Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid

Today I went with my friend to the Mega store in Mecca Mall to buy Jimmy Carter's new book "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid."

Not surprisingly, we did not find the book because it's sales in Jordan was prohibited by the censorship department.

I did criticize the censorship department before in an earlier blog post when the sale of "Da Vinci's Code" was prohibited. Luckily at the time the censorships department removed the blockage and the book was sold again.

Well, I hope this time around that censorship department would come to its senses and just call it quits and go home. Personally, I do not mind if they went home and still got paid for doing no censorship what so ever. We live in the 21^st century and it is almost impossible to do censorship. This book will get into the country one way or another, so why bother.

Vital Friends

I finished reading "Vital Friends." This is a great book and very easy to read. It is only 152 pages if you exclude the appendices. So, it can be finished in a few sittings.

Here are some of the books findings:

*People who have friend(s) at work are significantly less likely to quit.
*They are also happier
*Have less health problems

The book recommends that companies enourage on the job friendships and not to totally seperate one's social life from ones work life.

The Book then talks about the different types of friends and the different roles they play in helping ones well being and career at work.

Finally, the book talks about how to grow these friendships and making them
stronger.

I have the hard cover edition, which I got as a gift from my cousin. If you are not happy with work, one of the reasons could be the fact you have no best friends at work. If this is the case, go ahead and buy the hard cover edition. Otherwise, you can wait until the soft cover or paper back version is out. Even for those of us who are happy with their work and friendships this book offers some good information and would help you better understand your friendships.

Two Good Books

The good part about travel, at least for me, is that I get time to read. And if I am lucky enough, I get to finish the book that I am reading before going back home. This time, I got to finish two books, Excavation and Blink.

Excavation is a fast paced novel authored by James Rollins. The novel deals with a hidden treasure that can lead to immortality. There is tons of stuff going on from booby traps to betrayal to nano technology to a lost Incan village to people coming back from death. And unlike two of Rollins' other books, the end was good and convincing. It did not leave me thinking:" Shit what happened, where is the end?" So I give this book a good 9/10.




As for Blink, this a book where one can learn tons and tons of stuff. I am widely read and this book had tons of new and fresh and ideas, even for me.

Basically, the book deals with starting social epidemics. It proposes three rules to help with this. The rule of the few, which means that few people start any sort of epidemic. The Stickiness factor which means stuff has to stick to succeed and finally it has to have the right context.

The author can do a lot of tipping point analysis in his future work, for example he can analyze how to stop terrorism using a tipping point approach. This would be somewhat similar to his analysis of why crime dipped in NYC.

Even better, someone else might use the same approach to sway US public opinion in favor of "A"rabs.

Needless to say, the possibilities are limitless.

Da Vinci's Code

I am still waiting for "Da Vinci's Code" to be shown here as it is being shown in Dubai. Yesterday, I read in the Arabic news paper that "nobody" has applied for permission to screen it yet. Somehow I doubt it. I know that there are a lot of political reasons for not showing it here and the Government has to have an official position on it. But it all does not make sense when the book on which the movie is based is available at bookstores.Not to mention the fact that the movie itself is available at video stores for rent and a pirated DVD version is available for sale all over the place.

The other thing that really bothers me is that certain people feel they have a monopoly on history and that all other versions of history that do not conform with their own version is considered a heresy. That is why certain people do not want the movie to be shown, because it shows a none approved version of certain historical events.

With the exception of modern history, I do not think that anyone should be 100% sure of what took place, every once a while a new discovery takes place that sends all we held to be historically true, to the trash can.