Marzieh Ghiasi

I didn’t pay attention at all to the whole the late-night wars occurring over the past month, as it didn’t affect any shows I watch occasionally: Daily, Colbert, Mercer, 22 Minutes and Youtube for the rest of precious funny moments. But I saw Conan O’Brien’s final monologue on the Tonight Show and thought it was absolutely lovely. My favorite quote of this year… and it’s still January:

“To all the people watching, I can never thank you enough for your kindness to me and I’ll think about it for the rest of my life. All I ask of you is one thing: please don’t be cynical. I hate cynicism — it’s my least favorite quality and it doesn’t lead anywhere. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you’re kind, amazing things will happen.”

Honest, practical advice to not succumb to cynicism despite hard times. Nicely done.

I try not to be overtly meta in this blog, but I think it’s a good idea to reflect on the purpose of what one is doing every couple of years. When I read the works of people who write well, I can’t help but envy them and wonder how they do it. Writing is really a love and hate relationship for me. Sometimes when I put my hands on the keyboard, it’s as though I’ve set a flame beneath a paper with invisible ink– words just appear, fluent and natural. Other times, words tear through my flesh and rip my fingers as they come out. The rest of the time, when I have a million thoughts and fingers too reluctant to write, the words remain like a knot in my throat.

During the writing process I have the singular obsession to achieve perfection. To ensure that every word is properly placed, that every sentence serves a purpose. After all that is done comes the self-consciousness, which strangely enough has become more prominent the more experience I’ve had. I begin to question– Is this well written? Am I getting better? But perfection, as the saying goes, is a moving target. So, while on occasion a piece goes into the recycling bin, I mostly end up revising until I am satisfied. Writing for me is not always a pretty process, but it is one that I find necessary… and it’s nice to look forward to that moment when the challenge has been overcome .

A couple of days ago I was looking at the statistics for visitors to my blog in 2009… London, New York, and Chicago topped a list of 5,233 cities, the majority of which I had never heard of before… Now while I’d like to flatter myself, I’m sure not all of them stuck around, but even twenty years ago you had to be an accomplished writer in order have any number of people actually stumble upon what you wrote. In the blogs that I am subscribed to, people produce content that is timely, thoughtful, and in many ways exceptional; but many are not writers in the traditional sense. Today all you need is access to the internet and passion. While writing has its own intrinsic value, to know that out of the thousands of people that pass by, one person will actually read and enjoy what you’ve written is both humbling and stirring. It boils the desire to write more, and to write better.

I’ve had this site for five years, and over the course of the 76 entries I’ve written, it’s been a great place to share my thoughts. So while I’m never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down… I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how to orient what I write here, and give it more purpose than simply the repository for my occasional musings. Given my interests, my posts on Sundays will be on science & health, Tuesdays on technology and Thursdays on culture; and I anticipate that the posts will be more brief, but more frequent. I think rather than stifling my creativity, refining the ideas on the blog may put some method to the madness and pave way for even better ideas.

Speaking of creativity, I found an amazing channel on youtube which contains exceptional and creative advertisements from all over the world. This was their most recent one:

Things just got a little more interesting in the world of cyberpolitics.

Google revealed today that they’ve detected a sophisticated attack on their infrastructure originating from China back in December, an attack which they say impacted more than twenty other large companies in various sectors. Specifically, the attackers attempted to access Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Google does not lay blame on any specific party, however, it does indicate that it is reconsidering its approach to China.

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn

Externally Google has been pressured by various NGOs and governments with respect to its approach in China since it decided to censor its search results in the country. A move which some claimed was antithetical to the Company’s mantra “Don’t be evil.” In fact Google along with other search results faced a US congressional hearing back in 2006. Nonetheless, many queries in google.cn continue to deliver this note as part of the results: ” 据当地法律法规和政策，部分搜索结果未予显示。” or “According to local laws, regulations and policies, some search results are not shown.” Until today, it appeared that the revenue from China outweighed the costs.

