No, you’re not going to step inside a time machine to get physically shredded and transported as tiny packages only to be reassembled in another era where you can wreak havoc by just showing the local people of 1542 BC that you have an iPad 2. Though it might sound very alluring for the aspiring evil scientists among us, it still is possible the other way: traveling forward in time.
Yes yes – not quite that exciting as you’d hoped, but very interesting nonetheless!

The law of universal gravitation

We all know Newton’s laws from high school physics class. Still, for most of us, the equations remained highly abstract and we didn’t get the chance to apply them to real life scenarios. Though the equations were basic, some laws are highly applicable to an enormous amount of the universe. With the first law of Newton: Newton's law of universal gravitation we can have a simple planetary orbit system by applying the equation to the bodies [fig a.1].

The basic principle behind this confirmed idea is that any form of mass – a body – has gravity. You can simply imagine gravity as a force surrounding a body, pulling other bodies to its center. That is the reason we don’t fall off the Earth when we jump!

Newton was convinced that gravity worked instantaniously. For example: if the sun would suddenly evaporate and disappear, the Earth would fall out of orbit immediately and gets hurled into space. This was later proven to be a misconception of how gravity works.

Unification of theories

So now we know that all bodies – or just mass – has its own gravitational well that pulls other bodies towards the center of the body. This theory was the basis for further research on the matter by scientists such as Albert Einstein.

Albert Einstein was working on a theory about light in his early twenties. At the age of 26, he released a paper that proved that the speed of light was the absolute barrier of everything. Yet, light also travels at a certain speed. For example: the time for the rays of light to travel the distance from the sun to the surface of the Earth (150 million kilometers) is approximately 8 minutes. Einstein said that nothing can go faster than light, not even gravity. Yet, Newton’s theory told a different story.
When Einstein noticed this flaw in Newton's law of universal gravitation, he started working on a solution for this problem – in which he succeeded and revolutioninzed the picture of the universe.

Though to understand what Einstein did, we have to take a big jump through time and go back to 1632, when Galileo Galilei came up with the idea of a coordinate system in which objects, where no force at work, are completely still or make a uniform rectilinear motion. So if you’d spill coffee or drop a ball while on an airplane or while sitting on a couch at home, the same laws apply. Even though, in an airplane, you are traveling at 1000km per hour! This effect is called the Galilean invariance.
Einstein unified this theory with Newton's universal gravitation theory to end up with a coordination grid that simplifies the calculations for measuring the amount of deflection of gravity, amongst other physical changes caused by the mass of an object.

After nearly ten years of racking his brain, he found the answer in a new kind of unification. Einstein came to think of the three dimensions of space (length, width and depth) and the single dimension of time, as bound together as a single fabric of space-time.
Like the surface of a trampoline, is warped and stretched by heavy objects like planets or stars [fig b.2]. And it’s this warping or curving of space-time that creates what we feel as gravity. A planet like the Earth is kept in orbit not because the sun reaches out and instantaneously grabs hold of it as of Newton’s theory. Bodies no longer have a force that pulls other bodies towards them. The reason why the Earth orbits the sun is merely because the Earth follows curves in the space-time fabric caused by the sun’s presence.
This theory is named general relativity.

fig b.2 - A symmetric spherical body on a two-dimensional grid that illustrates the space-time universe. body A is surrounded by its gravitational well, defined by an outer ring and a gradient.

You can simply imagine a gravitational well as a ring or more specifically, a funnel surrounding a body [fig b.3] of mass that depicts the curvature of space-time.

fig b.3 - The same scene as fig a.2 illustrated from the side with the forces of the gravitational well of body A applied to the grid. The gravity well shows an exponential distribution (hyperboloid) of the force in this situation, since body A is a symmetric spherical mass. Therefore, there can also be noted that the gravitational force exponentially increases as you get closer to the center of mass of the body, and will theoretically have an endless reach.

So what does time have to do with gravity?

The current state of the general relativity theory also describes the dilation and delay of time, affected by the curvature of space-time.

When general relativity was introduced in 1915, it had no solid empirical foundation (it did not depend on evidence or consequences that are observable by the senses). This lead to a quest for proof, obtainable through experiments and testing.

