Dr. Nono is tonite in the radio

I will be interviewed in the program "La Bombilla, El programa mas viajero"( the light bulb, the program that travels the most of all) from Sanlucar la mayor, Sevilla Today, 29th. The program will be at 21:00 Greenwich time, one hour later in Torredonjimeno, Spain, and two hours later in King Mariut, Egypt. It is a very cool program apparently, i never heard it before :P but i spoke yesterday with German, one of the people producing the program, and he told me about it. They have "random" telephone calls to the world and they get to know different cultures. Every program they have specials about different countries and interviews with people that like to travel differently. They called me for the trips in bicycle in Cabo de Gata with the Hull crew in 2002, Maghreb/Morocco that i did with Mr. Sam "fishman" Petragallus along the Atlantic coast in 2002 and a mad adventure in the Atlas mountain and Sahara dessert with Dr. Tomsy Hedley in 2003. The program in Spanish can be heard online in:

http://www.sanlucarlamayor.es/delegaciones/frames.php?zona=25

Then click on the moving butterfly on the right..But in my mozila firefox doesnt seem to work...just in explorer.

Party for celebrating diversity

My friends in England, if you are close to Bath on Monday, please do not miss the opportunity to celebrate diversity of this world at the rhythm of the drums in the University. White people, Black people, yellow people, red people, mongrel people like me and even blue people that want to get in better mood will be there...my spirit will be there. (ps: dont feel discriminated if you are of another colour, my apologies to you). This party needs no excuse, but if u wanna find the catalyst, blame an idiot student in Bath University who invited Nick Griffin from the BNP, citing my dearest Dr. Pek: A former member of the National Front and convicted 'for distributing literature likely to incite racial hatred' A man who is widely regarded as a neo-Nazi and a fascist. A man who denies the existence of the holocaust. A man openly homophobic, Islamophobic and anti-Semitic. Thanks God or Allah or whoever you want, his talk, as well his brain, has been canceled...but the party of diversity is still on!!! attend and have a piece of fun for every person in the world who thinks like us!

The Egyptian adventure continues

Well last night was my plane back to the UK and my visa run out...and obviously i did not take it. My place is here right now, i am not going anywhere. The things i have got in here are not many in terms of material possessions, but my heart and my soul are full of joy. I am happy here, there is so much to learn and in so many levels. There are good people and bad people everywhere, there are advantages and disadvantages everywhere. I enjoyed many years the advantages of being living in developed countries* but living in the "other side" (in terms of percentage the "other side" are the majority of people, and theres more than one side!!!) has advantages too. Enjoying and growing, seeing and learning, meeting and talking in both sides are enriching...i know a bit of the Westerner world (or better west-south west European) and even less of this one. I will have to go for the one that i know less cos i will learn more here, its opening more windows. There a quotation from the Holy Qur2an: people choose the inferior over the superior (II,61). How can we discern the superior and the inferior? and what are we ready to accept as a proof? what we call proofs in science is something some how very particular. The proof is accepted when it feedbacks the theoretical background fitting relatively well with it. But what about the whole universe that cannot be quantified? what about those things that we are not able to perceive with our senses or with any technology? all the science in a gazillion PhD thesis are infinitely small compared with the number of events in the Universe at an infinite number of scales. Those proofs, signs and answers sent from the unknown world to the heart and mind are incredibly elusive and/or overwhelmingly obvious. Surely, they greatly determine our decisions in life. I extended my visa another 3 months, the Egyptian adventure continues. I consider i took the better over the worse for myself at this moment...so, in consequence, this blog wont be discontinued, home and open books.

This photo is an obvious translation :P

*progress can be defined in many ways, this issue surely takes many books of development, in this particular case referred from a technological point of view.

PS: last nite i committed a very bad mistake in referencing, now is corrected...i ask for forgiveness and i apologise the 3 people that read the article before i had time to find the exact ref. Ta!

Over two thousand hits and the digital divide

Well, and another milestone in my blogger experience. Thanks to the wonderful work done by Google Analytics i can see where is (almost) every person that reads the blog. The Geo map overlay of the last 500 visits are shown in the picture:

I know u cant see nothing in this view, please click on the image for appreciating the pretty orange points that represent your computers on the map. Actually the localized distribution of the people reading the blog is not surprising at all. Yesterday the Internet World Map 2007 was released in http://ipligence.com , from there this image was extracted:

It can be seen how the people hitting in this blog are confined to the areas of high density of the net. The data are quite shocking, large areas of the planet (and some of them very densely populated, Indonesia and India as the main example) are almost empty...but for putting some numbers to it, is good to recall the table ipligence provided:

