Subzero Blue

Barack Obama Is Not A Muslim

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama launched an online viral counteroffensive Tuesday against persistent e-mail chain letters that lie about his religious and political background.

[…]

There are various versions of the e-mails, but they generally insinuate that Obama is secretly a Muslim who attended a radical Islamic school in Indonesia. One of the e-mails charges that he’s a radical Muslim who refuses to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Another e-mail claims that he was sworn into the Senate using a copy of the Quran. All of the allegations are false.

[Source: Wired]

I don’t even know what to say or where to start about this…
Should I worry about the way Islam is made out to sound like a plague that everyone wants to distance themselves from?
Should I be wondering what the religion of a person has to do with them being electable to office or not?
Or should I just mind my own business and watch the US presidential elections as people judge the candidates on their race, religion and popularity instead of on how much good they’ll be able to do the country and how good a leader they will be?

The Masks We Wear

Don’t be fooled by me. Don’t be fooled by the face I wear. For I wear a thousands masks, masks that I’m afraid to take off and none of them is me. Pretending is an art that is second nature with me, but don’t be fooled. For God’s sake don’t be fooled. I give you the impression that I’m secure, that all is sunny and unruffled with me, within as well as without, that confidence is my name and coolness my game; that the water’s calm and I’m in command, and that I need no one. But don’t believe me. My surface may seem smooth but my surface is my mask, ever-varying and ever-concealing. Beneath lies no complacence. Beneath lies confusion and fear and aloneness. But I hide this. I don’t want anybody to know it.

[…]

Who am I, you may wonder? I am someone you know very well. For I am every man you meet and I am every woman you meet.

— Charles C. Finn, “Please Hear What I’m Not Saying”

Saudi Arabia To Lift Driving Ban On Women

Finally…

Saudi Arabia is to lift the ban on women drivers in an attempt to stem a rising suffragette-style movement in the kingdom.

Government officials have confirmed the landmark decision and plan to issue a decree by the end of the year.

The move is designed to forestall protests for greater freedom by women, which have recently included campaigners driving cars through the kingdom in defiance of a threat of detention and loss of livelihoods.

“There has been a decision to move on this by the Royal Court because it is recognised that if girls have been in schools since the 1960s, they have a capability to function behind the wheel when they grow up,” a government official said. “We will make an announcement soon.”

[Source: Gulf News]

I never understood why women were banned from driving in the first place; I can’t imagine there being any sound logic behind it.

All my respect goes out to the Saudi women who brought on this change by defying the ban and pushing for their rights.

People Automatons

Today we come across an individual who behaves like an automaton, who does not know or understand himself, and the only person that he knows is the person that he is supposed to be, whose meaningless chatter has replaced communicative speech, whose synthetic smile has replaced genuine laughter, and whose sense of dull despair has taken the place of genuine pain. Two statements may be said concerning this individual. One is that he suffers from defects of spontaneity and individuality which may seem to be incurable. At the same time it may be said of him he does not differ essentially from the millions of the rest of us who walk upon this earth.

– Erich Fromm

Blue Ocean Strategy

Yesterday I finished reading “Blue Ocean Strategy (How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant)” by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne.

The book explores the authors’ vision of the kind of expanding, competitor-free markets that innovative companies can navigate. Unlike “red oceans,” which are well explored and crowded with competitors, “blue oceans” represent “untapped market space” and the “opportunity for highly profitable growth.

Using dozens of examples, from Southwest Airlines and the Cirque du Soleil to Curves and Starbucks, they present the approaches these companies took to open new doors for their businesses and reach out to satisfy untapped demand.

The key to create these “blue oceans” and navigate away from the fierce competition and into very profitable waters is through what they call “value innovation”, that focuses on utility, price, and cost positions, to create and capture new demand and to focus on the big picture, not the numbers.

The book isn’t just talk and theory, it actually provides a set of tools and frameworks businesses can use to develop their own “blue ocean” strategies. It’s more of a guidebook and action plan.

I personally found it to be a really great business book and very thought inspiring. A must-read for everyone involved in running a business.

Thanks to my friend Bilel for telling me about and lending me this book. I’m certainly going to buy a copy for myself. It’s very well worth it.

