Saturday, July 31, 2004

 

Confusion ...

I have always had this confusion that why do the people have to use "JEEZ"? I really have not get its practical meaning up till now. Obviously it is a slang but why geez and not Jesus?? No one knows the reason, they just continue to use it; when do the people want to put aside these none sense slangs!

Friday, July 30, 2004

 

Oops!

Do you really believe that there is such a land existed where you can obtain all your dreams? I personally do not believe on merely the land. In my opinion where ever you want can be your land of opportunity, idea which Americans are not very happy with it.

The true place of opportunity for every individual is where, you are, happy, you feel it your home. You have to believe in what you want to believe; you have to be what you want to be, not what others want to see. If you could define these outlines for your self then you are free no matter where you are, and since every body believes in what you believe you are living in a free society.
 
This was one of My philosophy, chapter of politics!

Wednesday, July 28, 2004

 

Cool ...

Today like past couple of days I was doing calculus. It is not that hard but some times you are stucked just at the middle of a an equation or integral, etc. The interesting aspect is that you understand the concept completely but you need to have some sort of resource in order to solve some problems! I was just about to think of my days as a tutor for Pre-Calculus in  my high school and now I understand what do my students wanted me to do!!!!! I can work it out, it is enough that in past five days I am done with 120 pages and I think I can finish the book at least once before the term begins and master the concepts. I have to tell you that calculus is my favorite and one of my A+ courses although I got A range (A-,A,A+) grade for every subject up till now.



Tuesday, July 27, 2004

 

Finally ...

I finally got to write something in here; it is true that I am still a beginner even though it seems that I write sophisticated. Today I was thinking about my sister, Kathy, she is quite far from our parents (1600 miles! in Illinois) and it is abvious that she might feel lonely somehow but I can work it out. I am going to go to Chicago next week therefore I might not be able to write for a while but I'll bring my laptop; if I had free time and a connection line I will post something in here.
 
I am thankful of my friend Lena, I got most of the idea of template, font, sidebar, etc. out of her web log. I hope that she doesn't gets mad at me but I'll try to make some changes in my web log in near future! Stay tuned.


Monday, July 26, 2004

 

How does it feel?

Isn't it the worst thing ever that you don't have anything to say? Well, I think I am stucked in here tonight because I have no idea about what to write in here!
Ok! I might post something, probably one of my scientific investigations in the coming days.

Sunday, July 25, 2004

 

The Early History of Harvard University

Harvard University, which celebrated its 350th anniversary in 1986, is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States. Founded 16 years after the arrival of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, the University has grown from nine students with a single master to an enrollment of more than 18,000 degree candidates, including undergraduates and students in 10 graduate and professional schools. An additional 13,000 students are enrolled in one or more courses in the Harvard Extension School. Over 14,000 people work at Harvard, including more than 2,000 faculty. There are also 7,000 faculty appointments in affiliated teaching hospitals.

Seven presidents of the United States – John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Theodore and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Rutherford B. Hayes, John Fitzgerald Kennedy and George W. Bush – were graduates of Harvard. Its faculty have produced nearly 40 Nobel laureates.
 
Harvard College was established in 1636 by vote of the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and was named for its first benefactor, John Harvard of Charlestown, a young minister who, upon his death in 1638, left his library and half his estate to the new institution. Harvard's first scholarship fund was created in 1643 with a gift from Ann Radcliffe, Lady Mowlson.

During its early years, the College offered a classic academic course based on the English university model but consistent with the prevailing Puritan philosophy of the first colonists. Although many of its early graduates became ministers in Puritan congregations throughout New England, the College was never formally affiliated with a specific religious denomination. An early brochure, published in 1643, justified the College's existence: "To advance Learning and perpetuate it to Posterity; dreading to leave an illiterate Ministry to the Churches."
 
Learn more ...
 
*Copyright 2004 President and Fellows of Harvard College

Saturday, July 24, 2004

 

Cynical Love Poetry


How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breath and weight
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of every day's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I lobe thee with alove I seemed to lose
With my lost saints-I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life!-and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
--Elizabeth Barret Browning--

Friday, July 23, 2004

 

Laser and Ali Javan

There is a lot of advantage for you when your father is a professor at an institution called MIT. In the middle of Cambridge and across the Charles River and Boston metropolitan. One of those advantages is that you have the opportunity to meet a lot of famous people such as Nobel Prize Laureates, Pulitzer and Alfred P. Sloan winners.

