Saturday, July 28, 2007

TV Series's Remakes and DVD release's





A while back me and Anglo were reminiscing on the old day's :P when we used to watch Hart to Hart and the The Fall Guy among many other series's like the Bionic Woman, The Six Million Dollar Man and Battlestar Galactica; which were famous series's airing from the late 70's right through to the eighties.

Well, I went and did some googling after that and found out that the First Season of The Fall Guy has recently being released on DVD ( I already got my copy :P ) and I even saw that there is a remake of Battlestar Galactica, which isn't that good to tell you the truth. Actually, just this Wednesday I was lucky to see the pilot episode of the remake of The Bionic Woman, which was great, a must see.

So I was wondering how many of you out there have seen any of these series or their remakes or reruns ( for the young ones :P ) and what were your favorite series's of the time ................?

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

MIT Open Courseware

I've been frequenting this site for some time now and have been meaning to share it with the rest of you, but was waiting for the appropriate moment and given Leebeya's recent enlistment in an MBA program and some bloggers expressed boredom of the summer vacation, I thought the time was ripe :p.

The website is courtesy of MIT ( one of my favorite universities ) and provides an online repository of courseware (pdf's, audio recordings, powerpoint presentations, ........ ), for both graduate and postgraduate studies in all the fields available in its regular programs.

For example it provides the course materials of a whole school of Management and Economics ( Lebeeya and Mani ), it also provides material for Architectural Engineering ( piccolina ), Electrical Engineering and Computer Science ( Maiuna ) , and Mechanical Engineering ( a_akak ) . Unfortunately I couldn't find anything related to Legal studies so sorry happymoi , safia and ibeebarbie :).

So for those of you who have a lot of time on their hands ................hit the books and prepare for the new term/semester .......... at least thats what I used to do near the end of the summer :p.

Saturday, July 21, 2007

Between Duty and Humanity

The footage I've posted below was shot by the Guardian's Sean Smith, who is a photojournalist, during his time as an embedded journalist with the US apache company. The video was initially aired by ITV news; and was later picked up by ABC's London bureau who posted it on ABC's news website.

I'm posting it, because of the unique perspective it presents with regards to the Iraq war.In it you'll see a different view of the Iraq war that isn't common in the mainstream American media, so to speak, it shows the deaths and killings and also shows how the pressure of the war is getting to the soldiers and how it leads them, unintentionally, to kill innocent people. It also illustrates the soldiers anger towards their government; because of their indecision on what to do and their political squabbling over mundane topics while overlooking the real suffering and pain that both civilians and soldier incur from this war.

The posting of the video on an ABC's website attracted more than 250,000 views and 500 comments on this video alone apart from the comments on the subsequent related articles. One of the comments was from the mother of one of the soldiers killed in the video in which she said "He was 19 years old and could see the futility of Iraq invasion and occupation,", ABC's David Muir dedicated a whole article to the comments on the video which can be read here.

For those of you who have limited bandwidth you can read a summary of the video here and the original article within which the video was posted can be found here, if you're interested in the original video as posted on ABC's website ( not on youtube ) it can be viewed here .

Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Personality Tests

Ibeebarbie has brought to my attention an online personality test site provided by the web site similar minds . So I took the tests as well, out of curiosity, and posted the results below. Anyone else want to take a shot at it ?



Monday, July 9, 2007

Women Only Beaches


Women in Italy have recently gotten fed up of male harassment and unwanted advances on beaches to such an extent that they've created a Male free beach ! According to this article the beach is located on the Adriatic coast and takes up a 50 miles stretch of the coast and it's entrance has a big sign with "No Men" written on it. Even the male owner of the beach only monitors it from a rescue boat just off the beach so as not to intrude. I read from another news source that the beach didn't allow children either, which I thought was a bit of a stretch, but keeping men off the beach seems ok to me. I don't think there is a precedent to this except in Iran .

This article also reminded me of one of our female bloggers complaining about not being able to enjoy her day out at the beach because of bad mannered men harassing her, so maybe this is a good solution to the problem ?

Saturday, July 7, 2007

Lake Disappears - Update

A few weeks ago I made a post about a lake that disappeared in Chile, initially it was assumed that the lake was drained into the core of the Earth as a result of an earth tremor as the area was active at the time; but that was based on mere speculation .

Well a few days ago a report of a survey of the lake region by a group of scientists came out with a preliminary conclusion that global warming is to be blamed for the disappearance of the lake. It seems that the melting of some glaciers from within the vicinity of the lake increased the level of the water in the lake thus increasing the pressure at the depths of the lake. At the same time the lake itself was situated, it seems, in some sort of ravine that was blocked by a glacier ( acting as a dam ), the increased pressure budged the glacier ( that was acting like a dam ) out of its way which led the water to flow into the sea .
It looks like the effects of global warming are worse than we anticipated and the sea level is going to increase at a rate higher than that expected especially if we are going to be getting unaccounted for sources of water pouring into the sea ......... I wonder what we will be seeing next ?

Tuesday, July 3, 2007

The "new" World's Richest Man and July the 4th

Bill Gates has just lost the title of the worlds richest man, according to this report. Bill Gates was estimated to be worth $ 59.2 billion up until the end of the second quarter ( January 1st- March 31st ) , which was $8.6 billion less than the estimated worth of Carlos Slim . The increase in Slim's worth is attributed to a 27% increase in the shares of America Movil which is considered the largest cell phone company in both America's and of which Carlos Slim is the chairman. I remember reading a while back that IT and telecommunication companies are the most profitable form of investment and that the profit from them surpasses even that of the Arms and Drug trade, its no wonder then that the richest people in the World are investors in this field.

On another note, today is July the 4th ( or at least it should be by the time anyone reads this :p ) and no I'm not talking about Independence Day :p, I'm actually referring to the birthday of Amira, the daughter of a fellow blogger ( ibeebarbie ), so Happy 4th Birthday Amira :D .