Brunelleschi’s Dome: Inventions and Lessons Learned Related to Design-Build Projects

The Duomo's Dome, Florence (From Wikipedia)

After Santa Maria del Fiore, the cathedral church in Florence, Italy, announced Neri di Fioravanti as the winner of the dome initial design competition, the design amazed architects and builders and directly provoked constructability questions. It was no wonder. The dome design introduced a number of difficulties due the dome’s height and span. Therefore, when the competition for constructing the dome was announced on August 19, 1418, a huge number of interested architects, masons, and builders pursued this job to solve the perplexing design that people of Florence kept looking at for decades as a mystery (King, 2000). Everyone had to come up with a detailed plan of how the dome is going to be built.

Alassad's Sectarian Game in Syria

An endless attempts of the Syrian regime to prove its inhumanity has recently introduced an new massacre in Qubier near Hama. The regime ridiculously insists that an anonymous party, misleadingly called a terrorists group, is responsible for the whole mass killings and crimes that Syria has been undergoing, but everyone has a little idea of the current Syrian regime's dark history knows that there are no alleged terrorists except Alassad and his regime.  Needless to say that the number of killed, injured, and people who fled the country has been escalating since the beginning of the uprising in early 2011due to the relentless military operations directed to suppress the peaceful protests. This turned out to trigger a wide peaceful opposition of the continuity of Alassad, which got no response but bullets paving the way to military defections and forming a martial force of rebels.

Speaking more recently, Alassad's regime is responsible of the cold-blooded massacres recently occurred in Qubier and Houla, where hundreds of civilians, especially children, died. It seems that this merciless regime has no intentions to lead the country to any state of stability without being on the top of the government.

How are Things Gonna be Different?

Imagine a huge oil-producing country in the middle of Arabia deserts wishing to be a real 21st century country has a constitution, and every one in that country is under penalty of law. Whether a royal descendent or an African Arabian he or she was. Suppose that an army of known meticulous law and broad-minded religion scholars has written this constitution. How are things gonna be different?

My Magical Tips for the GRE (pre-Aug 2011)

Every GRE taker has his or her experience. There are a lot of preparation materials for GRE leaves one uncertain which one to choose, but many of those materials are equally sufficient to review. They give strategies, examples, samples of common tricks, and resources for reviewing math, suggested sophisticated English vocabulary, and writing skills. However, there is no such a thing that precisely tells you how to score a decent score on GRE if you do not have an innate sharp-witted mind. Average people need to be adept at math and widely knowledgeable in English language skills. That is not all. Speaking of the quantitative section of GRE, time management and quickly math discerning are two major factors. In my experience, I encountered a challenge that prevented me from scoring a good score in my first completely-a-bust GRE exam, which is trivial mistakes that happen due to unmindfulness and nervousness.

Trivial mistakes were a nightmare for me. Even though knowing enough math, I found that only silly mistakes madly ruin my answer sheet. That is for the questions that I knew how to solve, not the ones that I didn't. Thus I invented the magic solution. In other more realistic words, I develop a way that will help me overcome this challenge. While practicing math problems, I started listing the gaps that I usually fell in and make mistakes at and I wrote them to better bridge these gaps. They were the ones that I encountered and cared a lot to get a grip on. They are, again, not strategies but mind hints of lack-of-accuracy conditions that bog me down. I used them as marginal annotation kept them in mind, which amazingly helped me to get a decent score in GRE unlike previous trial.

Finally, here are the most important annotations I made. I hope they help test takers around world even though the GRE exam has seen some changes after August 2011.

Anotehr New Year is Starting

I cannot believe how fast days go. When I was a child, I always imagined that the life is so slow, and the days are tediously moving. I remember I couldn't stand how long is the academic semester, needless to say a whole grade.Year by year, I became more conscious about passing time especially after the mid of my college study. Nowadays, however, years seem to sneakingly pass while one is oblivious and rarely be aware until another new year rolls in.

Amazing vacations, experiences, and memories always happen quickly and be done early. Although they do not fade away, they leave a dissatisfying feeling resulted by the awareness of bygones and the sparse chances to live these beloved bygones again. Thus, people sigh when remembering a dear memory and repent not doing things in the past associated with those adored memories that might help them feel pleased later. But nothing can change the past, so everyone should sincerely enjoy and live their present and future darling events. They should share, reciprocate, and give love and faith to all their dears, condone as much as they can, be generous, and coin the future they want to remember without waiting reciprocation from anyone.


This year is a unique year where new winds blew on the world and shifted people destines, economies, regimes. Arab Spring has been flaming since the early beginnings of 2011 and still going in deep at Syria and Yemen. People minds has changed. They think differently now as I see in Facebook and Twitter and recall the human rights qualities, and fiercely condemn corruption and embezzlement, which are thins people did not used to publicly criticize. Lots of barriers have been gone. A new generation ushered in after the Minds Spring.


Life, by millions of years, always gives lessons, but unfortunately a few people, leaders, countries learn from. This ending year has given us in Saudi Arabia new sets of changes that are planned to rectify the present issues of housing, economy, education, corruption and employment. However, I wish that our government really appoint the suitable staffing to lead these huge changes to the best future of citizens and constantly paving the way to a developed, strong, self-contained country using the lessons of others collapse and retrogression. God bliss you Saudi.

Something About Weather Change

The world today sees new weather changes. It is important to know that these changes have been emerging in a slow process since a long time, but new human activities accelerated it vastly. Some of these changes are catastrophic indeed, and others are only threats that precede their future reality. It is not only the increase of world temperature or the global warming issue, but also the increase of environmental and ecological reactions and impacts.

Before two centuries, when the industrial revolution began, until almost the last fifteenth decade, no body was thinking about the environmental side effects in an adequate emphasis. In contrast, today even the politicians negotiate about the global warming and the environment because they perceived its seriousness and influence on the each country's environment, or future should I say. Unfortunately, some first-world countries are evading being at their supposed role in the process of global gathering and working for improving the way that industry affect environment.

Say it All, Obama

While the diffusive Arab Spring is awakening more understanding for Arabs crucial issues, some western standpoints prove that they wont ever justify Palestine, the most popular and old Western-made Arabic dilemma. In his speech three days ago, President Barack Obama had an evasive position from Palestine's efforts to acquire a full membership in the United Nation (UN). Subsequently, many Arabs became disappointed and articulately expressed that in Facebook, Twitter, and editorials. What others may not know is that the regressions of Palestine-Israel conflict was one of protesters topics that conspicuously emphasize how Arabs are depressed by the unfair Israeli everyday practices against Palestinians, said especially in Tahrir square.