Amongst those famous people I have liked one of them so much, Yes, Ali Javan who made the first beam of laser (The gas laser) and introduced that to the world. I have seen Javan a couple of times in MIT's hallways, with his smile you can easily figure out that he is your type, you know him but he doesn't know you. You'll come closer and with an special sixteen years old smile say "Salam". He gaze at you and says "Salam" but with an English accent. It is natural, he has lived in this country since 1949 but it is enough that he has a persian root to answer you. He has not forgot himself but he have some roots in here as well. He asked me to introduce my self and I did "Seyed Mansouri" originally from Iran and major of EE+Physics and electrical eng. at University of Illinois, again he stared at me and said then what are you doing here! What do you thing I said? I just said that it is summer and I am waiting for september to go back to university.
Unfortunately our conversation end up just before we get to talk a little bit more, and he gave me his e-mail address to e-mail him if I had any further question.
If it is the first time that you hear the name of Ali Javan Click Here


 

Philosopher

Well, my passion for philosophy has always led me to think, understand and analyze better. Again this year I could find one interesting person for my passion. Yes! Professor Sohrab Alavinia a visiting scholar from Iran who studies philosophy of quantum mechanics at Harvard University. A graduate of University of Teheran and University of London and a faculty member of Shahid Beheshti University which is located in Teheran, Iran.
 
I find out about his presence after my dear friend Mohsen told me about him. He is pretty knowledgeable and patience. With his simple manner everybody would love to talk to him. I have learned a lot as I sat with him and listened to him, when he talks about Hegel, Russel, Plato, ... all the ones that I have read; it just helped me to understand those great philosophers better. He helped me to understand rhetoric better. He is just amazing, I hope some day I can go to Iran and sit in his classes about Russel and make a comparison between what I have seen and what I got involved here at Haravrd University.

Thursday, July 22, 2004

 

You are Persian if ...

1.At your party you play techno songs the whole freakin' night
2.You drink tea at the end of the night to sober up
3.You remove the 318 emblem from your BMW and install M3 wheels on the car
4.You brag to your friends that your BMW was shipped from Germany
5.You keep your black leather jacket on the whole night at the party eventhough it's warm as hell
6.Your parents always call you to help them fill out the forms that are in English
7.Your parents always complain about the food at the local persian restaurant eventhough they go there every weekend
8.All your persian friends are DJ's
9.You talk in an italian NY style dilect.."yo, ha yoo doin?"
10.After 15 years of marriage, your mother still calls your wife "Aroos"
 
Well, Let's show the others who a Persian really is with its legend and culture.

 

String Theory

Have you ever tried to think about a single law which explains every phenomenon in the universe? Well, people are thinking about that and it seems that string theory is going to prove that some day in the future. It is interesting that amongst the top scientists who work on the string theory two of them are Persian, Nima Arkani-Hamed and Cumrun Vafa both of them at Theoretical High Energy Physics/String Theory Group at Department of Physics at Harvard University. In the rest I have included some basic definition about string theory.
 
*******
 
Think of a guitar string that has been tuned by stretching the string under tension across the guitar. Depending on how the string is plucked and how much tension is in the string, different musical notes will be created by the string. These musical notes could be said to be excitation modes of that guitar string under tension.
 
In a similar manner, in string theory, the elementary particles we observe in particle accelerators could be thought of as the "musical notes" or excitation modes of elementary strings. In string theory, as in guitar playing, the string must be stretched under tension in order to become excited. However, the strings in string theory are floating in spacetime, they aren't tied down to a guitar. Nonetheless, they have tension. The string tension in string theory is denoted by the quantity 1/(2 p a'), where a' is pronounced "alpha prime"and is equal to the square of the string length scale.
 
If string theory is to be a theory of quantum gravity, then the average size of a string should be somewhere near the length scale of quantum gravity, called the Planck length, which is about 10-33 centimeters, or about a millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a centimeter. Unfortunately, this means that strings are way too small to see by current or expected particle physics technology (or financing!!) and so string theorists must devise more clever methods to test the theory than just looking for little strings in particle experiments.
 
String theories are classified according to whether or not the strings are required to be closed loops, and whether or not the particle spectrum includes fermions. In order to include fermions in string theory, there must be a special kind of symmetry called supersymmetry, which means for every boson (particle that transmits a force) there is a corresponding fermion (particle that makes up matter). So supersymmetry relates the particles that transmit forces to the particles that make up matter.
 
