What's Been and What's Ben

There is a kitten sitting in front of my keyboard. I am watching it for a Saudi friend who is going away for the week-long break. We are having nothing but fun!

Previously I had only felt one drop of rain in Saudi Arabia that passed between my fingers. This time I stood out on my balcony partially dressed (my upstairs balcony is more private) standing in a legitimate downpour. It was a very cold rain.

It rained four inches. 48 People have died so far in Jeddah, Mecca, and Rabigh. None of the dead are among the 3 million religious pilgrims attended the Hajj. It typically rains an inch a year – if at all. The campus was flooded a bit. The hotel where the female students live was evacuated. Water is leaking from my ceiling still, although my apartment survived for the most part. The tape drives for Shaheen (KAUST supercomputer, ranked 14 in the world) were ruined, although the computer survived. The clean room is supposedly flooded, although the sanitation of the room used for making semiconductor devices like computer chips, solar cells, and LEDs was already compromised because of an accidental treatment with chemicals by pest exterminators. I was told that KAUST buildings had flooded before during a storm that occurred before the students arrived. Below are some pictures of rain, a flooded street just after the storm passed, my duct tape system for collecting the water running down my wall, a flooded street out on the island, and a car that got owned by a concrete sunshade thingy. Several friends have been moved to new apartments because of ceiling collapses. I worry about my friends that went on the Hajj because they left just before the storm so they don’t know if their apartments are damaged. Estimates put the number of students leaving after this semester at 100.
My friend Dan took some great pictures and wrote a good blog entry about the flood.

We had everything but gravy for our Thanksgiving meal. I made wild rice and a lingonberry pudding. The rice turned out well. There were electrical storms all night.

Website activity for last few days…

Tomorrow, the 24 of November 2009, marks the 150th anniversary of Darwin publishing “On the Origin of Speices” which changed science, public policy, and our general understanding of the universe forever. The most important thing about natural selection is that it applies to all systems that extend over time. Modern business theory and American Idol all represent the idea that those successful at hanging onto life will be present in future generations. It is not an active thing, but something that naturally flows as a consequence of time. Natural selection applies even to the idea of evolution, as it has perpetuated and flourished for a century in a half because it best explains evolution.

I personally side with Richard Dawkins and the theory that genes are the fundamental unit of natural selection instead of the species as a whole. Individuals have many copies of the same gene that often fight with other genes. The word “fight” shouldn’t be used because it makes it seem like an active action. It just happens. The process may appear purposeful because of the effective track record. I find the notion that life can become more complex just through billions of years of trial and error encouraging. It means the future tends to improve on the past. I watched a Google tech talk the other day about using evolution to design artificial intelligence.

The Y chromosome is small because it is attacked by the X chromosome because it has three times as much evolutionary time to work (XX and XY). Some species go extinct because the X chromosome goes crazy and kills off the Y chromosome. Insert joke here. I disagree with those that view evolution as a reason for misogany. Although men can dunk a basketball, we are really mutants that can dunk. A few minutes of thought with Occam’s razor says that XX was there first and XY joined the picture later.

Evolution for us multi-cellular organisms involves cooperation. You carry around ten times the number of bacteria cells as human cells. You can view them as hitchhikers or an ally in our digestive and immune system. Good bacteria you carry outnumber by several orders of magnitude the handful of bad bacteria that make you sick. Hating bacteria is like hating Italians because a few of them are mobsters. Good bacteria cooperate because we can move them far faster than their tiny flagella – an evolutionary advantage.

So thank you Charles.

My website has undergone an order of magnitude spike in readership for some reason. I found it hilarious when I was reminded by friend that all those that followed the link were greeted with a picture of a kitten. The internet (life) went down on campus for a day because of the whole Saudi Arabia/Yemen thing. The outage coincided with the publication of the New York Times article about me being the change we can believe in. I fear that this in combination with everyone thinking I look like Harry Potter (which I think is a case of all white people look alike mixed with denial) will give me a messiah complex. I want now, more than ever, to write a book about my experiences at KAUST and in the Kingdom. An idea I have been mulling over is collaborating with two or three other students to get a broader perspective. This is likely the byproduct of reading “Team of Rivals” before going to bed each night. I did get an English minor.

