Aarif Khan

Helping script rural India's development story.

[Aarif Khan @aykay_91]

Published my first paper on "Alternative Channels for Household Savings: Mobilizing Micro-savings", which has also been awarded by the Indian Institute of Banking & Finance (IIBF).

Link:
https://t.co/geKuz73hm6

[World of Statistics @stats_feed]

There are two known sublime numbers:

First: 12

Second: 6,086,555,670,238,378,989,670,371,734,243,169,622,657,830,773,351,885,970,528,324,860,512,791,691,264.

[Aarif Khan @aykay_91]

@b50 Is it available online anywhere? Never knew there was a TV adaptation all this while.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

In 1888, Alfred Nobel opened a newspaper and read his own obituary. He was still alive. A French paper had mixed him up with his brother, who had just died, and it wrote that the man who invented dynamite could hardly be called a benefactor of humanity.

Nobel had built one of the biggest fortunes in Europe on explosives. He held 355 patents. He ran more than 90 explosives and weapons factories across over 20 countries. Now he had read, in a few lines of print, the version of his life the world was ready to remember.

Seven years later, in 1895, he sat down in a club in Paris and signed a will that shocked everyone who knew him. He left 94 percent of everything he owned, about 31 million Swedish kronor, to pay for yearly prizes for whoever did the most good for humanity in physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, and peace.

His relatives were furious and fought the will in court. Sweden's elite disliked the idea of a national fortune paying for prizes open to foreigners, and King Oscar II himself pushed the family to break it. The plan was so messy it took years to sort out. The first Nobel Prize was not handed out until 1901, five years after he died.

Nobel never explained himself, and he told no one. The obituary people love to quote, the one that supposedly called him a merchant of death, came from a paper historians have never been able to find, and most now think that version is a myth. But an early notice did run in the spring of 1888, he did read it, and afterward the man known for weapons put almost his whole fortune behind the people who help humanity most.

The dynamite made him rich. The will made his name mean the opposite. Today a Nobel Prize is the highest honor a scientist, a writer, or a peacemaker can receive, and the explosives that paid for it have faded into a footnote.

[Aarif Khan @aykay_91]

@DocRumaisa When I offered to send a couple of weeks back, you didn't provide any details, nor responded to my messages.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Three years of silence is roughly what it takes for one of your closest friends to fade into just another acquaintance. A casual friend gets there in a few months. Same silence, opposite outcome, and the gap is mostly the hours you already put in together.

A researcher at the University of Kansas, Jeffrey Hall, measured this in 2018. He tracked new friendships and found rough lines: about 50 hours of time together to go from stranger to casual friend, around 90 to become friends, and more than 200 hours before someone counts as a close one. The kind of time matters, too. Hanging out, joking around, and playing games all count, but hours stuck working next to someone barely count at all.

That banked time is what makes a friendship hard to kill. Below that line, silence does kill it, on a fairly predictable timeline. Robin Dunbar, the Oxford scientist behind the idea that we can only keep up about 150 relationships at once, has spent decades on this. He splits your circle into layers: about 5 people you're closest to, around 15 good friends past them, then 50, then everyone else. The outer layers are fragile. Unlike family, those friendships need regular contact or the closeness drops within months. Feeling fond of them does nothing. The bond fades anyway unless you talk or do things together.

There's a reason only a few people get to be ghost-proof. A 2014 study out of Oxford and a university in Finland found that each of us has a fixed pattern for how we split our attention between people. A small number get the bulk of you, and that pattern stays steady even as the specific names change. How you keep in touch barely matters. In person, calls, texts, social media, they all tend to make the same shape.

The people in that top slot are the durable ones. Researchers tracking people's closest bonds in 2022 found the inner few stay steady across years. Those are the friendships that can survive you going quiet for months and pick right back up. The tweet is describing them exactly. It just skips the part where you spent a couple hundred hours earning it.

This shows up in your body, too. A review of 148 studies covering more than 300,000 people found that people with strong social ties have about 50% better odds of staying alive over any given period. The US Surgeon General now puts the health cost of weak connection near smoking 15 cigarettes a day. The handful of friends who let you go quiet and never bring it up are doing more for your body than almost anything in your medicine cabinet.

[Ancient History Hub @AncientHistorry]

Everyone knows about the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae.

Almost nothing they know is the full story.

