A spark neglected burns the house...indeed

Alex Wiens, cold-blooded murderer of Marwa El-Sherbini, was sentenced to life imprisonment three days ago on November 11, 2009. The murder took place in a very unlikely place and in a painfully disturbing way.

Before I go any further, I should note that the title of this post is so chosen because of the nothing-short-of-accurate portrayal of such a tragedy in a story of the same name by Leo Tolstoy. And also because of its nothing-short-of-accurate encapsulation of the events leading up to the murder.

Wind back the clock one year. August 21, 2009, Dresden, Germany. In a pleasant evening and in the backdrop of a playground where children, accompanied by their parents, were playing merrily with their peers, El-Sherbini, an Egyptian female immigrant, and Alex Wiens, a self-supposed male ethnic German, both in their late 20s, both never having met each other before, met near a sandbox swing with two swings for kids. Alex sat in one while his niece was playing in the other. El-Sherbini, clearly distinguishable as a muslim due to dress code (headscarf), approached the man and politely asked him to give up his seat for her son. He didn't. He turned towards her and said he didn't want to see muslims in that playground. Predictably, the woman did not take the malicious racial slur of the xenophobic bigot and thought it would be in her best interests to say something back at him, as if in an attempt either to facilely defend herself or to get down to his level of bigotry and heat up the exchange. And so it did. One word led to another, with both of them progressively clenching their eyebrows and digressively losing their temper and manners. Pretty soon he was calling her an "Islamist," "Terrorist," and a "Slut," and also yelled that her son would soon become a terrorist himself. Due to the obviously loud nature of the altercation, surrounding people gathered around the duo and tried defusing the situation by asking Alex to shut the hell up. He didn't. He now started throwing tantrums at the bystanders, especially those speaking Russian. At the moment, it seemed as if Alex wouldn't stop slurring in rage (for no apparent reason at all) until he is dead or at least until the force of the Law is acted upon him. A police car, called in by one of the bystanders/witnesses, arrived and he was taken into custody, later charged with charges of slander as filed and testified by El-Sherbini.

That would have been the end of this ordeal, but he refused to pay the fine of €330 and requested a trial by jury, consistently denouncing her scarf and muslims (not Islam) and referring to her only as "that woman" in scare quotes. A date for November 2008 was set and then he was fined €660 after being found guilty again. In this trial, he even suggested that "people like her" were not real human beings and therefore legally incapable of being insulted. It was a second opportunity for Alex to end the case, but he, assisted by his public prosecutor who somehow initially failed to see the blindingly obvious outcome of the prosecution, even after such a shameless act in the trial, appealed for prosecution in a district court, and was assigned the date of July 1, 2009. Many things happened between November 2008 and the date of trial that at one point made the public prosecutor try and retract the case, but upon Alex's persistent pressure not to, he had to oblige.

Then came July 1. Room 10 of Dresden's historic district court; nine people present including two judges and El-Sherbini's husband and son. The trial commenced and Alex resounded the courtroom with his extreme-right wing sentiments and unabashed hatred for muslims. El-Sherbini testified, and Alex asked her several irrelevant and disallowed questions, such as why she was in Germany at all, which was struck off the record. As the trial was approaching the end, El-Sherbini and her family decided to leave and were about the leave the courtroom when Alex attacked her with an 18 cm long blade, stabbing her 16 times in her upper body and arm while shouting "you don't deserve to live." Her unarmed husband, who tried as best as he could to stop the violence, also received 16 stab wounds to his neck and shoulders. The Judge raised the security alarm and a police officer, who was the only cop in the scene in this no-security, no-security-checking court and who was attending another unrelated trial, came to the rescue but mistook her husband as the perpetrator and shot him in the leg. Alex's defense lawyer also tried helping El-Sherbini by forcing Alex away with the use of chairs. El-Sherbini died in the scene of crime, Alex was arrested immediately after the crime, and El-Sherbini's husband remained in coma for two days after having received life-threatening stabbing injuries. Alex had preplanned the murder, as was evidenced by his bringing into a court of Law a malicious weapon of murder.

After more than four months of legal procedures from the day of murder and after growing national and international media coverage and pandemonium from uproarious muslim communities throughout Europe, Alex Wein was sentenced to life imprisonment on November 11, 2009, for the murder of Marwa El-Sherbini and the attempted murder of her husband Elwi Ali Okaz. Residing judge concluded that the murder took place “in front of the child, against two people, in a treacherous way, and in a court of law,” and therefore, according to the Law, the “convict is to serve a minimum of 18 years before a board will review the possibility of parole for the first time.”

If only he had let go of the swing that fateful day in the playground, and if only she had ignored his slur.

