An Uneasy Jam with the Beatles
1. The Earth:
“And the Earth He laid [out] to all creatures” The Quran 55:10 (Surat Ar-Rahman)
2. The land:
Sometime between 1953 and 1955, Abul Ala Maududi, a leading Pakistani Islamist philosopher and scholar, wrote his book “On the Ownership of Land in Islam” from within the walls of his prison cell. The book, which contains a series of correspondences between Ala Maududi and an anonymous writer, criticizes the latter’s claims that the Quran forbids the private ownership of land and encourages the equal distribution of its production.
As Abul Ala Maududi set himself to criticizing what he considered a faulty interpretation of the word of God, Syria was on its way to being merged into the Arab United Republic, under the leadership of Gamal Abdel Nasser, whose socialist program included far-reaching land reforms. Those reforms aimed at minimizing the percentage of authorized areas for private ownership and nationalizing the rest.
3. Language:
Arabic language does not offer two distinct terms corresponding to land and earth. The earth and the abstraction of its resources into a form of property remain one in the language of the Quran.
4. Compression:
In the aftermath of World War II, both USA and the Soviet Union started creating detailed technical studies for Mars missions. For decades ever since, space race became a pillar conflict in the cold war between the two superpowers.
As Nasa finally managed to announce its first Mars exploration mission in 1989, hopes of finding evidence of habitability on Mars started to concretize. Such missions required gathering as much data as possible from the surface of mars and transmitting it back to the launching agency on earth; a process that proved to be daunting.
To transmit large images from Mars, the cameras implemented within the Mars Exploration Rovers (MER) are bound to taking many individual images with a resolution of 480x640 pixels. Each individual image is then sent to the processing software, which gathers them into one large mosaic-like picture. As this process may take up tremendously large space on the CPU of the rover’s computer, an algorithm had to be created, allowing the reduction of the image size through compression.
5. Ground truth:
As part of his congressional program, United States Congressman Robert Pittenger criticized “President Barrack Obama’s foreign policy of appeasement, withdrawal, and apology [which] created a vacuum leading to crises in Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, and elsewhere, empowering [their] adversaries.”
To support his comment on national security issues, the Congressman preferred to speak as the Chairman of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, which was founded for the sole purpose of producing what they described as ground truth by visiting the actual grounds of conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq, and directly participating in anti-terrorism missions outside the United States.
6. To invade:
Ground truthing is the process through which scientists or technicians are sent to specific sites in order to verify, measure, examine and calculate certain aspects of the ground that are otherwise obscure in satellite remote sensing.
As Martian rovers are unable to produce such kind of truth(s) on Mars, space agencies contend with remotely assembled and compressed images. Unlike the satellite images taken of Iraq in 2002 and 2003 showing sites allegedly containing weapons of mass destruction, images from Mars cannot be verified and examined through expeditions and task forces.
7. YouTube:
As one searches for the videos published by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant of the execution of the American journalist James Foley and his fellow detainees on YouTube, tens of videos describing it as a hoax would appear. Only a handful of videos, republished by news agencies, would show the original video, with the omission of the actual moment of beheading.
If one looks closely, one would realize that in digital videos streamed online, the moment of death is never seized; not because it is cut out from the original video, but because the very nature of digital compression somehow always escapes it. Death is somehow lost in the transformation of pixelated data.
8. Authentication:
On December 13, 2001, the United States State Department released a tape showing Osama Bin Laden, one of the most wanted terrorists on the FBI’s list, seated in what seems to be a private confession party. The videotape, which was allegedly found in a house in Jalal Abad after anti-Taliban forces moved in, was claimed to prove the direct involvement of Bin Laden in the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center.
As the video was aired almost a month after it was found by U.S. military forces in Afghanistan, a swamp of anti-governmental accusations attacked the video as a fake attempt to legitimatize Georges W. Bush’s extensive military assaults in the Middle East. This is when War on Terrorism became a war for authentication.
9. The double:
Between 2001 and 2011, several VHS tapes released by Al-Qaeda’s founder, Osama Bin Laden, have mysteriously found their way to the mailbox of Al Jazeera, a well-acclaimed television network based in Doha.
As Al Jazeera boasted its agility on creating journalistic scoops during its coverage of the war in Afghanistan, U.S. officials were busy confirming whether the VHS tapes were authentic or not. Many people believed that Osama Bin Laden was already dead back then and that the man appearing in the videos was nothing but a double.
In June 2004, Wikileaks published a series of documents produced by a certain threat analyst serving at the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare. As a member of The Task Force, the analyst claimed that the secret behind Bin Laden’s double lied within the analogue recording technique adapted by a Video Home System (VHS).
10. Interlacing:
A Video Home System (VHS) is an analogue recording videotape housed in a 7.5-inches wide by 4.2-inches deep by 1-inch high plastic cassette. In order to enhance motion perception to the viewer while reducing costs on bandwidth, engineers developed a technique for doubling each video frame into two fields captured at two different times.
One analyst, whose name remained undisclosed in the confidential files published by Wikileaks, claimed that the very nature of interlaced video recording necessitates that each of the 24 frames per second be split in half. The halves correspond to fields of diagonal lines each carrying half of the visual information being filmed and which are captured at a time interval of 0.02 seconds away from each other. This split of both time and information captured on the VHS tape revealed that the videotape showed neither Bin Laden nor his double; in fact, it showed both.
11. An uneasy jam with the Beatles:
Ringo was frequently seen
Paul was merely a guard
Georges recited verses from the Quran
But John
Oh John
He was a rapper
Ney, a hacker
Or perhaps both