General relativity at its best

A very good example of general relativity is a natural phenomenon called gravitational redshifting. It describes how light has to “climb” uphill a gravitational well and thereby losing some energy, shifting the light-waves to a lower energetic frequency and longer in wavelength, resulting in the optical color red [fig c.4].

fig c.4 - The gravitational redshift of a light wave as it moves uphill against a gravitational field (caused by the yellow star body C).

The deflection of light caused by bodies with great mass was already foretold by John Michell in 1783 and Pierre-Simon Laplace in 1796, who predicted that some stars could have a gravity force so strong that light would not be able to escape. It was in 1801 that Johann Georg von Soldner calculated the amount of deflection of a light from a distant star, by the sun. He arrived at the Newtonian answer which is half the value predicted by general relativity. All of this early work assumed that light was a particle, a corpuscle with kinetic energy, which was inconsistent with the modern understanding of light waves.

In 1861 when James Clerk Maxwell published his paper, it was clear that light is in fact an electromagnetic wave rather than a particle. Einstein’s theory on light told that light does not simply “slow down” and combined with the fact that light is an electromagnetic wave, it all made sense. One way around this conclusion would be if time itself was altered – if clocks at different points had different rates! This effect is called time dilation.

What about special relativity

When Einstein came up with general relativity, a problem popped up when he faced calculations in the vacuum of space (or, hypothetically far from all gravitational mass). He did not have a reference of time nor space to make his calculations. So special relativity (SR) was his second invention: a way to make space-time calculations based on a “the inertial frame of reference”. This basically means that you will refer to a force that does exist in that space-time field you are doing calculations in, but only to measure differences between the two forces.

This also means that when making calculations in SR, you are excluding every practical cause of errors in measurements or formulas for a better understanding of what is happening.

Being able to make calculations like that gave a lot of new ways for calculating space-time ratios for different velocities. Now imagine two clocks that get shot into outer space to orbit the Earth. Clock A gets launched to orbit Earth with a velocity of almost the speed of light, while clock B gets launched to orbit at the speed of a regular space shuttle [fig d.5].

fig d.5 - Both clocks are launched at 00:00 hours and are measured 00:21, revealing that clock A has spent less time in space due to its high velocity compared to earth and clock B.

After one year, the time on both clocks would be measured and compared to one another. You would see that clock A would be far behind on clock B. This does not mean that clock A is broken, but simply that the speed time would pass depends on how fast the subject is moving. So clock A would have spent less time in space than clock B, even though they both spent a year in outer space. (Yes, the measurement of a year would be also relative, since the Earth is moving at a different velocity too!)

Welcome on board

In theory, time dilation is the key for travelling into the future without spending the same amount of time you normally would, compared to the speed time moves on Earth. You would need a very, very fast vehicle to have a dramatic difference. For example, one year of travel might correspond to ten years at home. A constant 1g acceleration would permit humans to travel through the entire known Universe in one human lifetime. The space travellers could return to Earth billions of years in the future. A scenario based on this idea was presented in the novel Planet of the Apes by Pierre Boulle, which… really didn’t give hope for having a nice welcome home party.

“YOU! Get off my planet!”

1. Understanding box-shadow and text-shadow

These new CSS3 properties allow you to create blurred duplicates of the element you add this property to. The syntax for box-shadow goes like this:

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/* box-shadow: Xoffset Yoffset Radius Color; */
box-shadow: 1px 1px 2px #000000;

Why doesn’t this work for me!?

Don’t worry! Not all browsers officially support this property since CSS3 is still not publicly released. Thankfully there are alternative CSS properties for a few browsers:

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-moz-box-shadow: 1px 1px 2px #000000;  /* Mozilla Firefox */
-webkit-box-shadow: 1px 1px 2px #000000;  /* Webkit-based browsers (Apple Safari, Google Chrome) */
box-shadow: 1px 1px 2px #000000;  /* Official property declaration */

It’s exactly the same for text-shadow:
The syntax for box-shadow goes like this:

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/* text-shadow: Xoffset Yoffset Radius Color; */
text-shadow: 1px 1px 2px #000000;

It even works with border-radius, giving you a smooth blur behind a smooth element!