This unspeakable, heinous act of crime raises many questions at many levels, from ethics to human nature to Law to even security. But to avoid the trite, I’ll just conclude that if there was anything in the universe that could be called immutably impossible, then it is cleansing ourselves of all human prejudices, bigotry, hatred, and the biases that arise from them all – no matter who or where we are and regardless of how highly we think of ourselves as the Nobel Savage. If pushed far enough, we all will unleash the Alex Wein in us that is manifesting himself in other, subtler ways right this minute. There’s no use saying “it’s time to wake up,” because we never will.




left: El-Sherbini's body being transported in a muslim community of relatives, non-relatives and those angered and grieved by the the hate crime; right: El-Sherbini being commemorated by Germans and other non-muslims who spoke against the hate crime and were for the fair treatment of muslims and non-Europeans in Europe

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Curb Your Enthusiasm...and the temptation to watch it!

To get to the point, and simply put, this is the greatest, funniest, and the most hysterically entertaining show in all of television history.

Created by Larry David, co-creator of the megahit TV show Sienfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm circles around Larry David himself in all of his daily predicaments and embarrassments, and his relationship with a demanding wife Cheryl and friendship with his fat friend Jeff. But when I say "himself," I need to make clear that this isn't a reality show. Far from it, it's metafiction. The character Larry David in the show is a fictionalized version of his real-life self - part true personality, part just made-up. Not just him; most other characters appearing in the show also are fictionalized versions of themselves, and to signify this, they change the second name of their character and retain the first from their real names. This concept was first created by Larry David for Sienfeld (in which he never acted) and now for CYE.

To quote the tagline of the show, "He's got it all: a loving wife, good friends, a successful career, a great home...what could possibly go wrong for Larry David?" That's right, he's just perfect! Except that he regularly trips into disastrous social humiliations, sometimes because of his obsessive nature of blowing things out of proportion, sometimes because he can't figure out what's really important, and sometimes because he just forgets what politeness is. He has a naive outlook on human nature, and he is agitated over trivial things said and done by others when a lot more is at stake. He tries to be affable at times, but always ends up saying the wrong things. He is insensitive to the feelings of others and runs into the the wrong people. He can neither foresee the ramifications of his actions nor watch his tongue in social gatherings. He is a victim of misunderstandings.

The embarrassment that rushes at you when watching the show is similar to the experience of watching Borat for the first time. (Some episodes are even directed by Larry Charles, director of Borat). I feel it would be apt to classify this show as foot-in-mouth comedy. But beneath all the humor, I think Larry represents the irrationality of the common man in many ways. Everything he says and does represents some aspect of our stupidity, which is why it's easy to relate to the character.

And Jeff Greene and his Italian-American, psychotic wife Susie Green make for a lot of entertainment as well.

Watch it once, and you won't stop watching the rest of the seaons or laughing while you do. A word of warning, though: sometimes, the humor can be subtle. Remember that, unlike most sitcoms and comedy flicks, CYE has its hilarity in the characters, not in dialogues or jokes. A sample should prove it:

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Nostalgia and regret

It's always, always, "either...or..."

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Symbolized

For the past four years, and for many years before that, I’ve seen mechanical engineering being invariably represented by gears. At least two of them together each time, both usually spur. If you’ve been perceptive of things around, you too would’ve seen much the same. Additionally, for evidence of this, run a Google Image search for “mechanical engineering” and crack how many of them have spur gears associated with them.

And all this when mechanical engineering is so vast a subject as to cover elements from safety pins to satellites.

Such a generalized outlook on mechanical engineering is likely in part because of the “age” of mechanical engineering, in part because of the popularity of gears, and in part because of the perception of ruthless operation people have about machines. I mention age because mechanical is one of the oldest branches of engineering, and since gears have been around for almost as long as the branch itself, they might subtly hint a feeling of its longevity. Secondly, it's hard to find someone that hasn't seen gears in action, be it in watches and clocks, motors, engines, turbines, vehicles, and a myriad other mechanical devices. Gears enjoy more popularity amongst us than any other tool of their league. Even if only the outside of an engine is visible, our mind immediately thinks of the gear mechanism inside. This undue familiarity of the common man with gears would naturally lead to, especially when present for long as suggested here, a generalized representation of the whole of mechanical engineering with the object of familiarity. Lastly, gears are ruthless! If you’ve seen two huge spur gears in action, you will know the kind of emotion they generate. And this emotion itself is representative of machines in general, making gears all the more symbolic of mechanical engineering.

But whether such symbolism is justified or not is an altogether different matter.

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Pynchon's letter

I just found this awesome letter written by Thomas Pynchon, published in Daily Telegraph, supporting and in defense of Ian McEwan. For the uninitiated, Mr. McEwan was the object of a plagiarism controversy in late 2006 as regards his bestselling and highly acclaimed novel, Atonement. What made the whole charges of plagiarism absurd on its face was that it wasn't plagiarism at all; the author had acknowledged, both in the novel and vocally on many occasions, the source of historical information he is purported to have plagiarized. Nevertheless, some unscrupulous attention whores desperately wanting to muster some attention for themselves accused him anyway.

