the 'islamic' time standardization institute

For those of you who does not know the reknowned turkish novel writer ahmet hamdi tanpınar and his witty work the time regulation institute, the joke in the title of our yet again turkish plagiarism story, will be lost.

in his famous book tanpınar criticises the superficial hence ala turca attempts of modernization via the all too important 'time regulation institute' and the story of the individuals who use the time regulation concepts to further their personal agenda.

well it finally happened. and sometimes reality is stranger and funnier than fiction.

mustafa helvacı, an astronomer in ankara university starts working in the religion ministry in turkey as an astronomer, since prayer time regulation is very important and one of the main tasks of the ministry: 'the standardisation of prayer times and calendars.' later he used his internal knowledge and possible contracts to acquire a scholarship for research on 'the orbital motion of moon.'

but apparently he used the money to conduct his own research on circumstellar dust around asymptotic giant branch stars. 4 years later in 2001 he came back to turkey supposing he got his degree on the 'moon orbits,' and for some reason he later got another degree in astronomy from his department on dust around AGB stars in 2003.

funny part is he has been personal advisor to former minister current president abdullah gül, and he continued his work in various government institutions due to his connections with the rising islamist party.

it was published on an article today on the 'republican' (read opposition to the islamists in turkey) newspaper. it mentions, the majority of the work is in web and have been done by the astronomers. i could not find the actual reference but i will get to the bottom of it. i will not be surprised that it was an astronomer collective action.

anyhow here is helvacı's information in ankara university website, from his kentucky connection and research papers in ads.

neuroquantology - or - here comes a new challenger

after our (as the people's physicists front) yarman triumph through wiki deletion and witnessing the unfolding of the anılır story it was time for a new target, a new challenge. and our wishes were fulfilled without further ado. behold:

NeuroQuantology

as my fellow physicist comrades point out the necessity of violent physical force against the bullshit users of the term "quantum" we are set out to find and ridicule relevant bullshit. like quantum leadership or quantum therapy. in between the penis size increase google ads, some kind of personal help book pops out of the white noise with some kind of scientific reference.

we of course know the fringes which relate consciousness with quantum processes which are even worse than the gravitation fringes which only are interested in the physics theories. the reason being, when the bullshit theories diffuse to the scientific area concerned with human issues, the applications of the relevant bullshit to real life situations become immense hence the possibility to infect and effect the society is considerable. but nothing would have prepared us for the horror of a journal in citation index.

first of all meet the person behind the scene, doctor sultan tarlacı. he is a medical doctor of neurology working in our lovely city of izmir, at a private hospital. he is a writer of many books and operator of a blog called quantum brain (kuantumbeyin) which is a "best of" assembly of bullshit buzzwords including but not only constrained to: quantum, psi, parapsychology, neurophilosophy. he also publicizes his books on brain, psychology and quantum physics and seems to have gathered some following due to his exotic assortment of topics.

there is nothing wrong up to this point. but when the jokes stop being a joke and the feyerabendian distopic scientific practice (=proliferation of the "truth value" of a topic through propaganda and public relations) starts to be applied for this pseudo scientific discourse then the line needs to be drawn. it turns out neuroquantology is not just a bullshit topic in a blog but a editor reviewed journal.

as good rationalist physicists we disseminated the bullshit and appropriately ridiculed it on friendfeed. but the funny thing is, apparently our dear doctor googles himself hence paid us a visit and even made us famous in his blog by answering our allegations and linking to our friendfeed topic!

the title is "the brain impaired are squeezing for fat in a fly," referring to a turkish proverb.

nevertheless he made us so happy that, rather than answering to him in friendfeed we decided to put our allegations here, also in english, to start up disillusioning the not only the current status of quantology but also the thompson-reuters which put the journal to the list.

anyhow; tarlacı's rebuttals of our allegations are irrelevant and amusing at best: ranging from his test scores as a medical student, to sadly not being able to make money from "his new paradigm." but the most disturbing ones are first, as formerly mentioned the isi indexing of neuroquantology which is a long topic that i will go into detail; and secondly the inclusion of nobel laureate brian david josephson in their editorial board. according to tarlaci's logic, josephson's existence in their journal should prove the scientific nature of it.

for the uninformed; josephson is won the nobel prize in physics (1973) for his work on condensed matter when he was 33 (24 according to tarlacı), and then later he moved onto more greener pastures, i.e. mind–matter unification project. this sudden shift to more speculative topics, led him to multiple ordeals like being banned from arXiv for a while to being the target of scientists for supporting pseudoscience in royal mail's nobel stamp series.

