You Can't Make Mistakes.

Hi guys,

I just wanted to let our families and close friends know that we are alright in case you had caught the news and were worried about us.

There were widespread protest demonstrations in Cairo yesterday and in about 10 other cities as well. They have continued tonight, but on a smaller scale. There was a good deal of violence at one point late in the evening yesterday when the police finally decided to clear out the occupied areas. Tear-gas, water cannons and rubber bullets were all used. There were no live rounds fired. There have been several deaths and in Cairo about 250 people were injured and are now hospitalized. This could well be the beginning of something huge here, not unlike what happened in Tunisia. There are reports of rumors coming in that the son of the President (and his perceived successor) has left the country and is presently in London. It is rumored that the First Lady has also left. These reports have been vehemently denied by the American Embassy and should probably be considered unlikely to have actually occurred.

It will be interesting to watch how the situation progresses, but it will be unlikely to cause any problems for us. This seems so far to be a primarily secular popular revolt instead of one lead by the Muslim Brotherhood or other politico-religious groups. It is unclear where exactly the organization is coming from though. The protesters are regular, working-class people seeking governmental reform and measures to relieve the grinding poverty that Egypt is experiencing.

Social media sites and some news sites are being blocked variously throughout the country. Twitter confirmed earlier that they were in fact blocked yesterday. People are using external proxies in order to circumvent the internet blockades and communicate with each other. This will likely lead to stronger measures undertaken to control the flow of information both to news outlets and to those involved in the demonstrations. There are rumors that mobile phone service is being cut off for known activists. There were reports last evening that mobile services were cut off in Tahrir Square in central Cairo.

We are quite safe at present in Maadi (a southern suburb/district of Cairo). The part of the city we live in is far from the action, and the likelihood of anything happening in this particular suburb/district is low considering that it is inhabited primarily by wealthier folks and expatriates. Regardless, we’re keeping our eyes and ears open and making only leaving the house when absolutely necessary. Some of our more foolhardy friends are headed downtown regularly to scope out what is happening. They are brave, but perhaps a little foolish. It is understandable though. This is an exciting time here.

I am paying pretty close attention to what is happening and I will keep all of you informed in the case that the situation changes, possibly necessitating our evacuation. In that extremely unlikely scenario, our plan is to catch whatever flight is available to somewhere in Europe and then regroup and figure out what to do next. We will be extremely grateful to our friends in the EU if they will be willing to take in refugees at such a time as it becomes a necessity.

A DISCLAIMER: None of the information contained in this letter is original research or journalism. All of this has been gleaned from online news sources over the last two days. This is a letter to friends and family who are concerned about my safety and the safety of my friends in Cairo. I have been told that the international news reports on the situation here are confusing and convoluted. This digest is meant to clarify the situation for my loved ones back home. Please do not regard this as some sort of news report, which it is not.

Love, JM

This piece appears in this month’s issues of Erudition. You can find it here: http://www.eruditiononline.co.uk/article.php?id=909

When I was invited to write a piece about the future of technology, I assumed that I was being asked to predict which gadgetry we would have next year, how medical science will progress, and the new and terrifying surveillance methods our governments will employ. So, here are those predictions:

You will have more and smaller (and sometimes bigger) gadgets. They will thrill and delight you. Then you will tire of them and throw them away and buy different gadgets. Apple® will love you. Your smartphone will begin—if it already hasn’t begun—to be a little creepy. It will, of its own (programmed) volition, gather data about your friends and contacts in such a way that every time you pull someone up in your contacts list, you will be presented with more information than the last time you looked them up.* Medical science will find increasingly bizarre ways to not cure cancer, but to look at cancer. Cattle and chickens will be replaced by grasshoppers and ants as sources of protein as the human population outgrows its ability to produce food supply. Your government will place tiny microchips in your toilet paper to monitor your bowel movements.

Now, with that boring, run-of-the-mill assessment out of the way, let us actually have a look at what the future of technology will be for us as people.

