The Coffeehouse

Eid Mubarak and Happy New Year!

May this coming year bring more joy than pain and end to injustices around the world.

No New Year's Resolutions again this year (wow, my punctuation sucked...).

BUT, if I were to have any kind of resolution, it would be to travel to more countries. These are the countries I've visited so far...

visited 16 countries (7%)

create your own visited countries map

Only 7% of the world, and I didn't include any flight stopovers because, if you stay in the airport, you're not really IN the country since international airports are considered to be "international land". And I was really dissappointed I couldn't check off any Asian or South American countries. It would be amazing to visit India, Japan, Argentina and Brazil...

Happy New Year everybody, nobody party too much!

We got this in the mail today...

THANK YOU GOD THERE ARE INTELLIGENT PEOPLE OUT THERE!

Apparently, there's a book called "Stop Dressing Your Six-Year-Old Like a Skank" by Celia Rivenbark, which discusses how teen clothing is now just hooker clothes, only smaller. The article is basically an interview with the author, and she makes some interesting points about how some things in culture change over time, but there are still basic do's and don't's, but a lot of it is becoming "normalized" in society.

There's a quote from the interview highlighted in the article - "It doesn't turn them into monsters - I'm more concerned about the perv who sees them at the mall".

I think that while in any population there is a certain pecentage of "pervs", the more sexualized the society, the more pervs you'll get. And if little girls start wearing mini-skirts and halter tops and midriffs, things that are meant to show off your body, and clothes that are usually associated with older women wearing them, you'll get more people treating a young girl's body the same as an older woman's. That's my two-cents, what's yours?

Oh yeah, I'm going to be visiting my uncle in the US of A for a couple of days, thinking of dropping Dubya, Jefferson, and Lincoln a visit, any messages you want me to relay? 

Be back mid-next week!

Why won't my room clean itself?

It's December and it's not snowing.

And there's not enough hours in the day!

The Birmingham Choir also has complaints of their own...

Also check out the Helsinki Complaints Choir :)

I've wanted to take the test at PoliticalCompass.org for a while now. My sister did it a while for one of her politcal science courses and I don't remember where she ended up on the compass exactly, probably somewhere in the middle. Since political ideologies aren't black or white, right or left, there's a wide spectrum of political, social, and economic ideologies that one can subscribe too. It's not just conservative vs. liberal vs. socialist. You can have a "liberal" economic ideology while subscribing to conservative social ideologies. The PoliticalCompass tests aims to locate you in this economic/social spectrum. This is the compass:

And examples of where certain historical figures are on the compass...

As we can see here, Margaret Thatcher was on her way to becoming a fascist leader... I don't really like that they have "Anarchism" and "Fascism" there because it seems to polarize the compass, but I guess they have to show the extremes.

The test had questions that relate to your views on economics, social justice, religion, the role of the state, etc. I had a lot of difficulties answering some questions, mainly because I felt that the issues they addressed weren't black and white. The answer options vary from "Strongly Disagree" to "Strongly Agree", but even that couldn't help me make up my mind. For example:

Military action that defies international law is sometimes justified.

Where does resistance tie into here? Some parties may be justified, others may not. I was mainly thinking about the events of this past summer when trying to answer this and how although both parties acted militarily, I do believe that one side was justified, and the other wasn't.

Those with the ability to pay should have the right to higher standards of medical care.

I didn't like this questions because it assumes that there are higher standards of medical care that are not available to all of society (and a reality in today's world). It was difficult to answer because, ideally, everyone should have access to the highest medical care available, and me being egalitarian, I don't think you should have to pay for this higher medical care. But how do I include this belief in my answer?

Some other questions I found to be interesting:

"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" is a fundamentally good idea.

Protectionism is sometimes necessary in trade.

There are no savage and civilised peoples; there are only different cultures.

No one can feel naturally homosexual.


This is where I ended up on the compass...

...which is not too bad considering I have the same political views as Nelson Mandela :D

I'm gonna turn this into a tag! I tag Omar, Abed.Hamdan, Digital Niqabi, Ohoud, Mona, Izzi, and WLFG (you can always put it in the comments as well!) :) It should be interesting to see where everybody else ended up on the compass...

Time for a guessing game. What's wrong with this picture?

(Besides the intervals being written backwards? Sorry.)

