I’ve been feeling this pain in my right arm for a while now. It is faint most of the time, but once a day it ramps into this sharp piercing pain.

All evidence points to a pinched nerve, which shouldn’t be a problem once I get time to visit a massage therapist and, more importantly, replace my shoulder bag.

This morning, I received –what I will choose to interpret as– another sign that the shoulder bag should go. A three-year-old girl turned to her mom as I passed them by and asked, “Mommy, is he a mailman?”

Each branch tipped
with a folded cone, gasping
like fish in air:

Spring is late, limping.

Now a goldfinch flits
by the feeder — a daffodil
with wings.

by Susan Robertson.

(*first seen on the bus on a cloudy late Spring afternoon.)

This week on zumblr:
Egyptian beatbox
Guardian: comment is free: Evolution giveth …
NASA MODIS Image: Dust storm off the north coast of Egypt.
PopularMechanics’ report on Microsoft’s Surface.
Trailer - My religion or my country - documentary about the bahaai quagmire in Egypt. (Arabic w English subtitles.)
Egyptian Candid Camera, The Panel.
Medhat Saleh sings the situation in Egypt.

You got some real nice frontal lobes; are they real?

Projection of Egypt’s population over the next 20 years. Numbers from CIA factbook.

A friend pointed out to me, very tactfully and somewhat covertly, that this blog has more of a tumblelog feel to it at times. I agree. Thus, I’m starting a tumblelog, zumblr, to collect the little snippets. Leaving this one for…whatever you might call the other stuff.

Lisa has a really nice post (including shots of two really nice poems by Darwish and Adunis) about Poetry for the Road,

Excerpts from poems in Hebrew, Arabic and French have been emblazoned on colourful banners and suspended from the trees lining the city’s boulevards; there are also miniature take-home versions in the form of postcards that have been distributed amongst the cafes.

She did not attempt to translate Adunis’ poem, and perhaps I shouldn’t have either, but… under the influence of Shajarian’s music and such wonderful words, who can resist? So here’s my attempt. Please be generous with your criticism.

The child I used to be,
once
appeared to me,
a stranger.
He didn’t utter a word. We walked,
glancing at one another in silence. Our strides
a river running astray.

disclaimer: this post contains zero euphemisms.

You most probably know that matter is made of atoms, which were thought to be indivisible. You probably know that this is not true — we now know that an atom has a nucleus, which is made of proton(s) and neutron(s), orbited by electron(s). You’ve heard of electrons, right? They’re from the lepton family, which includes muons and neutrinos. These are thought to be fundamental indivisible units of matter. Hadrons (protons, neutrons, etc.) on the other hand, are made of quarks (of which there are six: up, down, top, bottom, and the amusingly named charm and strange.) We, collectively and individually, do not know whether this is the end of the story, or whether there’s more to it. (If you’re a betting man, go for the “more” option.)

One of the big questions (besides whether these particles are essentially fundamental or whether they are composed of other more fundamental units) is why these particles have mass at all, let alone the actual observed masses they have. This, and other really interesting questions could possibly be answered in your lifetime (even if you only have a few years to live) thanks to a huge project ($8 billion) that is set to go online soon — the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN.

There’s been some good reporting on the LHC, including this documentary (49 mins.), and a really good article a couple of weeks ago in the NewYorker (accompanied with a decent slideshow), which I would suggest you start with. I like this quote from CERN’s chief scientific officer, Jos Engelen, addressing concerns that the experiment might create tiny blackholes that would destroy earth:

Among Engelen’s responsibilities is dealing with the frequent calls and letters CERN receives about the possibility that the Large Hadron Collider will destroy the world. When I asked about this, Engelen picked up a Bic pen and placed it in front of me.

“In quantum mechanics, there is a probability that this pen will fall through the table,” he said. “All of a sudden, it will be on the floor. Because it can behave as a wave, it can go through; we call that the ‘tunnel effect.’ If you calculate the probability that this happens, it is not identical to zero. It is a very small probability. But it never happens. I’ve never seen it happen. You have never seen it happen. But to the general public you make a casual remark, ‘It is not identical to zero, it is very small,’ and . . . ” He shrugged.