Firstly, you will not notice the proliferation of technology in the world around you. It will just be there. Everywhere. You will not see it. It is this type of technology which I will address presently. Secondly, due to proliferation, there will be two kinds of people in the world: those who know what they are looking at and how it works and those who do not. The latter group will comprise the majority of people.

This is, of course, already happening. Ask anyone with an iPhone to describe the manner in which it connects to other such devices and you will get a range of bizarre answers of varying levels of complexity and detail. An example: a friend explained to me his theory that the reason that he had to turn off his iPod on take-off and landing was because it was communicating with satellites. He believed that the device was communicating with satellites because it would magically change its time when he went from the United States to Egypt or Egypt to Thailand. He had overlooked the fact that the time had only changed once the device had been plugged into a laptop.

Explanations like this abound when your average end user picks up a device or opens a web browser and then tries to contemplate how and why these things work the way that they do. This is not really a problem most of the time. Users of technology do not need to understand how something works or in some cases even how to use it. Some things just work without ever requiring human intervention. When they stop working, however, this is a problem.

What do you do when your mobile phone, iPod, computer, router, or other devices stop working? You call someone and then they tell you to either take or send it somewhere to have it looked at by a technician. We are becoming increasingly reliant upon technicians and technology experts. There will come a time, very soon indeed, that there will be no user-serviceable devices in the market at all. Apple has done a good job of doing away with external artifacts that betray that your device can be opened up and looked inside. This is the way of the future.

Personal computing could already be considered esoteric, but this is only the beginning. As mentioned above, we are going to see—or, more importantly, not see—tiny computing devices embedded in all manner of objects and products. Everything will become “smart”. Users, on the other hand, will become less smart about how these things work. Those who do know and who can repair and change the manner in which the devices function will become tantamount to clergymen or magicians. They will be the keepers of the esoteric knowledge of the future.

Think of it like this: if you told someone in the fifteenth century that you could look into a device and see someone looking into a similar device on the other side of the world, they would either turn away in utter disbelief or they would call you a witch and burn you at the stake. Yet we do this all the time with Skype and other internet video phone and video chat appliances and applications. Magicians, astrologers, priests, and mystics in antiquity were revered—or reviled—for their knowledge of the unseen world and familiarity with the methods used in manipulating it.

Magic, science, and religion have never really been all that different, if even at all separable. Each comprise on one hand a set of theoretical models which are required for understanding and explaining the world. On the other hand, they each have a set of protocols for interacting with that which is not directly visible or tangible. The practitioners of each have deep knowledge about both the theory and protocol associated with their chosen discipline. This knowledge allows them to interact with the world in a manner very different from those around them.

Place technological advancements in computing in this context. There is already a clergy associated with computing. System administrators (sysadmins) require a huge amount of knowledge in order to do their jobs and to make systems and networks function properly. Dabblers often miss things and with disastrous consequences. End users neither need nor want to have the kind of knowledge that sysadmins have , but they know that they are different. Every office has a set of people who are considered “technological wizards.” These are often the same people who are employed to keep the servers and networks in good operating condition.

There are also those who will use their vast knowledge for evil. The recent Stuxnet infection of computers in Iranian nuclear power plants comes to mind. Black-hat hackers and virus engineers will hold dominion over the black magic of the future and we will have reason to fear them. The less end users know about the devices that they use, there will be a greater chance that those devices can be used against them. This may manifest in actual life-threatening situations—think “smart” cars, onboard navigation systems, autopilot—or they will be used to monitor their users surreptitiously—tracking the whereabouts of users using the GPS devices in their mobile phones, monitoring email and text messages, tapping calls.

This is not a warning, this is a prediction. The path has already been set. End users have neither the desire nor the the need at present to know how or why their devices function. This trend will continue to the point that they will barely even know how to use them. They will simply know that they are there. Those who possess the esoteric knowledge will be increasingly considered to be wizards and magicians to the point that they will come under scrutiny if not members of the orthodox clergy. This already happens to some extent. In governmental background checks, technological knowledge of those being investigated is of great concern to weed out any potential “hackers” who might be or have been involved in any illegal activities.

