This is what I like

My Jes-se.  A pos-se.
Perfect joy.


Asa, grim and powerful.
The world needs Asa like it once needed Sade.

I'll be back. 

Bonus:

10 more years

I started this blog ten years ago, in May 2004. 
Here's a wish that I'll still be blogging ten years hence. 
Amen. 

Small things and big things - an essay from my private little book

I'm listening to a collection by Rufus and reading from my diary.
5am on April 1st 2014: "I've figured it out: I keep pretending to give a shit, when I don't."

Here's the rest of the entry:
I feel like it's really one theater event, this life, and the things that seem to matter, or that matter at all, are just little.  And if there's a God, or if we're in the Matrix, or whatever - who knows?  And one person filled with so much love exterminates all the butterflies in the world (they are forever trapped as larvae; although in their short lives, 'forever' is what - three days?) so the world may eat or something.  Another, filled with so much hate builds a company that takes over the world and makes all but ten people absolute slaves.  Who gives a shit?  Just plot twists.  Then the world will go on.  Or it won't.  Then we'll go to heaven.  Or we won't.  Then the present will be transformed, transmuted, into the future.  Or maybe it'll just poof! and be gone.  Big boo hoo.  
But the little things make us cry still.  A film in which two fall in love.  Tears of joy.  A megastar musician whose art one thinks is lousy.  Oh, protest out of proportion.  
We all should be very bored.  But thank God, we find small things to fight for.  
We all should be very bored.  But how many believe how small these our lives are? 

Three three!

1. Alhamdulillah, birthday tomorrow.

2. Thinking back to when I was 12 or 13, you know, I haven't changed much.  In particular, I still have this beautiful mind that I love.

3. I want to end the fake phase our world is in, with media and branding and PR of everything vacuous, hyping the hype bubble, and for what?  Just to draw a bit of money from the attention.  That, and I'm with the pope on dethroning money from its lead in the pantheon.  The cult of money ought to be this small minority thing, but what do we have instead?
 
4. In Lagos, Nigeria, dense with youthful energy, but with constraints on access to capital (there's a difference between wasted oil wealth and active capital) coupled with hugely increased access to information and markets, we find creative expression that is simply world-class.  My REALbubbler.blogspot.com chronicles this renaissance.  It is possible that nobody is making better music these days than Nigeria.

Dying, living, and living well

A few health headlines I just found basically say that:

YOU SHOULD SLEEP
That I can do.  Off to sleep in a bit.  Back in the day, I used to say "sleep is for the weak."  Now I know that it's a luxury and "I'm worth it."

DIESEL IS KILLING US
Better move out of the city before you get lung cancer.  And I think of all those rats in the neighbourhood, whose lives are cut short as they unknowingly take in all these fumes. 

WEED IS GOOD FOR THE BRAIN
All things in moderation.  PS I've never tried myself, but I love a second-hand toke, it smells nice and makes me happy.  Seriously, I don't know how to smoke.  Or whistle.  Or ride a bicycle. 

On twitter, a moment of symmetry

I'm finally learning how to use the thing :)

Better get a pre-nup, hahaha

Love In The Future (John Legend) is such a perfect album, yet I hate it so much. Today, for a change of pace from Janelle Monae and Pitbull, I decided to treat myself to a little Legend.  

The album is genius really, great compositions (although All Of Me/All of You is, as I like to say, akin to a great ten-ingredient salad: it would likely have been even better with just the first six ingredients) , extremely capable voice, a confident and assured message...  

This message is what I hate so much - who can stand all that romance, love and marriage? Sometime in the future, when governments need a campaign to get people loving and procreating again, yeah, sure, grab this sappy album with its excrutiating cover - bloodred flowers on a plain white background - and honeydoused lyrics. 

The album is a great illustration of what I call thematic unity; not only do the titles, cover, lyrics and style, match, but the songs actually bleed one into the next - delightful! ) Anyway, moving on - the one thing more gag-inducing than this music is its official video, I'll spare you and just show a (much saner) live performance instead.  
 