That was the "bell curve" for an assignment for one of the classes I'm taking (and finishing!) this semester. As you can see from my lovely drawn (omigod how do you spell "graff"?! I'm blanking out... ), more than half the class got grades between 50 and 70, and this is after the professor curved our grades even more. I'm usually not one to share my grades, nor do I care very much what others get, and I don't mean to sound conceited, stuck-up, or uppity, but I am not used to getting grades in the 50 to 70 zone. However, that is the region I got put in for this assignment, along with, as it turns out, many others in the class who usually get higher grades as well. From talking to people in my class, those who usually end up in the high end, got stuck in the low end, and vice versa. And I found this quite weird as the assignment was not hard to do at all. We all voiced our concerns and dismay at the grades to the professor, who had provided an answer key to our TA for grading. The answer key was reasonable and many of us had the same answers, but the grading was still a problem and when the bell curve looks like the above AFTER being given additional marks, something has got to be terribly wrong. The TA, she is terribly wrong. One of the questions in the assignment asked us to voice our opinion, whether we agreed/disagreed with the author's arguments. In her marking, she later explained that we had to have said "I agree with..." or "I disagree with..." in order to get a point. Now she's a Master's student, and we are freaking 4th years, so I don't know when it was acceptable for people that far along in their education to use personal pronouns and phrases like "I agree with the author" to make a point or support your own argument. You're supposed to indicate agreement/disagreement within the text. For example:

"Landsburg fails to see the bigger picture when assuming that his interaction with the environment, such as increasing waste and not recycling, are isolated acts that only impact him because it is an individual preference he has made. " (It was regarding that "Why I am Not an Environmentalist" article)

Clearly, I disagree, yet I got no marks for this because I did not say I disagreed. BS! Clearly, this chick is wacko and I wasn't gonna bother arguing this over with her since she did this to the whole class and wouldn't back down. And the prof backed the TA.

The day we went over the marks was also the day that the professor announced he was going to drop another assignment, meaning this assignment and the previous one had even bigger weightings on our final grade (ie. now 35% each). The only other grade was our final exam (30%), so now most of us were REALLY screwed. My first assignment was really crappy, even to my standards, but it still shouldn't have gotten THAT crappy of a mark. In the end because of this different weighting, I managed to convince the professor to let me do an extra essay which would be weighed into my final grade (ie. 70% divided by 3 assignments), because I knew that ANY assignment I would do would get me a better mark than the last too, even if it was still weighted less. I honestly had no time for this extra assignment and I worked on it two hours into my class to hand it in on the day it was due, but whaddya know, the professor marked it and emailed me my grade, 85%. I'm telling you, this idiot of a TA is a plain idiot! I hope she's not grading our final exams, or I'll wring her neck... (Disclaimer: The last phrase was purely for entertainment purposes, there will be no wringing of anyone's necks. I do not wring people's necks.)

Yeah, I just had to rant.

I love Adam @ Home because Adam is a coffee-nut like me.

So then I saw this...

And whaddya know, the site exists...

But which came first, the comic or the website?

Tagged again by DN! I must say though, this one was a hard one for me to do...eek.

 Seven Things I want to do in life:

1. Start a revolution!
   
2. Clean my room
   
3. Travel
   
4. Read the whole Qur'an
   
5. Open a coffeeshop
6. Live/work in Palestine
   
7. Learn Hebrew
   

Seven Things I can do:

1. Hold a grudge
   
2. Dabke
3. Intimidate people (so they tell me!)
4. Take decent looking photos
5. [I don't
6. know what else
   
7. I can do?]
   

Seven Things I can’t do:

1. Forgive and forget.
   
2. Figure out 12 Monkeys, I thought I understood it once, then I got confused again.
   
3. Eat "foole" (flava beans)
   
4. Eat lentil soup
   
5. Be a party to oppression (stole that from you DN, but it's very wise)
6. Study for more than 10 minutes at a time, I get so easily distracted. Or I fall asleep.
7. Throw out old magazines
   

Seven things I say the most:

1. Yallah!
2. Vayamos (Spanish for "let's go")
   
3. Niiice
4. Coffee
   
5. Oh yeaaa
   
6. [Honestly, I can't
7. think of anything else :( ]

Seven Things that attract me to the opposite sex:

My French professor actually asked me this during my French oral exam. I had to reply in French of course. Je préfère un homme... 

1. socialiste
2. religieux
3. humaniste
4. travailleur (hard-working)
5. individualiste
6. idealiste
7. drôle (funny)
   

Also, the mandatory tall, dark, and handsome!

Seven Celebrity Crushes:

1. George Clooney
2. Johnny Depp
3. Hugh Jackman
4. Matt Dillon (only when he was in The Outsiders)
5. Harrison Ford
6. Denzel Washington
7. Tom Welling

It was cold, white, and bright...

* York University campus.

The following is something my friend, Vivian Tabar (intellectual property rights :p) wrote...

Beauty vs. Brains? - Vivian Tabar

So the other night, my roommates and I had a few friends over for drinks. At one point in the night, we all began discussing what characteristics we look for in our significant others. One of my (male) friends responded by saying that his woman must be ‘beautiful’. I instinctively jumped in. I felt the need to explain to him that beauty is a subjective construct- beauty is beyond reason and cannot be defined. At any particular moment in time, we might find any one person attractive as a result of a specific element of their character that in turn impacts our perception of them.

When I read "He then continued by saying that he also wants an intelligent girl, but he then stated that beautiful women are not intelligent", I wondered, since beauty is in the eye of the beholder and varies based on perception, maybe this guy doesn't really perceive intelligence as an attractive quality and that's why "there are no beautiful intelligent women". Maybe that's just his subconscious thoughts coming out...