There’s an oft-quoted reasoning given for the fasting during the Islamic month of Ramadan; to be able to emote with those who do not have the ability to stay fed on their own accord, a very “social justice” reasoning behind the act; it’s one that sounds great during a sound bite for the media or in the Friday sermons to drum up support for the local food bank. It’s a great selling point for a  noteworthy cause, but I think this misses the point; a head fake of a divine nature.

At its core, I believe that the ultimate purpose of fasting during Ramadan is to help its participants; while many tout numerous benefits to it, I believe it all comes down to self control. Let’s think about this pragmatically;  we’re being told to abstain from food, water, and sex from sunrise to sunset. For those of you at more southerly latitudes where sunset and sunrise times don’t vary much, the sun goes down these days at around 8:30 PM in Toronto these days, and it comes up at around 6:20 AM – although, truth be told, you start fasting from the first light in the day, and not just astronomical sunrise. Without context, it sounds pretty insane. Why on earth would anyone ask you to prevent yourself from partaking in the most basic human needs?

Unless that’s the point. Perhaps the point is more than just a parable of mutual empathy, but rather an exercise in training the mind. By choosing to not eat and not drink from sunrise to sunset, we’re training our minds to overcome even the most basic human needs. It doesn’t dismiss the biological need for food and water, but rather, we’re putting the control of it in our own hands – we’re not letting our hunger and thirst dictate our actions, or be more powerful than our minds’ intent.

But I think it goes beyond simply fasting, but is the core of Islam as a faith, and directly stems from the five pillars of faith that are heralded in the Sunni interpretation. After all, no divine being needs our actions or rituals, so at some level, these rituals have to be designed for our self improvement, which also fits with the nature of Islam being an orthopraxic faith. Perhaps the belief in the oneness of God is a requirement of self control over ones’ arrogance; arguably no other human trait has caused as much grief in recorded history as arrogance. Maybe the recognition of the existence and superiority of a divine being controls our ability to feel ultimate power when we are enabled with a new piece of technology, knowledge, or advantage, which oft happens throughout history.

Prayer, at fixed intervals; perhaps a lesson in the control of one’s time and practical chronology, requiring us to structure our days and lives based on our fixed intentions rather than falling victim to circumstance.

Zakat, (sometimes translated to charity, but I find that misleading since charity by definition, is voluntary), can be a lesson in self-control when it comes to our possessions, requiring a recognition of all that is available to us, and some degree of planning to the use of it all.

Finally, Hajj, which I believe is a lesson to remain earnest in a long term goal or dream; looking at this again, pragmatically, you’re talking about saving for long periods of time to one day be able to go to a foreign country to partake in a once-in-a-lifetime ritual. Remembering that people were doing this back a millennium ago, this could potentially lead to long periods of travel at great cost. At some level, what this has to be teaching us, unconsciously, is that to obtain something great – even if it’s required, you have to devote yourself and plan to make it happen.

In the end, each of these required acts are simply a lesson to us – more like a gift to be able to deal with our physical reality. Now that’s quite the head-fake.

-Mubdi

Often writing a short piece is far more difficult than writing a much longer piece. It’s more than the difficulty of being concise without being trite, it’s just getting started. At least that’s the way it’s been for me. After writing a gargantuan paper, I’m trying to write a short letter. For those not in the field, letters are short research papers that are meant to communicate exciting results in a timely fashion. So much for timely, since this paper is taking forever. This isn’t new to me, since starting the writing of a paper always takes me the longest. What concerns me though is that I’m overwhelmed.

There’s more stuff that I want to put into that paper than I can imagine how. It has gotten to the point where I’m writing the same sentences over and over again, deleting them in between. I never start writing a paper from the introduction, as it is usually the last part I write. So that leaves me starting to write somewhere in the middle. I’m jumping from section to section, writing one or two sentences, deleting them, and then jumping to a new section. I’ve been like this for a week. Guess where that leaves me? A document with only section headers. Sound frustrating to you? Imagine what it’s like for me!