I didn't want to puke at All Of You on this latest listen.  I managed not to think of the near-inevitability of divorce maybe, like hey, Monsieur or Madame Stupid-In-Love, you'd better get a prenup hahaha. I kept my mind away from the many musical transitions and my theory of salad ingredients. I was using the good speakers and having a good time. ( Speaking of which, I need to get rid of every poor audio machine in my life soon...equipment quality really matters when listening to music. )  I was really enjoying myself. 
To summarize, Love In The Future is a perfect album about...Love In The Future.  It believes in love and wants you to believe too.  Technically, it's flawless.  It should have won whatever the big award is.  
But by the eighth track just now I had to stop the music.  It was getting to be too much sap for my delicate mind to bear. 
 Makes me immature, I guess. I mean, who hates John Legend?

My latest pastime is laptopera

This week was...ugh.  No power from Monday to Friday.  My inverter was dead too.  No internet, and sometimes no water.

On the first no-electricity day, I read The Flannigans.  I expected an Irish novel and had in fact bought it in part for its unapologetic green cover.  Instead I found a simple telling of small-town politics and a family conflict in Newfoundland, Canada, far from their original Irish homeland.  This novel was indeed a little "literary treasure" with its wise measured observations and clear presentation.  P.S. I bought it used but nice and shiny, probably unread, and signed by the author too :)     

The Flannigans, by M.T. Dohaney

Before the extended power outage, I'd been drowning in music; listened to almost all of Chocolate City's oeuvre - M.I.'s two albums, his brother Jesse Jagz's two albums, Ice Prince's latest album, Brymo's album.  Then I moved on to Omawumi's albums.  Tuface was supposed to be next.  There is so much good music in the Nigerian pop/entertainment space these days.  Love it.  

I'd also finally done something I've been meaning to do for months: watch opera on my computer.  I live in the-megacity-with-no-opera-house Lagos, so why not?

I found this Carmen: 

And this Rigoletto:

Enjoyed both verrrry much.  

I may never go to the movies again.  There is so much entertainment that is superior to the movie-theater experience...I think.  

One week ago, just before reading The Flannigans, I finished two really really cool novels.  

Better Times Than These.  

Nanjing 1937: A Love Story.  

 

Many great things about both these works:   

I love the humour of the latter...oh the sharp ending too.  I would read it again.  It's one of those repetitive, not-really-about-the-plot novels.  In fact I didn't read it in a straight line because it got boring sometimes but you would like parts better after peeking a chapter ahead.  But I liked the quirky main character and the sarcasm of the writer Ye Zhaoyan.  I laughed out loud often. Making fun of marriage is fun.  

The first is a Vietnam war story by Winston Groom, of the Southern USA.  It was most excellent in its descriptions of moods, motivations, long-festering emotions.  I associate such emotional intelligence with the South.  Its Chapter Two made me say yes, that is how I felt, when I lived in a fishbowl thinking I was brilliant goldfish and being disoriented at seeing upturned noses instead.  First time I saw my feeling about that period so understood anywhere.  It could be the first time I even understood it.  So of course I didn't want the guy at the center of this beloved chapter - Frank Holden - to die.  He'd been a Princeton tennis star.  He was probably great to look at.  I overlooked his flaws.  Well, he died.

Reading Vietnam and reading China.
The Nationalists of China alongside the Viet Cong organization.
The US excusrsion into that SouthEast Asian theater vs the cool detachment of the upper crust months before and up until a gigantic war on China.
...All this makes me want to learn a little more Chinese.

Read some other stuff in between too: a poetry/motivational/fiction thing that I liked and read twice (Dream Maker).  Some stories from a giant collection by William Trevor (again, I trust Ireland.)  And so on.  But when there was no electricity, I was so miserable I just read newspapers and such, and waited...  

Besides all the usual books, music, movies, blogs and online courses, I have this new hobby: laptopera.  New word.  Next up to watch: an old Tosca (in black and white) and (after all these years of anticipation) Madame Butterfly.  

Let's Misbehave!

