Cool!

Cool! somebody has put my recent post about the role of media in Clipmark. Check it out, and hopefully express your thoughts.

Return of the Exam-Man

I am finally back after a long time and after a month full of exams and projects and applications! My GRE was much better than what I though it would be but maybe it wasn't as I first planned it. The reason is pretty simple as a matter of fact: in the last two weeks leading to the test I found out that I have two other exams, one the day before and one the day after the exam. And just when I finished that horrible week of exams I found out I have two other coming the next week and when I was almost done with them I found out that TOEFL expires in two years and mine has just lost its validity a week before.
But now it is much more relaxing. I should just hand in a project by the end of the week and then fly to Norway next week to begin my christmas vacation. Meanwhile I have a lot of half written posts that I should finish and put them here.

An evening with Jay Leno

It is really sad and frightening what the world is driving itself into. It seems that we are heading towards a real mess full of misunderstandings and animosity. And it is not like just a simple misunderstanding between two friends. This is the kind of deep painful misunderstanding that has thickened through the years and it has speeded up in the last three or four years. What seems to worsen the case is that it seems everyone is ok with this and no one is stepping forward to make a move and make things better. Among all these the media is playing the role of the match for this pile of dry firewood.
A few days ago I saw one of Jay Leno's programs. Well! The whole center idea of this episode was making fun of Iran's space program. Making fun of things is ok in a comedy but to give wrong data to make people hate a country where most of the Americans are already considering it enemy and especially in this offensive cruel manner where it tends to insult the whole country does not seem fair. Of course, what else is fair now?
Anyway, it is not funny any more to call an Iranian, Mustafa. First of all, it is more an Arabic name and word than Iranian and I have told you how they feel when they are told they are Arabs. And second, it is one of the titles of prophet of Islam, Muhammad. So it is an insult to a religion than to anything else.
When someone from Middle East sees this it really annoys him, not because of the insults and making jokes out of them but maybe mostly because they are doing it by giving misleading information and introducing them in a totally false way.
This I think is the most serious problem of our world today. Although we claim that now we live in a small village of world and the distances have shortened by the means of internet and media, at the same time we hardly know each other very well and we are full of prejudgments and misunderstandings. And the very means that should have helped solve this problem has turned to worsen it: the Media.