"Josephson believes that psychics and telepaths may be able to direct random energy at sub-atomic levels for their own purposes, and in the commemorative stamp booklet writes that developments in information and quantum theories 'may lead to an explanation of processes still not understood within conventional science, such as telepathy'. It is not a suggestion that has gone down well with fellow Nobel laureates, however."

in this piece i don't want to condone any scientist of any stature; but i just want to point out that one should evaluate the scientific value of a proposal on the basis of the argument, not on the basis of who said it, what is the former accomplishments of the person. from this respect, the arguments and interests of josephson is not currently accepted by the rest of the scientific community. call it orthodoxy or not, unfortunately this is peer review. a concept that neuroquantology journal does not have.

having said all this, actually josephson himself also voiced concerns about the publication quality of the journal neuroquantology for the case of a paper which explained poltergeist activity as a quantum effect. his response to the new scientist was "this looks distinctly flaky to me."

so we decide to evaluate neuroquantology (which tarlaci refers to as "my journal"), on the basis of its contents, not based on whether thomson-reuters listed it in citation index or on your editors (who find the papers inside "distincly flaky" by the way), but evaluate them on their contents. and the final resolution is they are an intellectual pollution to the scientific commons, just ingullible accumulation of bullshit buzzwords, written with the style and sophistication of a first year engineering student taking a class on philosophy.

we will continue our quest to find and ridicule the NQ papers, to exemplify how bad it is to leave the decision of what science is and is not at the hands of cooperations like thomson-reuters.

here are some of my current favorites.

* A Game-Theoretic Approach to Metaphysical Reconciliation of Quantum Superposition
* A Neuroquantologic Approach to How Human Thought Might Affect the Universe
* A Robotic Program that Acquires Concepts and Begins Introspection

serkan anılır, an update

remember anılır? the astronaut candidate polymath, the man of many talent who lost his PhD? he also lost his job at the Tokyo University after it was discovered that he also falsified his CV.

meaning; he forged his documents concerning his graduation from istanbul technical university and illinois institute of technology. here is the google translated japanese news article and the university press release.

serkan anılır - portrait of a young scientist as a fraud -

this entry comes from a draft from last year october:

as we sit in a busy cafe which is renowned by its cakes with the fellow heidelbergers and sip our coffee, our friend claudia, with a voice uncontrolled, tells us what she realized about publicity of science. everybody become suddenly silent and look at us. she cracks up in awkwardness.

another person who is not afraid to spit out bullshit (more precisely lies) in public and profit from it is serkan anılır. i have mentioned him in a former post and at that time in sourtimes. but things turned out to be worse than i thought.

let's back up a bit: anılır is an architect in tokyo university, which currently works in a project called infra-free, meaning infrastructure free buildings. but more importantly he regularly appears in the contemporary media, both in japan and turkey as the:

space elevator guru,
jaxa (japanese space agency) department leader,
astronaut candidate,
cosmologist,
scientist with awards,
writer, educator, entertainer, enterpreneur etc.

but he and his career came under questioning by a group of online people. of course i need to mention myself and my post in turkish sourtimes, but more importantly a group of japanese interested people realized the importance of the situation and started a blog only dedicated to our researcher anılır. i was contacted through my post here and my sourtimes entry, and i witnessed as the thing unveiled.

it seemed his lies about his past exceeded paid bullshit awards, fake papers nowhere to be found and talk materials full of plagiarized material but also included a photoshopped picture of himself in an astronauts suit in the children's book he wrote.

he retaliated in his blog that this picture was a joke that got out of hand and he was going to reply to the allegations.

that never happened.

funny thing is right now that post is currently deleted which can be found in sourtimes.

even worse the japanese bloggers sent a big package to tokyo university with their findings. the investigations started on december and they ended this month (march). and for the first time in the university history a phd was annuled (see google translated japanese press release, and an english news)

this is a great day for the university and science, it more so because it underlines the importance of the common people's (translated people outside university) participation in it. not the academia, not the media, not the public, not the government (which funded him) and not even the tokyo university itself discovered it, but rather a group of japanese bloggers, getting partly help from turkish volunteers made this happen.

we are at a time of transformation, a transformation of not only communication but a paradigma shifting, revolution pending, change of means of production. don't think that i am extrapolating too much. as the information was commodified starting from 60s and used as a means of profit; now it is time to free it for the people.

the classical institutions which control the information and the people who take advantage of them through the titles and the credibility that are given are bound to be replaced by a more equal and efficient way of information production: that is the effort of a web community that can access the information freely, and share and proliferate it collaboratively.

p.s.: by the way turkish news channels were pretty quick to pick up on the story. here is a nice recap from december.

corrupting germany through history of islamic astronomy

turkey is a great experiment of and case study for modernism in early twentieth century. i think "the little prince" is a book that is translated to most languages, and it perfectly captures the zeitgeist, with a footnote on turkish modernism. the asteroid of the little prince is discovered by a turkish astronomer but western audiences do not believe him due to his clothing, till a turkish dictator makes a law for clothing and with the switch of clothing the turkish astronomers ideas suddenly become acceptable (check it out yourself).

