The Iranian community on friendfeed.com, which by the way is a 2000+ strong group, is pushing for a change of logo for the Nowruz, the Persian/Iranian new year. Google already recognizes Nowruz and exhibits a custom logo on the day.

The above logo has been designed by the Iranian user Pedram, the one below by Nimaa. Follow the discussion here.

Radio Zamaneh mentions local reports [Persian] stating that there have been attempts to demolish Khavaran Cemetery. Believed by the family members of the victims of the political cleansing of the 1988 to be where their loved ones are buried, the 30m by 60m cemetery in southern east of Tehran has been the scene of protests in recent years. There are no gravestones or any other signs in the yard, except for a few put in place by people who claim to have received information regarding the burial places of their executed loved ones.

There is now a call to action to demand Navanethem Pillay, the High Commissioner of Human Rights at the UN, to use all his capacity to stop the Iranian regime from destroying this piece of land, one of the few signs of a brutal past which has never been forgotten.

To: InfoDesk@ohchr.org

Your Excellency Ms. Navanethem Pillay High Commissioner of Human Rights at the UN

With deep disbelief and disdain we have become aware that the authorities of the Islamic Republic of Iran have undertaken the destruction of Khavaran Cemetery, the only known site of mass and individual graves of the victims of the Great Massacre of political prisoners in the summer of 1988 and other non- Moslem dissidents executed in Iran through out the Seventies.

I beg your honor to urgently take action demanding the authorities of the Islamic Republic of Iran to immediately stop this barbaric operation.

The destruction of Khavaran is tantamount to the eradication of an important material evidence of a historic crime.

Respectfully,

More about Khavaran Cemetery in BBC Persian, Wikipedia

I think one of the observations made as a result of the recent round of fights in Gaza is that, aside from all the moral and humanitarian concerns, bombing people does not necessarily yield any solution (Larger PDF at the bottom of the post).

Source – Through Antony

Persian Post – What is an Excerpt?

 PDF Download

These days I am reading the fascinating book “More Sex Is Safer Sex” by Steven Landsburg and at the same time I try to use my optimization background to work out some of the arguments made in the book.

This is proof for what Chapter 1 suggests: “Do not make people terrified of AIDS, or you’ll have more!” (click on the images for larger sizes).

This would be the situation for the US (the variable s denotes how much more worried cautious people will become as a result of the ad campaign, compared to the less cautious people),

Persian Post – What is an Excerpt?

The Iranian filtering system has reportedly started custom filtering of the users in friendfeed.com. As a result, the Iranian blogger Vahid Online has been filtered out.

In a “guest piece” he asks what the limits of freedom of speech in Iran are. He asks,

Is development, including economical, political, and alike, possible on the basis of anything but freedom of access to information for the people?

Persian Post – What is an Excerpt?

There is no change in the order of the twenty most-read Persian blogs since nine days ago. This result is collected through project “Feed Counter“.

Persian Post

The last post in this blog is dated December 26 (see: “Al Maliki witnesses another shoe tossed for Bush”), so I guess I do not need to tell you that I have not been updating this blog as frequently as I probably should have. And if you have been following this blog for some time, you have definitely noticed that this is an oddity, given the trend here back then.

So, as I seem to be stuck in my Persian blog, which now has six times more readers than this blog, I thought why not do a little gimmick and publish excerpts from my Persian posts here. I will translate the posts in their entirety if there is any request of course.

So, here it comes the “Excerpts” category.