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The Box That Built The Modern World

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By Andrew Curry In Nautilus

Engineering: How shipping containers made distance irrelevant. 

“Think of the shipping container as the Internet of things. Just as your email is disassembled into discrete bundles of data the minute you hit send, then re-assembled in your recipient’s inbox later, the uniform, ubiquitous boxes are designed to be interchangeable, their contents irrelevant.

Once they enter the stream of global shipping, the boxes are shifted and routed by sophisticated computer systems that determine their arrangement on board and plot the most efficient route to get them from point to point. The exact placement of each box is a critical part of the equation: Ships make many stops, and a box scheduled to be unloaded late in the journey can’t be placed above one slated for offloading early. Imagine a block of 14,000 interlocked Lego bricks—now imagine trying to pull one out from the middle.

The container’s efficiency has proven to be an irresistible economic force. Last year the world’s container ports moved 560 million 20-foot containers—nearly 1.5 billion tons of cargo altogether. Though commodities like petroleum, steel ore, and coal still move in specially designed bulk cargo ships, more than 90 percent of the rest—everything from clothes to cars to computers—now travels inside shipping containers. “Reefer” containers, insulated and equipped with cooling units, carry refrigerated cargo and are plugged into power sources on ships or at dockside. Because the containers are all identical, any ship can move them.

Those already huge numbers are expected to grow. Increasingly, cargo companies are looking for ways to move bulk cargo in containers, fitting the steel boxes with bladders to transport liquid chemicals or cleaning them and using polypropylene liners to move anything from soy, corn, and wheat to salt and sugar.”

“By driving the cost of shipping internationally way down and the speed of global commerce way up, containers made the globalization of manufacturing possible. Yet for all the concept’s seeming simplicity, the actual process is fiendishly complex.

To get a sense of how the system works, imagine one of the containers aboard the Hong Kong Express, which is owned by German shipping giant Hapag-Lloyd. Asked to trace a product through a typical container voyage, Hapag-Lloyd spokesman Rainer Horn suggests a T-shirt sewn at a factory near Beijing, the kind you might buy at H&M.

Tagged, folded, and boxed, the T-shirt would be “stuffed” into a container with 33,999 identical shirts at the factory. Once sealed with a plastic tag and listed on a computerized manifest, the merchandise could pass through nearly three dozen steps before arriving at a discount clothing retailer’s distribution center near Munich. There’s the trucker who moves the box to a waiting ship in Xinjiang, the feeder ship that moves it to Singapore to be loaded onto a bigger Europe-bound freighter, the crane operator in Hamburg, customs officials, train engineers, and more.

Yet the container’s uniformity smooths each step of the way. Trucks and trains are fitted to haul the identical boxes; cranes are designed to lift the same thing over and over. The total time in transit for a typical box from a Chinese factory to a customer in Europe might be as little as 35 days. Cost per shirt? “Less than one U.S. cent,” Horn says. “It doesn’t matter anymore where you produce something now, because transport costs aren’t important.”

http://nautil.us/issue/3/in-transit/the-box-that-built-the-modern-world

Posted By F. Sheikh

 

‘Growing wings in a bus’ A Short Story By Masud Alam

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A worth reading short story.

The girl standing in the women’s section among more men than women in the morning rush hour had been, with all the force of indoctrination, prior experience, and will, pretending as if nothing just happened that concerned her.

When hero took over the situation and had two fellow passengers restraint the offender, he tapped her shoulder with a polite, ‘bibi’. She recoiled in horror. The hand pushing against her buttocks was obviously out of her sight; it was not supposed to be seen by anyone at all. The journey would soon end and she could reclaim her body without a blemish, and without anyone knowing anything about the hand or where it had been wandering. It only happens for a short while, why turn it into a bigger museebat by reacting to it? This policy had worked for her till that day.

The kindly tap on her shoulder pulled her out of a world she’d made up to escape from the real world of a crowded bus and male bodies pressing against her. It exposed her in front of strangers, all looking at her expectantly and imagining God knows what in their heads. She was mortified. She wanted to cry but her features stayed frozen in fright. She raised her eyes with difficulty and looked around in a quick semi circular movement of head. She wanted to plead for help, help her get out of this embarrassment that she was about to be pushed deeper into. All she saw was a blur of male faces perspiring and flushed with the heat of July as much as that of unfamiliar emotions.

Would I want my sister in the shoes of this young woman? Tauba tauba, Allah forbid. Anyways, now that something as commonplace as caressing a butt has been criminalised, let’s see what comes out of it. Females are passive, you do things to her, she is not supposed to react. What is this one going to say or do about it? It was a private court held by a strong man and that was as good an assurance as can be that justice will be done and done quickly. They looked on expectantly.

‘Bibi, look at this beghairat, especially his face, because you are the last one to see this face intact. Go and kick his face until his ears come out of his eyes’. Hero’s voice had the elder brotherly command and assurance in equal measure. She was covering her face with her chador, showing only her anxious, sometimes frightened and sometimes pitiful eyes. Her hands were clasped tight to keep them from shaking. She hadn’t spoken a word, or moved a foot. She was half turned back, towards the men’s section and even with downcast eyes, couldn’t avoid the sight of the offender pinned down on a seat two rows from her. She looked up at hero, begged him with her eyes for something that wasn’t clear to either, and bowed her head again. Click Link for full article;

http://www.dawn.com/news/1030595/growing-wings-in-a-bus

( Posted By F. Sheikh)

Pakistan’s first sect-free mosque calls for end to discrimination Submitted by Tahir Mahmmod

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This is one of the most heart warming posting we have received for the TF.  Thanks Tahir sahib.