The average lay person will both marvel at and fear the knowledge of the sorcerer. The clergy will work to maintain their position of dominance as the keepers of the knowledge, though they will mostly be charlatans, possessing only partial or partially-falsified knowledge; the real knowledge being locked away in vaults somewhere; the keys held by few, if any.

——————

*This has already happened. My phone freaks me out all the time with things like this. It should learn to mind its own damned business

My friend and colleague Amanda Propst wrote a brilliant limerick this evening about the 6th Fatimid Caliph al-Hakim. He is the clear front-runner in my in my list of favorite historical figures. Amanda mentions in her introduction the the poem that he is probably in hiding. What she forgot to mention, though, is that he is perhaps also a vampire. Only time will tell.

Enjoy the limerick.

http://amandapropst.com/2010/12/14/al-hakim-limerick/

Raymond Stock, translator of Arabic literature and an author in his own right was denied entry to Egypt this week. He was traveling to Cairo for a visit and to give a talk over the holidays while on a break from teaching Arabic Literature at Drew University. Upon arrival he was detained and then denied entry and put on the next British Airways flight back to London, whence he had arrived.

He has translated a good number of the novels of Naguib Mahfouz and has lived and worked in Cairo for 20 years. He recently left to take up a post at Drew University.

A Washington Post article about the incident:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/10/AR2010121004492.html

I recently wrote this piece for Erudition regarding the American mid-term elections. It looks like it was a pretty good prediction/assessment after all.

http://www.eruditiononline.co.uk/article.php?id=816

There was an autumn sandstorm this week. There was a rather large tree uprooted in our neighborhood in Maadi. It smashed this car to bits. Oh, and the first picture is of a couple of guys shooting BB-guns at songbirds on Friday morning.

“Let us call ourselves radicals, let us pick up the mantle of the great Progressives, let us be petit-bourgeois anarchists, but please let us not be “liberals” any longer, who have confirmed themselves as callow wankers who cringe and waffle if only the bullies will leave them alone.”

- Michael Fountain, science-fiction author and teacher

My dear friend Mike Fountain wrote the above this morning. I found it quite moving. You can read the rest of the post here: http://michaelfountain.blogspot.com/2010/09/democrats-deserve-to-lose.html.

Day 5

[UPDATE 25 August 2010: I have added photos and a slideshow of the sunrise. Enjoy.]

I got up at ten to six this morning. I just happened to wake up really early and then realized that the sun might have not risen yet. It was light out, but when I checked on my phone, I found that sunrise would not occur for another twenty minutes or so. I dragged myself out of bed and went up on the roof to watch. It was beautiful. Dr. Arafa said there were two times here that one should not miss: sunrise and sunset. He was not wrong.

Here is what I saw, sort of:

Sunrise in Basaisa, 5 August 2010 [AVI]

I got a bunch of work done after sunrise since no one else would wake for several hours. It was pretty good morning.

Dr. Arafa had to leave this morning again. He is a busy guy. After seeing the way we handled being left on our own in charge of the workshop the other day, though, he told us that he felt that it was in capable hands. Jeff spent the morning doing a free-association exercise with the kids. He put together a slide-show and then asked them to write down words and descriptions that occurred to them when they saw the images. I came into the room just as they were going back through the pictures telling the class what they had written. Free-association brings up interesting stuff. One girl, Gehad, described a picture of an American/English style house as “classic.” Where she got “classic” or why she would choose to associate it with that style of structure—which is unknown here—is beyond me. Probably movies or TV.

We took a break and then the students came back to review for a final assessment later in the afternoon. The plan was to have them all around for the afternoon and then take a break and administer a final evaluation after which we would take a break. After the break we would come back and hand out certificates and dismiss.

Of course that didn’t work out. Several students needed to leave a bit early and were unsure if they could come back or not. One told me it was because something terrible had happened at home. I didn’t press him on it. So we administered the test a little early to 5 of the students. Then there was the matter of the certificates. We wanted everyone in pictures, so we did the presentation of certificates before half of the students had taken the assessment, explaining that we were reversing the order of events now. They rolled with it. Everyone smiled and took pictures and then the rest sat their exam.