The controversy was much analogous to a news network filing charges of plagiarism against a filmmaker for having based his story on real events reported only by that network...despite the fact that the filmmaker has acknowledged it.

Thomas Pynchon was quick to speak against such wild accusations, as is seen in this letter (dated December 2006):

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When nouns and trademarks become verbs

There is a tendency in people to replace longer words with the shorter (‘faking’ for ‘counterfeiting’), to cut down the length of the words (‘fundas’ for ‘fundamentals’) and to abbreviate words, especially when such words are used in high frequency. (This helpful site ranks words on the basis of their usage). But at the same time, there is yet another tendency to replace an entire group of words with a single word, changing the very grammatical construct of the replacing word. In the course of this treatment, adjectives become nouns, nouns become verbs, verbs become nouns, and adverbs become something else. Some, presumably traditionalists, frown upon meddling with language like this, more so when it is done on a large scale, but such frowning speaks more of their own lack of understanding of the development of language than it does the so-called offenders.

Linguistics reserves a special chapter for the study of functional changes taking place in words: Conversion. Conversion is a form of Derivation (also a linguistic terminology, meaning the creation of a new word from an existing word, the new word being of a different spelling) wherein a word changes its part of speech without undergoing any change in its spelling. As mentioned earlier, nouns becoming verbs, for example, is a kind of Conversion and is specifically called verbification. Verbification is a much happening, though less noticed, process in all languages of the world, and more so in widely spoken ones – in our case, English. It facilitates word economy in written as well as spoken English and cuts down redundancy and awkwardness. This example makes it clear:

Statement A: Don’t tell lies. (lie: noun)
Statement B: Don’t lie. (lie: verb)

Both sentences mean exactly the same, but B is always more preferable. It’s concise, economic, and doesn’t sound awkward.

Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, particularly 20th Century onwards, such Conversion is no longer restricted to words already present in the English language. When Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, he might not have thought so much of the linguistic usage of his invention as much as he did of its working, but very soon, to his and everyone else’s convenience, the word ‘telephone’, while a neologism, was verbified. It isn’t very uncommon today to hear someone saying, “I’ll telephone you tonight.” And the same applies for the term SMS (a.k.a. text messaging in the West). It’s verbified. Or you could also look at 'blog'. With the technological invention, it was a neologism, a noun. Now, blog is a verb, too ("I love blogging").

Lately, this verification has taken another step forward with trademarks, albeit with a slight twist. Despite the fact that verbification is a productive process in language, it is, say the corporate representatives, an equally unproductive process for the companies whose trademarks are being verbified. In fact, they would go so far as to call it “genericide” and call those who use it as “guilty of genericide.” Nice.

Xerox is perhaps one of the most commonly verbified trademarks. While the actual process is to be called photocopying, almost all of us have at some point made the statement, “xerox it” (with a small x, though it doesn’t make any difference in speech). It even finds an entry as a verb and with a small x in all leading English dictionaries. The problem these companies have with their trademarks being used as verbs or nouns is that the trademark loses its association with the company and becomes a generic term for the process of doing it or for the generic product and hence the brand loses its popularity ‘rights’ over the trademark. Xerox, for example, is so widely used as a verb that the other day I overheard a guy saying he’ll xerox the paper in this machine when the machine in question was a Canon photocopier. It’s good for linguistic conciseness, yes, but bad for the company Xerox that has lost its market value to the now-generic term xeroxing – the process of photocopying. "Using a Xerox photocopier" gives more credit and attention to the brand Xerox than does "xeroxing".

Google, too, has been the victim of genericide, and its founders woefully dissented, in vain, against Oxford Dictionary’s decision of including google as a verb in the dictionary in 2006. Google is now the generic term for searching the Internet for keywords using Google Search Engine, and soon it’ll be a generic term for the process of searching keywords on the Internet. Other trademarks belonging to this category are Hoover (a manufacturer of vacuum cleaners; now hoovering – the process of cleaning with a vacuum cleaner), Photoshop (Adobe Photoshop, a software for editing photos; now photoshopping – the process of editing photos in Adobe Photoshop), and most recently, as voted second by people in Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year 2007, facebook – a verb – for the process of browsing (doing whatever) in the popular social networking site Facebook (“Did you facebook today?”).

Maybe there is an inherent logic to the structure of these words (trademarks) that give us the tendency to verbify them. Photoshopping is structurally similar to ‘shopping’, facebooking is to ‘booking’. That can explain why very few these trademarks get verbified and most do not. But whatever the tendency, it increases the ease with which language is spoken, written, and concisely expressed, and that is what language is all about.

