Deluge of news. This time it is very big.

Yesterday, young people were defiant despite the ban on protests. A thousand or more appeared from no where on the streets of downtown after every attempt to disperse, beat and arrest them by the police and police hired thugs.

Photo by Sarah Carr

Police brutality was on display in full force in the main streets of downtown. The use of electric cattle prods was also there …

UPDATE Wed. Dec 29, 2010:The Supreme Council for Antiquities announced today that building housing the Abbaseyya Psychiatric Hospital will be listed as an Islamic heritage site.

Original post:

In the 19th century, with the development of railway transportation, train accidents became a frequent source of death and serious injury.

Some of the victims claimed injury following an accident without a visible pathology. Jon Eric Erichsen, a British surgeon, in 1867 published a book called On Railway and Other Injuries of the Nervous System in it he argued that an unseen physical injury to the spine and brain caused the condition `railway spine.'

Railway …

LCD screens on your flat-screen TV, laptop or phone are direct descendants of the cathode-ray tube TV. Difficult for prolonged reading. Although recently I read around 400 pages of a textbook on my laptop, I had to, it was difficult and wasn't an enjoyable experience. The last time I enjoyed reading a book on an electronic device was using the Palm PDA. I think the Amazon Kindle is a direct descendant of the Palm PDA …

Bibliotheca Alexandrina is hosting an interesting site called Memory of Modern Egypt which contains scans of photographs, documents and maps from 1800 till now.

They have a low resolution scan of a map of Cairo from 1800 in French. The city is the darker area. Notice the flood basin surrounding the Nile and how the Zamalek island looks weird compared to the Roda island (Manial) which looks almost like what it really looks like.

Overlaying …

The science museum in London has interesting items on display in the Psychology: Mind Your Head exhibit. Unfortunately, not all of them are on the website so here are some I photographed.

A skull showing phrenology markings with a device used to measure the features of a head for phrenological interpretation. Phrenology was a radical idea developed by Franz Joseph Gall in the 19th century. He said that different mental faculties like memory, sensation and …

Since change from the top seems unlikely. Civil society should establish programs to reach out and provide alternative career options for current police officers who are willing to leave their jobs.

For example, they may help them transform into lawyers. NGOs may fund masters programs in different Law schools, provide them with extra tuition help, enroll them in human rights courses and help them establish small combined legal offices through grants.

Priority can be set …

I think by now you might have heard of Khaled Said. The Alexandrian 28 years old who died minutes after two secret policemen approached him in an internet café sparking outrage after a photo following the autopsy was published on the internet. Two blurry photographs of a bloody disfigured head.

What happened exactly is still under investigation by the prosecution. Witnesses say he was beaten by the two secret policemen. They say they did this …

Using a copy of all the obituaries published online by the Ahram newspaper from January 2002 till April 2008 it is possible to use Linux command line tools (gawk, sed, bash) to find family relations between individuals in certain professions. An example given here explores the family links between a sample of 456 Egyptian state security officers.

This is a very brief description of the method.

1. The first step is to convert the HTML files …