Geographic Area	Number of Addresses	% of Addresses
Africa	40.241.664	1.519%
Antartica	15.620	0.001%
Asia	371.297.015	14.015%
Caribbean	1.681.866	0.063%
Central America	2.557.340	0.097%
Europe	569.838.903	21.510%
Middle East	12.011.131	0.453%
North America	1.481.754.661	55.932%
Oceania	76.417.711	2.885%
South America	93.409.304	3.525%

Some striking data are: 1. fifteen thousand IPs in Antarctica?! (that was a surprise to me) 2. Taking into account that the population of US is only the 5% of the world total, they hold the 55% of addresses 3. Africa has the 13% of the world population and only 1.5% of the IPs...and so on. Because of this, is obvious that the most of information on the net is in English, which means that a person with no knowledge of English cannot retrieve most of the data, which is a massive language barrier. Furthermore, the levels of illiteracy in many developing countries make Internet an Utopian land for many (not very extreme estimations are that 30% of people in Egypt are illiterate). Others, simply do not have access the technology as many cannot afford a computer or even paying in an internet cafe. These fact is one of the main problems of the so called "Digital Divide", which refers to the gap between those who benefit from digital technology and those who do not (please visit digitaldivide.org for a more detailed description of this global problem). Anyway those who can read and write and have access to the tech dedicate most of their online time in playing games, chatting, porn and downloading...Even in developed countries many times educated people do not make a great use of the vast amount of resources available; there are many many PhD students in European Universities that still make their research in Google (not even the scholar version).

So why is all this mess??? we have been lucky enough to be blessed with one of the most powerful cultural advances (if not the most) of all human history: the computers and the net. The last time that a similar cultural revolution took place was with the invention of the book (through the Arabs that stole the paper technology from two Chinese prisoners :P and then improved greatly the fabrication processes) and the invention of the movable character print by Gutenberg. The time that passed from the moment of the inventions until the majority of people could benefit from that massive cultural tool were centuries. So it happens now, we have an amazing tool without instructions. The people of my generation were educated in a system developed for the old world by educators that thought that www was some association of world wrestling. They did not know, they never taught us. We had to discover ourselves, to explore a vast unknown land with no much guidance...and we still are. I understand it can be very discouraging to search in the net, spending time in distinguishing between useful data and crap... it can be quite overwhelming, but that cannot be an excuse...lets go and use already discovered resources, discover new resources we did not know, use them wisely, identify new resources, use the tools to spread knowledge, to collaborate, to bridge through national borders. Do not forget that, until very recently, information was a rare precious thing. My parents in Spain could not get newspapers from France 40 years ago, and today we can read the news in real time or speak with people from many different countries just with a click.....enjoy the wonderful opportunity that is to have access to information. Enjoy the wonderful opportunity that is to have access to information from this side of the digital divide.

and the Doctor is...

I just received this email, the one that has made me the happiest man in the known universe. If i was feeling lucky before, now i have another big reason.

"Peter Huggard and Paul Snow have approved your corrected thesis. The paperwork is now being passed onto the department and faculty. You should officially hear soon that you have passed and will be awarded your doctorate.

Congratulations Dr Nono"

I would like to acknowledge to all the people that has made my PhD possible with their technical and personal support (many of you reading actually and particularly Dr. Party, gracias hermano, Dr. Pek and Dr. Frog). Thanks soooooo much to all of you

This is a 3D model i did based on Ait el Caid Kasbah, Agdz, Morocco. You can get the full model for goggle sketchup in the 3D warehouse...long life to mud:
http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/search?q=kasbah&btnG=Search&styp=m

PS: For obvious reasons the name of the blog has been changed ;)

Egypto Interruptus...

Technical reasons took me to England for 6 days...After a taxi (miami-station), bus Alex-Cairo airport, plane Cairo-London (...after 14 hours traveling) i finally was in the bus destination Bath (or Baaaaaath in local English). After a little nap i spend the last hour of my trip admiring the landscape through the window. I found a patchy afternoon and everything in the west country (arrrgggghhh) looked as green, clean and nice as ever. Where the spirit of the country side and the silent left overs of industrialization got frozen in the built environment:

I love the architecture of all the little towns in the way, south west vernacular in action:


And another English sunset for my collection:

I forgot how cold England could be...

Over one thousand page loads...thank you all

Well, there is no much of a story for this post, there has been over a thousand hits in a month since i put the counter. So beyond my expectations as it is my first experience publishing what i write, is my first blog, is the first time i publish my photos...i am really flattered, so i want to thank all of you reading from Masr, UK, Spain, China, US, Canada, France, UAE, Yemen, Trinidad, Bosnia, Switzerland, Portugal, Greece, South Africa, Croatia, Luxembourg, Mexico, Germany, Uruguay, Bahrain, Chile, Ukraine, Italy, Indonesia, Mauritius, Netherlands, Hungary, Brazil, Belgium, Saudi Arabia, Norway... I didnt know what this blog was to be, i have just been trying to open a little window through my eyes to the Egypt i am living in. I really hope that i am succeeding in making you feel a bit what is like to be here, that magic of traveling without moving that the books have given me so many times. I intend to give you a hint of the taste of the spaces and people of this country without the blurred filters of media, solely with the subjective texture of pure personal experience...thank you all for peaking through this little window.