Thankfully the article did not begin with “…can Rev. Ben Frevert change Saudi Arabia?” as if I had any interested in converting anybody. I am, along with The Beatles, a reverend (from the internet, but still legitimately) in the Universal Life Church. I did recently watch the PBS frontline piece (watch in full) online about Mormonism. It is an interesting religion. I hope the conflict between Saudi Arabia and Yemeni rebels quiets down. With the Hajj coming up, both sides should at least take some time to cool down and celebrate some peace on Earth instead of a potential WWIII.

A recent New York Times article about KAUST mentioned me. It started with the line “The $12.5 billion question is this: Can Ben Frevert change Saudi Arabia?” To answer in terms of improving the education of science and technology I need to borrow a line from President Obama, “Yes we can.” Despite my love for the film “Lawrence of Arabia”, I don’t think one person will change Saudi Arabia. KAUST is mostly potential at this point. We are still deciding how to discharge it. Conservative elements within the Kingdom do not like departure from their traditional society that the campus requires to be a functionally modern university. Most students from outside the region find aspects of life here constraining – only compounded by problems of moving into a campus still under construction. We function well together after a process that brought us together – albeit not by the path they meant. The lack of a lab frustrates me because it takes away a sense of purpose I have been craving. My professor borrows a 100-Ohm resistor – the most basic electrical component – from me because the school lack a basic electrical shop. Equipment deliveries are constantly delayed. With all of this working against us we fight on. It will take a few years for research to settle in – after I have left. Hopefully I can help lay a good foundation. Next year I plan to be in Minneapolis, Boulder, Berkeley, or hiking the Appalachian trail with a banjo. I decided to add hiking the Appalachian trail with a banjo to my list of life goals now that I was quoted in the New York Times. I must admit it is cool to be mentioned in the main paper I’ve read since I was 15.

In related news to me changing Saudi Arabia, the TED talks we have working on for so long finally went off last weekend. Only three dozen people showed up to watch. Half were from an amazing Polynesian band that played Edelweiss on really cool instruments I could only describe as a slap-organ. We focused on featuring videos related to technologies for the world that lives on $1 a day. TED talks are videos online of TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conferences where people like Bill Gates, James Watson, and Malcolm Gladwell about “ideas worth spreading.” People enjoyed it, but turnout was low because of limited administration support.

The US government now trains more unmanned pilots per year than traditional manned pilots.

Self explanatory:

Well played Democrats. The last election showed that the Democratic base stayed home. Obama was elected already. Hope is busy walking his dog and saving the free world. So they decided to stir the pot of crazy and put abortion on the table. Several decades ago a supreme court decision decided that we (women) have the right to an abortion because of privacy. It became the status quo. The majority of Americans are in favor of this. Republicans use it as a perpetual issue. They will not challenge it because it provides a war they can always rally against. If overturned, it would rally the Democratic base to the point where Democrats would have overwhelming majorities in house, senate, and oval office after the next elections. I could see it as something that could be traded away for the public option. Republicans really want to derail it.

The I thought of another paranoid delusion. What is the US economy was intentionally crashed by US. It would make us look less domineering to the rest of the world. I image a group of secret trillionaires – the ones that own Bill Gates – could see an interest in doing so. I like to link everything back to disaster capitalism. It is fro the book (the Shock Doctrine) which has the idea that only in crisis can things be changed. To an extreme view, the FEMA response to Katrina could be a way of proving that the government is incompetent. I sometimes jokingly think that Republicans are intentionally incompetent at government so that it does fail and get smaller. It benefits the wealthy. A drive for a bigger government is the idea that larger governments (tax burdens) creates a more equal distribution of wealth – like in Scandinavia. Enough crazy conspiracy theories. I personally view large conspiracies as unlikely due to the tandem parts of human nature: incompetence and the inability to keep a secret. At the end of the day it would be almost comforting to have a global conspiracy. They would have a large interest in long term stability. They could only accumulate so much wealth. Although it might just become a game to them. Healthcare will be a struggle.

I hope in a decade we have universal healthcare in the United States. Everything important America has done has been difficult. Washington didn’t know he would win the Revolution, Lincoln didn’t know the country could reunify, FDR didn’t know he would beat Nazi Germany, Regan didn’t know he would overcome Communist Russia, and Obama doesn’t know that he will be able to bring America prosperously into the new millennia we largely helped to build. I disagree with those that cite the idea that the next generation (my generation) will be the first generation in American history to be worse off than their parents’ generation. Threats to our existence have only made us stronger and defined us as a nation. If anything, our spirit encounters malaise due to the bounty brought to us during periods of good harvests. We change with our environment, adapting as biological systems do. Democracy is naturally frustrating and a constant (metaphorical) fight.