this year, with our Dai al-Mutlaq (TUS) my Ashara was particular spiritually uplifting because we not only

MYGnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5115798.post-909190962003-03-18T12:41:00.000Z2004-07-31T17:39:54.693Z

From: Chambers Science and Technology Dictionary, Chambers, Cambridge, 1991. epicycle (Astron.) The term applied in Ptolemic or geocentric astronomy to a small circle, described uniformly by the sun, moon, or planet, the centre of that circle itself describing uniformly a larger circle (the deferent), concentric with the earth.

MYGnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5115798.post-901702322003-03-05T11:28:00.000Z2004-07-31T17:40:46.590Z

Perhaps the hardest part of starting my own blog was choosing the name. I wanted something short and snappy, identifiable and distinctive, something I could relate with. Yet it had to sound cool too. ;) I found that all my initial choices, such as siphr (Arabic for zero), coincidence (my life is FULL of them) and potato (don't ask! ;) had already been taken. So had all the Greek letters and

MYGnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5115798.post-900770222003-03-03T23:41:00.000Z2004-07-31T17:41:05.860Z

Tonight is the first night of the Islamic year of 1424 Hijri. Looking back on 1423H I feel a great deal of accomplishment. Spiritual accomplishment (I received a Mafsiyat), academic accomplishment (I completed my PhD) and personal accomplishment (I fell in love with Tasneem). I feel so overwhelmed with the fortunes of this past year, that I'm not sure how I would even begin to express my

MYGnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5115798.post-899511002003-03-01T12:33:00.000Z2004-07-31T17:41:25.646Z

Hey all! So after reading Maria's blog (http://serendipity786.blogspot.com) I felt compelled to jump on the bandwagon and begin my own blog. Here it is. My main purpose for creating this blog is to provide a means to organise and record my random thoughts, and share them with the rest of the Universe. However, I've become so bad at communicating lately (at least by the medium of the web),

MYGnoreply@blogger.com