This asteroid has only once been seen through the telescope. That was by a Turkish astronomer, in 1909. On making his discovery, the astronomer had presented it to the International Astronomical Congress, in a great demonstration. But he was in Turkish costume, and so nobody would believe what he said.

Grown-ups are like that...

Fortunately, however, for the reputation of Asteroid B-612, a Turkish dictator made a law that his subjects, under pain of death, should change to European costume. So in 1920 the astronomer gave his demonstration all over again, dressed with impressive style and elegance. And this time everybody accepted his report.

for me this is a perfect example about how the perception of science as empirical, rational and progressive is misplaced. the current problems of science of course is not effected by things like dress code but rather community connections due center periphery relations, which puts the scientists of peripherial countries into a disadvantageous positions.

a bold proposition coming from a well respected western scientist is more likely to be accepted in the scientific community, rather than it coming from an outsider.

this shows there is a certain aspect of habitus culture in the community of science, to form collaborations and apply for grants, we abide by unwritten rules of communication. although it creates hindrances for the outsiders, it is not by itself such a bad thing but rather a fact.

as a scientist who wants to change the sexist and racist practices of science, and destroy the market oriented transformation aspect of it, my solution is to show the cultural aspect of science and learning science.

ok, my rationalizations are sometimes an overkill i admit. here is what i am doing as a practice, i will be giving a talk in mannheim (which supposedly has the most fraction of inhabitants with turkish background) and a giving a talk in the planetarium about history of islamic science.

it is called islamic science, since back at those days there were no nations and the culture was dominated by islam, the language of science was arabic. science was conducted intercontinentally, and most importantly the switch from greek idealism to empiricism happened during middle age, in an islamic geography.

i believe, like the change of our clothes, the switch in language was made in hopes of a paradigmatic shift in the minds of the masses, in effect only caused us to be severed from our history. the history of science we learn is written by west, completely disregarding the middle age transition from ancient greek concepts to enlightenment. in our history islam is disdained as backward and dogmatic.



it might be, but only the institution of the religion; not the culture of it, which included all colors of heterodoxy, and richness of literature, science and logic; even literary analysis of kur'an.

in summary i will talk about vahdeti mevcut as a basis form empirical research, i will talk about geometry, spherical trigonometry, first analog computers and more importantly the attempts to topple ptolemaic universe.

racism in europe, sexual discrimination in university

i met a turkish astronomer yesterday. she'll be here for a year for a research project. it was not so hard for her to find me, since my name is out there and here i am bothering people by sending group mails for organizations. through the foggy and snowy landscape around the observatory i found my way to her building and we sat down for a while.

i was happy to meet another astronomer, sometimes i am jealous of my italian colleagues who can discuss their problems in their own language. one of them says it does not matter because the terms are english. i believe learning and discussing science in mother tongue is a hindrance we learn and practice the language of the master, we are stripped off of our culture and ability to express ourselves. one language as the international language might be practical but in everyday life usage the cultural particularities which defines us as a person is lost in the translation and the language spoken between colleagues is an empty receptacle for information transfer not a profound communication tool. that's why we are speaking a language with english grammar with italian and german words.

anyhow the reason i go through this is to explain the fact that my positive response of meeting another turkish astronomer was something personal and practical not ideological.

as opposed to an unknown max planck institute worker, who said "you are the first turkish astronomer in max planck," during a visit.

i would have understood if he said, "you are the first turkish person working here," which she was not. i wonder do they tell our swedish colleague, you are the first swedish student coming here. will they care if they had a norwegian postdoc, pointing out the exoticity of it.

i don't think so and this is not just pointing out an objective fact. facts are things we notice, as they pass through our filter of prejudices.

let me sketch it out for you, a female turkish astronomer is a positive thing because it means "we" are raising ourselves up from our backward stance. this is coming from a male professor who works in a country with currently one (in number: 1) female professor in astronomy.

it is well known that the fractions of female scientist in engineering and natural sciences in western, scientific central countries are far below the levels of greece, turkey and india. researchers are puzzled. i read this fact before but here is the words of wendy williams concerning the book they edited "why aren't more women in science?" :

The single most surprising finding was how much better women in some countries perform on math tests as compared to men in the United States and Canada! For Steve Ceci, the most surprising finding was that countries not known for their egalitarian attitudes toward women (for example, Turkey) produce more women computer scientists than do countries thought to be more modern and egalitarian (for example, the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom).

