7-YEAR ECONOMIC CYCLE

December 17, 2015December 17, 2015 Fawzan Alsharif Leave a comment

(First published in August 2015).

In both the Quran and the Bible (Genesis) it is known that Pharaoh had a dream of 7 fat cows eaten by 7 thin cows. This was interpreted as 7 good years eaten by 7 bad years. Today’s New York economic cycle follows a similar pattern. You start a bubble, then you intentionally burst it at 7 years. It is like building a beautiful home, then you destroy it in 7 years, it is creative destructionism at its best. A bubble burst in 2001, add 7 years, you get the crash of 2008, add 7 years of Fed’s ZIRP policy, you end up with this month’s crash of 2015. A clear 7-Year period. You can go back to 1994, and 1987 (Period T=7 years, Same pattern).

Almost always, crashes happen in the last month in the Jewish Calendar, the month of Elul. This is August. See what’s happening now in August, or what happened in August 2008, etc. All debt needs to be wiped out before end of the Jewish Calendar year so the Lord is happy. The same applies to the end of the 7th year, all debt must go. It seems, after all, the money masters follow some religious guidelines, and you may benefit from this macro-level knowledge.

ON IRREVERSIBILITY AND TERMINAL ILLNESS.

October 21, 2015 Fawzan Alsharif Leave a comment

In science, one learns about irreversibility, unavailability, and entropy. As students, irreversible processes are difficult to grasp. Young people see everything possible and reversible, it is part of their very “elastic” minds / brains. Once married with children, irreversible processes become easy to understand. Just try to undo marriage and children, good luck! Very little recovery. An irreversible process.

Recovery is the important metric for reversibility/irreversibility concepts.

If you study math, and then decide to change to a biology major, you will have good recovery (credits applied, residual useful knowlege, etc.) There’s short-term and long-term recovery. Some math knowlege may come in handy in your future projects. This is the concept of “hysteresis” – how much recovery (net output) given the history of the input in effect.

Now to terminally ill people. They’re not only ill, they also have a relatively short time to live. Their sickness is irreversible. News of such illness creates a shock wave. This creates instant “disorder” in thinking (turbulence). The shock wave will dissipate after a short while, and acceptance takes place. The patient now understands she moved from the sublime to the ridiculous in no time (discontinuity point).

What to do in the few weeks left on earth?
What legacy (read net recovery) to leave for children and the world?

If the person is an experienced professional, transfer of knowledge and experience (book project) maybe a good rewarding activity, crowning the end of the patient’s life with an immortal gift that will benefit many others in the future.

Other end of life activities should be focused on immortality actions, things that have a purpose and leave net legacy for relatives and the world, things of rememberance (knowledge, wisdom, keepsakes, etc.) Issues of estate transfer and allocation are appropriate activities during the acceptance period.

“هل أدلكم على شجرة الخلد وملك لا يبلى”

This verse in the Quran summarizes life drivers and in the correct order: (1) tree of immortality (your children, your legacy, anything that ensures continuity), and (2) possessions (personal property, wealth, fame).

Death will render these drivers useless.

INCENSE AND EXORCISM.

September 23, 2015September 23, 2015 Fawzan Alsharif Leave a comment

Incense (العود / Oud) has been used to get rid of demons, jinn, and other evil spirits for thousands of years. Yet none can explain exactly why burning incense works. It is unfair to dismiss the claim that it works (absent immediate results and due to the invisibility of the target entities) given that this tradition was central to the life of Ancient Egyptians, Chinese Dynasties, Native Indians, Muslim Sufis, and many others.

Here’s a possible explanation that I put forward. The best incense burns in blue color (e.g. blue Oud). Now remember that angels exist up there in the invisible ultra-violet portion of the frequency spectrum (blue sky/cloud association), while demons, jinn, the Devil, and evil spirits belong to the infra-red, the other end of the spectrum (underground). Burning blue incense is like exposing infra-red creatures to ultra-violet (blue) waves, and such exposure can drive these spirits from the exposure area. It is disruptive. It is known that light of different wavelengths does not add or subtract frequency. The effect is not from interaction, but rather from exposure or existence of an unfavorable light (blue.)

It is possible instead of burning incense, based on this hypothesis, to use a blue light at home to drive evil spirits away. This also assumes that the aroma of burnt incense is irrelevant to the invisible entity and that it is more of a sensory need for humans to experience the magic of the event. This is especially true that there’s no consensus on the smell of incense (sandalwood, myrrh, etc.) for effectiveness of evil spirit removal, suggesting a subjective human element.