They did well. When we looked through their answers it was clear that they have all made progress throughout the week. The biggest hurdle we had was simply getting everyone to be less shy. By this point we have jumped it. A few were asking if we would play soccer with them this evening. Others actuallywanted to come and sit with us and learn some more words and have a chat in the evening. Perfectly fine by me.

Tomorrow morning we are all going to the beach in Ras Sidr and then Jeff and I are getting on a bus to head back to Cairo. I kind of dread returning to Cairo. I also have a ton of work to do there; there is an apartment to move into and a thesis to research. Also—and I can’t believe this as I am writing it—I am gasping for an ice cold Stella. It’s pretty dry out here in the desert.

Day 4

[UPDATE 25 August 2010: I have added a gallery of photos. Enjoy.]

Jeff wanted to discuss development with the kids today. I really didn’t know how to go about this, so I let him have at it. He decided to start—I’m not joking here—with a listen and read the lyrics exercise involving Jack Johnson’s “The 3 R’s” from the Curious George soundtrack. I was skeptical. It’s a pretty weird song. The guy obviously wrote it while stoned—he’s a frigging surfer turned songwriter; of course he is stoned—and the lyrics are pretty confusing and convoluted. There is all this math and then somehow we are discussing recycling? The song ends with the singing of a bunch of numbers? Really weird.

‘Reduce,’ ‘Reuse’ and ‘Recycle’ were the only three words that EVERY one of the students would remember on their final assessment the next day. Well done Jeff.

The day continued quite pleasantly. Dr. Arafa returned from Cairo and surveyed the progress. We continued to make spreadsheets of vocabulary words, which everyone seemed excited about—as this activity would provide a list for them to use as a reference for studying.

In the afternoon, pursuant to our chosen theme of the day, Jeff had the students decide on what sort of things that they would like to see in the future in New Basaisa. He used the map that the girls drew the other day as a base and had them draw new buildings and features on pieces of paper which they then tacked on the map in place. These included such frivolities as a hospital and a police station and such necessities as a night club and a cinema on the beach. It got everyone thinking forward though.

Meanwhile, I compiled their vocabulary lists and printed them. Immediately after distributing the lists, I was told, by everyone, that there were wrong translations, wrong words. I explained to them that these were not lists that I made myself, but rather the compilation of all of their lists. It took a few times explaining what I meant before they figured out that if there were mistakes, they belonged to the authors, and it was up to the authors to correct them. They proceeded to do so, collaboratively, arguing over words here and there. Eventually they came up with a decent list of errata which they shared between them.

After the students left we sat around and worked, preparing for the last day of the workshop, waiting for the sun to get a bit lower in the sky. Dr. Arafa wanted to take us on a walk to the beach. Behind the village, there is an expanse of planted olive and palm grove with several wells dug in it. Beyond that, he told us, there was an expanse of dunes and virgin beach.

So around six we began walking west. The groves are really pretty, even when they are out of season. The olives are coming into season shortly and we could see fruit starting to sprout on the branches. I hadn’t realized until this week that olives don’t flower. There are just buds and then suddenly olives are growing on the branches. Dr. Arafa and several of kids confirmed this. Odd plants that grow in the desert.

When we got to the edge of the dunes it was like stepping onto another planet. I realized that I have never really seen virgin beach before in my life. I have been around a lot of dunes, but they are mostly in preservation areas in the States where they have been destroyed to some extent. This was unreal. Like some alien landscape.

The scrubby bushes and tall grass were well rooted causing great huge hills and hollows in between. There were all sorts of animal tracks in the sand: some kinds of lizard, dogs, a few that I couldn’t recognize. The tracks that most interested me were the snake. They were everywhere. Snakes are apparently pretty busy when there aren’t folks around. Based on the size of some of the tracks, I was not particularly interested in coming across their makers.