2. Including jQuery and mk-shadow.js

You’ll need jQuery (a popular javascript framework) to use mk-shadow.js. It’s easy to include in your page and is hosted by Google. Put this piece of code between the head tags of your page:

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<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.2/jquery.min.js"></script>

For the sake of ease, I created a JS file you just have to include in your page between the head tags using something like:

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<script src="js/mk-shadow.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

Basically, what mk-shadow.js does is read the page you included the script in and create shadows for all elements with the class mk-shadow and text shadows for elements with the class mk-shadow-text.

3. Adjusting mk-shadow.js

You may adjust the script itself by editing the few variables in the top of the .js file:

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var updateTime = '50';                   // shadows' update time in ms
 
// BOX SHADOW SETTINGS
var boxShadowRadius  = '10';             // how many pixels the shadow is blurred
var boxShadowColor   = '#000000';        // color of the shadow
var boxShadowMultiplierX = '1';          // multiplier for the shadow's horizontal position
var boxShadowMultiplierY = '1';          // multiplier for the shadow's vertical position
 
// TEXT SHADOW SETTINGS
var textShadowRadius  = '5';             // how many pixels the box shadow is blurred
var textShadowColor   = '#000000';       // color of the box shadow
var textShadowMultiplierX = '1';         // multiplier for the shadow's horizontal position
var textShadowMultiplierY = '1';         // multiplier for the shadow's vertical position

4. Applying to elements

It’s very easy to add this effect to any element using the classes mk-shadow for box shadows and mk-shadow-text for text shadows:

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<div class="mk-shadow">Testing dynamic box-shadow</div>
<span class="mk-shadow-text">Testing dynamic text-shadow</span>

5. Working example

Here you can see a working example using mk-shadow.js. Another one with a light image that follows your mouse to strengthen the effect.

6. Compatibility

Tested and working with:

• Mozilla Firefox 3.6.4
• Apple Safari 5.0
• Google Chrome 5.0.375.70
• Opera 10.54

7. Download mk-shadow.js

Download mk-shadow.js

As you can see, this is my first blog post on http://murtada.nl. I wanted to have a personal place for my stuff, all gathered on one site. Kind of like a “home” for anything that is linked to me.

Next to that, I wanted to have a space where I could show off my work and skills so people who might be interested could easily see what I can offer them from the kitchen!

So there is a personal and professional side of my homepage. A lot of people who create a website (including me) want to promote a product or just share a story, photograph or other work. It’s pretty hard to know where to begin if you haven’t done this before, but no worries! I’ll give some pointers on how to get your site up and running!

1. Be complete and thorough!

Try to have as much as information and background on the story/photo/product you want to promote. This means you know precisely what you want to accomplish with your website. Having too much information is better than having not enough.

Design is a very important part in this stage. The design of your website should follow the structure of your informational structure. Clear menus and seperation of content and navigational interfaces are crucial things to look at.

But my site is flawless, I’m not gonna mess around with it anymore!

Be an open thinker and try to get inside of your visitor’s mind. Doing so allows you to see things you might have overlooked by judging too fast: “That’s obvious – no need to put that on the website!” is precisely what you should be careful with. You can almost certainly count your visitor to be a rookie or he/she might even be unfamiliar with the subject of your site. Try to grab their attention at the very first moment they see your site, because you know what they say: “In the first 3 seconds a visitors decides to stay or leave”.

2. Get a spot on the stage!

After you’ve finished working on your concept for your site and poured everything in a seamless mold, get a stage as soon as possible. It’s easy to give Google a hint to start crawling your site by adding your site’s url to Google’s index on Add your URL to Google.

Doing so helps a bit in starting off in the showdown. Even better is to register at Google Webmaster Tools and submit your sitemap. Not only will this fasten things a lot – it will give you access to more knowledge on what’s happening and give you some great tools to see if there are any duplicate entries or other crawl errors.

All nice and dandy, but how do I get a sitemap? I’m not gonna make one manually for my 25141 individual site urls!

Of course you’re not going do it manually! There are great tools out there that allow you to get a complete sitemap of your website in no-time. I personally liked the Java sitemap creator by AuditMyPC.com: AuditMyPc Sitemap Generator
No java? See the url-list at the end of this post for alternatives.

