Recently, it seems, there have been more articles than usual written about the Baha’i Faith. One from the Huffington Post, is a nice personal opinion about someone who is now investigating the truths about the Baha’i Faith. The article has some very interesting discussion (via comments) at the end of it. It shows several concerns that many people who are or could be investigating the Faith are having.

Another one, from the Wall Street Journal is a brief, but very accurate and current, exploration of the Faith, which contains some of the history of the persecution of the Baha’is, mainly in Iran. The author resides in Haifa, Israel, where the spiritual and administrative centers of the Baha’i Faith are found: the spiritual center because the physical remains of the Bab and Baha’u'llah are kept in Shrines in these properties and the administrative center because the Seat (meeting place) of the Universal House of Justice

Both are very good reads. At this point, I will pause and give you some time to go read them.

…

Reading the collection of blogs found on my favorite RSS reader today, I came accross a cool use of Google Insights for Search (it was new to me, mainly because I didn’t look into it much when it came out). TechCrunch was highlighting the use of this tool to track several Web 2.0 sites/concepts. The maps looked cool so I decided to try a few of my own. Let’s see what insights Google has for the search term: bahai

and

Top Ten Countries (by Search Volume Index)
Iran, Jamaica, Israel, Canada, Kenya, Australia, Bolivia, Panama, New Zealand, Norway

leads me to a few observations:

• Iran and Israel for sure (for reasons mentioned above and more)
• Kenya is a nice surprise (there are clusters in Kenya that are 4% Baha’i by population)
• Australia and Panama both have temples
• Jamaica, Canada, Bolivia, New Zealand, Norway cool!
• Two of the top three countries with largest Baha’i population: US and India didn’t make it, probably due to the normalization. Volume is probably up there, though.

Top Ten Cities (by Search Volume Index)
Vancouver, Chicago, Toronto, Sydney, Seattle, Washington, Melbourne, Los Angeles, Atlanta, San Francisco

San Francisco is #10!! Hmm… If you are from San Francisco and you searched because you are investigating, give me a call, or write at least a comment. We’ll meet up with you! :)

All these cities: it makes a lot of sense. They all are part of A clusters, which means many many prayers and energies are being dispensed to allow the message of Baha’u'llah to reach more and more people.

Thanks for revealing this Google!

I was stumbling-upon (a.k.a. browsing) around the internet earlier today and I found something kinda cool. I reached a website that had some stock photography tagged “bahai”.

One of the pictures stood out to me because I had never seen it before. It is a picture from “Le Petit Journal” (a small magazine?) presumably from France showing ‘Abdul’l-Baha giving a talk around a crowd of people in Constantinople (now Istanbul), Turkey.

The image came from the Mary Evans Picture Library which seems to be a collection of pictures/photos/images from one or two centuries ago.

The title may imply that ‘Abdu’l-Baha is a new prophet of Islam or that ‘Abdu’l-Baha is talking about a new prophet of Islam, Baha’u'llah. The perception at the time in many places around the world and even currently in many textbooks, news articles, essays, etc. is that the Baha’i Faith is a sect of Islam and that Baha’u'llah and maybe even ‘Abdu’l-Baha are prophets of Islam. Though it is correct that Baha’u'llah was raised in the Islam tradition, it is very clear that he came to establish a new and independent world faith. This says it best:

The Bahá’í Faith is a world religion whose purpose is to unite all the races and peoples in one universal Cause and one common Faith. Bahá’ís are the followers of Bahá’u’lláh, Who they believe is the Promised One of all Ages. As you know, the traditions of almost every people include the promise of a future when peace and harmony will be established on earth and humankind will live in prosperity. We believe that the promised hour has come and that Bahá’u’lláh is the great Personage Whose Teachings will enable humanity to build a new world. In one of His Writings, Bahá’u’lláh says:

“That which the Lord hath ordained as the sovereign remedy and mightiest instrument for the healing of all the world is the union of all its peoples in one universal Cause, one common Faith.”