I’m sure that as soon as I get something (aka anything) on digital paper, it will get easier and start going faster. This is an exciting result and I’m excited to get it out. Here’s hoping I don’t frustrate myself to death before I get there.

Back in the summer of 2006, I took a number of road trips across this continent. It was the first summer I had a car, and I put over 50 000 kilometres on it over 4 months. Most of the time, I was the only one in my car, left to my own thoughts. Yeah, it was crazy, but everyone has to do something like that before they leave University. I’ve  been meaning to write about these experiences, if only to appease my need to have some written memory. This post will hopefully be the first of a series of memoirs from that summer.

I was coming to the end of the second day of driving – the day started in Wisconsin Dells, the world capital of water parks, through the speed traps of Minnesota, and now up through North Dakota. I’d had my fill of driving through the States at this point, and was now getting eager to head north as sunset hit. My GPS was sending me through the border crossing at Portal, and then I’d be back home in a familiar land – just 3000 km away from my normal stomping grounds.

By the time I hit the border, the sky was pitch black and the red-and-white flags were being illuminated by my headlights. Nothing makes me feel quite as patriotic as coming home after time away. Even if I’d only been away for a day. The border guard was bemused at my joy of being back in Canadian soil, until she saw my Ontario license plates.

“Where’s the closest Tim Horton’s? I’m dying for a fix!”

“I get that all the time,” she said with a grin. “It’s about 20 minutes down the road, in Estevan.”

I had my target. Now driving on a Canadian highway, it felt different. Perhaps the quality of the road work, but I digress. At this point, all I could see was the road directly in front of me. Not even the headlights of passing cars, as none were to be seen. Just me and a bunch of dashed yellow lines.

I got to Estevan and the Tim Horton’s therein – with what looked like a sizable portion of the town. Young and old, were all here this night – it truly was the town’s community centre. I got my tea and doughnut, and hit the road again. Again into the darkness.

Eventually I saw something bright off to the west. It looked like a fire from afar, but as I drove closer and closer, it looked more and more industrial. To this very day, I have no clue what I drove past, but the fact that I could see it from such a distance was what amused me.

I hadn’t driven too long until I realized that I should stop for the night. After an hour of driving, I hit Weyburn and decided to stay for the night. It was warm, and I had my trusty pillow and blanket in the car, so I decided to find a place to park and sleep in my car. I ended up in a department store parking lot, bright enough for me to figure it was safe, but dim enough so that I could sleep. I rolled my seat down, kicked off my shoes and slept for the night. Cracked a window open for a bit of air. Never before had I slept so well in such a cramped space.

I woke up the next morning to the sound of a train. I wiped away the remnants of the night and propped myself up. Gold. Surrounded by Gold. As far as my eye could see – fields of what I thought was wheat (and now know is canola). I couldn’t see the end! It was as bright as the sky and filled the distance between my car and the horizon, with grain elevators faintly seen, breaking the golden yellow fields. This is what I’d heard about from my junior school geography classes, this was truly the Prairies.

I knew it was going to be a good day.

Which of the following are NOT ultimatums:

1. “If you don’t hand over those folks who shot our Archduke, we’re going to invade your country and thereby start World War I.”
2. “If you don’t move those missiles off Cuba, we’ll invade.”
3. “I don’t like where this is going, so perhaps we shouldn’t see each other.”
4. “You’ve got 5 hours to leave this town, or else.”

Really, take your pick.

We were sitting in the Lady Eaton participant lounge the night before we all left Peterborough. Four friends and a guitar, with the students long having fallen asleep. Sadly, the guitar wasn’t being passed around, but my song book was – as I did the impromptu acoustic performances that I’ve come to be known for since Saguenay in 2006. Ever since, my guitar has always come with me to Canada Wide Science Fairs. As we’re doing this, song to song, Jason tells us about his favourite part of concerts; the banter. You know, the brief talking moments any artist uses to tell an anecdote, connecting their last song to their next. Doesn’t necessarily have to be true, it just has to flow.

