infojunkie's blog

I feel grateful when a good thing happens in the day. Today two good things happened, so I feel extra grateful.

But grateful towards who, or what? Towards the universal forces that, invisibly, conspired to make the good things happen. I am part of those forces too, of course. It's useful to give those forces a name. Collectively, I call them God. When a good thing happens, I say الحمد لله.

by measuring a thing, you force it to take a definite value in some frame of reference. you subsequently deal with that thing as having that snapshot value, thereby forcing it to respond as if it had that value - and forwarding that value to other things that go on to cause more reality to happen based on it.

Our individual lives are made up of scenes. I start the workday on a breakfast with the family scene, concluded by walking my daughter to her schoolbus. Then starts the work scene, in which I interact with my team, mostly virtually. Then my daughter comes back from school, and it's homework time, then dinner, etc.

The soul is a meme as old as humanity. Ancient Egyptians had that concept and had possibly inherited it from previous peoples. It figures prominently in mythologies and religions.

But ontologically (or epistemologically, I confuse the two), what is the soul? In other words, what behaviour does the soul exhibit that distinguishes it from other things in our universe (of ideas)?

some examples:

hamza elimination: صحراء => صحرا, أنا جئت => أنا جيت
substitution of diacritics: تَكتُبُ => تِكتِبْ
change of pronouns: http://arabic.desert-sky.net/g_pronouns.html, http://arabic.desert-sky.net/g_pronouns_demr.html
elimination of dual mode
negation: ما جيتش
conjugation: بتشجع اي فريق؟

other good resources:
http://www.lexilogos.com/keyboard/arabic.htm
http://www.almaany.com/ar/dict/ar-ar/

We are waiting for the Egyptian language to be recognized officially, maybe like Modern French around 1500. How would the Egyptian alphabet look like? As with everything linguistic, evolution is at work and historical events play a major role. Here's my prediction of the simplest alphabet that could emerge, given progressive loss of differentiation between some Arabic letters (as observed on social media):

أ
ب
ت
ج ≡ G
ح
خ
د
ر
ز or ذ but not both
س

One of the human weaknesses is that we only desire what we cannot have or fear to lose. Some prescriptive philosophies aim at curtailing desire in its various forms, or even in its abstract expression. Most if not all of these attempts are doomed to failure. A glaring example is the sexual revolution that we've been experiencing since the 1960s.

For R., the purpose of each person is to communicate with his neighbours. Establishing communication is the main effort to be done, as opposed to solving practical problems. If we look at the human condition, most problems have been resolved, or are in the process of being resolved, but communication problems are still plaguing our existence and causing pain and misery.