With this move, the pendulum has clearly shifted. However, many questions remain regarding how decision was arrived at and how it will play out: Whether the costs of operating in country have become too much compared to the net revenue (to the tune of 22 billion dollars in the second quarter of 2009)? Or if Google is simply finding its infrastructure too vulnerable in the country? Has Google returned core values with respect to freedom of information, or caved in to external pressure regarding China’s censorship policies? Will China comply with Google, or will they reach a compromise? And if Google does indeed pull out of the Chinese market will its place be filled with other foreign search giants like Yahoo, or will it set precedent?

This is really the first major news this decade about cyber-attacks. Cyber-attacks have become commonplace in recent years, however in this case the economic and diplomatic stakes are incredibly high. Beyond the scope of the attack on Google, and the battle of the nerds… cyberwarfare between nations is not such a remote possibility as the internet and information technology take a more prominent role in national infrastructures. The following is an excerpt from a piece I wrote late last year on the transformation of war:

“… Constructivism takes an optimistic approach towards norms and progress. However, while norms can change to ameliorate conflict among nations, they can just as easily bring an ever-changing face to war. Indeed the 20th century was witness to a shift in the paradigm of warfare that took conflict from the trenches into cities. The democratization of war was a shift in norms which instead of creating taboos of war, propagandized war. This led to even more destructive weapons and created a situation where wars were supplied by, and waged on citizens. It is possible that even if the killing of human beings as a part of warfare becomes taboo (to the extent that state-sanctioned slavery is today), war itself might evolve. Going back to the definition of war, it is an act that is a means and not an end; and certainly any act that engages two parties in aggression, and achieves the desired outcome by force may constitute warfare. For example, in a world that is becoming increasingly reliant on technology, cyber attacks are becoming increasingly threatening^*. Equipment disruption, invasion of data banks and information highway can all be considered modes of cyber warfare. This type of warfare would not require massive troop mobilization; and it may not lead to civilian casualties, unless that is desired. But compromising critical systems in a nation could paralyze it and threaten its security. This type of warfare would have little resemblances to historic wars, however, it would achieve the same outcomes.”

*Hildreth, S. A. (2001). Cyberwarfare. Congressional Research Service policy paper.

Click to see full view of a panorama of Mellat Park enterance.

I’ve began to go through my pictures and journal entries from the past summer. These pictures were taken this past summer at Pârk-e Mellat (the National Park) in Tehran, Iran. It’s adjacent to Valiasr Street and is the central park of Tehran and one of its largest. I visited the park a couple of days after the initial massive post-election protests that took place passing through the lengthy Valiasr street. In front of the entrance of the park there are many small kiosk shops that sell lovely handicrafts. There I heard the shopkeepers’ recollections about the protests they had witnessed. As with future encounters, in general some people were hesitant, but the majority of the people spoke quite openly which actually surprised me. One lady said “I saw it with my own eyes. There was a sea of people passing, but everyone was silent.”

Kamal-ol-molk - painter.

Nima Yooshij - modern persian poet.

Muhammad ibn Zakariya Razi - alchemist, chemist, physician, philosopher.

Mohtasham Kashani - poet.

Statue of Mother.

Statue of Mother (close-up).

Working hard to keep green.

Lanterns at the park.

Permanent smog in the air.

The park's enclosed zoo.

Swans in the lake.

Deers on the grounds.

A resting kiosk.

Entrance of the park.

Reaching out to the sun.

Having written an ode to an age goneby I’d like to write one to an age coming. I am at a turning point, yet the future is filled with uncertainty. What is certain is successes and disappointments will ebb and flow. There will be wars, peace, new threats, new breakthroughs. My only wish as we enter this new decade is courage. Courage to climb new frontiers and hold strong against storms thrust on us. Courage to be patient, persist and believe even when the turning epochs do not move with our will. Courage to stand in solidarity, to stand for what is right.

Image Source: “Beyond Belief”, at the 2003 Burning Man Festival.

Ode

We are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;—
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.

With wonderful deathless ditties
We build up the world’s great cities,
And out of a fabulous story
We fashion an empire’s glory:
One man with a dream, at pleasure,
Shall go forth and conquer a crown;
And three with a new song’s measure
Can trample a kingdom down.

We, in the ages lying
In the buried past of the earth,
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself in our mirth;
And o’erthrew them with prophesying
To the old of the new world’s worth;
For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth.