Start with the number. There weren't 300 Greeks at that pass. There were around 7,000. Spartans, Thespians, Thebans, Phocians, Locrians, Arcadians, Corinthians. Citizen-soldiers from across Greece who marched north knowing they'd be facing the largest army the ancient world had ever assembled.

The 300 is just the headline. The ones who stayed to the end.

Now the men themselves. King Leonidas wasn't some chiseled 30-year-old. He was roughly 60 years old when he led that march. And the 300 he picked weren't his strongest warriors. They were specifically men who already had living sons. Spartan law demanded it. Leonidas wasn't choosing an army. He was choosing men whose bloodlines could survive their deaths. Every one of them knew what that meant before they ever saw a Persian.

They marched anyway.

And they didn't march alone in the way movies suggest. Each Spartan citizen-soldier was accompanied by helots, the enslaved underclass that propped up the entire Spartan economy, outnumbering their masters roughly seven to one. Hundreds of helots fought and died at Thermopylae too. They get no statues. No films. No name on the monument.

The pass itself was barely 15 meters wide in 480 BC (it's silted up now and looks nothing like it did then). That bottleneck is the only reason a few thousand men could hold off a Persian force modern historians estimate at 70,000 to 300,000. Herodotus said 1.7 million. He was lying, or possibly counting cooks, slaves, and camp followers, but even the conservative number is staggering.

For two days, they held. Wave after wave broken against bronze and discipline. Xerxes reportedly leapt from his throne three times in fury watching his men die. He sent in the Immortals, his elite personal guard, supposedly invincible. They weren't. Not in that pass.

Then the Greeks were betrayed.

A local man named Ephialtes, whose name still means "nightmare" in modern Greek, sold the Persians a goat path through the mountains that flanked the pass. The Phocians assigned to guard it scattered when the Immortals appeared in the dawn fog. Leonidas knew by morning he was surrounded.

He dismissed most of the allied Greek forces. Saved their lives. But here's what almost nobody talks about: roughly 700 Thespians, led by a man named Demophilus, refused to leave. They were citizen-farmers from a small town that knew Persia was coming for them next no matter what. They chose to die beside the Spartans rather than run. About 400 Thebans stayed too, though their motives were murkier and many surrendered when the end came.

So the "last stand of the 300" was actually closer to 1,500 men. The Thespians died to the last. Their town was burned to the ground by the Persians weeks later anyway. They're a footnote in a story that should bear their name.

The final fight happened on a small hill called Kolonos. Spears shattered. Swords broken. Herodotus says they fought with hands and teeth at the end. Leonidas fell early, and the Spartans fought four times over his body to keep the Persians from taking it.

They lost.

Xerxes had Leonidas decapitated and his body crucified, a violation of Persian custom so extreme it tells you exactly how badly that old man had humiliated the king of kings. Forty years later, Sparta sent a delegation to recover his bones and bring him home.

Two Spartans survived the battle. One, Aristodemus, had been sent away with an eye infection. He returned to Sparta and was treated as a coward, shunned, refused fire, refused conversation, until he threw himself into the front line at Plataea a year later and died seeking redemption. The other survivor, Pantites, was sent on a diplomatic errand and missed the fight. He hanged himself from the shame.

That's the world they lived in.

The epitaph carved at the site doesn't brag. It doesn't even mention victory, because there wasn't one. Roughly translated, it just asks the traveler to tell Sparta that her sons died here, obedient to her laws.

A small group of farmers, an old king, an enslaved underclass written out of history, and a town that vanished from the map. Together, for three days in August of 480 BC, they did the math on freedom and decided the price was worth it.

We remember 300 of them.

There were always more.

[Gowhar @Gowhar_]

1. When Hazrat Fatima died Imam Hussain was just 6-7 years old, around the same age as that of our Prophet ﷺ when Hazrat Aamina died.

[YourFavoriteGuy @guychristensen_]

The average Roman didn’t know their empire collapsed they just noticed their roads stopped being repaired one day.

[Aarif Khan @aykay_91]

@SamSiff Case name?

[It's Ahmad @AhmadX_Official]

In Riyadh, a man saw a dream: a person told him, Call this number and arrange Umrah for so-and-so. The number was crystal clear.

He woke up, remembered every detail, but dismissed it as a mere illusion and forgot about it.

The next night, the exact same dream returned.

On the third night, it came again.

This time, he went to the imam of his local mosque and narrated the dreams. The imam advised: "If you see it once more, note the number carefully, contact the person, and fulfill this command."

