A quest for fun

shari‘ati and the (elusive) quest for a just order

ali shariati was undoubtedly among the most important of the prerevolutionary islamist thinker particularly insofar as he made islam a politically respectable force for many young men and women in iran's traditional middle classes. shariati was novel for the time in terms of his education and intellectual influences. the clear attraction of ideology for shariati is that he believes by means of ...

the quest for an hiv vaccine

Exploiting BitTorrent For Fun

This paper assesses BitTorrent’s robustness against selfish peers, who try to download more than their fair share by abusing existing protocol mechanisms. We design and implement three selfish-peer exploits and evaluate their effectiveness on public and private torrents. In practice, BitTorrent appears quite robust against this kind of exploit: selfish peers can sometimes obtain more bandwidth,...

Knitting for Fun: A Recursive Sweater

In this paper we investigate the relations between knitting and computer science. We show that the two disciplines share many concepts. Computer science, in particular algorithm theory, can suggest a lot of powerful tools that can be used both in descriptive and prescriptive ways and that apparently have not yet been used for creative knitting. The obtained results are short (optimal size) recu...

A quest for the moon

There has been a renewed interest in exploration of the moon in the past few years and a number of space missions are planned by various countries during this decade. The Indian Space Research Organization has also been discussing the possibility of an orbiter mission to the moon for remote sensing and has debated the scientific goals for such a mission in various fora such as the annual meetin...