i know for a fact that only in ankara the total number of female professors of astronomy is higher than whole germany. this is not considering the departments in istanbul, izmir, çanakkale and antalya.

i am not suggesting that turkey is doing "good science," after all we are at the periphery of science. but it shows where science is the science as we know it creates less female scientist, due to the competitive male aggressive aspect of it. in the center of science, doing good science not only means personal prestige but also means power through big projects and funds.

luckily enough last week there was a nature article about a relevant research that points out that american female astronomy graduate students suffer from "impostor syndrome" more than male phds. meaning they doubt their potential and scientific prowess more than their male counterparts. just to briefly give a cause it is due to the aggressive way of male communication (here i just quote my socialist feminist friends) that dominates the scientific research in which we need to present our results sweeping over the problematic analysis details and "hide" the shortcomings of our approach. there is no flexibility or space for doubt during a presentation, we give a complete, consistent and contingent picture and everybody claps, curtain closes.



another aspect is the so called cultural issue. maybe culturally turkey is not egalitarian (if we consider the female parliament members and violence against women) but institutionally is far ahead of germany in terms of class and sex diversity in higher education (i will write about this extensively later), to explain the institutional discrimination one only need to look at the current discussions about the law which plans to give money to stay at home mothers as opposed to subsidizing the kindergartens which are running out of space for children. this law will condemn women of germany to their homes, rather than to pursue a career, if they ever want to have a family. even worse this is done in the name of in christian values and concept of family.

let's be real, the west still has a long way to go to achieve equality. even worse, some of the rights that have been gained are thinned out. if a male scientist wants to pursue his career, moving from one city to another every 2-3 years till he gets a permanent position, it is more likely that he will find a stay at home partner, or a partner who would sacrifice her future for her family. the situation is far from symmetric for female scientists.

in summary, hell yes we have female astronomers in turkey. if as a professor you are happy for "my people" that we have a visiting female astronomer, and you think you are concerned about the equality of sexes in science, do us a favor and fix your own environment. push your government for egalitarian laws, and change the way western science is done.

to finish, i want to quote roman; a fun, loud and exteremely colorful astronomer colleague, "at least he did not say, you will be last turkish astronomer in max planck!"

racism in europe, an introduction

a very bold title after all this time that i was absent. apparently the people who are the closest to me do not recognize the daily banal racism that i face everyday.

let me back up a bit. i am a turk studying in germany. i talk german worse than a first generation of immigrant (as my other "auslander(foreigner)" peers here in university) yet i am a "white turk" not racially (because i don't believe in such a thing) but rather classwise. i dress up like an average westerner and i almost have an american accent when i speak.

when people hear my strange accent they ask me where i come from and when they hear turkey i get multiple responses which can be bundled up in just one simple sentence.

"you don't look turkish."

there are variations, sometimes they shut up not to say anything inappropriate and i appreciate it. but the other end of the spectrum is is when they ask me whether i have relatives in germany (because as you know turks move in flocks).

in the median of both they ask me about the race of my parents, or try to rationalize that the turks they observe come from anatolia (which from my perspective i do too). but you see the problem is not the looks but the social sense of what turkish is. rude, uneducated, dangerous, unemployed, backward/conservative/islamic/misogynist/non-western. don't think i haven't heard these things. when you talk to people about the racist possibility of turkish houses being burned in ludwigshafen, they say there is no such evidence and the fire was self inflicted due to the faulty illegal electricity tapping.

according to my friends i should be happy about this comments, because this derives from the empirical evidence they have; meaning they only have uneducated, unintegrated turks around them. and i am showing them that it is possible for a turk to have a phd. they pleasantly surprised, they mean well and it means they don't have ill feelings towards me anyway.

i say bullshit.

does looks, meaning phenotype defines the way you behave? this is -fucking- race centric view of life, and if you think that just because of the color of someones skin, or the way he dresses up or talks he acts in a certain negative way, you are racist.

another friend who is learning turkish, after six months, asks me whether i have european ancestors and tells i don't look turks. i tell her, i quickly learned that german girls are not all tall and blonde. she tells me no, those are swedish. i was speechless of course.

when it comes to the empirical reason for this kind of thinking; i just want to say if you want to look and find stereotypical turks, you will see them. you don't walk around with a racemeter and asses what kind of race looks and dresses up like.

and finally as it comes to how i feel personally about it, malcolm x will give the answer for me:

"If you're afraid of black nationalism, you're afraid of revolution. And if you love revolution, you love black nationalism. To understand this, you have to go back to what the young brother here referred to as the house Negro and the field Negro back during slavery. There were two kinds of slaves, the house Negro and the field Negro. The house Negroes — they lived in the house with master, they dressed pretty good, they ate good because they ate his food — what he left. They lived in the attic or the basement, but still they lived near the master; and they loved the master more than the master loved himself. They would give their life to save the master's house — quicker than the master would. If the master said, "We got a good house here," the house Negro would say, "Yeah, we got a good house here." Whenever the master said "we," he said "we." That's how you can tell a house Negro.