The third night, the dream repeated.

The next morning, he dialed the number. After a brief introduction, he said:

"Brother, I have been commanded in a dream three times to take you for Umrah. I wish to fulfill this good deed."

The man on the other end burst into loud laughter.

"Umrah?! I haven’t even prayed my obligatory prayers in years! I’m a drinker. You want to take *me* for Umrah?"

The dreamer insisted with sincerity and humility. He offered to bear every single expense. After much persuasion, the man finally agreed on one condition: "I’ll go, but you must bring me back to Riyadh and cover all costs."

When they finally met, the dreamer was taken aback. The man looked rough clearly a heavy drinker who rarely prayed. His appearance screamed negligence in faith.

Yet they traveled together to Makkah.

They performed ghusl, entered Ihram, and reached the Haram. They made Tawaf of the Ka’bah, prayed two rak’ahs at Maqam Ibrahim, performed Sa’i between Safa and Marwah, shaved their heads, and completed Umrah.

As they were about to leave the Haram, the man said:
"Before we leave, I want to pray two rak’ahs of nafl. Who knows if my Umrah was even accepted?"

The dreamer had no objection. "Pray with full devotion," he said.

The man began praying. When he went into sujood (prostration), he stayed there longer and longer.

After some time, his companion called him. No response. He touched him and realized his soul had departed in that very sujood.

The dreamer wept with envy.
"What a beautiful death! Husn-e-Khatimah. How I wish my end could be like this!"

The man was given ghusl with Zamzam water, dressed in Ihram, and his funeral prayer was led in the Haram. Hundreds of thousands of Muslims prayed for him.

Later, his body was taken back to Riyadh as promised and buried there.

A few days later, the dreamer called the deceased man’s widow to offer condolences. He asked:

"Tell me, what good deed did your husband do that earned him such an honorable death dying in sujood inside the Haram?"

The widow replied with painful honesty:
My husband was not a good man. He had abandoned prayer and fasting long ago. He was addicted to alcohol the bottle was often by his bedside. But there was one habit…

In our neighborhood lived a very poor widow with small children. Every night when my husband went to the market to buy food for our family, he would also buy food for her and her orphans. He would quietly place it at her door and call out, 'I’ve left food for you please take it.'

That widow would pick up the food and always pray for him:
(O Allah, grant him a good end!)

Allah accepted her prayer.

Dear readers, never forget the hadith of the Prophet PBUH:
"Acts of kindness protect a person from an evil death."

A small, consistent good deed done quietly even by a flawed man became the reason for his magnificent end.

May Allah grant us all husn-e-khatimah a beautiful ending.

This is a true incident from Saudi Arabia, recorded in books of genuine spiritual events.

A powerful reminder that no good deed is ever wasted in the sight of Allah.

[رعد @RaadIbnDawood]

The angels who bear the throne right now are four. They have the faces of a man, a bull, an eagle, and a lion.

Ibn ʿAbbās reported that the Messenger of Allah ﷺ affirmed the truth of two lines of poetry composed by Umayyah ibn Abī al-Ṣalt. He said:

“A man and a bull are beneath one side of it … and on the other side are an eagle and a lion standing watch.”

The Messenger of Allah ﷺ said:

“He spoke the truth.”

[Reported in the books of Tafsīr and Ḥadīth, like the Musnad of Ahmad ibn Ḥanbal...]

Imam Ibn Kathir commented:

“This ḥadīth has an authentic chain of transmission, and its narrators are trustworthy. It indicates that the Bearers of the Throne are presently four [angels].”

[al-Bidāyah wa al-Nihāyah, 1/12]

[Aarif Khan @aykay_91]

@DocRumaisa Please DM me the details.

[ハヤシモン｜AI × 個人開発 @hayashimon1]

Claude Fable 5でどこまで表現できるのか、あえて難しいお題を投げてみた。

インクが流体みたいに溶け合う演出。

これは厳しいかなと思って限界を見にいったんだけど、普通に形になってしまった。

デザイン表現力もかなりすごい。

実際にこちらで遊べます👇
https://t.co/ez1QlU66j6

[It's Ahmad @AhmadX_Official]

A Miracle at the Prophet’s Mosque.

When the decision was made to install the same radiant white marble on the floor of Masjid an-Nabawi (PBUH) that had graced the floors of Masjid al-Haram, a profound miracle unfolded.