-Arthur O’Shaughnessy

Tonight we say goodbye to 2009 and the decade that it brings to an end. I was glued to the television ten years ago with sheer excitement as the millennial celebrations unfolded throughout the world. It had been just a week after my birthday, and I felt incredibly lucky to have been born at a time when I could witness the turning of the millennium… the 1500s are so passé. I started this decade in elementary school and ended it in university. It has been a decade filled with ups and downs. Personal failures and successes. Global failures and successes. It has been filled with hope and disappointment… and hope again.

I was raised in the decade when towers fell, when tyrants fell, when millions of innocents fell. I was raised in a decade of fewer wars than before, but even lesser peace. Axis of evil became the emblem, and we became familiar with allies, enemies, sanctions, and moral crusades. Us and them. Them and Us. Religions. Cultures. Languages. The Clash of Civilizations self-prophesized. Plain talking, simple talking. Dude, where are my WMDs? Reality is TV and we’re all stars. Vote each other off islands, houses, and the stage. But Keep watching. With SARS, Bird Flu, Swine Flu, our lungs never caught a break. Mad Cow, West Nile, and Anthrax just in case you weren’t scared.

Earthquakes wiped out ancient mud cities, tsunamis wiped out modern steel cities, and hurricanes came and went from Y2K to 2012. Broken ice-sheets, broken promises, broken levees. Green bags, green protests, green earth. Poisoned rivers feed largest dam, and black gold feeds humanity as starvation abounds. It was a decade of threats and terror. Sixty years since the bomb, look north of the 38th parallel. Planes, subways, only bikes are safe now. And no carbon footprint.

But we connected. We forged friendships on walls, carved our aspirations on the screen. Mundane life or the greatest tweet ever. Status update: Will you accept my friend’s request please? The Roman forums became the digital platforms for dialogue between civilizations. Cell phone cameras became the eyes of the world jury, and our redemption. The world is watching your every move. Seriously? Seriously.

We changed our perspectives. We saw more than ever. The world at our fingertips, Gorillas in our Midst, planets in worlds far off, and the hobbits in humankind’s family tree. Stem cells created parts of us. Millionaires traversed space, and shuttles disintegrated while one lone mathematician solved the Poincaré Conjecture. When I was your age, Pluto was a planet… and the Hadron Collider investigated the essence of the universe. Before it had a Wardrobe Malfunction. Wiki stored our collective knowledge. The threads of our existence were unraveled and their codes became just one click away. Data, data, data. I’ve been Swallowed in the Sea, will you Lift me up? Ice from Mars for the iGeneration. Order from your nearest online retailer. Man from monkey? The debate rages on a hundred and fifty years later.

Millions voted in world’s biggest democracy. With solidarity, with courage, millions turned out against wars, for civil rights, in white, orange, green and all the colors of a rainbow. Funny men on TV made us think. Elections were won and lost, or in dispute, or recalled. Candidates assassinated. Men became presidents. Proud Cowboys and Humble Street Sweepers. They wore their faith on their sleeves. Epic Fail– You Betcha that’s What She Said. Recessions didn’t recede, but swept the globe. Watch the numbers fall, fall, fall. Dollars, schemes, prisons, and bail-outs.

We LOLed at cats, and shed tears when massacres took lives. Batons, Kalashnikovs, mines and bombs. White phosophorous gave a light blue shade to the heavens above, and tear gas burnt. We clash, we collide, and sometimes we headbutt. Run fast. You are Bolt. Keep running when they make you fall. You are gold. Black man became most powerful person in the world, and gave us all a change and a glimpse of hope, however transient.

I grew in the 2000s, and it was worthwhile. Google it.

What do you remember?

At a painter’s doors in the Narenjestan-e Qavam (Shiraz, Iran)

I was fortunate enough to find a print of a painting of this Sepehri poem when I was going through the old things I had carefully preserved in my grandmother’s house in the third grade. I had a series of these prints. Each illustrated a few verses from modern Persian poetry, and I was unusually attached to them.