Supersymmetric partners to to currently known particles have not been observed in particle experiments, but theorists believe this is because supersymmetric particles are too massive to be detected at current accelerators. Particle accelerators could be on the verge of finding evidence for high energy supersymmetry in the next decade. Evidence for supersymmetry at high energy would be compelling evidence that string theory was a good mathematical model for Nature at the smallest distance scales.

 

Freedom ...

It was a couple of months ago that I went to a very exciting speech. A Nobel prize laureate and an activist for human right in Iran, Yes!, Shirin Ebadi. It was a great speech but I think more than the speech itself I met some people who I couldn't meet them on the regular bases. It was Richard Nelson Frye an emeritus professor and Afsaneh Najmabadi a professor of sociology both in the department of history at Harvard University.

I had a chance to speak to professor Frye for a couple of minutes but in Farsi. He was able to speak Farsi pretty good and I can say better than me! Our conversation last for about half an hour; I came up with some challenging issues in terms of comparing societies in a direct and solid definition. My main concern in that conversation was that we have to define freedom in any society regarding its own values and limits rather than a solid pattern. He was agreed with me and in his conclusion I saw one thing where he was agreed with and that was; because of the present western superiority over the developing countries it is the rule of nature that whoever has more power will be more acceptable. So what do you think?
 
In my opinion we have the freedom which is in balance with our cultural and religious limitation and we have to try to not to give up and at least do not accept the western pattern completely because we have a giant potential to expand and becoming more advanced to the point where we can possibly have an influence on their society.

Wednesday, July 21, 2004

 

Four doctors talk politics!

An Israeli doctor said, "Medicine in my country is so advanced, we can take a kidney out of one person, put it in another and have him looking for work in six weeks.
 
"A German doctor said "That's nothing! In Germany, we can take a lung out of one person, put it in another and have him looking for work in four weeks."
 
A Russian doctor said, "In my country, medicine is so advanced, we can take half a heart from one person, put it in another and have them both looking for work in two weeks."
 
The American doctor, not to be outdone, said "Hah! We are about to take an asshole out of Texas, put him in the White House and half the country will be looking for work the next day."

 

I am ...

There has been times in my life that forced me to think about and ask my self that who am I? A person who has finished high school in his late fifteen, and has gone to greatest universities. A person who knows four languages and will know a couple of more in near future. Is the youngest in class who is a double major of Physics and Electrical Eng.

But, I have missed a lot, never had a true friend or a person who can rely on. It is more valuable for me than any degree or personal ability but I think I am going to be mostly a scientific expert rather than a social person. As a friend of mine told me once "You might save a nation some day, but you might not be able to save your self".

 

Mark Twain: Huckleberry Finn

I have put one of my  persuasive essays in my Advanced Placement(AP) American Literature class in high school about one of the best pieces of literature about the slavery. I am discussing about the possitive and negative points of the novel which can be useful for the people who have read Huck Finn before or will read that in the future. I also feel necessary to mention Katie Hillstrom, my teacher who have had a great influence on me to write this and helped me to become a better writer.
 
******
 
The Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” is a brilliant piece of literature; it also shows a part of American history. The Twain’s novel demonstrates the racism and social inequality which existed in the south.
 
The people, who believe that Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is an inappropriate novel to be taught in the schools, express their concern, around Jim’s character. The relationship between Jim and Huck, Their escape from home which they believe might affect on the young minorities and also the Huck’s treatment with his father. This kind of treatment is not accepted for must of the families and they do believe that Huck must not be honored in the book.
 
The definition for a brilliant piece of literature varies from every culture and society to another one. A good piece of literature should not be necessary have a solid form of grammar or writing. As a matter of fact a good novel or story is which can easily connects it self to everyone in the society. Twain’s used informal expressions as they were said in the south make his novel special, because, it connects his novel to the people in the south who were his main readers. It also made the people in the south more familiar with southerners’ culture. “Yo’ ole father don’t know, yit, he’s a gwyne …” Jim said to Huck; is a strong sample of Twain’s brilliant literature which brings humor and culture together to the readers.
 
Mark Twain’s novel demonstrates the American history. History includes special facts and aspects of each society which have been formed in a particular period of time. Slavery is one of the most important periods of United States History which he demonstrate this period and its difficulties in Jim’s character. “I am a slave and I’d be a slave for whole life” Jim said. This is a proof to the hopelessness and sadness environment of this period of history that Twain shows that beautifully in the Jim’s character.
 
