Feras's Blog

I made sushi…!

// January 7th, 2012 // 4 Comments » // family, Information

I’ve made sushi a couple of times before, but this time I think I finally got it right. I made 6 kinds of sushi:

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In the first plate I made smoked salmon nigiri and a deep fried maki with smoked salmon, crab, crispy tempura, and avocado.

click on the photo for a larger image

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In the second plate I made 4 makis. One with shrimp tempura, avocado, and some mayo. In the second I put smoked salmon, avocado, and crispy tempura. In the third I put shrimp tempura, avocado, and cream cheese! In the last one I put something of everything!

click on the photo for a larger image

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My guests said they loved it, but maybe they were just being nice Who knows, if this phd thing doesn’t work out, then maybe I can just open a sushi place back home!

Shanghai in 2 Decades!

// January 1st, 2012 // Comments Off // Information

The top photo was taken 1991, while the second was taken 2011

How Many People Were Born The Same Day I Was?

// December 20th, 2011 // 5 Comments » // Information, Personal

I recently became 28, and started thinking to myself, what is the probability of meeting a random person that was born on my birth date.

Normally we would say that meeting someone that shares your same birthday has the probability of 1/365, which means that you have a 0.274% chance of meeting someone that shares your birthday.

However, in real life, peoples’ birthdays aren’t distributed equally. For example, I found a dataset online with 481040 birthdates for an insurance company. This dataset shows that Aug. 18 had the highest number of births, while Dec. 26 had the least number of births.

The chances of me meeting someone that shared my same birthdate became 0.266% which meant that my birthday had a lower number of births than the average. That also means that for every thousand people I meet, there are 2.6 that share my birth date.

Then I started thinking, what are the chances of me meeting someone that was born the same year I was born. Now we could just assume that the average lifespan of a human is 68 according to the World Health Organization, and say that my chances of meeting someone are 1/68. However, in real life that’s not the case. The number of births increase exponentially. According to this wikipedia entry:
“The population of the United States of America is exponentially increasing at an average rate of one and a half percent a year (1.5%). This means that the doubling time of the American population (depending on the yearly growth in population) is approximately 50 years.”
Plus the numbers of deaths per year are not the way they were a century ago. We have fewer wars now, and the number of deaths has also decreased due to advancements in medicine.

Back to the question, what are the chances of me meeting someone that was born the same year I was born? Recent stats show that there are 7 Billion humans on this earth. The year I was born had about 78 million births. According to the UN data, it was estimated that 105 die between birth and the age of 5 for every 1000 births during the year I was born. It is also estimated that there are about 50 deaths per 1000 people between the ages of 5 and 29 for various reasons for natural causes to wars (I’m not 29, but its close enough). So, we can say that around 850 per 1000 people born in the same year I was born are still alive today. That means 66.3 million of the 7 billion people on this earth were born the same year I was born.

So, the chances of me meeting a person born the same year I was born are 0.947%.

Finally, what are the chances of me meeting someone that was actually born on the same day I was born? If we take the probability of being born on the same day I was born, and apply that to the 66.3 million that were born the same year I was born. Then we would come to the result of having about 176280 people in the world that were born on the same day I was born and are still living today.

The chances of me meeting someone born on the same day I was born are 0.0025%.That means that there are only 25 people in every million, that were born on my exact birth date! So, given the population in Montreal of 1.6 million, there are only 40 people!

7 Creative Restaurants… part 1

// December 8th, 2011 // Comments Off // Information

When life gets boring we look for things that are different to cheer us up (or change weather as we say in Saudi). So, here’s a list of weird yet creative restaurants from around the world:

Ninja Restaurant in New York

Idea: Ninjas serve you in this restaurant !! [video here]

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Hilton Maldives Resort & Spa in Rangalifinolhu, Maldives

Idea: It’s pretty clear from the photo, the restaurant is under water! [link]

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Hajime Robot Restaurant

Idea: The waiters in this restaurant are Robots !! [link]

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ONOIR in Canada

Idea: Its totally dark in the restaurant. When you eat without your sight, your remaining senses are heightened to savour the smell and taste of food. Some of the waiters are blind, so its great they get a job oppertunity. [link]

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Graveyard Restaurant – Ahmadabad, India

Idea: well, its a graveyard with real occupied graves!! Why would anyone want to eat there?! That’s just stupid and crazy, yet its different thus attracting tourists. [link]

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Kayabukiya Tavern in Japan

Idea: The servers in this restaurant are MONKEYS !!

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Toilet Restaurant in Taiwan

Idea: I’m not saying it’s a good idea, just saying its different! In this restaurant, the clients sit on toilets and eat from mini toilets too !! [link]

Dear Sophie…

// December 6th, 2011 // Comments Off // tech

This commercial is by Google Chrome, I loved the idea sooo much!

Child-Free Flights? Genious!!

// July 20th, 2011 // Comments Off // humor, me, Trips

I recently read that Ryanair was going to offer “child-free” flights starting October 2011. Now I don’t really hate kids, I just don’t like them crying for hours on a flight I’m on. This reminds me of a story that happened about a year ago.

I was taking a trip from Montreal to London, and the plane was set to depart at 8pm. I had so much to do the night before so I didn’t get enough sleep. I thought that I might be able to kill some time on the trip by sleeping. So I grabbed my travel pillow and headed to the airport.

I’m not a big fan of airplane food, so I ate a whopper from Burger King before going through the security check. There was not a baby in sight, and I was sooo sure my flight would be child-free. By the time I got in line for the security check, I was full, I finished praying, and couldn’t wait to put my head on my pillow with hopes of sleeping most of the trip. While in line I saw this guy from Pakistan with a child in his arms and another in a stroller. I couldn’t imagine how hard it can be to travel with 2 kids and all that luggage. I think one of them was crying or something, all I know is that I felt bad for the guy and whoever was going to be on the same flight with him and his kids.