"This modern house Negro loves his master. He wants to live near him. He'll pay three times as much as the house is worth just to live near his master, and then brag about "I'm the only Negro out here." "I'm the only one on my job." "I'm the only one in this school." You're nothing but a house Negro."

-- Malcolm X

i might dress up and talk like the master, but i am not a fucking house negro/white turk that will accept and be happy about the racist discriminatory behavior of the master race.

free speech in university - a.k.a. how to fend off lying ministers

very fresh news. vice prime minister arrives in ankara university to attend a mini conference on "democracy and human rights"

before he starts his talk, a student says he and the government violates human rights dailiy, be it the killing of uğur kıymaz 12 year old, a set up anti-terrorist operation; or the death of engin çeber under custody in prison due to beatings; or the lack of desire to lawfully release the cancer patient güler zere who is a political prisoner.


the students desire for him to leave is expressed with unending applause, nevertheless he appreciates the comments and continues;

Untitled from sendika.org on Vimeo.

not for very long.

the crowd go mad, as one student yells "you talk about democracy. what you understand from democracy is giving a examplary service medal to the likes of coronal ali ertosun," who was responsible for the prison hunger strike crack down of 2001, which resulted in 32 deaths (2 of them soldiers).

the bit i want to make note is that before hell breaks loose, cicek tells that when he is trying to be silenced, it is against democracy. imagine a situation where you know mainstream tv channels would not show the demonstrations, hence you need to have a handy cam so that the footage can be online, is that a equal representation of freedom of speech? as the media and information flow is consciously controlled to suppress free speech, is it really undemocratic to make the vice prime minister leave?

i would say no.

nobody needed to sit through his lies and clap in the end just because of common courtesy.

sustainability can be an excuse for revolution

it is not unusual for bourgeouise to use intelilgentisia to rationalize profit maximization policies in the expense of lower class and the nature itself. the subject of sustainability is a different matter however, it is totally a gray area.

last weekend we were in a workshop where warner zittel, the publicizer of the peak oil concept joined us in for a weekend in frankonia to teach us all about non-sustainability non-renewable resources.

although his main area is oil and energy sector he talked about world models.

the main problem with the approach as all the data also points to, is the non-sustainability of the current idea of economic growth. patrick, god bless him noticed it right away in the beginning. the current ecological problem is a very core one, that was pointed out by marx and even before engels: the current concept of development is defined upon accumulation of wealth or simply capital. hence the bourgeoisie constantly searches for cheap resources, cheap labor, working longer hours with higher efficiency and new markets to sell their goods. due to the economy of scales, the more they produce, the cheaper it costs, hence they can raise their profits. this is the unending loop that we are pursuing in the current capitalist mode of production today in the expense of nature.

zittel showed us how we have reached the oil peak somewhere between 2007 and 2008 and from now on the production will be on a decline.



there is a more important point in all the analysis. there is such a thing called system analysis, in which world is taken as the system and the human factors are added on top, to see how does the economic activity of the man:



one of the shortcomings of the system analysis is that it does not take into account the national and class differences. which is not "very" interesting for the big picture.

the bottomline is that with declining resources, the world will overshoot its capacity of production and population. because of this, the simulations show that, production will decline, due to pollution and lack of resources to feed people, people will die population will decrease.

this is apparent even with an optimistic view on resources and resource extraction:



the solution offered by the limits of growth people is population and pollution control, productive equilibrium. this will generate not an exponentially increasing human growth but rather equilibrium in both economy, production and population. hence, the argument is, progress in technology can be harnessed for quality for human life, rather than growth:



these were all copyrights of meadows, randers and meadows work with world3 from "limits of growth."

my point is, this already been said more than a hundred years ago in the "manifesto of the communist party" anyway. but now the data even shows this and worries people. what needs to be done is to change the definition of what growth is and realize the problem itself cannot be solved without changing the core of the problem, the capitalist mode of production and the meta fetishism that drives the bourgeoisie to indefinitely "grow."

Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. (...) It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crises, a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity — the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce.

The Manifesto of the Communist Party

a comment about the role of phd comics in grad culture

i sent a mail to Jorge Cham, our very own phdcomics artist. i am still considering to throw a shoe at him (figuratively speaking) when he comes to heidelberg next week.