[Amazon: Blue Ocean Strategy]

Jill Sobule Tries To Make Fan Funded Album

American singer-songwriter Jill Sobule is another artist attempting to break away from the recording industry machine; her approach is by turning to her fans to fund her next album.

She has launched a website called Jill’s Next Record through which she’s collecting donations from her fans in an attempt to come up with $75,000 for recording the album and other related costs.

In return for her fan’s donations, she will be giving them prizes according to the size of the donation.
Donations can go from $25 up to $10,000; while her prizes go from sending out an advanced copy of the CD to being mentioned on the CD to getting a house concert or even getting to sing on the CD with her.

I really think it’s an interesting approach, and a very good way to break free from the greedy music industry giants. I wish Jill the best of luck in getting her album made and that her fans enjoy every bit of it.

Singapore Contest For Next-Generation Search Engine

Singapore’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research has launched an eight-month contest to lure software engineers and researchers to develop the next generation of search engines, offering them a cash prize of $100,000.

The aim is build a search engine that works across multiple media platforms, that not only searches for text in websites but also for terms within music and video files.

The top five teams will be flown to Singapore for the finals at Fusionopolis, a science and technology research centre set to open in October.

An international advisory panel will oversee the competition. Applicants have a registration deadline of February 29.

It seems like everyone is on Google’s tail, trying to come up with the next big search engine that will take over the world. I wonder who gets there first and what factor will tip the scale to their side.

[Source: Physorg]
[Via: Truemors]

Four Lebanese Jailed For Rude Commentary On Facebook

Weird bit of news from Lebanon…

Four Lebanese university students have been jailed for a week for making crude remarks on the Facebook social networking site about the singing talents of a woman they met at a party, media reports said on Thursday.Local newspapers reported that the students, all male, were ordered to be detained on January 10 after the young woman’s father objected to the authorities in the western town of Zahle.

The four were charged with slander and “violating public morality” and were ordered to be held in preventive detention despite objections by human-rights groups.

[Source: Now Lebanon]

When people get thrown into jail for stuff like this you can’t help but feel how long the road ahead still is.

Should this really be an issue? Don’t these judges have anything more important to do?

[Via: AndFarAway, Beirut Spring]

Blogger Does Arabic, Hebrew And Persian

Blogger is finally available in Arabic, and two other Middle Eastern right-to-left languages: Hebrew and Persian.

Besides localizing the Blogger interface into these three languages, they have added right-to-left templates and new toolbar buttons for bi-directional text editing in the post editor.

I think it’s great that they’ve done this, it will make a lot of people’s lives easier. I know many people who’ve been using Blogger to publish their blogs in several languages like Arabic, Farsi, Urdu and Hebrew for some time now.

Some of these people who have a little technical know-how were able to play around with their blog designs and templates to flip them around into something nice and presentable, but the result with others wasn’t such a nice view, even though they eventually got to get their ideas across, which is what counts most I guess.

Anyway, very welcomed move from Google’s Blogger team. May blogs from this corner of the world flourish even more.

[More: Blogger Buzz, Mashable]

Muslim Athlete Disqualified Over Uniform

Another stupid act by some school over a Muslim girl’s choice of clothes…

… Juashaunna Kelly, a senior at the District of Columbia’s Theodore Roosevelt High School, has the fastest mile and 2-mile times of any girl runner in the city this winter. She was disqualified from Saturday’s Montgomery Invitational indoor track and field meet.

Kelly was wearing the same uniform she has worn for three seasons while running for Theodore Roosevelt’s cross-country and track teams. The custom-made, one-piece blue and orange unitard covers her head, arms, torso and legs. Over the unitard, she wears the same orange and blue T-shirt and shorts as her teammates.

The outfit allows her to compete while adhering to her Muslim faith…

[…]

[M]eet director Tom Rogers said Kelly’s uniform violated rules of the National Federation of State High School Associations, which sanctioned the event. Uniforms are required to be “a single-solid color and unadorned, except for a single school name or insignia no more than 2 1/4 inches,” he said.

[Source: Yahoo! News]

Flexibility, Freedom, Respect, Understanding… These are all words that seem to be missing from these people’s dictionaries and vocabularies.

Such a big fuss over some non-issue. Just be and let be for God’s sake.