Muhammad Kamal Ismail was the first engineer entrusted with the monumental task of designing and executing the expansion projects of the Two Holy Mosques. Despite repeated insistence from King Fahd, he refused to accept any remuneration for his engineering designs and architectural supervision. He would say, "Why should I take payment for this work? How will I face Allah on the Day of Judgment?"

He married at the age of 44. His wife gave birth to a son but passed away shortly after. From that time until his death, he remained devoted to the worship of Allah. He lived to the age of one hundred, yet shunned worldly fame and media attention, serving the Two Holy Mosques in quiet anonymity.

The story of how he acquired the special white marble for the Haram is itself deeply moving. This unique stone, which beautifully absorbs heat and keeps the floors cool even in the scorching heat, was found in a small mountain in Greece. Engineer Kamal traveled there and signed an agreement to purchase nearly half the mountain. After the deal was finalized, he returned to Makkah. The marble arrived and was successfully installed in Masjid al-Haram, adorning both the Mataf (the area around the Ka'bah) and the outer courtyards.

Fifteen years later, the Saudi government decided to use the same marble for the flooring of Masjid an-Nabawi. When King Fahd instructed Engineer Muhammad Kamal to source the identical marble, he became deeply worried. The only place on earth where this stone existed was Greece, and they had already purchased half the mountain.

Kamal returned to Greece and met the CEO of the same company. When he inquired about the remaining marble, the CEO replied, "We sold it shortly after you left. It has been fifteen years now."

Heartbroken, Kamal stood up to leave the meeting. As he was departing, he met the office secretary and asked if she could help trace the buyer of the remaining marble. She told him it would be difficult to find old records but requested his phone number and hotel details, promising to try. He gave her the information and left, planning to return the next day.

Before leaving the office, Kamal thought to himself: "What need do I have to search for the buyer? Allah Himself will make arrangements."

The very next day, just hours before his flight, he received a call: the address of the marble buyer had been found. Kamal made his way back to the office, his heart heavy with anticipation. When the secretary handed him the company details, his heart skipped a beat. He took a deep breath in awe.

The company that had purchased the marble was Saudi.

Kamal immediately boarded a flight to Saudi Arabia. He went straight to the company’s office and met the Director of Administration. When he asked what had become of the white marble imported from Greece, the director said he didn't recall and called the stock department. The reply came: "The entire quantity is still here. It has never been used."

At that moment, Engineer Kamal wept like a child. He narrated the entire story to the company's Saudi owner and presented him with a blank cheque.

"Fill in any amount you wish," he said, "but please hand over all the marble to me."

When the Saudi owner learned that this marble was destined for Masjid an-Nabawi, he refused to take even a single riyal.

He said with deep emotion, "Allah had this marble purchased through me, and then made me forget about it. It is clear that this marble was always meant for the Prophet’s Mosque (PBUH)."

SubhanAllah.

A beautiful reminder of how Allah orchestrates even the smallest details for His beloved places and His sincere servants.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Every annoying password rule you follow, the capital letter, the number, the symbol, changing it every few months, came from one man at a US government office in 2003. He was mostly guessing. Years later, he went public and apologized to all of us.

The password is older than that rule, and it was a mess from day one. It was born at MIT in 1961, when a scientist named Fernando Corbató built one of the first computers many people could share at once. Since everyone shared that one machine, he needed to keep each person's files separate. His fix was the password. He never meant it as serious security, just to stop casual snooping.

It didn't even do that much. Every password sat in one plain file anyone with access could read. In the spring of 1962, an MIT student named Allan Scherr hit his four-hour-a-week limit and wanted more. One Friday night he asked the system to print that file, then grabbed the whole list Saturday morning. He logged in as other people and passed the list around to friends. The password was about a year old, and it was already broken.

The man behind the rules you hate was Bill Burr, and in 2003 he wrote an eight page guide on building a password. He told everyone to add a capital letter, a number, and a symbol, and to switch to a new one every 90 days. Banks, schools, and offices copied it word for word. That is why your login still wants a symbol and a number you can't recall. He had almost no proof any of it worked. He leaned on a paper from the 1980s, before the internet existed, when almost no one had studied what made a password safe.