I got me a decafe to enjoy while waiting for the gate to open. While I was checking my email and browsing the web on my Blackberry I saw the guy with the two kids sit near my gate! Of all the flights that night, why mine? Seriously! The only kids in the airport were on my flight! So I sat there wishing they’d at least be in a different cabin. I usually get on the plane after everyone boards because I’d rather wait in the airport than on a tiny seat in a crowded plane (Plus the duration of the flight is technically shorter if you board towards the end).

I show the flight attendant my boarding pass and she guides me to my seat. Guess who is right next to me? The guy with the two kids, and boy were they crying! Why would anyone cry that hard? I turned to the flight attendant and begged for another seat or another flight, but she told me that I had no choice the flight was fully booked. I sat down and hoped they would get tiered of crying and sleep. Boy was I wrong, those devils had different plans. When one would cry, the other would take a break to fuel up on crying power. Don’t they have shots to make them sleep or something? The plane took off and the pressure kicked in, and that’s when they both went berserk. There was a moment where I thought those kids might have been kidnapped and the crying was their way of asking us to save them.

I sunk my head into my pillow and tried to go to sleep wishing for at least an hour of silence, but those kids knew of my plans and wanted me to suffer. There were moments in between shifts when one would cool down, and it would take the other about 2 or 3 minutes to pick up where his brother left off. During those moments I would doze off, and right when I would fall asleep the other one would cry like crazy. I didn’t know what to do, and there was nothing for me to do but look at them and hope those kids would look at me and have mercy on me and the other passengers on that flight.

About 3 hours into the flight the kids went to sleep and I got about 30 minutes of sleep during that time. I would wake to the sounds of mommy and daddy giggling over the alone time they’re enjoying before the kids wake up and ruin it for them. During those moments I questioned why people even have kids and whether they were worth all that trouble. I woke up to the sound of a ball being sucked in by a mega vacuum. I opened my eyes only to find the baby being kissed by the father. It wasn’t a normal kiss, it looked like a Zombie trying to suck the poor baby’s brains out. Even the baby had a look on his face that said “Pleeeease save me!”. The father continued to kiss the baby until it started crying all over again. This time it was because the baby was hungry, and the mother was trying to get the flight attendants to get her hot water. The crying went on and off till we got to London. I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy to get off a plane in my life! Thanks to those kids the first day of my break in London was spent in my hotel room sleeping.

The moral of the story is that “child-free” flights are a great idea!!

* The photos above were taken by Jill Greenberg. She is known for taking amazing photos of crying babies. She officially has the worst job in the world!

It’s been a while

// February 19th, 2011 // 1 Comment » // Personal

I’ve been really busy lately with school. Today I noticed a button on my Firefox toolbar that linked to a page I named “myBlog”. That’s when I remembered that I had a blog which I haven’t updated in ages. I opened the link and saw that I had over 100k visitors now. It’s been so long I had to try a couple of times to get the right password. Who would visit a blog that hasn’t been updated in 6 months? Well, I found that the most visited posts were on the TOFEL and GRE exams I took. I also found that many people liked the posts on the iPhone and how to process your bachelor’s graduation papers (it was a really long process). Anyways, I decided to write a couple new posts in the upcoming weeks.

Ohh, I also found out that when you search google for Feras, my blog is the first result you get back! When you search for فراس my blog is the second result, the weird thing is that my name isn’t even written in Arabic on the page! It’s because many sites have my name linking to this site.

I also updated my flickr with a couple new photos I took recently with my new Canon T1i. So, check them out and let me know what you think.

Blackberry and Linksys

// August 9th, 2010 // 1 Comment » // tech

I’ve had some trouble getting my blackberry to work with linksys routers. After reading a couple of posts on different forums, I found this solution which should work with any linksys. Changing these settings should allow you to connect to the blackberry server without connecting to a mobile network, you’ll get access to your email, bb messenger, etc. This is useful when you’re roaming and don’t want to be charged for data usage.

Change the wireless settings on your router to the following:

DTIM: 2 (1-255)
Fragment Threshold : 2304 (256-2346)
RTS Threshold : 2304 (0-2347)
Beacon Interval : 50 (20-1024 ms)

I used to think that having a UMA connection meant I could make long distance calls as if I was in Canada, but it turns out I need to get another service to make my UMA work while roaming.

Kindle 2: Now international

// October 9th, 2009 // 2 Comments » // Personal

Kindle is Amazon’s really amazing ebook reader. It was only available in the US due to it’s whispernet technology, which enables it to download your books from the amazon store using the 3G network. Yeah, 3G not wifi. They just announced on their website that it is now international, but for some reason Canada is not on the list of countries. Kindle books are a lot cheaper, for example my text book this semester costs 100 bucks, but on the kindle store it’s only 45.

I was recently looking for an alternative a few weeks ago and sony prs 600 seemed like the best choice. It has a touch screen, so no need for all the extra buttons. It also has native pdf support, and SD card expansion slots.

Wireless Electricity

// August 29th, 2009 // 1 Comment » // tech

For more information on the Wardenclyffe Tower mentioned in the presentation click here. It was an early wireless telecommunications tower designed by Nikola Tesla and intended for commercial trans-Atlantic wireless telephony, broadcasting, and to demonstrate the transmission of power without interconnecting wires. The core facility was never fully operational and was not completed due to economic problems.

For more on witricity click here.