As we have seen in the history, slavery and racism is one of the darkest points of this country’s history. Mark Twain in his novel has done his best to show the inequality and racism existed in the south which pursues Huck and Jim to escape. “You can buy me, and then I’d be free.” Jim said to Huck; the fact that a human could be easily sold like an animal without have any right to choose, think and argue.
 
In conclusion, the Mark twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn must be in the school curriculum because his novel tell the students the dirt and nastiness of slavery and racism. It brings this idea that every human being must be equal regardless of their color and gender, despite the fact that it was meaningless in the history for some people like Jim and many other slaves who have lived, killed and tortured in the slavery period. Thus the students must know these facts to be thankful of their freedom and society. 

Tuesday, July 20, 2004

 

Persian Comedian!!

Tissa Hami is one of the world’s few female Muslim stand-up comics.  Her unique act and fresh perspective on life as an Iranian-American woman leave audiences in shock and awe.  From Islamic fundamentalists to white liberals to good old-fashioned racists, no one is safe from Tissa’s sharp wit.  Tissa, who performs in Islamic hijab, hopes her comedy will help break down stereotypes about Muslim women and foster understanding between Iranians and Americans. 

Tissa grew up in a traditional Iranian family in a predominantly white suburb of Boston.  She holds Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in international affairs from Ivy League universities.  Her parents are thrilled that she is using her expensive education to pursue a career in comedy.

People who disapprove of her act will be taken hostage.
 
Learn more ...

 

Persia, A brief history

Persia, the country has always been known to its own people as Iran (land of the Aryans), although for centuries it was referred to as Persia (Pars or Fars, a province in southern Iran) by the Europeans, mainly due to the writings of Greek historians. In 1935 the Government specified that it should be called Iran; however, in 1949 they allowed both names to be used. 


Most people today, know Persia or Iran through its carpets, its caviar, and its costly war with its neighbor Iraq, or through its importance as one of the world's major oil-producing nations. Yet, Persia has one of the richest and oldest cultures in the world.  


For more than three thousand years Persia was a melting pot of civilizations and demographic movements between Asia and Europe. Under Cyrus the Great, it became the centre of the world's first empire. Successive invasions by the Greeks, Arabs, Mongols and Turks developed the nation's culture through rich and diverse philosophical, artistic, scientific and religious influences. 


Persia's first vigorous growth began in the Neolithic era, and by the third millennium B.C. it had developed into a civilization of great sophistication. The infiltration of the Aryan peoples into Iran during the second millennium B.C. paved that way for the Achaemenian dynasty, whose achievements were gloriously represented in the great palaces of Persepolis.


These monuments had been built to testify to the absolute power of the Achaemenian Empire, and yet they were razed to the ground in just one night by Alexander, who conquered Persia and begun the Hellenistic period. This was followed in less than two hundred years by the Parthian and then the Sassanian Empires.... 



 

Persia or Iran?

Sometimes I think about the possible reactions which people may have when they figure out I am an Iranian. Well, I am proud that I am Iranian, but in America there is a diffrence between being Iranian or Persian.
 
The diffrence orginates from the fact that because of the theocratic regime in Iran and hardliners policy over there, and a lot of other mistakes which they have made in the past quarter of century, Iran has been recognized as a an isolated state in the western communities. I do not condone that western people are right or they think the way it ought to be but we as the muslims have not been recognized as we can appreciate the western recognition.
 
Persia; a huge diffrence. When you introduce your self as Persian there is a great feel of pride in your soul, because of this name you will remember who you are a "Persian". The first superpower and the greatest civilization where it has been alwyas the melting pot of cultures and religions. Cyrus, Darus, and Zorost great names of history but unfortunately as Plato says " As the greatest civilizations will fall through out the history, the only thing which will be left from those civilizations will be their names". Are we truly one of those nations that are proud of the greatness of our ancestors? Then let the hands come together and bring back the soul of pride and power to our land "Iran" and that day I will say this loudly over the land that I am an "Iranian".

 

PersEternity!!

Well It's been such a long time that I have had the idea of making a web log but I couldn't aquire this wish till this moment. You might ask me why did you choose to name your blog PersEternity? Well, I am originally from Persia and I also wanted to write about eternity. Thus it is a good idea in order to have Persia and Eternity together and name that PersEternity. For more information about who I am and what I am supose to do in this univers you might be intrested to check out my personal webpage. I will come up with some more data to put in here as I will become more fluent with blogging!!!


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