Dear Jorge Cham,

I am a PhD student of Astronomy in Germany and as understandably, a
fan of PhD Comics. I believe your strips not only describe and
crystallize the situation of a PhD student but brings the students
together in their anguish. As the career development guy says[*], the
strips resonate with PhD students all over the world, due to the
common adversity. But make no mistake this mail is not simply a fanboy
expression of admiration but rather a hate mail aimed at you as an
artist who is the most important representative of the graduate
students in contemporary culture.

Your strips decipher what we care about most dearly and fear the most;
to sacrifice of our personal lives, the insignificance of our very
specialized research, built upon this shaky ground the competition and
the pretense surrounding it. This simply means, what PhD Comics does
best is to expose the exploitation in the "industry of science."

You are an artist who depict the reality in such a way that the crowds
find it compelling. This certain group is the main "labor force" of
the "industry," and should be the most educated minority of the
community but nevertheless they look at your strips when they feel
frustrated and then continue with their depressing routine and then
take some. Sometimes these are so terrible things that they don't even
make their way in your strips; like mobbing, sexual harassment or
being plagiarized by your superior.

What makes this mail an actual hate mail is my feeling that you
overlook your responsibility as an artist and even worse (again as the
career development guy says[*]) normalizing the miserable existence of
the graduate students. Your depiction of the PhD student is subaltern,
inertial and in most cases disempowered which, I agree, is not far
from reality and almost an exact description. The problem is, this
kind of crystallized depiction only furthers the learned helplessness
of the individuals. I was involved in arguments where PhD comic strips
were shown as evidence to keep the graduate school and the University
as it is because it is as it is, hence normal and acceptable.

Currently we are profiting from the glimpses you present of the big
gears that drive the science industry. These are things that we,
students do not have the opportunity to experience personally, your
work in exposing the inner workings (like the science vs. nature
strips) is highly appreciated. But keep in mind there are small and
almost unknown struggles happening in different cities and campuses in
the name of local grad students, be it for unionization or fair
employment, or to struggle for a just set of rules for graduate
school. I realize personally, it is our responsibility to point these
things to you, to the public and basically make them more visible.

In the final analysis I can neither judge you or suggest you a road
map. But what I could tell is having a political structure in the back
of an artist mind makes all the difference between pure entertainment
of daily ordeals or art that shifts the perception of the spectators.
Like the difference between contemporary hip-hop which barely will be
remembered and Gil Scott-Heron's spoken word which will echo over
generations through his words "the revolution will not be televised."

Have nice travels, and hopefully see you when you come to Heidelberg
(if I can find a spot in the auditory).

Ferayebend, Heidelberg**


[*] "The message of the presentation really resonated with our
students. The graduate school journey can be extremely isolating, and
Jorge Cham's presentation and comics normalize the experience and
provide solace and humor.“
-John Nonnamaker, Graduate Student Career Development, M.I.T., from
"the PhD lectures" testimonials http://www.phdcomics.com/speaking/

** i used my real name in the actual mail, of course.

if i don't write right now, i won't be able to ever. i came back from a stressful vacation, just because. my choice of not having drama in my life worked and i started worrying about work due to lack of problems.

also realizing i won't be able to go turkey to work (ok, maybe istanbul), i came back to heidelberg with great motivation due to a destroyed ego. mevlevi acolytes go into 40 days of seclusion just before their acceptance. if accepted they start out by cleaning, cooking and washing in the temple. before you give up your your property and everything worldly, you first need give up on your ego. it is self emancipating.

i met a lot of interesting people, and discussed a lot of interesting things during my vacation. from open source science to a cultural conscientious objection.

but before i write about them all, i need to leave for a workshop on sustainability. meaning, let's not listen to karl marx, and find ways to maintain conspicuous consumption, but this time reborn as environmentally responsible. physicist are collaborators in this story (sorry patrick!)

Tolga Yarman (Wiki)Resolution

one of the main drives behind me starting this blog was my anger against the self promoters of science. one that stand out throughout my posting was of course our infamous tolga yarman and more importantly his actions in editing wikipedia.

you may have followed his ordeals through my blog, but finally after he was listed for deletion by the wiki user aadagger, pretty seamlessly he was found not notable enough to be in wikipedia and his page was deleted. now noone will be able start the page tolga yarman.

this is not a triumph of `good science' but rather the proof that opensource information is more democratic. money and power to have a press release is not enough to be mentioned in cyberspace. there are democratic checks and balances.

the right to be lazy and the vacation deceit

there have been a gap in the blog for our revolution, because it is time to come back home.

travelling is a marvellous thing. i don't know how you are but i am addicted to sensory input, either music or reading the news or watching a something on the side. this leads to basically not being able to finish any kind of work, mail the friends that you are missing out on, and more importantly have time to think.

sad that we need to say that we need "reflection."