Calligraphy and painting by Seddigh (1995) – (خط و نقاشي اجراء صديق (١٣٧٤

Adress¹

“Where is the home of the friend?”²
Asked the rider at dawn.
The sky stood still.
The passerby bequeathed
the branch of light he held to his lips
to the darkness of sands
and pointed to a poplar and said:

“Before the tree,
there is garden lane greener than God’s dream
where love is as blue as the wings of fidelity.
Go on till that alley which emerges from maturity,
then turn to the flower of loneliness,
two steps before the flower
remain at the foot of the eternal fountain of earthly legends
where a transparent fear overtakes you.
In the flowing sincerity of the space, you hear a rustling
A child you see
has climbed a tall pine, to take a chick from the nest of light
and you ask him
where is the home of the friend?”

November 24th, 2009 marked the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. The book, along with Marx’s The Communist Manifesto is the most important work of the 19th century. Like the other, Origin challenged both the scientific establishment and the social establishment, and as a result, generated a lot of controversy, which it continues to do so to this day.

Origin of Species must also be considered one of the most influential books of all time. I can’t think of any work that has so rapidly and in a such a way shifted the prevailing paradigm and changed humankind’s perception of the world and itself– so it’s no surprise that the book is said to have brought about a revolution in science, much like Copernicus’ On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres. Unlike Copernicus, however, Darwin himself foresaw this and wrote in the last pages of Origin:

When the views advanced by me in this volume, and by Mr. Wallace, or when analogous views on the origin of species are generally admitted, we can dimly forsee that there will be a considerable revolution in natural history. -Chapter XV, On the Origin of Species

In the words that follow, I explore the origins of Origin and pose that the revolution in fact started a year and some months earlier with the publication of the Linnean papers. I also examine the brilliant naturalist and elusive figure, “Mr. Wallace”, and his role in putting forward evolutionary theory.

The Linnean Papers
Darwin, Wallace & A Nascent Revolution

By Marzieh Ghiasi (Nov 2009)

n July 1st, 1858, in a special meeting of the Linnean Society, held in London, two brief papers describing natural selection as a mechanism of evolution were read. The Linnean papers, published later in August 20th as part of the society’s proceedings, were the start of a movement in science that became known as the Darwinian revolution. One essay was by Charles Darwin, an English naturalist whose name has become the cornerstone of evolutionary theory. The other essay was by Alfred Russel Wallace, an English naturalist whose name has become largely restricted to the annals of history. The traditional approach has been to set Darwin and Wallace as rivals in a fight for priority of publication, one which the majority of literature has argued Darwin won. The Linnean papers, however, can be examined as an outcome of a cooperative trajectory in which a common theory of evolution was developed by two vastly different individuals. This paper focuses on the association between Darwin and Wallace with respect to the Linnean papers, arguing that the interactions of the two naturalists offered them mutual benefits that would have been unlikely otherwise. As well, the interactions between the two men created a cohesion and unity critical in a field at its nascent stages.

Two Men Worlds Apart

Victorian Britain was highly class-conscious and its science was viewed as a domain of the upper class. Charles Darwin, born in 1809 into a prestigious and wealthy English family and educated in the University of Edinburgh and University of Cambridge, was an ideal representative of these values. Alfred Russel Wallace, conversely, was born in 1823 to a low income family and class relations played a tremendous role throughout his life.^[1] Although his father was a lawyer, he never practiced and the family had to learn to rely on self-sufficiency. Wallace never received formal schooling beyond the age of thirteen, when he was withdrawn and sent to an apprenticeship because his family no longer could pay for his education. By the time he was fourteen, he joined his brother as an apprentice land surveyor. However, Wallace was precocious and determined, and began to teach himself many subjects including taxonomy for which he had grown a great affinity.^[2] Unlike Darwin, who was well positioned for a life in pursuit of science, Wallace’s challenge was to break through rigid social barriers and prove himself as a scientist.

Read the rest of this entry »

Every year, for more than twenty years or so, the McGill Anatomy & Cell Biology Students Society has held an “anatomically correct” bake sale at the systemic human anatomy class. This year’s bake sale was pretty amazing and apparently in an hour managed to raise nearly two-thousand dollars for a charity for deaf students here in Montréal! I took a couple of (low-quality) cell-phone pictures. Yes the last one is legs and kind of NSFW.