And there it began – we all took turns choosing songs in the book for me to play, many I haven’t played in years. Whoever chose the song would have to do the banter. Every one of us had our own styles – some took a bit more to push it out, while others told stories of their love of disaster movies. Every song became prefaced with a story, and regardless of the actual content, our banter said something about us each individually. We were creating our own soundtrack to our lives, and to the story we told through the night. Obviously, I had the easiest time since I knew every song in that book – and there usually was a story about it. What struck me, however, was when everyone else chose a song and told a story that had nothing to do with the mythology I had created about the song for myself. That’s what made this night special.

There it was, a bunch of friends sitting around, sharing music that meant something to them. What a way to end a great week.

While I’m not sure what this says about the Astronomy world’s belief of the importance of peer review, but when a paper is submitted to a journal in Astronomy, we almost always post it on the Arxiv preprint server. Yes, even before the peer review takes place. It is where astronomer’s go for their daily dose of the cutting edge research. (Well, perhaps not daily, but somewhere in that timescale.) It gets our work out to other scientists while we go through the tedium of peer review and the like, which regularly takes months of time.

Many of us get a daily email with all the new postings and their abstracts. Unfortunately, this email can be particularly long and cumbersome to read. In fact so much so that the people often only skim the first few papers on the email. the amusing part is that the number of citations you get on a paper is a strong function of where you see on the list: the first few papers on average get the most citations on average, but if you’re even fifteenth on the list, the average number of citations goes down by about a factor of two! Crazy, eh?

The way the list is compiled is first come first serve. That means the first papers submitted after the cutoff time for one day become the first papers on the next day’s list. This cutoff time is 4 PM eastern. Hence today, at 4:01 PM, I will be playing the game to see if I can be first. Wish me luck!

This is the first year that I won’t be attending the Toronto Science Fair since 1997. That may not seem like such a big deal, but it is to me. It may seem like a lesser deal because I’m going to a conference in Florida instead. Believe it or not, I’m still heartbroken. I suppose when you’ve done anything for more than a decade, especially when you’ve only lived for two and a half decades, you can be forgiven. To me, the science fair here always marked the end of Winter, and the culmination of the year. (Yes, I think I’m forever going to be stuck thinking of years in terms of the academic year.) Even as I stopped competing, it was still a big deal. It’s where I cut my teeth, so coming back to judge was my little way of giving back. But in not going, I’m finding my old sense of anticipation coming back.

For the first time since those days, I needed to get my own scientific results in check. As I was putting together the last bits of my poster for this conference, I couldn’t help but feel like the same grade 7 kid who was competing for the first time. Sure, everything isn’t as last minute as before, there aren’t prizes, and the only competition is getting folks to believe your results, but the basic idea hasn’t changed: I’m going there to present the science I’ve been working on for months. At the end of the day, that’s why I loved science fair, and that’s why I’m so excited right now.

It is nice that the conference is specialized: it’s on star formation as it relates to Galaxies. I find that thee specialized conferences are where I have the most fun. They’re more engaging than the larger, more general conferences. And the big plus is that I already know a ton of people who are going. In that way, it seems a lot like my Science Fair days where I caught up with friends I’d made from earlier fairs.

Anyhow, must get off this park bench and head home to pack. Plus, there’s always the possibility of judging the Florida state science fair being held this Thursday…

I needed a win. I’ve been working on this paper for months now. Admittedly, it really should be three papers, or at very least two, but definitely more than one. In manuscript form, it is about 35 pages minus figures. And I have a ton of figures. But, really, that’s not been bugging me. Heck, most of the papers I use on a regular basis are lengthy papers, with multiple nuanced points: I should be so lucky to have my paper be considered in the same realm as them. Yes, its been a marathon of a paper, but a PhD is a marathon of a degree.