Shoeb

ISLAMABAD: Darul Iman Jamia Masjid Qurtuba’s story is as dramatic as the sectarian history of Pakistan. The newly-built mosque in Islamabad’s Margalla foothills is calling upon its followers to stop discriminating along sectarian lines and to start praying together – in whichever way they like – under the same roof.

Zahid Iqbal is a local businessman who conceptualised the idea of a sect-free mosque in 2010. He bought the mosque plot in the E-11 sector. But the road to the realisation of his dream wasn’t easy: At first, authorities refused to register it as a sect-free mosque. Under Capital Development Authority rules, every mosque has to declare its sect following, before being granted permission to build the mosque.

The procedure involved some complicated maneuvering: To bypass the strict rules, he registered a trust, and then sub-registered the mosque under the trust’s banner: The Al-Kitaab Foundation Trust.

Meanwhile, Iqbal has already found an Imam for the mosque – Qari Jehangir, who is currently doing his Master’s degree from the Islamic University. The coordinator of the mosque is doing his MBA from Preston University. Both are young men in their twenties. The Imam and Khateeb are both from different sects – and the mosque administration says it will have no problem if a Shia Imam leads prayers.

There’s a simple philosophy behind Iqbal’s revolutionary idea. For the mosque’s administration, branding Islam along sectarian lines has damaged religion more than any other reason. “By branding ourselves on sectarian lines we have even put non-believers to shame through violence and unruly conduct,” the businessman said. He believes that mullahs have turned religion into business ventures for petty personal gains.

Calling his prayer hall a ‘model mosque’, Iqbal added, “This is God’s house. Even non-Muslims are allowed to come and seek the light.”

In addition, the mosque, located in the northern strip of the capital in the E-11/2 sector, not only invites all sects, but also has a separate section for women, and a library filled with religious books from all sects. With the support of other businessmen and overseas Pakistanis, the 2-kanal compound has been built at a cost of Rs30 million.

The mosque is also funding at least ten students’ completion of their Bachelor’s degree, which they could otherwise not have afforded.

So far, Iqbal is thrilled by the reaction he has received from people. “There has been individual criticism but overall a collective acceptance amongst the community is settling in,” he said, adding that people from different sects are already praying there together, although the number is not yet big enough to cover the 350-people prayer hall.

Despite the heightened sectarian strife that plagues Pakistan, the Darul Iman Jamia Masjid Qurtuba has no qualms in declaring its message loud and clear. A bold tag welcomes the followers to the mosque stating: “This mosque does not discriminate between any sects and welcomes all Muslims.”

Considering the environment at this time, it appears the kind of initiative which was bound to attract the attention of the Taliban. Iqbal recalled how on one recent evening, more than ten members of the Taliban came to his mosque and argued with his thinking and “not adhering to his sect”. The businessman claimed that he debated the Taliban for hours and convinced them to stop opposing his interpretation of Islam. But he knows that they may come back.

This wasn’t the only obstacle that the mosque administrator faced. Iqbal also recalled how the plot for his mosque was forcibly taken over by the ‘Imam’ of another mosque. “After I bought the plot in 2010 for the mosque, I had tasked an architect to prepare its design. In the meantime I was complimented by friends for constructing the structure of my mosque in record time. I was shocked to see that my plot was taken over by a mullah along with his ‘body builder type’ madrassah students. I had to call the police to vacate the plot,” he said.

For now, the mosque administration is planning to spread their message to other mosques as well. As a starting point, the mosque owner is giving Friday sermons in another mosque, also in E-11, to urge people to shun sectarian differences and forge unity amongst their ranks.

While the administration of the mosque acknowledges that it receives some of its funding from the US, it adds in the same breath that that doesn’t necessarily mean it endorses all its policies. “How can we term US aid bad if we ourselves are receiving funding from Pakistanis in the US? But we do condemn US support for Israel against the Palestinians,” he said candidly.

Meanwhile, for the coming Eid, the mosque is planning to hold its first multi-sect gathering for Eid prayers. A bigger gathering, the administration hopes, will be one more step towards tackling sectarianism.

Sectarian militancy, and the resulting violence, has led to hundreds of deaths in recent history. In 2012 alone, according to the Human Rights Watch, 400 members of the Shia community were killed. This included 125 in Balochistan. Most of these were members of the ethnic Hazara community. Things only got worse in 2013, when the worst attack on Hazaras in the history of Pakistan took place in the beginning of the year – responsibility for the attack which led to 92 deaths, and over 120 injured, was claimed by increasingly brazen terrorist group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. Besides a barrage of suicide bombings, targeted killings have also taken place of prominent members of the Shia community across Pakistan.

The increasing sectarian strife has even led to several members of the Hazara community fleeing the country in hope of asylum elsewhere, often in Australia.

 

 

NEGOTIATING THE LOWARI PASS IN NORTHWEST PAKISTAN-RISKING IT ALL

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It is a worth watching video-how trucks negotiate the dangerous mountainous unpaved roads in Northwest Pakistan. One has to hold breath on every second of the video. It also evokes old memories, if you have traveled these mountains with class trips. Click link below to watch video. Picture below is of same mountain area;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=DVyPwgC7OpU

Imgur

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=DVyPwgC7OpU

Posted By F. Sheikh