However, I would like to point out at Sony’s shameless attempt to verbify their logo. It’s one thing if people verbify a word, but a totally different thing if the company itself forces it down. And fails. It doesn’t even belong to the field of linguistics, since it’s a damn logo, but here it is, whatever it means ("I Sony it"? or maybe "I Ericsson it", or perhaps "I love it", in which case it is even more shameless than it is to verbify their own trademark):

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World War III

As I was researching the possible scenarios for the outbreak of a Third World War, and meanwhile learned that Churchill actually had plans of starting one (as outlined in Operation Unthinkable) in 1945 but was, much to his dismay, overruled by people smarter than him, I came across two interesting quotes:

"If the Third World War is fought with nuclear weapons, the fourth will be fought with bows and arrows." —Lord Louis Mountbatten

"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." —Albert Einstein

Eloquent as they are, I feel my modification to the above quotes is more accurate:

"If the Third World War is fought, there won't be a Fourth one."

But there will always be dense politicians who would, in response to my version, say, "Well then, let's just put an end to World Wars and fight the Third."

You've gotta love this crazy, German-accented satirical video I found on YouTube:



"But I'm le tired..." Hahahahah

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All the pretty horses

Are all horses in the world of the same color? You’d think not.

But you can’t be too sure. Especially not when nutcases like George Pólya are around. His argument is adduced much like this...

There are five very pretty horses. Their color(s), unknown as of yet, but we’ll arrive at that shortly through the givens.



Now the given: Of the five horses, any set of four horses contains horses of the same color. (Will be proven later).

Meaning, if I made a set of four horses out of the first four horses, they’d all be of the same color. If I made a set of the last four horses, they’d again be of the same color. Likewise, a set of first two and last two horses would also give me horses of the same color, and so with any other combination of horses in sets of four. Which color, we don’t care. But do pay heed to the fact that the statement doesn’t say all horses are of the same color. No. Let’s sketch out one set, set 1, for clarity…



Similarly, we have another set, set 2…



Math time now. Let the first horse in the entire group of five be denoted by A, the fifth horse be denoted by B, and the middle three horses be collectively called C. From set 1, it is clear that A=C. From set 2, B=C. And anybody with an understanding of even elemental math knows that when all humans are monkeys and all monkeys are apes, then all humans are apes. So, we have A=B from those two equations, leading us to the (obvious) conclusion that the first horse is of the same color as the fifth. Meaning, all five horses are of the same color. Phew.

That wasn’t so difficult a reasoning as I made it seem, but here comes the fun part. We have to prove our initial given statement. To do that, let’s shoo one horse away into the fields and be left with only four. Now let’s commence the whole logic again with the same initial givens. Color(s) of horses, unknown. A set of three horses in this group of four will always be of the same color, regardless of which three of them you choose for your set. Follow the same line of reasoning and end up arriving at the same conclusion that all four horses are of the same color. Shoo off another horse and do these calculations with three and two and one horse. Since a set of one horse has to be of the same color, the initial statement that any set of four horses in a group of five contains horses of the same color is proved by backtracking the deduction.

Okay, recess time just got over for our horses in the field and it’s time to get back to the stable. All five horses are back. Add another one. Wherever it came from it doesn’t matter, just add. Now you have six. Apply the logic all over again. Arrived at all horses of same color? Make it seven horses. Again all same color. Go on increasing the set one horse at a time to get the same result. 1000 horses, all same color. 10,000 horses, all same color. A million, still all same color.

ALL horses in the world…why would that be any different? They would all be of the same color, wouldn’t they? Of course they would.

Except that our own real-world experience tells us they aren’t, even though this seemingly perfect logical reasoning deduces that they are!

What went wrong then? Maybe George Pólya really is a nutcase. Case closed.

Or maybe not. Maybe, he’s just smarter than us to have fooled us with this. As it happens, he is. Pólya used this reality-contradicting “logic” to expose the, or demonstrate the, fallacy arising out of apparently all-encompassing general statements (laws/rules) when specific cases in which they are demonstrably false aren’t considered. The fallacy in our horse game has been cleverly planted in mathematical induction. Our math equations of if A=C and B=C then A=B are universally valid for all arguments containing three or more elements. However, it just doesn’t apply, indeed it is impossible to apply, when you have less than 3 elements. A=C and ?=C, therefore A=?. Nothing can take the place of ‘?’ as there is nothing to take its place. Therefore, our reasoning is valid only up until we have 3 horses to work with, but the logic breaks down once we are down to two horses. Since we cannot continue the till-now-valid reasoning after reaching two horses, we cannot prove the initial statement, thereby making it a false initial statement. Any theorem based on false assumptions collapses on its face like Nazism.

Hence, all horses in the world are not, as unlikely as it may seem, of the same color.

This type of logic in which the fallacy is intentionally planted in the reasoning is called Falsidical Paradox.

And oddly, I've plagiarized the title of this post from Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses. Sue me.

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