Friday, January 30, 2009

Forget Taliban - here is some public science in Pakistan

I had couple of postings about Swat and Taliban's affection for schools. Well - we need to see the other side too. Khwarzimic Science Society kicked off its activities for the International Year of Astronomy (IYA) yesterday in Lahore. Their speaker was Pervez Hoodbhoy talking about The Usefulness of Extra Dimensions of Spacetime - and they had a fantastic turnout for the lecture. Also, see Umair Asim's website about his telescope (a nice Celestron C14) and his astrophotography through Lahore's light pollution.

About eight hundred miles away, as part of The Year of Science, The Second Floor (T2F) was holding a Science ka Adda talk in Karachi on the Large Hadron Collidor. Mason Inman was the speaker and his talk was titled the Big Bang Machine.

And here is Zakir Thaver on News Weakly (a desi version of the Daily Show) talking about building a Science Multimedia Library in Pakistan and the power of science documentaries (hey - after watching the segment, I'm in no position to disagree :) ):

2 comments:

Robin Lloyd said...

Yes, Hoodbhoy was about the most interesting/intelligent contribution I read in the Templeton Foundation's 2008 publication, "Does science make belief in God obsolete?" which I wrote about at url below. He really thought about the intersection, rather than just positing it. http://www.livescience.com/strangenews/080516-god-science-debate.html

Salman Hameed said...

Thanks Robin for the link. I think there are some excellent quotes from Hoodbhoy in your article - and I more or less tend to agree with his position.

Powered by Blogger.