Egypt Pyramids-worth watching video.
Reply
Author Archives: Editors
“Schools Opening” Brief Thought by F. Sheikh
I agree with Governor Cuomo that we do not have to choose between safety of children and opening the schools. We can achieve both if done properly and competently. The President is giving the nation a false choice between opening the schools and safety just as he did in opening businesses prematurely and it achieved neither. There is still enough time to take preventive measures which will help to open the schools safely in September. The measures start with the President himself. Start wearing mask yourself and mandate it for the nation. Stop and discourage rallies and gatherings which are source of close contacts and spread of virus. Actively promote, not undermine, mask wearing, hand washing, and social distancing. Make it mandatory for all your personnel and lead by example. This should be followed and promoted by all states and have one message for the nation to follow.
By September, it will create an environment which is much safer for the schools to open with original CDC guidelines (not watered down). During the months of July and August, White House and Congress should provide help to schools to prepare for the schools to open in September.
Blustering and threats to withhold aid will backfire and nation will pay a heavy price.
My Mother’s Dreams for Her Son, and All Black Children
She longed for black people in America not to be forever refugees—confined by borders that they did not create and by a penal system that killed them before they died.
By Hilton Als
By the late summer of 1967, when I turned seven, we’d been living in the house for six years. By “we,” I mean my mother, two of my four older sisters, and my little brother. And although we shared the place with a rotating cast of other relatives, including my mother’s mother and an aunt and her two children, I always considered it my mother’s home. The house was in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. Like all the moves my mother engineered or helped to engineer for our family, this one was aspirational. Despite the fact that Brownsville had begun its slow decline into drugs, poverty, and ghettoization years before, my mother’s house—the only one in her life that, after years of work and planning, she would even partly own—symbolized a break with everything we had known before, including an apartment in Crown Heights, with a shared bathroom near the stairwell, where, on Sunday nights, my mother would line her daughters up with freshly laundered towels so that they could take their weekly bath.
Privacy was something my sisters had to get used to. Our new house had doors and a proper sitting room, which sometimes served as a makeshift bedroom for visiting Bajan relatives. (My mother’s family was from Barbados.) The sister I was closest to, a poetry-writing star who wore pencil skirts to play handball with the guys, composed her verse amid drifts and piles of clothes and kept her door closed. My brother and I shared a smaller room and a bed. My mother had her own room, where the door was always ajar; she didn’t so much sleep there as rest between walks up and down the hall to watch and listen for the safety of her children.
posted by f.sheikh
“Contributions of Al-Khwarizmi to Mathematics and Geography” By Kamal Ayyubi
Muhammad ibn Musa Al-Khwarizmi is one of the greatest scientific minds of the medieval period and a most important Muslim mathematician who was justly called the ‘father of algebra’. Besides his founding the science of jabr, he made major contributions in astronomy and mathematical geography. In this article, focus is laid on his mathematical work in the field of algebra and his contribution in setting the foundation of the Islamic tradition of mathematical geography and cartography.
Introduction
Islam gave birth to a new civilization that spread from China in the east, India in the south east, Russia in the north, and Anatolia in the west of Asia, to East and North Africa up to the Mediterranean regions of Southern Europe. This civilisation was marked by a deep interest in science. In the heart of the Islamic scientific tradition lays the queen of sciences, mathematics, where the scholars of bilad al-Islam (lands of Islam) excelled in all its branches practiced in pre-modern times.
One of the greatest minds of the early mathematical production in Arabic was Abu Abdullah Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi (b. before 800, d. after 847 in Baghdad) who was a mathematician and astronomer as well as a geographer and a historian. It is said that he is the author in Arabic of one of the oldest astronomical tables, of one the oldest works on arithmetic and the oldest work on algebra; some of his scientific contributions were translated into Latin and were used until the 16th century as the principal mathematical textbooks in European universities. Originally he belonged to Khwârazm (modern Khiwa) situated in Turkistan but he carried on his scientific career in Baghdad and all his works are in Arabic. He was summoned to Baghdad by Abbasid Caliph Al-Ma’mun (213-833), who was a patron of knowledge and learning. Al-Ma’mun established the famous Bayt al-Hikma (House of Wisdom) which worked on the model of a library and a research academy. It had a large and rich library (Khizânat Kutub al-Hikma) and distinguished scholars of various faiths were assembled to produce scientific masterpieces as well as to translate faithfully nearly all the great and important ancient works of Greek, Sanskrit, Pahlavi and of other languages into Arabic. Muhammad al-Khwarizmi, according to Ibn al-Nadîm [1] and Ibn al-Qiftî [2] (and as it is quoted by the late Aydin Sayili) [3], was attached to (or devoted himself entirely to) Khizânat al-Hikma. It is also said that he was appointed court astronomer of Caliph Al-Ma’mun who also commissioned him to prepare abstracts from one of the Indian books entitled Surya Siddhanta which was called al-Sindhind [4] in Arabic [5]. Al-Khwarizmi’s name is linked to the translation into Arabic of certain Greek works [6] and he also produced his own scholarly works not only on astronomy and mathematics but also in geography and history. It was for Caliph al-Ma’mun that Al-Khwarizmi composed his astronomical treatise and dedicated his book on Algebra.
posted by f. sheikh