3. Get social!

Social networking cannot be ignored nowadays. It’s everywhere – even dogs are doing it! Anyway, social networking gives you a big oppertunity to really get the flame burning. Twitter, Facebook, Digg, del.icio.us, reddit, stumbleUpon and many many more networking sites can give you a nice visitor – webmaster relationship other than opening a door to a lot of visitors!

But do not think your social journey ends here! Many people get their own host to be independent of other sites that host their work. Of course that has a lot of benefits, but don’t forget that many sites that allow hosting already have a big social network connected to it. Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo and a bunch of other sites give you great tools to host and manage your work and also contribute to the community within the site. This obviously gives visitors an easier way to get connected with you. Be it favourites, views or subscriptions… In the end it all adds up and makes people aware of you and your story!

But all this is a lot of hard work; how can I pull it off without dying of “social-network-overdose”?

First of all: it looks like more work than it actually is. Twitter even limits your tweets to 140 characters for a reason. There also are a lot of settings that will synchronize your accounts and send an update to your accounts all at once. A great application is TweetDeck. It allows you to keep track of what’s happening and updating your accounts will be as easy as pie!

4. Track and analyze!

Okay, so you’ve got yourself some accounts on a few social networking sites. Nice, but how can you be sure you are getting any visitors on your own site? I personally use Google Analytics to keep track of my visitors and pageviews. It’s one of the most complete and thorough analytics solution for your website, and best of all – it’s free!

You can learn a lot of things by just analyzing your pageviews and visitors. There is a map overlay which shows you where your visitors come from. There even is a site overlay that tells you exactly how many times the links on a page are clicked, while you are visiting your site!

So what exactly do I directly benefit from analyzing my page?

There is an upside and downside to everything. You might have been writing for days on a blog post but didn’t get any visitors. Thanks to analytics you’ll notice very quickly what’s going on. Analytics shows you if there is a problem with connecting to your post or if your readers just leave the site after a few seconds (in this case your post might be too long – repelling for many readers).
On the other hand, you might notice a sudden growth at a specific post. You might want to look into that and maybe promote it more (on your social networking sites!).

Either way, you’ll make sure your visitors get what they want by looking at their behaviour on every specific page.

5. Keep it fresh!

Cool! You’ve geared up your site, let it run for a few moments, but what’s that? You’re losing visitors!
Of course a site can be informational and static, but in most instances there is a lot to tell about the subject your site is about. Don’t weaken your motivation but deliver fresh updates every now and then. You’ll notice that not only your visitors will be repeating their visits but even Google Search will like your site more! Search engines tend to prefer sites that update frequently and have fresh content.

A good way to deliver new content is to start a blog or forum on your site. Using WordPress (blog) or phpBB (forum) will make things a lot easier to manage and are both free. So don’t forget to oil up your gears every now and then – even websites get rusty!

I have no time for a blog or forum. Heck I am already tweeting like a forest full of birds. Do I really need this?

Alright, granted. All that social networking might take up a lot of time or maybe your site is a side-project you don’t want to waste all your effort and time on. There are a few solutions for this though. Try looking at ways to integrate your social networking accounts in your site. For example: read the RSS feed of your Twitter account and post it on your site. Maybe a nice Flickr slideshow? There also are many “widgets” or “gadgets” for specific communities. See the url-list at the end of this post for a few examples.

6. Give your visitors a microphone!

Wow, your site is really starting to shine here! Lots of visitors, great content. But where is the interaction? I bet a lot of your visitors want to say something about your new blog post or that cool photograph you posted last night. Don’t restrict your visitors to only reading! Besides, a new comment means an update. And updates mean freshness! It’s a win-win situation and not that hard to integrate in your site. See the url-list at the end of this post for a few examples.

Conclusion

That was not that hard after all, was it? A lot of these steps will come naturally once you know how it all works. To sum it all up, a short list of the things you can do to make your site popular.

1. Create a thorough site
2. Get your site indexed by a search engine
3. Use social networking communities to spread your story
4. Analyze your pageviews and visitors
5. Update frequently
6. Give your audience an oppertunity to interact on your site

That’s it for now! I hope it helped you in any way!
Good luck on your website!