"See you soon" to the early man

This is a sad moment, one of the members of the red sofa crew (el-ahmar canabe crew) has left us. He like many other educated, professional and talented Egyptians is going to emigrate to Saudi or Emirates...the estimation i heard is that there are 45.000 Egyptian scientists working abroad, we could really do with all those here! The same great problem that can be found in many other countries in Africa: brain drain. The difficulties at all levels (social, economical, political, etc...) that most of people face here on a daily basis are fueling the dreams to live in any other place and killing any hope of amelioration. One simple example (and not representative at all of the width of the multifaceted problematic) is that one of Prof. Ahmed Zewail (Nobel laureate in chemistry). He finished his undergraduate degree in Egypt and emigrated to the US, where he ended up in CalTech. This guy really loves hes mother country, for a graphical example go http://www.its.caltech.edu/~femto/ and pass the mouse over research themes. He put his research on the map of Masr, how lovely/geeky the mesoscopic phase in the new valley? If that little detail of his love for his country was not enough, i will tell you more. He came back to Egypt with a great plan: to create a whole new university for boosting the research in here and to try to retain the great intellects this country produces. He spoke with the government and fought and fought and fought for it, problems, problems and more problems...at the end he could not get anything done and he had to go to Qatar to open the University. The teaching is: if a Nobel Price falls in despair trying to implement a promising project to develop the state of education, science and technology in his own country, who can keep his hopes high??? everyone should agree that that will be a great for Masr, but nevertheless another battle was lost...the fight is still on...so my dear friend, you are another innocent casualty in this non-sense war, i deeply cry for your lost. Still, this was not a bad bye letter to a friend, it is a see you! I really hope one day in the future we will be able to repeat this picture in a much better Masr for all:

Ashof washak alla kher!

Curiosity of the day: When we are talking about somebody of unknown name (or we cannot be bothered to repeat it) the generic words used in Arabic and Spanish are fulan and fulano respectively. Arent you impressed? i was! And if you are wondering mengano is unknown to the arabic speakers :D

Arrival in Alexandria

Sunday night i left the house at 2am and took a taxi to Heathrow Airport. In there i spent my time reading in the deserted airport until the time of embarking (see photo).

I arrived in Cairo airport at 3pm on Monday after spending all my time in the plane recovering all the sleep i missed Sunday night ;) Yasser was in there to pick me up, negotiate with the taxi driver, take me to the train station and invite me to a delicious egyptian coffee. Before i realised, i was (for the first time in my life) in a 1st class wagon to Alexandria. The 2 hour and a half trip to Alex passed without any other mayor incident, other than me committing the mistake of ordering food in the train (i think it was cooked by the same chef that serves that "food" in all the planes in the world). Khaled, the person that ill be grateful all my life for facilitating my trip to Egypt (might Allah have him in his grace), was in the station waiting for me. Together with Badry (one of my house mates) we went for having a proper Egyptian feast: salads, beans with humus, omelette, grilled cheese, beetroot, chips, etc... And then i begun to enjoy and "suffer" the famous egyptian hospitality. I have come to realise that the argument of me trying to pay something and not being allowed is going to happen quite often. They dont know limits of hospitality, god bless them!

After dinner we came to our flat, and my first surprise is that i live in a neighborhood in the east of the city called Miami (no further comments please). The flat is in the 7th floor of a high rise building (18 floors) that look like one that has been teleported from Sarajevo :D Inshallah, I will post an article just on the state of the lift in the next few days, it is simply hilarious. In the flat i met my other two house mates, Bahz and Balal (Bibo), and we went for a coffee in Amys favourite cafe. In there i met two architects, Karim and Mohamed, that begun to help me with my architectural findings. The (hours long) conversation was extremely animated, from buildings to energy, from terrorism to cultural issues and finally, back to in the flat, talking about cinema with Balal until 9am that i went to bed...where i died for only two hours, as i had to be at 12 am in the Biblioteka Alexandrina.

Fact of the day: Egypt in egyptian is called Masr!!!

Introduction

Hello everyone!

The most of you reading out there know already i am going to Egypt on Monday. The main plans: working for an NGO in Alexandria, learning Arabic and doing architectural and technological research. Inshallah, I will be posting little pieces of text and photos for sharing this Egyptian experience with you.

I hope well all enjoy
Nono

PS: Feel free to criticize, comment, reference or discuss.