After the passing of Baha’u'llah, ‘Abdu’l-Baha continued to spread the faith his father revealed to humanity throughout the world. In 1911, he went to Paris, France where he gave a series of talks, many of which were recorded and compiled in this book, Paris Talks:

In 1912, he came to the United States where he continued to give talks and to meet with the Baha’i Community that had recently started to grow here.

P.S. I’m back, hopefully to be more constant. BahaiNine has been keeping me busy, be sure to check it out.

Mr. (or Ms.) Internet Nongeek doesn’t need all the fancy extensions that make Firefox the best web development browser out there. Thus, I picked out from my list of Extensions the few that will keep Firefox running fast while also giving it some extra functionality. These along with Firefox’s Quick Searches make Internet browsing much more efficient and should be a reason for making the switch from your current browser:

All-in-One Sidebar - Puts all of Firefox’s separate windows (Add-ons, Downloads, History) in the Sidebar. Toggle with F4.

Auto Copy - Select text in Firefox and its automatically copied to the Clipboard. So useful, that I do it in other applications and forget to press Control-C.

Download Statusbar - Creates a new status bar at the bottom of Firefox that appears when you download a file. No more Downloads Window (or Sidebar). Double click to open the file.

Flat Bookmark Editing - In the Bookmarks Manager, it enables easy editing of Bookmark information.

Mouse Gestures - Control Firefox by rightclick-dragging your mouse in certain directions. I pretty much only use the rightclick-drag to the left for Back.

PDF Download - Short circuits PDF links and asks you if you want to download it to your computer, view it in the browser or open with Adobe Reader.

Tab History - Click a link that opens a new tab, and that tab will keep the history of the parent tab!

Tab Mix Plus - Tons of Tabbed Browsing preferences, defaults are cool, but you can download my settings file and import it (in this extension’s Settings) to get a few more tweaks. This extension’s Session Saver is better than Firefox’s default.

Table Tools - Sorting of tables in any webpage by Control-Click the header, right click the table to copy it as tab-delimited text for easy import into Excel.

For further (and possibly geeky) Firefox tweaking, check out these 15 cool tips. Ask any questions in the comments and I’ll be sure to try to help you out. :)

Some Bay Area Baha’is and I have been working on this project called Bahai Top 9 (with precursor site bahainine.com). It’s basically going to be a popurls-look-and-feel, newsvine-styled-organization web portal with digg-like-capabilities in order to showcase user-generated content about the Baha’i Faith.

Our first phase in the project consisted of finding either personal blogs written by Baha’is or Baha’i-inspired blogs that are out there today. We also collected photos from flickr and videos from youtube which are tagged bahai (or baha’i). The design and backend of the site has been keeping us very occupied. :)

At this point, bahainine.com has a registration form for your blog and a map of the world with markers for the locations of the Baha’i blogs out there:

Thanks to those of you that have linked to us and encouraged your friends to register. Also, the Official United States Baha’i website has written a nice article about Baha’i Blogs.

For all the faithful “Kevin’s Blog” readers out there, I’ll include a screenshot of the design we are currently working on:

Keep in mind that it’s in a very early stage of development (alpha). Feel free to include your feedback as comments to this post. I will be sure to pass it on to the team.

This YouTube video (thanks Sara!) has some very interesting statistics. As anyone who has taken a statistis course can tell you, take them with a grain of salt but that’s not to say you can’t clearly see how many of them could be true.

Without taking away too much of the effect of the video, here are some of the facts:

-The 25% of the population of China with the highest IQs… is greater than the total population of North America. In India, it’s the top 28%. Translation for teachers: they have more honors kids than we have kids

-China will soon become the number one English-speaking country in the world.

This I find very interesting:

… the top 10 jobs that will be in demand in 2010 didn’t exist in 2004. We are currently preparing students for jobs that don’t exist yet… using technologies that haven’t been invented… in order to solve problems we don’t know are problems yet.

I can see how fast the world is changing in terms of technology and keeping up is a mighty task. Technology should be used to improve the lives of people even though at first, it may be unclear how a particular technology will do this.

I also found a report that very cleverly uses maps with distorted countries to display statistics about the world. I found the two maps about toys very interesting: the one about toy imports shows the US as the biggest and the one about toy exports shows China as the biggest.