URL Reference list

Sitemap generators

• AuditMyPc sitemap generator
• XML-sitemaps.com
• WordPress sitemap generator
• SitemapDoc sitemap generator
• NeuroticWeb sitemap generator
• (Self-hosting) Google automatic sitemap generator

Social networking sites

• Twitter
• Facebook
• Google+
• Digg
• reddit
• stumbleUpon
• Flickr
• YouTube
• Vimeo

Social networking widgets/gadgets

• Twitter widgets
• Flickr widgets
• Facebook widgets
• Youtube widgets

Comment-functionality solutions

• JS-Kit comments
• HTML Comment Box
• Instacomment
• Commentist
• Disqus

The problem

Categorization differentiates and groups people in specific categories, usually characterized by a set of (similar) properties. Many people actually give categorization a negative charge. Even Dutch dictionaries give this view a bad name: “Having a (over)simplified view of the world”. Why? Because categorization leads to prejudice.
The dilemma is: you cannot escape using this method of viewing the world. Everyone categorizes and has prejudices to almost everything he/she sees. There are many reasons why you should and must prejudge the things and people around you.

An example: seeing something that has two wings and two legs, you instantly know it is a bird. This way you don’t need to judge every individual bird (crow, duck, eagle). Instead, you just put them in one group, namely: birds. This phenomenon is a very useful property of the brain. This ability to generalize is needed to simplify complex information your brain receives. Without it, you would probably be pretty dysfunctional.

Practical use

Most of the time, you are unaware of this process. When you are in a supermarket and you cannot find the product you are looking for, you automatically look for someone with an apron or a uniform to ask him or her. You actually are putting someone in the “box” of “supermarket staff”.

As you can see, this property of the brain comes in handy to compare different things more easily. Differences will be easier to be defined. You still know that everyone is unique and individual, but it makes it easier to identify a person… “Oh, you mean that nerd with the glasses?”

Innate or not

Considering people cannot ignore this process of categorization means that many choices are based on the feelings connected to a certain group of people. Now when you look at a person who is wearing only black, you might think he is gothic instead of “just a person with black clothes”. This grouping is presumably characterized by the media and environment. This leads to dishonest grouping by only one characteristic: “black clothing”. By now you might wonder where we get the information to group certain people. Is it the media? Is it the education? Is it innate?

I would say that it is most likely not innate. Considering the different forms of social cultures that exist, it is not thinkable that all those cultures are “natural” divarications (branches) of the standard human character. Most of our categories are made up by the media and education.
Some categorizations are innate though. For example: a person who is bigger than you will most likely win in a fight. This is a natural quality (also known as “common sense”) that almost every organism has. You need categorizations to survive. It will help you make a choice considering the properties of the group you put the person in. So, in some way it is needed to know where you stand and to plan your move for a positive outcome. You need it.

Reactions

The reactions on this “hokjesdenken” are varied.
People who were negatively placed in a box often feel rejection, anger, indignation and sorrow. On the other hand: people who were positively placed in a box feel especially proud, happy and cheerful. A disadvantage is that these positive expectations put a great pressure on the shoulders of that person. It becomes a problem when people have certain expectations of you while you cannot meet them at all. Another major drawback of the attempt to simplify the world is that often only the negative things are seen, and this often leads to racism.

Conclusion

“Hokjesdenken” or categorization or generalization is not always a process you are aware of when it occurs. It is a subconscious process and it is almost impossible to turn it off. Categorization is a quality, a property of almost every organism, simply because it helps to make the right choices to survive.
It is also very helpful when you need some grip to make a decision. You consider all the positive and negative aspects of a certain situation, person or even food. So don’t be ashamed of using this method of categorizing people.
But beware when making decisions that way: you can hurt people unintentionally.
Also, if you notice yourself being very negative about a certain group of people, look out that you are not building up racist feelings.

“Hello, may I ask you something?” he said with a broken voice.
“What color is the sky?”

I was so surprised to hear these words from his mouth. And I know how this sounds crazy, but I really didn’t expect he would have the courage to begin such a conversation. I couldn’t grasp that this moment was anything like a normal person would ask. The thing about this man that makes him so different is just unimaginable for a normal person.

“The sky is red,” I said with an unscraped throat.
“How does it look like, red?” he then asked me.
“I’m sorry?” I responded confused.
“What does the color red look like. Could you describe it with anything familiar?”

That question immediately unleashed a chaos in my head of feelings, objects, moments and people who I associate with the color “red”.
I obviously tried very hard to respond with some sort of logic. So I told the man a few things.

