The El-Refa'i Experience

El-Refa'i is the name of an infamous grills "restaurant" in Cairo. It's located in a narrow allyway, against Masjid Sayeda Zeinam, a very old district in Islamic Cairo.

El-Refa'i keeps its doors open to 5 AM. It's very popular to the extent that you'll find it busy at 2 AM! The vast majority of El-Refa'i's tables are in the street. Hence, clients are severely exposed to the life in this old spot in Cairo. The old, dirty tables and the wandering cats also contribute to the hard-core experience. And it's not cheap, 1 kilo of mixed grills costs you 150 LE. Drinks are served by an old woman with a refrigerator right in the street, not through the restaurant itself. Generally speaking, service there is way below the average.

Clients tolerate all what I mentioned because El-Refa'i cooks tasty grills; really tasty grills. We are not quite sure about the quality, though. They offer what can be best described as "salade juice" in bottles, and they name it Wisky; I have to admit I'm fell in love with their spicy Wisky.

I do recommend experiencing El-Refa'i once, for Egyptians as well as for non-Egyptians.

Drive Ahead

If you know that a car accident will probably happen after 60 seconds, and you will be part of it, maybe you can exercise caution to avoid it. I'm not talking about science fiction, the idea is very simple; regardless of its applicability.

Consider the following setup:

• EACH drivers wears a helmet.
• Helmets are equipped with an embedded system in-sync with all other helmets.
• The vehicle itself is in-sync with the driver's helmet.
• Through the helmet, a driver observes (and lives in) the virtual world, not the physical world around him. The virtual world is initialized once, then it reflect the immediate commands drivers give to their vehicles; such that, if Khaled's car and Waleed's car (in the virtual world) are running side by side at the same speed and Waleed -stupidly- gives a command to his steering wheel to run into Khaled's car, this will happen immediately in the virtual world, and both Waleed and Khaled will see (through their helmets) an accident.
• Vehicles respond to a driver's command (e.g. starting the engine, moving forward, pressing on brakes, turning left) 60 seconds after the driver issues the command. So, when Waleed turns his steering wheel running into Khaled's car, this happens immediately in the virtual world, but the car will respond physically to Waleed's command after 60 seconds, giving both Khaled and Waleed enough time to switch to another mode, cancelling Waleed's command which would have resulted in a physical accident.

Problems:

• We need the virtual world to accurately renders what will happen in 60 minutes. It needs to be aware of so many aspects in order to predict accurately what will happen in the physical world (e.g. conditions of electrical and mechanical systems in the vehicle, road conditions, pedestrians movement-the most impossible)
• We need all vehicles on the road to be equipped with the system, and all drivers on the road to use their helmets. The idea cannot be applied partially (by a subset of the vehicles).
• All vehicles on the road should be initialized at the same time while parking (not moving). This needs to happen only once.

Applicability:
Obviously, the idea is inapplicable on the road, as it stands now at least. However, the idea is applicable in any sceario where human operation of machines could result in catastrophic events, and physical interaction is done through machines only, not involving living things.