This scientific explanation, while simple, it is coming to you over 5000 years too late 😉

ON GROWTH. YOUR BANK ACCOUNT VS. YOUR BODY?

September 7, 2015 Fawzan Alsharif Leave a comment

Growth is always seen as a positive attribute until it reaches your own body. If I tell you, for example, I will grow your wallet or your bank account by a few thousand dollars, this is seen as a good proposal. But if I tell you, grow your body bigger by 20%, this is seen as a negative proposal. Wallet fatter ok, waist line fatter, not OK. So what gives?

The difference, in short, is in the infrastructure. You cannot build a Dodge Ram size vehicle on a Mini Cooper vehicle chassis. But if you do, you will overload and maybe break that Mini chassis. The same concept applies in the case of your body, since the infrastructure (your chassis / skeleton / backbone) is “fixed”, any additional growth (beyond normal BMI) is seen as negative since such growth will strain your body and its organs (engine/heart overload, also auxiliary/organs overload). The only way adding pounds to your body will be seen as positive is when you can scale up your skeleton; add 1 foot of skeletal structure along your height, hypothetically, and add a few pounds, no problem whatsoever.

In the process of growing a business, operators forget to scale up their business quickly. Your business grows by 50%, then you don’t keep the same business skeleton, you will need to hire more people, invest in new facilities, or else you will strain your resources, and your best workers will leave you (or fail on you, similar to body kidney failure with overload.)

When you get a bigger family, you will need to scale up; bigger home, hire maid service, etc. Absent that, the system will not be sustainable, unhappiness ensues.

The lesson learnt; good growth is accompanied with commensurate infrastructural growth. This may seem like common sense, but it is most frequently ignored because of the immediate added cost to scale up the infrastructure. The long-term cost of not adding it quickly is much higher.

ON SYNTHESIS AND ANALYSIS.

September 6, 2015September 6, 2015 Fawzan Alsharif Leave a comment

So which comes first? As young kids, we use Lego bricks to build structures and ideas- some designs of sorts. This is synthesis. Once you have the first completed structure, you can do some analysis, then decide to reiterate on the design to improve it. Synthesis takes place again – as new ideas are synthesized / compounded. Your first Lego car design had no wheels, the 2nd one did as you discovered the first car didn’t roll. Synthesis first. Engineering is all about this continuous process of synthesis-analysis-synthesis. God does not need to do any of this, he creates things perfect, at first go – no iterative synthesis. We, on the other hand, err every step of the way. So synthesis is our way of saying we cannot see the optimal design right away, we have to work hard to understand things. All those corporate departments of research and development, analysis groups, etc are an acknowlegment of how little we know a priori.

NEUROLOGY, FRONTAL CORTEX, THE QURAN, AND SYSTEMS ENGINEERING.

August 9, 2015August 9, 2015 Fawzan Alsharif Leave a comment

There’s a lot of talk about the connection between verses in the Quran implicitly citing the frontal brain cortex as responsible for lying / wrong-doing, and recent academic research independently supporting this citation.

The direct verse: “No! If he does not stop, We will take him by the naseyah, a lying sinful naseyah” (Quran 96:15-16), where naseyah is generally explained as the front of head of human or animal.

The academic research is documented well – and is easily searchable – on the fact that the pre-frontal area is responsible for decision-making; e.g. lying vs telling the truth.

I am adding to this today a system element, which is that of the “controller” in a feedback loop system as shown in the attached diagram.

More than it being a processing unit, I think the naseyah is the controller only, it has the algorithm and filters that minimize the errors, relative to the individual’s ideals (level of faith.) The job of the controller ends with a signal that goes to the brain (processor) to trigger an action through the available body actuators (hands, legs, mouth, etc.) These actions maybe good or evil, depending on the controller and its logic.

Following the action, the sensors (eyes and ears) collect data about the output (response), and feed it back to the controller for additional revised (improved or worsened) control signals. For example, to change mind about sth that was said or apologies about action, or take new action (walk away, say sth else, etc).

The controller is the most important part of a system because the logic in it defines the efficiency of the entire system. If the person is educated (refined logic), the system (person) response will be more fine-tuned, more stable (less violent, no erratic response), and will reach his or her set target.

Controller logic means the different filters (education, faith, ethics, and other decision filters). In the frontal cortex, this is a complex highly non-linear algorithm.

In the first surah (chapter) of the Quran, it reads: “guide us to the straight path”, the straight path defined by God is a system target. How fast you can reach this target will depend on the controller algorithm (again depends on education, faith, ethics, etc.) A good efficient controller is one that takes you, fastest, in stable mode to the desired target.