Red is a very powerful color. It is actually the most symbolic color. It is associated with lots of passionate feelings like love, danger, politics and religion. It is often used to highlight an element between other less important elements. It also is the color of blood…

The man listened very carefully to every word I said. While I was talking he moved his mouth as if he was repeating the words I was saying.
After I was finished he smiled and looked away. He seemed relieved to have heard those words. As if he knew what I would say. He looked back without the smile. It almost seemed like that he saw something awful while he was looking around.

“I see,” he said with an emotionless expression.

It was completely silent for a few minutes when he suddenly stood up, leaning on his stick and looking away in the blurred horizon.
He greeted me and walked down the gravel path with a bit of a swing, ever holding his stick to the ground and moving it back and forth.

When I arrived on Syrian grounds, I was immediately ensured by every human being I met that they were constantly only finding ways to get richer. Nonetheless, it was a pretty exciting adventure where the hard part was actually “blending in”.

I’ve made a few photographs along the way, hope you will like them!

Good times were there
And bad times make you remember
The moments of despair
Through October, November and December

You’ll never find out
Now that all these elements
Enriching your life with doubt
And unforgettable accidents
That you’ll never fail
To show your true face
So lifeless and pale
Rotting away in grace

Complicated as we thought
We found ourselves caught
Between the true meaning of
Hate and love

And the static grows
Killing the one true feeling
Only the light glows
Lying to make it appealing

Direct experience

I’ve lived a few years in small towns, but as me and my brothers and sisters were growing up, we had different needs. We moved to a city, not that big really. But it was a lot bigger than the towns we had lived in. Anyway: we settled in an apartment and it was all okay. But as time passed, we’ve sensed a shift in atmosphere. The socialized people, the good neighbors and all the people who were friendly moved out of town. One by one.

After 10 years, every person we knew had moved. And guess who were filling the empty apartments? The uncosialized dirt, gathered from around the land. It seemed like the town has been filtered. Good out, bad in. Clustering negativity and positivity.

A bit of history

This land has had a very rich history. Lots of wars, lots of power, lots of weird stuff. But let’s get to a more recent happening. After the second world war, the Netherlands were totally disrupted: the pre-war economy was no more. After 10 years of hard work coupled with economic cuts, the land has gained a lot of improvements. In the beginning of the “wederopbouw” (reconstruction), there were a lot of “gastarbeiders” (guest workers) from East-Europe migrating to the Netherlands for work. Though, in the seventies there was a much bigger need for workers. So workers, mostly from Italy, Spain, Turkey and Marocco, were supported to migrate to the Netherlands and some work to later head back to their families in the land they’ve left… So after a few years of work, every smart guy stays in the Netherlands: work is payed very well and there was a certainty for work, thus ensuring a positive future for their families. Who would leave with such an oppertunity?
Anyway: in the coming years, the Netherlands has had a growing amount of immigrants. It was not bad at all: people worked hard and ensured a brighter future for the Netherlands.

Turkish "gastarbeiders"

Bad immigrants

After a long time, around the year 1990, immigrants became well-known about the ins and outs of the social welfare provision system. Immigrants had the intention to abuse this system to only live off the social welfare payments. After a couple of years, politics became aware of this issue and started reducing the amount of immigrants by tightening the rules to be allowed as an official asylum seeker. Still, they had to reduce it with time, so there have been lots of immigrants who are only here to abuse the social welfare system. The only thing they did was make problems: “Idle hands make for the devil’s work”.

House of Representatives elections, May 21, 1986

Current state

There are big groups in the Netherlands who dislike (hate) immigrants because of the abuse and the problems they brought. I can understand that, but the problem is that they mix the cause with the consequence. When they needed workers and supported them to come and work for the Netherlands, they should’ve known there was a risc of immigrating “bad people”. It’s a side-effect and should be accepted as a failure of the system. Other than that: I am not saying that abusing the system is a good thing.
So people get pissed off about immigrants and blame their social differences as the cause for the lack of cooperation between the immigrants and the natives. Terms like culture and religion become a reason to differentiate citizen and seperate them in two parts: “allochtoon” and “autochtoon”.

