Distribution of Sunnis and Shias

I did not realize how, outside of Iraq and Iran, how many more Sunnis there are than Shias. I kindof feel I should have known that, but there you have it. Click on the map for a larger image.

The map is a scan of a CIA-created, public domain map downloaded from the Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection's World Maps series found via Wikipedia.

More from Wikipedia:

By some estimates, approximately 15% of the world's Muslims are Shia. There are an estimated 130 to 190 million Shia Muslims[2] (including Twelvers, Ismailis, Zaidis) throughout the world, about three quarters of whom reside in Iran, Pakistan, India, Iraq, Azerbaijan, and Afghanistan. [3][4]

A large portion of the world's Shia live in the Middle East. They constitute a majority in Azerbaijan, Iraq, Bahrain and especially Iran, where 90% of the population is Shia, giving it the highest percentage of Shia Muslims of any country in the world[3]. In Lebanon Shia form a plurality, and they remain as significant minorities in Afghanistan, Syria, India, Pakistan, Turkey and Yemen. Among the smaller Persian Gulf states, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates also have significant Shia minorities, as does the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia.

About 20% of India's Muslim population is Shia, and significant Shia communities exist on the coastal regions of West Sumatra and Aceh in Indonesia (see Tabuik). Shia presence is negligible elsewhere in Southeast Asia, where Muslims are predominantly Shafi'i Sunnis.

According to the Shia, one of the lingering problems in estimating the Shia population is that unless the Shia form a significant minority in a Muslim country, the entire population is often listed as Sunni. The reverse, however, has not held true, which may contribute to imprecise estimates of the size of each sect. For example, the 1926 rise of the House of Saud in Arabia brought official discrimination against Shia [5]. The Shia-majority areas of Al-Ahsa, Qatif and Hofuf on the Persian Gulf, and western Arabia provinces of Jazan, Asir and Hijaz, that had large Shia minorities, have officially been completely stripped of their religious identities. Some Shia claim that they endure much bigotry and other indignities from Walmen authorities daily and that Shia pilgrims from other countries are often singled out for harassment (see Status of religious freedom in Saudi Arabia); in Saudi Arabia they are called accaf (عكف) which means rejecters (رافضه).

The World is Moving East

Halliburton Moving to Dubai I am sure this would have been unimaginable 10-15 years ago...

Lagos, Nigeria

long, remarkable New Yorker article on the madness that is Lagos, Nigeria.

In 1950, fewer than three hundred thousand people lived in Lagos. In the second half of the twentieth century, the city grew at a rate of more than six per cent annually. It is currently the sixth-largest city in the world, and it is growing faster than any of the world's other megacities (the term used by the United Nations Center for Human Settlements for "urban agglomerations" with more than ten million people). By 2015, it is projected, Lagos will rank third, behind Tokyo and Bombay, with twenty-three million inhabitants.

When I first went to Lagos, in 1983, it already had a fearsome reputation among Westerners and Africans alike. Many potential visitors were kept away simply by the prospect of getting through the airport, with its official shakedowns and swarming touts. Once you made it into the city, a gantlet of armed robbers, con men, corrupt policemen, and homicidal bus drivers awaited you.

Full article mirrored here as New Yorker not showing it.

The Birth of Stochastic Science and the strength of the US

Nassim Taleb is at it again with his usual brilliance...about the positive real options that randomness brings in business and in science.

I am convinced that the future of America is rosier than people claim — I've been hearing about its imminent decline ever since I started reading. Take the following puzzle. Whenever you hear or read a snotty European presenting his stereotypes about Americans, he will often describe them as "uncultured", "unintellectual" and "poor in math" because, unlike his peers, they are not into equation drills and the constructions middlebrows people call "high culture". Yet the person making these statements will be likely to be addicted to his Ipod, wearing t-shirts and blue jeans, and using Microsoft Word to jot down his "cultural" statements on his (Intel) PC, with some Google searches on the Internet here and there interrupting his composition. Well, it so happened that the U.S. is currently far, far more tinkering an environment than that of these nations of museum goers and equation solvers — in spite of the perceived weakness of the educational system, which allows the bottom-up uncertainty-driven trial-and-error system to govern it, whether in technology or in business.

It fosters entrepreneurs and creators, not exam takers, bureaucrats or, worse, deluded economists. So the perceived weakness of the American pupil in conventional and theoretical studies is where it very strength lies — it produces "doers", Black Swan hunting, dream-chasing entrepreneurs, or others with a tolerance for risk-taking which attracts aggressive tinkering foreigners. And globalization allowed the U.S. to specialize in the creative aspect of things, the risk-taking production of concepts and ideas, that is, the scalable and fat-tailed part of the products, and, increasingly, by exporting jobs, separate the less scalable and more linear components and assign them to someone in more mathematical and "cultural" states happy to be paid by the hour and work on other people's ideas. (I hold, against the current Adam Smith-style discourse in economics, that the American undirected free-enterprise works because it aggressively allows to capture the randomness of the environment — "cheap options"— not much because of competition and certainly less because of material incentives. Neither the followers of Adam Smith, nor to some extent, those of Karl Marx, seem to be conscious about the role of wild randomness. They are too bathed in enlightenment-style causation and cannot separate skills and payoffs.)

...

The world is giving us more "cheap options", and options benefit principally from uncertainty. So I am particularly optimistic about medical cures. To the dismay of many planners, there is an acceleration of the random element in medicine putting the impact of discoveries in a class of Mandelbrotian power-law style payoffs.

Full article here