In 2017, he came clean. He told the Wall Street Journal, "Much of what I did I now regret." Forcing a new password every few months just taught the lazy move, bumping Rosebud1 to Rosebud2 to Rosebud3, which a computer cracks in seconds. So the same office threw the rules out. The new advice is to skip the symbols and forced changes and use a long, plain phrase. A cartoonist named Randall Munroe ran the numbers. A phrase like "correct horse battery staple" would take a computer about 550 years to crack, while a rules-style password like "Tr0ub4dor&3" falls in three days.

People have leaned on spoken passwords for roughly 3,000 years. Roman soldiers had a code word for the night guard, and during Prohibition you needed the right phrase to get into the bar. But there was only ever one of them, just for that night. The same brain that once held a single code word now has to track 120 of them, each with a capital and a symbol, half guarding accounts you forgot you ever made. So no, the human spirit was not built for this. One man's shaky guess in 2003 just made it hurt a whole lot more.

[Fox News @FoxNews]

“Donald Trump” the buffalo has been spared from sacrifice in Bangladesh after going viral.

“Donald Trump,” the rare albino buffalo named for its blond tuft of hair, was hours away from being sacrificed for Eid al-Adha… until the government stepped in.

It had already been sold for ritual slaughter when viral videos turned it into a national attraction.

Crowds started flooding the farm to see the nearly 1,500-pound animal in person, forcing officials to intervene due to security concerns.

Now the buffalo is headed to the national zoo in Dhaka instead.

[It's Ahmad @AhmadX_Official]

Centuries ago, Muslims from the heart of Africa walked nearly 7,000 kilometers for Hajj.

Not for days.
Not for weeks.
But for years.

They crossed deserts on foot, travelled with livestock for food and survival, and spent entire lifetimes saving for one sacred journey to Makkah.

Along the roads stood wells, inns, and shelters built by Muslim rulers and generous souls to serve the guests of Allah.

Some pilgrims returned home after two years.
Some stayed longer seeking knowledge in cities like Cairo and Damascus before finally returning with the honored title of “Hajji.”

A reminder that for many before us, Hajj was not a trip.
It was the journey of a lifetime.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

A normal book page is about 5% ink, 95% blank paper. To make a dark page, you'd reverse it: ink everywhere, the letters left blank. Twenty times more ink per page, multiplied across every single copy in the print run. And ink is only the first cost.

One self-publishing printer, 48 Hour Books, will print dark pages but only sparingly. The first 5% of total pages are free. Past that, each dark page tacks on 5 cents per copy. Push to their cap of 30% dark pages on a 400-page novel and the upcharge alone runs $5,000 on a 1,000-copy print run. Go over 30% and they refuse the job. Their machines can't handle that much toner reliably.

White ink runs into its own problem. Most white inks are semi-transparent (like watered-down paint), so when you lay them on black paper, the letters barely show up. The fix needs opaque white ink plus a specialty press built to lay it down as a thick base layer, then print the colored text on top. Most book printers don't own that kind of equipment.

The paper has to change too. Dark ink soaks through normal book paper, so you need thicker, heavier paper. And the drying time balloons. A page soaked in dark ink needs 5 to 8 hours minimum before anything can stack on top of it. Otherwise the wet ink rubs off onto the next sheet, ruining both. Every hour the sheets sit drying is an hour the printing machine isn't earning.

This is why dark-page books only exist as collector's editions. Specialty shops like QinPrinting run small batches of black-paper hardcovers and price them as luxury items, because the math demands it.

You can see the same economics in books with painted page edges. Close a book and look at it from the side: that bare strip of paper along the page edges can be sprayed with color. Rebecca Yarros's novel Fourth Wing launched in 2023 with black-painted edges, only on the first printing. Standard hardcover retail: around $30. Same copy resells today for $240 to $600. Roughly 8 to 20 times the price for one strip of color you only see when the book is shut.

Books can have dark pages. They just live at collector's-edition prices, because the math only works there. Mass-market printing can't absorb 20x the ink, the specialty equipment, the thicker paper, and the longer drying times. Collector pricing can.

[Aarif Khan @aykay_91]

@DeepikaBhardwaj Just because two people didn't succeed as husband and wife, doesn't mean they can't succeed as parents. But for that, maturity and prioritising child welfare is required from both sides, which hardly ever happens.

[BOSS @thebeautyofsaas]

it is an unwritten rule of life that after every prolonged period of hardship and uncertainty, there is going to be a period when you are going to achieve quantum leaps across multiple areas of your life. the only requirement is that you do not give up on yourself