Note also that the location of the brain controller is, by design, near the eyes, which is the primary sensor for efficient feedback and filtering.

The goal of this short article is to clarify what the job of the brain pre-frontal area (controller) is. The current conclusions following related academic research are attributing more to this controller than it actually does, it is only one part of the system; processing, actions, sensors have other complementary roles too.

Sorbitol in Hookah Tobacco

August 3, 2015 Fawzan Alsharif Leave a comment

This is always a “hot” topic. Hookah Tobacco consists of about 20% tobacco, and the rest is Glycerin (vegetable product), artificial flavors (esters, etc.), and sweetners (sugars, invert sugar, and/or sorbitol) which oftentimes are loosely referred to as honey or sweet base molasses. It hardly ever contains natural flavors.

Here I will only discuss “Sorbitol”, which is a sweetner you most commonly find in your toothpaste along with Xylitol. Your body naturally makes sorbitol when breaking down glucose. When you smoke hookah, sorbitol will be completely burnt at around 300 degrees C (coal burning temperature.) This is a very high temperature. The result is formaldehyde and acetaldehyde, some known carcinogens to humans. These products materialize thru the hydrogenation of CO. If your eyes become red or itchy while smoking, this maybe the result of 2 additional by-products; acrolein, and furfural.

The hookah Tobacco ingredients look innocent on the surface, but once you burn them at 300 deg C, the ugly output shows up.

Jordan is one of the world’s top producers of hookah tobacco. This makes it a primary exporter of cancer to humans smoking these productks. This unfortunately helps indirectly solve part of the global over-population problem.

Pictured in Amman, JO, at a Hookah Tobacco manufactory

ON JINN. OR JINN AND PHYSICS.

July 27, 2015July 27, 2015 Fawzan Alsharif Leave a comment

Some 18 months ago, Movie Director Ajmal Zaheer Ahmad invited me for an interview to provide a scientific opinion about the existence of Jinn (a creature made from Fire and is mentioned in the 3 holy books.) Ajmal released the movie Jinn on 4/4/14, but it was far from successful. What follows is my rant about Jinn from an Electromagnetics standpoint.
———————
From the physics standpoint, there are 2 main issues regarding Jinn:

1. The eye as the tool for perceiving images. The images can be of physical or virtual objects. The eye has frequency limitations. Example, the bulb frequency at 60 Hz, the light actually blinks 60 times per second, but we do not see it blink, as our eye cannot resolve that frequency. So our understanding of the world will always be limited to what the eye can see. What it cannot see remains an unknown unkown.

2. Electromagnetic Specturm. When it comes to electromagnetics, we talk about a spectrum, yet we continue to talk about angels, humans, and Jinn. Perhaps there are other creatures for each level in the known electromagnetic spectrurm. So there maybe a continuum, not just discrete points.

Just below the visible spectrum that we can see, you can find infrared waves, and this is where Jinn belong to. On the other end, above the visible spectrurm, there is ultra-violet, above the clouds where angels belong. This is why angels are depicted as above the clouds light-weight short wavelength creatures. The point is that both angels and jinn operate outside the visible spectrum of the human eye. To see jinn, first you have to feel cold (consistent with reports) if you are near it, because it has to suck energy out of its surroundings to create that dense infrared hologram or ghost. That temperature gradient, will make the person seeing the ghost feel cold. Infrared waves are known to penetrate deeper into earth, thus the notion that Jinn live underground.

I think we are disturbing the lives of Jinn and other creatures today with our use of low frequency systems such as radars, microwave, and radio waves. They may be angry at us.

The word Jinn is also related to Jinna which in Arabic means madness or craze. This means that the devil, himself a Jinn, or other jinns can interfere with the human’s low frequency brain waves, and cause a behavioral change, on the extreme driving the person to insanity.

Maybe people in the past knew or saw of Jinn more than we did due to better spiritual connections, Jinn and the devil at the infrared level are almost always associated with the color red, which is the lowest frequency in the visible spectrum (the color of blood, longest wavelength, our eyes will see it quickly, it is a primitive instinct), vs. the blue color (high frequency, short wavelength) associated with angels and the blue skies. I can speculate easily that if a Jinn would show up here now, it would have a red color tone based on the energy needed to generate its ghost around the infrared frequency and going into a red color wavelength.

Science

Sorbitol in Hookah Tobacco

ON JINN. OR JINN AND PHYSICS.

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