we basically have a lot of things to "do" and not enough time.

augusto boal put it the best, "when you are in prison you are trapped in space, but you realize you are no longer trapped in time you are not bound by the pace of the daily life." (my words)

the conquest of time is not a new concept, that's what the bourgeoisie does, which the best reactionary example to that fact is the fight for the 8 hour working day. and for you dear young scientist, remember the adverts you saw about time management in your university.

anyhow, to return to the main point; traveling gives you the unique chance to be in limbo of boal's prison and freedom at the same time. while travelling although you are trapped in the receptacle of the means of transportation (train, bus, plane, boat) you are actually going to your planned destination. hence during the trip, we are partly free in time, with a time to reflect and think and realize all the things we hope to do and think or more importantly postpone the things that are dear to us and most humane.

it is time of "re-flection" or most probably deflection, deflection from the things that distracts us which we call daily life. deflection of a system that normally surrounds us and binds us in time to work be "productive."

i believe in the right to be lazy, and the best place to do it is while traveling.

(i wrote these while watching ghandi, i cut myself some slack from total meditative)

a critique of economy of intellectual property, an introduction

it is time, as we the scientist need to acknowledge the fact that there is an economy behind our rather solipsist defined "search for reality" practice of science. Not only a whole industry of "tool building," is out there what is worse, our intellectual property gets owned by scientific journals so that they can sell subscriptions.

this discourse is motivated by a recent phdcomic.



they argue that they are providing the important service of deciding what is "cutting edge research." imagine the journals that affect you getting a job, continuing research are basically setting the "contemporary trends" in contrary to what most of the scientists think of as the science they need to pursue. i don't know what my molecular biology and biophysics friends think but my astronomer and physicist colleagues are fed up and disillusioned by the choices these highly regarded magazines make.

and get this, they are getting paid for this. be they are non-profit organizations or not.

here comes another challenger, called Public Library of Sciences. they support ideologically all articles should be publicly accessible and they publish online journals. they emerged from a very effective public relations stunt, which was triggered by a boycott of journals to make their archives public.

now they are considered to be a new business model in which they rely on scientist charges and do almost the same kind of editorial "filtering" that the high brow journals do.

i became interested in the progress of scientific publishing which not only affects but defines most of our lives. and this is a first post in this series. and i want to finish with a post from phdcomics phorum.

If I had any editorial input at The Onion, I would do an article about Nature announcing a new spin-off journal: Nature Horseshit. There'd be quotes from Nobel laureates about all the horseshit research they had that would be perfect for the journal, etc, etc.

excerps from the miserable life

this week i had my birthday.

i hate birthdays, not because of this stupid fear of getting old but the significance of earth's movement around the sun escapes me.

i hated till last year, i came home exactly on my birthday. i tried to spend time with friends but it didn't work. i knew "home" wasn't home anymore. the life of a scientist, is the life of a heimatlos. who we have are each other, and i truly appreciate it, after seeing people leaving one by one.

i feel i came to the absolute climax of my phd experience. the closest i am to people, the most fun i had with my work, the most relaxed i am in heidelberg. and unfortunately everything will be downhill from now on.

from now on the job search, the thesis stress and separation from true comrades one by one start.

it is the middle thesis crisis.

i am happy and sad at the same time.

no i truly appreciate the friends i made here, how many nice people surround me.

nevertheless they cannot understand that i am a kurdish man and i can never be a veteran

i come home after a great night with dear HD friends, simon and kelly. spending time with them is always very intellectually fulfilling and more importantly fun.

near the end of the night i somehow brought up the topic -as always- to my desire to be a conscientious objector and to not do my mandatory military service. it is always grim, and since i am not doing anything for it i always feel like a poser.

and as i come home to listen to a bit of black steel in the hour chaos:






i saw the news in the sourtimes that
a) 25000 people attended a memorial of a pkk militant in hakkari.
b) also people were discussing that mothers of pkk militias met the mothers of the soldiers who died to call for peace. (the article in turkish is here)

some (actually two but they are enough) wanted the people who attended the funeral to simply be killed by the government.

after discussing a similar issue with my friends just tonight about a funeral service about a canadian soldier, and how they unknowingly interrupted the memorial as they jogged through the crowd, these stories and the responses to them really agitated me.

basically the father of the dead pkk militant asked for the guns to stop and the pseudo strike in the city hakkari to end, while the statists in sourtimes asked for -basically- more blood in the name of the martyrs and the sovereignty of the holy turkish nation.

my HD friends felt bad interrupting the funeral and on top of they felt guilty of feeling bad because the soldier died in afganistan as a volunteer officer, i.e simply he died in an unjust war. imagine my situation, to be pushed to support and participate in an unjust war, and before doing that living beside the people which support blood and death. glorification of death for the country is one thing that i can and may empathize but glorification of killing is unacceptable.

