Ted Mahsun

Alike for those who To-day prepare, And for those that after a To-morrow stare, A Muezzin from the Tower of Darkness cries, "Fools! Your Reward is neither Here nor There!" --Omar Khayyam; translated by Edward Fitzgerald I keep wanting to write a fantasy story inspired by this. Perhaps one day.

Now that we're sending Muslims up into space, the West seems to be amused with the fact that our very own Muslim scientists have drafted up guides on worshipping procedures in space. Wired's got an article worth reading about the problems in facing the kiblat and how to find Mecca from space: Dr. Kamal Abdali, a cartographer who is also Muslim and who has written (.pdf) extensively on determining the qibla, favors the great circle route, but adds, "Prayer is not supposed to be a gymnastic exercise. One is supposed to concentrate on the prayer rather the exact orientation." He points out that in a train or plane, it's customary to start in the qibla direction but then continue the prayer without worrying about possible changes in position. But how does that work in space? Mathematically, Shukor would need to place both ISS and Mecca on the same imaginary sphere -- by either comparing the place on Earth directly beneath ISS with the real Ka'aba, or by project...

This picture was taken by the Voyager I spacecraft on 5 March 1979. It reminds me very much of Van Gogh's Starry Night . I'm still in a bit of a daze but if I wasn't in the cloud I am in right now, I'd probably right a quirky little story inspired by it. Via Wired .

This isn't book related but I'm blogging this to remind me to write a sf novel one day that has this concept-- generating tornados on demand and using them to power our cities ! This so-crazy-it-might-just-work idea could only have come from a Caractacus Potts -type of character, and so it has. Louis Michaud, who came up with the concept in his garage in Toronto, ...has spent the past 40 years studying tornados and hurricanes, and is convinced it's possible to engineer and control powerful, full-scale whirlwinds and harness their energy to produce emission-free electricity. Forget wind farms and their intermittent operation: the future of electricity generation could be tornado power on demand. Michaud has adapted this process to create what he calls a vortex engine, and has patented the invention in both Canada and the United States. Recently, he formed a company called AVEtec Energy Corp. with an aim to turning this unconventional – and to many, unthinkable – approach to...