The internet at KUAST seems to be behind the Saudi Arabia firewall – which all of us were promised again and again would not be true. There are only 700 workers doing housing stuff now. 20 days to move in is the best estimate. Nobody is giving us a real answer. The hotel we are [...]
My middle school gym/health teacher taught me this trick. You bend in the corner of a sheet of paper and tear the paper to create a staple without having a staple or a stapler. It has saved me in a pinch a number of times. http://www.bloomize.com/how-to-bind-papers-without-staples-or-clips
I was going to fast along with my Muslim friends for Ramadan to see how it goes. I woke up at 11 am and missed my third opportunity to visit the KAUST campus after running to try to catch the bus in the heat. This was the first time something actually happened on time since [...]
There was a recent New York Times ARTICLE about the morality of dog fighting. Clearly the dog fighting part is barbaric. What about other animals? Pigs are just as intelligent (actually more so) and we treat them like the shit they so enjoy rolling around in (it is natural sunscreen). We draw a special line [...]
Cool big bang video: My current theory is that as a universe experiences heat death it becomes a uniform haze of photons (nature’s garbage particle) which can be viewed in a different way (for mathematicians think of a Fourier transform of a constant being a delta function) as a singularity which becomes more complex and creates a [...]
I have never heard of a nation that failed or was negatively impacted because they invested too much in education. So we need more tax cuts.
Cuban cigars are legal here. In the US since the early 1960′s it has been illegal to import anything from Cuba. I got to smoke one last night on the Jeddah waterfront in front of the local royal palace island. So take that Americans!
KAUST is an experience full of manic-depressive cycles where the overwhelming awesomeness of amazing facilities, great faculty, and most importantly my fellow students is combined with the frustrations that come with a new university in Saudi Arabia. This afternoon I walked out of a meeting where our schedules were being handed out because the people [...]
I went 4x4ing in the desert today. I forgot my camera so I can’t share the awesome view. It was cool. We didn’t get to drive so it was kinda lame.
Brett Favre was the quarterback for my Green Bay (Wisconsin) Packers football team from 1992 to 2007 – the sworn enemy of the Minnesota Vikings. Now he is the quarterback for the Vikings. Now a tornado has struck southern Minneapolis not too far from my parents’ house. Favre has a few NFL records such as [...]
I had a good conversation until late in the night with a Muslim friend and fellow KAUSTer about the day-to-day aspects of practicing Islam. He described how it differs from Judo-Christian religions in that it is a daily lifestyle. They have five prayers a day based on sunrise, noon, evening, sunset, and nighttime. Being a [...]
I went to the IKEA in Jeddah yesterday and picked up some things. It is just like here, but the prices are in ٠,١,٢,٣,٤,٥,٦,٧,٨,٩ numbers, not what we call Arabic numerals. The prices are a bit more expensive. I had to rush through checkout because just after I passed through they partially shut the store [...]
Northern states could pay for their own single-payer universal healthcare system if they simply equalized the flow of federal funds so that it treated states fairly and did not subsidize the South. George Bush Jr. (43) succeeded in one thing: convincing us that the US government is useless. In my off-time here in the Kingdom of Saudi [...]