Today is Naw-Rúz, New Year’s Day on the Bahá’à calendar. For the nineteen days prior, we have been fasting between sunrise and sunset. So parties are pretty common to celebrate surviving this trial. My first Baha’i experience here in Athens was a Naw-Rúz party. A coworker said with all the stuff my group is doing I…
The New York Times article “Nuclear Agency Tells a Concerned Congress That U.S. Industry Remains Safe” had a curious statement from Gregory Jaczko, of the chair of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, in front of Congress. “U.S. nuclear facilities remain safe,†Mr. Jaczko told two House Energy and Commerce subcommittees, which had originally planned to consider his…
From Shoghi Effendi in Directives of the Guardian: The fasting period, which lasts nineteen days starting as a rule from the second of March every year and ending on the twentieth of the same month, involves complete abstention from food and drink from sunrise till sunset. It is essentially a period of meditation and prayer, of…
The Bahá’à calendar consists of nineteen months with nineteen days plus 4-5 intercalendary called the Days Outside of Time or Ayyám-i-Há. On the Gregorian calendar, it starts at sunset on February 25th and lasts until sunset on March 1st. The morning of March 2nd starts the Bahá’à Fast where we abstain from eating between sunrise…
I glanced at my Google Analytics stats for this site and noticed a huge traffic spike. Somehow my TED Talk: We Are All Cyborgs post landed Bing’s number two spot and Google’s number three spot for “ted talk we are all cyborgs” a couple days ago. Normal for a Tuesday is something like 650 visits.…
We celebrate with flowers, candy, dinner, and gifts the beheading of the patron saint of love, beekeepers, young people, and happy marriages. The flowers suddenly make sense given the beekeeper part of his domain. I forget how interesting Catholicism can be. According to Catholic Online…. Valentine was a holy priest in Rome, who, with St.…
Malcolm Gladwell wrote last fall how strong ties like friendships are how high risk opposition works. Weak ties like Facebook cannot sustain them. So it is interesting how stories about the Egyptian revolution mention Facebook and Twitter as tooks. Naturally, Gladwell responded by writing, “Please. People protested and brought down governments before Facebook was invented.” Also, he…
Passing is a term for a person with both black and white ancestors who encourages others to think he or she is white. I recall a blonde woman talking about her father having told people he was Greek in order to pass. Has anyone really seen members of the black community excluding people who admit…
Twenty-five years ago today my teachers had us all gather in a classroom. A teacher was being sent into orbit. The intent was for us to see a historic event. Instead we got to see even bigger history being made as the Space Shuttle exploded 73 seconds after launch. The disintegration of the vehicle was…