A young man who can dance in sync with the aunties is both a capable chairperson and a unifying bridge between generations.
@MickailNaseem ah mikan vaaane. MDP needs this to evolve.
hemun vaashe fidha, fidha
hithun shauq vedhee, ekee
gaumee, gaumee
chaalu chaalu, gaumee 💃
#LabourDay in Maldives, captured perfectly: migrant workers packed onto a vessel like cargo, while the men who profit from their labour give speeches about development and nation building!!
This image was reported in 2018 as workers being transported at the Waldorf Astoria Ithaafushi construction site, by a company linked to @JanahMohamedAli Mohamed Ali Janah .. now Principal Advisor to the President on Trade and Investment. Human Rights Watch has repeatedly flagged wage theft, passport confiscation and unsafe conditions faced by migrant workers in Maldives!
So yes, Happy Labour Day .. to the workers who build the country, and condolences to them for being ruled by people who treat them like disposable equipment!
An MIT professor taught the same math course for 62 years, and the day he retired, students from every country on earth showed up online to watch him give his final lecture.
I opened the playlist at 2am and ended up watching three of them back to back.
His name is Gilbert Strang. The course is MIT 18.06 Linear Algebra.
Every machine learning engineer, every data scientist, every quant, every self-taught programmer who actually understands how AI works learned the math from this one man. Most of them never set foot on MIT's campus. They just opened a free playlist on YouTube and let him teach.
Here's the story almost nobody tells you.
Strang joined the MIT math faculty in 1962. He retired in 2023. That is 61 years of standing at the same chalkboard teaching the same subject to 18-year-olds.
The interesting part is what he did when MIT launched OpenCourseWare in 2002. Most professors were skeptical. They worried that putting their lectures online would make their classrooms irrelevant. Strang did not hesitate. He said his life's mission was to open mathematics to students everywhere. He filmed every lecture and gave it away.
The decision quietly changed how the world learns math.
For decades linear algebra was taught the wrong way. Professors started with abstract vector spaces and proofs about field axioms. Students drowned in the abstraction. Most never recovered. They walked out believing they were bad at math when they had simply been taught in an order that nobody's brain is built to absorb.
Strang inverted the entire curriculum.
He started with matrix multiplication. Something you can write down on paper. Something you can compute by hand. Something you can see. Then he showed his students that everything else in linear algebra eigenvectors, singular value decomposition, orthogonality, the four fundamental subspaces was just a different lens for understanding what the matrix was actually doing under the hood.
His rule was strict. If a student could not explain a concept using a concrete 3 by 3 example, that student did not actually understand the concept yet. The abstraction was supposed to come last, not first. The intuition was the foundation. The proofs were just confirmation that the intuition was correct.
The second thing Strang changed was the classroom itself. He said please and thank you to his students. Every single lecture. He paused mid-derivation to ask "am I OK?" to check if anyone was lost. He never used the word "obviously" or "trivially" because he knew exactly what those words do to a student who is one step behind. He treated 19-year-olds learning math for the first time the way he treated his own colleagues. With patience. With respect. With the assumption that they belonged in the room.
For 62 years.
The result is something that has never happened in the history of education. A single math professor became the default teacher of his subject for the entire planet.
Universities in India, China, Brazil, Nigeria, every country with a computer science department, started telling their own students to just watch Strang's lectures. The University of Illinois revised its linear algebra course to do almost no in-person lecturing. The reason was honest. The professor said they could not compete with the videos.
His final lecture was in May 2023.
The auditorium was packed with students who had never met him before. He walked to the chalkboard, taught for an hour, and at the end the entire room stood and applauded. He looked confused for a moment, like he genuinely did not understand why they were cheering. Then he smiled and waved them off and walked out.
His written comment under the YouTube video of that final lecture was four sentences long. He said teaching had been a wonderful life. He said he was grateful to everyone who saw the importance of linear algebra. He said the movement of teaching it well would continue because it was right.
That was it. No book promotion. No farewell speech. No legacy management.
The man whose teaching is the foundation of modern AI just thanked the audience and went home.
20 million views. Zero ego. The entire engine of the AI revolution sits on top of math that millions of people learned for free from one quiet professor in Cambridge.
The course is still on MIT OpenCourseWare. Every lecture, every problem set, every exam, every solution. Free.
The most important math course of the 21st century is sitting one click away from you. Most people will never open it.
This is exactly what Nasheed was banking on when he destroyed Solih’s chances of a second term, splitting from MDP & forming The Democrats out of sheer spite, and supporting Muizzu’s presidency bid in the second round of the elections.
After the split & destroying the hopes of many & trampling upon any of the same ‘democratic values’ that he loves to talk about fondly, he left for whatever international position, knowing fully what Muizzu was capable of & what would steadily unfold & end up being, by the time he was to return.
Return to what, exactly?
Return as the savior “needed” by the people as a group that has lost its way in the scorching desert heat & looks upon a distant oasis with yearning.
Return & mend what he broke in the first place, knowing well enough that the the democratic values he refused to live by then, would be the same values that would welcome back to the folds of the party that is teetering on the rim of an edge that falls sharply into an abyss.
However, some of us have long memories.
We remember how his fragile ego destroyed everything that refused to budge to his formidable resolve, how he & his minions made mincemeat out of the Gov, & ensured that the party that more than half the population supported was effectively eviscerated from within. And he wasn’t ashamed at all to announce it from podiums & hammer that point home.
That is why, in the parliamentary elections, no one from The Democrats managed to secure a seat, no democrat leaning candidate has been able to make significant waves & inroads in politics, & why ultimately, all its members became fool & tool to whatever agenda Nasheed had cooking on the back burner, simmering in the flames of resentment, ever since Solih was sworn in as President.
I said it then.
I am saying it now.
I will probably end up reiterating this in the future.
The entire area has become a ghost town, haunted only by the scent of martyrs’ blood, gunpowder, and rubble.
No one lives here anymore; it is no longer fit for life. There is no water, no food, no services — nothing but fear, terror, and constant anxiety.
We are no longer truly alive; we are mere bodies moving without souls, weary of this existence and this world that has lost its worth. It has become a place that thirsts for bloodshed, massacres, and annihilation.🥲💔
Maldives earns USD 3B+ in taxes — more than enough to reach developed nation status. But with corrupt politicians at the helm, $100K projects cost $1000K. Development’ is just a cover for looting. This isn’t governance; it’s daylight robbery. #Corruption#WastedNation
It was not a significant amount.
My intention was to help a kid.
It was the only help a stranger could provide.
I do not need further explanation or proof.
Hope the kid recovers soon.
There is a biker gang in Arizona called Bikers Against Child Abuse that keeps victims of child abuse safe, including guarding their homes at night if the abuser is not already in jail and attending court with the children, shielding them so they don't have to look at their aggressor.
I watched a video where a woman approached President @MMuizzu . It's really admirable that, as Maldivians, we can value how he patiently remained within the crowd, attentively listening to her points and respectfully addressing her accusations. Very impressive.
@pizza_buona why!!😭 Your personal size pizzas came in thin boxes. It was easy to discard. Life was good
Send my pizzas in tinfoil. Even that's better than this bulky box