Monday, April 27, 2015

Streaming Arabic TV Channels



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This seems to be a good site to get reliable streaming Arabic TV channels.
Some of the channels won't work in the US, but many do.





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Thursday, March 12, 2015

Science and Islam on BBC



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A truly excellent, and well-done documentary. The early Islamic & Arabic language contributions to the modern world's understanding of the sciences is one of my favorite topics included in the study of the Middle East and of the Arabic language in general.


 Part 1


How Islamic scientists and mathematicians contributed to modern day usage of numbers; the decimal point; the early rise of Baghdad as a cultural center; Islamic political expansion; the purpose of gaining knowledge; Arabic as the common language of the early scientific revolution; the purpose of Arabic vowels; Arabic calligraphy; The Translation Movement where new books were said to have been paid for with their weight in gold; Islamic medicine and its contributions to modern medicine - Galen and the humors, Greek, Indian and Chinese medicine, traditional medicine; The Nur Al-Din hospital; early Islamic understanding of Egyptian hieroglyphs; the majlis discussions and debates; Al-Khawarizmi and the combination of Greek mathematical visualizations with Indian mathematic symbols to create Algebra; the contribution of Algebra to everything that has followed in history; how early Islamic synthesis of worldwide ideas of science proved that science transcends political boundaries and religious affiliations.

 *

 Part 2

The scientific renaissance of the medieval Islamic world; the sciences and governing an empire; Medina Al-Zahra' outside Cordoba in Spain; the Nile-o-meter - keeping track of the Nile's yearly floods and using this information for taxation; Al-Ma'mun, map-making, and how mathematics contributed to a better understanding of the circumference of the earth - Al-Biruni and the combination of algebraic and geometric principles to estimate the size of the world; the scientific method and experimentation; the effects of the interaction between crafting traditions and trade with the sophisticated scholarship in the medieval Islamic world; carrier pigeons and their use in trade; mass production; useful alchemy and its eventual development into modern chemistry: industrial-scale soap manufacturing - alkaline substances - glass-making - metallurgy - perfume markets and distillation - weaponry based on petroleum and an improvement on Greek fire - the periodic table - the first classification based on observation vs. philosophy; physics (the science of change): the useable combination of mathematical forms and experimental observation to form a philosophical understanding of real-world change; Ibn Al-Haytham and the scientific method - the modern science of optics - the modern understanding of light and vision - the beginning of understanding physics in a mathematical context and the providing of repeatable experiments - a first explanation of reflection and refraction - the camera obscura - an estimation deduced from these ideas of the thickness of the earth's atmosphere based on the refraction of the sun's rays at twilight.


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Friday, February 27, 2015

Signs in Egypt



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قسم شرطة اثار القاهرة




تبارك - لتأجير السيارات





معمل سقارة - لتشخيص أمراض الدواجن





موقف إنتظار خاص بسيارات الميكروباص

















شركة ابو الهول للنشر



يورك شير لطيور وأسماك وحيوانات الزينة



المنتزة رويال بلازا
شركة الحلوانى
للإستثمار العقاري





ممر دجلة





نت أسرع من الصاروخ!
إنترنت كافية
شبكات - صيانة
تدريب - طباعة
إدارة / مهندس : وائل عباس





إنترنت كافية





وزارة الدولة للبحث العلمي
 المعهد القومي لعلوم البحار والمصايد
فرع البحر المتوسط - الإسكندرية



مياه



شرطة الآثار







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Arabic Labels, Ads, and Signs



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دجاج كنتاكي



اكياس للفرن



المعجون المنظف



حليب مجفف كامل الدسم



حليب مكثف محلى



كوكا كولا لايت




اكوافينا


ليبتون


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Sunday, February 22, 2015

The Game is Simple...


All of the vocabulary and phrases below come from the article linked above.  
I'm still working on the best ways to translate a few of the phrases in this one.





اللعبة بسيطة - إن كل اوامر القصف والهجوم كانت تحوم في الهواء - وكل طائر يمر عبر المحيط تدخل بياناته في هذا الشيء



The game is simple
All of the bombing and attack orders 
were floating in the air 
and every pilot that flies across the ocean 
enters his (flight) data in this thing.



بهذه السطور تُختصر حقيقة حرب عاشت فصولها البشرية كما عاشتها أوروبا وبريطانيا في صراعها الدامي ضد النازية إبان الحرب العالمية الثانية



  With these lines
 the reality of the human chapters,
as they were being lived out in Europe and Britain
during their bloody battle against the Nazis in WWII
are summed up.



 لندن تجد نفسه أرضا وبشرا وسماءً تحت رحمة رسائل مُشفرّة تصدرها آلة الحرب النازية فتقصف ساعة تشاء وتهاجم ساعة تشاء وتخرب وتدمر وسط هلع القادة الإنجلي وسعيهم للحاق بهذا الغول الذي دمّر بلادهم



London found itself, 
its lands, its people, and its skies
 at the mercy of encrypted messages
which were sent out by the Nazi war machine,
as it was bombing, attacking
devastating and destroying at will,
In the midst of this chaos, 
was the English command's quest 
to deal with this ghoul 
that was destroying their country.




***


The Trash Guy


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I saw an Arabic quote today, tweeted by @ksa_twitt_sa, that I had never seen before.
Perhaps it sounds better in Arabic than in English, but its point is good in both languages:


قال الولد لأبيه: صاحب القمامة عند الباب.
 فرد الأب: يا بني نحن أصحاب القمامة،
 وهو صاحب النظافة جاء ليساعدنا

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"The boy said to his father, 'the trash guy is here.' 
The father replied, 'son, we are the trash-guys; 
he is the sanitation guy, coming to help us out."

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صاحب القمامة / أصحاب القمامة 
garbage man / men

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صاحب النظافة / أصحاب النظافة  
sanitation man / men
(sanitation worker)


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In translating this, I was reminded of a couple of good stories involving garbage collectors in Cairo that I had either listened to or read over the last few years. The first is a story by Liane Hansen that was broadcast on NPR back in 2009, about the "zebaleen" in Cairo, and how they are able to collect and successfully recycle more trash on Cairo's narrow streets than foreign contractors."

Another memorable article I was reminded of was Tales of the Trash, By published in The New Yorker last year. Tales of the Trash focuses on one of the zebaleen in particular, (Sayyid Ahmed) and the observations he is able to make about individuals on his route, and the extrapolations he is able to make about Egyptian society as a whole, based on things discovered in the trash.

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Saturday, February 21, 2015

Muhammad Ali Mosque - The Citadel - Cairo, Egypt



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The Muhammad Ali Mosque, (sometimes called the Alabaster Mosque) located in the Citadel in Cairo, is one of the city's most popular Cairo tourist destinations. 





A Greek architect,Yusuf Bushnaq, was hired by Muhammad Ali and was charged with designing a mosque which would resemble the Blue Mosque in Istanbul. Construction on the Muhammad Ali Mosque started in 1824. The mosque was completed in 1848.
































There are two minbars in the mosque. The gilded wooden one, an original structure, is said to be the largest of its kind in Egypt.













May 12th 2007