We finally crested the last dune and came to the tide plain. It was like nothing I have ever seen. There were shells and pieces of dead coral everywhere. The reef is quite deep here, so the and the sea floor are quite bare and sandy for a long way. It is great for swimming: I’ve never been a big fan of reefs because I don’t tend to like the way that you have swim near them. This was ideal for my aquatic tastes.

Beyond the beach we could see ships approaching the mouth of the canal to the north. On either side of us a kilometer away, there were settlements or developments that went right up to the beach. Compared to where we were standing, they were ugly concrete boxes. They looked out of place.

We walked back into the village just as the sun set and wandered by a few more wells and were shown the site of a future desalination plant right in the middle of the tiny settlement. The walk to the beach and back was not an easy one, given the terrain, but it was a good time and place to be. I have seldom seen more interesting and beautiful natural places here.

Day 3

[UPDATE 25 August 2010: I have added a gallery of photos. Enjoy.]

Dr. Arafa was summoned back to Cairo last night so today’s lessons fell entirely on me and Jeff. We decided that it would be community day, so we wrote a fictitious letter from our friend Mike in the States to the kids here telling them about his community and asking about theirs. We then decided that their homework tonight will be to write a letter to our real friend Mike Creager, which we will bundle up and send to him. It will be amusing when Creager gets a bunch of letters from kids in Sinai, unexpectedly.

We learned how to use spreadsheets in the afternoon and everyone put their vocabulary words into a spreadsheet in two languages. The kids were pretty excited about this for studying purposes. My hope is that they will continue to employ this method in the future. It always helped me remember vocabulary words. Sometimes the act of just writing the words next to each other is enough to help retain them.

In the afternoon we asked everyone to collectively draw a map for us. Everyone was a little sheepish about drawing except for Shaykh Mubarak the Bedouin. He was a pretty fair cartographer, though almost completely disregarded the roads, save a few of the more obvious ones, preferring to just draw landmarks and houses with spaces in between. The kids would call out stuff and he would place it on the map. Good exercise for everyone.

After the mapping, we asked the kids to take us out and show us where everything was, so they did. The three girls mysteriously stayed behind; more on that later. We walked out toward the sea where most of the houses are concentrated. Everyone pointed out their houses along the way, and the houses of others. Moamen brought lemons out from his house for us. We stopped at Ahmed’s house for a water break. Mohamed showed us his family’s house near the mosque. Then we walked to the well on Hamed’s father’s land.

This was a good thing, because this morning we had a hell of a time getting everyone to talk about the wells. No one would say the word for well. We discussed the mechanics of irrigation yesterday at length, but this morning we were back to being told either that the water came from a pipe or—in the Delta—from a canal originating at the Nile. The visit to the well finally drove it home.

Then we walked through the fields and ate dates right off the palms. I have never liked dates at all. Eating them fresh, right from the palm makes all the difference. These were amazing. The olives were ripening as well. Apparently they will be ready for harvesting and pressing into oil later in the year.

The walk was a fun time. We got to see the community and its surroundings a bit closer. The place has even more personality now. These kids are really, really proud of what they and their families have here. They are not wealthy, but that is meaningless. Here they have a different kind of wealth: equity. They have houses and land to farm, crops that are suited to the environment that they are in. They have means to make happen what they need to and they are open to modes of doing all of this that are unorthodox in this part of the world.

I have been having a hard time figuring out what comes first. I don’t know if their surroundings and this community make these kids so enthusiastic and eager or if everyone here is enthusiastic and eager and that makes the community what it is. It’s a chicken and egg problem, but it doesn’t really matter. It is what it is.

And there we are. Jeff and I are sitting here in the main building with the kitchen listening to Dave Matthews Band and Creedence Clearwater Revival creating tomorrow’s lesson and I couldn’t be happier. This is exactly the kind of vacation I needed: a not-vacation. We’re working like dogs and loving every minute of it. I hate the regular, sit-around-and-do-nothing vacations. I’m always bored and feel useless. I always take work with me and never get anything done because I am in sitting-on-my-ass mode. Here I am actually getting some work done in the evenings for myself on top of what we are doing during the day and in preparation for the next day. I can’t ask for better than that.