Do we have a courage to face the reality...

Cant sleep, just lying in bed wallowing in sadness after watching this video.

Filthy water --> Drinkable

TED is my favorite website and you can always find interesting talks almost about everything. Today I was watching this talk again! (I love robots) and I found this talk by Michael Pritchard about making filthy water drinkable. 

Here is his website.

Mamloo Dam construction

I was director of SACES (Scientific Association of Civil Engineering Students) at University of Tehran and we planned many talks, field trips and colloquiums. In one of our filed trips we visited a soil dam 45 km southeast of Tehran. I was looking to the map of rivers around Tehran today and found that they finished the construction of the dam and already using it. Name of the dam is Mamloo soil dam and it receives water from two rivers from north and northeast of Varamin; and the main river is Jajrood river which supplies some water of metropolitan Tehran. You can look at the location of the dam here (google maps) or download the kmz file here (google earth). Here are some pictures before finishing the construction when we visited the site (Pictures are big in size so you may download them if you want to have a closer look).

Why blogging?

So you can find different things here on my blog!
One the reasons I like to do here is know what other people in academia doing, mostly PhD students who put too much time and effort on their work. Usually, people (your adviser) demand to have new things to be done by the end of your PhD thesis. But this is not a case for every PhD student. If you are in Engineering as I am, so in most probability you are working on a applied problem. Applied problems are good in a sense you can see immediate effect of your work, if it is really applied, or at least you can see its effect in a long run.
Many of problems we are trying to solve are just a little bit improvement in our world but
Anyway, I was reading this article by Sarah Kendzior and found good advices for PhD students here by Patrick Meier. He has some good points for you if you want to get more involve in your research and also open some doors for you future after graduation. I am totally agree with him about blogging. Actually, I can say, its better to have another blog for your inner personality. By that I mean to have some place that no body knows you and you can write whatever you want. This helps to keep track of your inner peace, may be!
So, in conclusion I encourage you to create a blog for your work and write as much as you can. You may be the only follower of that blog but as I mentioned this will help you a lot.

Why water infrastructure

Somehow history of human begins with water.  Ancient civilizations developed near water resources like springs, lakes and rivers, which were sources of clean water on that time. All of us heard about great civilizations on the bank of Mesopotamia, Nile rive and Indus river. 

Water has a huge impact on human history and having clean and safe water always has been a big concern and will be. In arid areas people knows the value of water and they did very interesting works to bring water to their home. They dig water wells and Qanats and much of the population in that areas depended directly to this water. One of the oldest and largest known Qanat is in Iran and still after 2,700 years providing drinking and agricultural water to nearly 40,000 people. Also there is a two story Qanat in Ardestan which is constructed 800 years ago and has 60 l/s flow.

In the picture you can see a Qanat in Hormozgan province from Sassanid era.

Besides drinking water and using it for cleaning and aggregation, human tried to use water for other purposes. To providing energy like watermills, to having cool flow in windcatchers, for measuring time and ....

In the pictures below you can see water clock and the clay tablet for water clock calculations from Babylon period.

Beside of these, there is a great history on dams and how human tried to reserve water for his future. 

Blow is the picture of the Saad El Kafara dam which is built by ancient Egyptians around 2650 BC.

 I will try to have a post about dams later.

Beginning ...

Did the world have a beginning?

Where is the origin? Which one is true: the Big Bang Theory or the Steady State Theory?

I don't know about that but I know this blog started at a single moment with the a blast and growing in time and space!

I'm a graduate student and I began this blog for several purposes. First of all, to keep track of what I'm doing. Having spreadsheets and tables in word is good too, but here I can reach the content all the time and also since I was blogging before, for me is more incentive to write and write and write. In addition, I will try to link useful papers, websites, blogs, ... so for me its easier to cite them here for future use. Moreover, I can get others opinion about topics I am posting. Finally, blogging is fun and helps to think better I think!