No, rather than the length of the paper, what’s been aggravating me has been gow it has been “almost done” for months. And I’ve been running full steam on this paper for that time. Imagine running a marathon where you’ve passed the three quarters point. But now, you run a kilometer and you pass a sign saying “5 km left”. So you start running faster because you see the end in sight. And you run another kilometer, faster than before, but you come onto another sign saying “sorry, 5 km still left”. Thinking it was just a mistake, you keep chugging, and again, you see that sign. Eventually, you stop believing the signs. Eventually, you stop running as fast as you can. Eventually, you believe that this will never end.

Thankfully, time doesn’t stop, even when you feel like you have, and we came to the telescope proposal time. So, great, something else to work on while I’m working on this never ending paper. The difference this time, I have a fixed deadline. Nothing I do has meaning unless its done by a certain hour on a certain day. So, rather than depending on imaginary trail markers in my head, I see the finish line and its a big fat date on the calendar. I ran, twice this month. One was close, the other was a good finish long before the deadline. It’s a win. A small win, but a win nonetheless. I needed this win.

Bring on that paper. I’m ready for ya!

Splattered all across the sky, stars we see before they die;
Swiftly twinkling way up high, I’ve looked at stars that way.
But in the clouds we’re looking through, the dust turned into stars a new;
Bubbles blown by stars so blue, the dust was in the way.

I look at stars from both sides now, from young and old but still somehow,
It’s star’s illusions I recall, I really don’t know stars at all.

…and so I treat you all to a late night, unedited, rambling as I sip on herbal tea and listen to “More Than a Feeling” by Boston. Over the years I’ve developed a multitude of tricks to get up on time – sometimes with limited success, but at least I know what works and what doesn’t. Through setting 5 alarms on every electronic device I own and having at least two friends give me wake up calls, I can usually get up reasonably close to when I need to. (I did say usually.)  This problem of needing to find a way to drain myself so that I can fall asleep is new.

Whenever I used to get into this predicament, I would just let my system deal with it naturally, which usually meant staying up the entire night and getting back into the swing of things the next day. At least, that’s what I used to do during undergrad. In fact, this used to be my way of making sure I got up on time – I’d stay up all night to make sure that I’d be on time for my obligation the next morning – be it a plane flight or conference or just needing to meet someone really early. It doesn’t work any more – mainly because I’ll fall asleep sometime between 4 and 5 AM nowadays and not be able to wake up until 10 or 11 the next day. I’d be well rested with between 5 to 7 hours of sleep, but there goes any chance of making that 8 AM meeting.

You’d think travel or observing would screw me up then on a usual basis – but surprisingly not – I don’t seem to have a problem with jet lag (crossing fingers) and the fear of something going wrong with a multi-million dollar telescope ensures that I stay up for the entire observing session. When I came back from Italy and Tunisia, it took me no more than 24 hours to get back into the right time zone, and less than a day when I got back from observing in California. It’s just when I’m home, and I do something stupid to screw up my sleep cycle do I suffer. As great as listening to Don’t Stop Believing by Journey at 2 AM in the morning is, I’d rather be asleep so that I can get up at some reasonably sane hour.

The stupid thing that I did last week (now a week and a half ago I suppose) was pull an all-nighter between Thursday and Friday to get a paper done. In truth, it was only a half-all-nighter as I fell asleep on a futon in the office next to me by 4 AM and I was up by 8 AM. I did, however, get the paper done (and so begins the revision process). Success? Yes – but now I pay for it. Damn this productivity (and I maintain that “damn”, while not the most polite language, isn’t a swear word – long story).

And here’s the big problem, because the university’s technically closed, not many people are around – so I can’t even use the presence and biological clocks of others to synchronize myself. It doesn’t help that those people that are around are even bigger night owls than I am.

Anyhow, I’ve finished my herbal tea and I’m going to see if I can lull myself to sleep with my guitar.

Sweet dreams.

Mubdi