Since the beginning of the 80′s, there have been several nationalistic and anti-immigrant parties such as the Centre Party (CP) and the more recent Pim Fortuyn List (LPF) and the Party for Freedom (PVV). They all share the same obession of rearranging lives of new immigrants and of people with a different cultural background or religion. They preach about the rule “freedom of speech”, and say all the things they like. They embarrass, vituperate and lie without any difficulty. The only thing they have to say when you try to tell them that it’s not socially responsible and honest to say these words is: “I say what I want, it’s a free country. I have freedom of speech.” The funny thing is: if any immigrant tries to open his mouth, he’s immediately a terrorist, a  “haatzaaier” (hatred sower) or the more common “ape”. Because of course, we – as immigrants – have no social skills and lack the intellect to have the same rights.

Wilders illustrated as an ape

Recently there have been hundreds of Dutch websites hacked. An image of Geert Wilders (the founder of PVV) resembling an ape has been put on the websites. Also, there is The websites are hacked because the owners of the websites did not update their software of their websites. Nevertheless, I bet you’ve heard about Geert Wilders before. He has been on the news almost every single day the last two years. He speaks the most flagrant things about religions and cultures only to be accepted because there is “freedom of speech.” The funny thing is that when the site is saying Wilders is an ape, they call it stupid and unsocialized, while Geert Wilders wrote, spoke and filmed much worse things about whole nations. Where is freedom of speech now?

Something to think about for now – I’ll return on this subject later.

Every hair becomes one of many many trees. Imagining myself in the middle, I’m surrounded by thousands of trees that are so tall, they end up in nothingness. It’s a dark place. It’s a miracle these trees can survive this harsh place. The ground is pretty dry but still movable, resilient. A very strange texture on the ground. It has a certain repeating pattern but it still contains a certain beauty of unpredictability. If you look closely, you’ll see that all the trees are bending towards one side. Every one of them in a different degree. They’re bended so far down, that it’s pretty easy to climb them, but that’ll just leave you at the top that is too high to jump off. Why was I placed in this land? What am I here for? Maybe I’ll find out if I choose a path. But the only paths are to follow the trees or to go against them.

Heh, I guess it’s pretty weird to have read that if you’ve never considered such stories to be set on tiny surfaces of your body. The funny thing is, my eyes are too powerful; I can adjust my eyes to very very close objects without any difficulty. I can adjust my eyes even more than a regular person can so I can see more detail on close objects. Though, this comes with a price: I have to wear glasses for far-lying objects. Maybe that’s the reason I always looked differently to the world?

Nowadays I regularly make macro photographs. A camera with a macro function has the ability to focus just inches away from an object or subject so as to produce big close-ups, sometimes even larger-than-life size. Here follow a few macro photos I took recently.

But it’s not that simple. It’s never that simple. When you start being an “adult”, you’ll see life through different eyes. It’s more bitter now – you get to know the truth and the beauty of all that you had dreamed of. Because what you felt, when you were just a kid, was reality. You know it could be so beautiful as back then. Yet it’s hard to seize the moments of purity and total control of the awareness of life. You’ll get depressed because you cannot make the time run back to how everything was. The harshness of reality returns as a toreutic coating on top of every sense you have.

It makes you mad, it turns you into a faithless person who lost sense of reality, or just wants to run away from it all through excessive drownage of awareness. People who don’t have faith in the positivities of life often lose theirself in materialistic pleasures and shallow meaningless activities. They pretend to know what they want. Placing their targets on pure earthly values give their life the everyday motivation to go on without thinking too much – the values they are looking for are shallow but still time-consuming. Honestly, it consumes all the time and all of their minds. It even makes them forget about others.

Because you can just live your life pretending everything is alright, but it isn’t. If you do, you’re selfish. Why shouldn’t we stand still and rethink the goals of our life to something more human, something more valuable? Think about the people in need, think about lives being lost without any meaning. Think about the value of being a human. Think about having a goal that makes you give the most of yourself. Because there are lives that have never had any of the great feelings we spoiled people have had. Think about happiness; is it really something selfish? Because helping others is for all of us the greatest experience we can have.

We have to consider others, we have to give. Because we have received the most, it is now our time to give.

PS. This is a quick message after a visit at http://1000awesomethings.com
What would people, who haven’t had the oppertunities we enjoy every day, find awesome?