What's Been and What's Ben

I am posting this with my new 32GB iPod touch! I think these things are awesome and someday these iPods might catch on. I got this thing in Dubai.

I made it back. Things will be detailed later such as

• flying on a discount Saudi airplane
• never again taking an unlicensed taxi
• living in class at the York Hotel
• swimming in the Persian Gulf
• the tallest structure in the world
• skiing in the desert on sand
• skiing in the desert on snow
• seeing a rare N. American raccoon in a zoo
• dodging cars while crossing the street
• searching for some bacon
• encountering Iranians
• encountering Kenyans
• riding the new light rail train system
• getting back to KAUST
• accidentally locking myself in a bedroom
• moving into a maid’s room
• and drinking beer

Dubai is fun. We left Abu Dhabi from the airport. The first hotel we stayed in was a joke. The current one is great. On Thursday I swam in the Persian Gulf at a nice beach. On Friday we just hung out, as Ramadan shuts many things down for the day. It is a blast here anyway, and Eid starts tomorrow.

I have yet to see a construction crane moving. This place is a bit of a ghost-town. The tower here is crazy tall. I am in an internet cafe for a little less than a dollar per hour. It is over 100 degrees outside now.

Tomorrow I leave for Dubai for a week.

Life at KAUST can be very cool, even though it is very hot here. I love my classes. My research seems like it will be really awesome. The team  I am on seems to be a fun group doing some awesome things with crystals. Dissatisfaction with certain standard of living issues among the students, faculty, and staff still fall of deaf ears. I did find out that Saudi Aramco is running things at the moment. But all in all, I like being here. Many of our problems are part of the newness and the speed at which KAUST was brought together. Our student council is slowly coming together. Protest is officially banned on campus, with the punishment of expulsion, so our power is limited.

Ironically, in a very coincidental way, there are no knifes in anybody’s apartment. There is also no first floor in any building on the main campus. I imagine it is like Being John Malkovich where you just need to stop the elevator at the right time.

I am going to Abu Dhabi and Dubai next week in The UAE! We are going to have an awesome time as this coincides with Eid ul-Fitr, the end of Ramadan. They have a giant festival there every year. It is a huge holiday here and we get the week off! It is cheap to stay there now because of the general world recession. Me and Romeo are signed up. Many others will probably want to get onboard.

In the future, nuclear power will be seen as unethical for its destruction of innocent atoms.

…and I am in Saudi Arabia. Something I would never have thought at the time. I spent tonight at a preliminary planning meeting for a student council planning meeting. Part of the administration has refused to answer anybody’s email and seem unwilling to listen to student viewpoints – their job. I assume they play computer solitaire all day. The component that does listen is out of the country at the moment. We just want to be able to provide the administration with a body that can reflect the views of the students. We realize that we could only get a group that could give advice and not have real power. We have formed a coalition of students from many different countries to present a way of providing a legitimate forum to channel our ideas of how to form this student council. They want to try to make this the MIT of the Middle-East, but I think they fail to realize that the best modern schools have student input. MIT is way overrated, by the way.

I found something out today about 9/11. It is when news networks started to really use the scrolling banner of text at the bottom of the screen. They came on then and have just stayed around ever since. I really liked the World Trade Center because of the elegance of form following function and the ambition of the project. When I visited it a few months before the terrorist attacks I took rolls of film worth of pictures of the tower back when people still used film cameras. Half my pictures from the trip were of the towers. They would bend enough in the wind that you could look down from the top and see the entire height of the building at once reaching up to the floor below your feet. I don’t like the freedom tower concept. I think it should either be  a park or a pair of 111-story buildings (as opposed to the original 110). I will never forget.

From the world of science, which I am starting to think is just a fad, there were two cool things on the intertubes today

• air-compression microprocessor from Ann Arbor
• human hair  solar cells from Nepal

On the KAUST front, my building started on fire a little bit again, and again. A fellow motorcycle-enthusiast student at KAUST had his roof collapse in his bedroom (he saw it coming at was sleeping on the couch). I finally got my second book of six. A Burger King opened up on campus to provide the best American food I have had since coming here. I get to eat free there for the first month. I have been taking notes with colored pencils – Tufte would be pround. This has been very effective when trying to draw pictures of layered semiconductor devices.

I have come to the realization that what I do would best be described as a crystal engineer. My new biker-gang name is Ox. Some creature is making a great deal of noise as it dies in my ceiling. I am caught up on the Daily Show now – which has brought me more comfort than anything else in the last month. The films District 9 and Man On Wire are awesome. Stream of consciousness is awesome too.

I geeked out last night when I heard a cricket behind my fridge. Instead of pulling the fridge out and bringing him to a farm in the country, I got my LED lighting development board I made for my senior design project and strobed him with light at an irregular pace to make him stop chirping. I plan to trick out my 49 cc motorcycle with LEDs all over.

This is important, if it is true, that a magnetic monopole has been found.

KAUST came out with a helpline for problems. Larger problems about school policy that was sprung on us at the last hour still loom over our heads. I will keep updates about the progress as it unfolds. A cleaning crew did come in a give my place a once over and removed most of the dead flies on the floor.