secrecy or flat out evil?

i have been accused of secrecy before. both in sourtimes and by tolga yarman. people who think my ideas are atrocious, think that i am only doing these because i am a tricky, sneaky bastard.

well in reality these people should wonder and consider how i am in real life. let's take away the fact that people are so getting used my radicalism that they are in the border of not listening to me ever, but at the same time i seem to reflect upon a strange aura, even in a scientific background.

this is from the conference proceeding i received two weeks ago by mail:



guess which one i am? ok i learned afterwards that they showed this picture in the conference dinner, alongside with other "funny" pictures but i mean, wtf? this is the actual proceeding publication.

as you can guess i wasn't very social this conference.

guest log: (...) a giant leap for exploitation

One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.
Destiny has its funny ways: 40 years from that first legendary moonwalk in the year of the much more terrestrial departure of the "moonwalker"...
Two different but strong symbols of one same culture: the american dream, the possibility of reaching the impossible, of physically touching the sky starting from nothing.

The culture also where things are not what they seem. A black man that looks white, an old man that wants to be an eternal teenager. A science mission that nobody will ever remember as scientific but that only served to the purpose of showing the strength not only of a country but of a whole political, economical and ethical system. A mission so similar to a hollywood movie to be surrounded by the myth of a setup.

One giant leap for mankind, but in what direction? It is undeniable that that day the whole western world held its breath and dreamed of whole new frontiers of knowledge and freedom. The movement of the students, then in its most intense and creative years, surely dreamed of a different freedom that seemed only a step away that night in front of the television as well as the next day in the streets with thousands of people.

But there is probably no better symbol than the mission to the moon to relate the exploitation of scientists and of the concept itself of science to a more general defense of a political and economical model. That was not a step for mankind, but a step ahead of the Western block with respect to the Eastern one, not a sign of unity but of division, not of brotherhood but of predominance. And all this defended (at least waiting to see whether it worked or not) under the shield of "science" and "progress".

The whole rush to space, as the cold war in general, gave to the great science that was produced in those years on both sides, its character of competition and suspect and secrecy, and highlighted the necessity for scientist to accept the concept of "production" to survive.
The cosmonauts...a childhood dream or one more shiny commercial?

- ailu

taverns in ottoman empire

my dear ultra progressive friends were surprised to hear that alcoholic drinks were served in ottoman taverns.

i was telling them the story of the name tequila; tek-i-ala (the good single shot), from the mouth of a tavern keeper of a 17th century konstantiniyye (istanbul) from ihsan oktay anar's book, kitab-ül hiyel.

then they interrupt and ask me, "wasn't drinking alcohol forbidden?" and i responded "yes but do you obey every law?"

the point of my rhetorical question is not that apparent but i think it closely resembles the fact that we are still continuing to download and copy illegally, violating copyright laws. the state either gave up on trying or simply turning the blind eye. and i think the situation was similar in most of the ottoman history.

i did some fact checking and it seems non-muslims had the right to sell and trade alcohol in ottoman empire. and there were specific taxes for selling alcohol and owning a tavern which serves alcohol.

i admit that it is a valid question to ask, but still prohobitionism is such a hard state philosophy to maintain that it is almost absurd for me to think that there were time in the history in old turkey without the culture of drinking while eating.

was "whitey" really on the moon?

today is the day of the moon landing, but for some people the question still remains: were "whitey" really on the moon?

for the ones who are following my blog (who like 3 people?), remember that i mentioned the "whitey on the moon" by gil scott heron. who criticized the fact that scientific advance on space travel advanced despite and probably due to the inequality and poverty in U.S. (USSR also).

some are actually not even sure about that:



you probably heard the conspiracy theories that the apollo 11 mission is the greatest hoax in the history, because U.S. government taped everything in a stage.

well, while writing my last post i realized that the lunar laser ranging experiments that measure the distance between earth and moon makes use of the reflectors that have been put on the moon by apollo 11 mission.



sorry to disappoint the skeptics but scientists are using the machinery that is set up on the moon by the apollo 11 astronauts. to be fair, the signal that arrive from the reflectors are very weak. and it is very hard to precisely aim for the reflector, a lot of painstaking analysis goes into finding the exact photons that bounce off the reflector.

coincidentally i found this guardian article from last month, reporting the cancellation of funding of mcdonald laser ranging station at fort davis in texas. national science foundation apparently does not find the science case strong. apparently laser experiments will continue in the future at apache point in texas and observatoire de la côte d'Azure in france.

p.s. thanks to giulia for giving me the idea for this post, and claudia for excessive ranting about the most ridiculous things on the moon.