They say that Spring means just one thing to little lovebirds We're not above birds Let's misbehave!!!	They say that bears have love affairs And even camels We're merely mammals Let's misbehave!!!
There's something wild about you child That's so contagious Let's be outrageous Let's misbehave!!!
Now listen, Hon, a little fun Would be attractive While we're still active, Let's misbehave!	It's getting late and while I wait My poor heart aches on Why keep the brakes on? Let's misbehave!!!

Words from Let's Misbehave, by Cole Porter
Images from 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

Next up, in online course world

My MuslimWorld course ends next week.  My Alexander course starts now. 

Alexander pictures

What is it about? 

"This is a course about the life, leadership, and legacies of perhaps the greatest warrior in history and certainly one of its most effective, if controversial, leaders.  The course invites you to ask and answer a number of questions about Alexander’s story that are just as fascinating and relevant today as they were 23 centuries ago.

First, how did Alexander conquer the Persian empire in less than a decade, without ever losing a major battle? The Persian empire was the largest and most successful empire in the long history of the ancient Near East. Before Alexander conquered the Persian empire, no one believed it could be done, let alone by someone in his early twenties. It just can’t have happened; but it did. Over the next few months I’ll explain how.

Second, we’ll ask: what were the leadership qualities that Alexander possessed? What did Alexander know, what did he do to get tens of thousands of people to risk their lives repeatedly on battlefields to help him achieve his goals? Perhaps more importantly, how did he get people who had been enemies to put down their weapons and work together? Were – are - those leadership qualities passed down in the genes? Can leadership be taught or learned? If so, how?

Third, we will take on one of the most controversial questions about Alexander: was history’s greatest warrior gay? Straight? Bisexual? Can we understand Alexander’s sexuality using modern terms such as gay or straight or bisexual, as some historians have argued? Or are such terms fundamentally misleading when applied to an ancient culture?

Finally, we will look at the question of Alexander’s legacies. Is it really true, as some scholars have claimed, that Alexander appeared at the end of the fourth century B.C.E. like a kind of fiery comet that burned brightly for a short time and then exploded, leaving nothing but a trail of mythic vapor? Or did he fundamentally change the world in which he lived in ways that are still being felt today?"

- Was Alexander Great? The Life, Leadership, and Legacies of History’s Greatest Warrior is HIST229x on edx.org  .  The course instructor is Guy MacLean Rogers, Professor of Classics and History at Wellesley College.  Come on, join up. 

On constitutional struggle and the challenge of modernity, with Iran as an example

Iran is a nation-state that is descended from the Persian empire of Biblical times. 

In those days, more than 2000 years ago, kings like Nebuchadnezzar and Darius conquered lands as far as the Levant, in the historic home of the Jews. Wikipedia has that "Iran reached the pinnacle of its power during the Achaemenid Empire founded by Cyrus the Great in 550 BCE, which at its greatest extent comprised major portions of the ancient world, stretching from the Indus Valley in the east, to ... the northeastern border of Greece, making it the largest empire the world had yet seen." 

To cut a long history short, over the centuries, this civilization has seen ignoble defeats in war and also the self-inflicted malaise of incompetent civil administration.  In fact, in this course, we learn that a state's achievement in war and in administration are closely linked in a mutually reinforcing, or mutually eroding, cycle. 

So for Iran, times have changed.  Their landmass is greatly diminished.  They boast impressive ruins, ancient architecture and ancient feats in technology and the arts, but are not today first or best in anything.  How does a people so aware of their majestic history handle such a discrepancy between their great expectations of themselves and their mediocre reality?  If they could do it before, why are they not doing it again? 

In the 19th century, Iran was under the rule of the Qajar dynasty, and by the early 20th century, this largely incompetent rulership had for "neighbours" the clever Russian and British empires.  Iran was losing badly - not just land, but even the labour of the people, the wealth of the remaining territory, was committed to servitude and debt payments. 

The British, and later, American meddlers were of course not their traditional rivals - say Ottoman, Arab, or their conquered minority tribes.  Modernity in the 19th and early 20th century meant that a country that lay oceans away could 1. have commercial or martial interests in your own country and 2. actually cross barriers in communication and transport to realize its aims.  That is, to say, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the challenge of modernity came to many of our territories in the form of European colonialism. 

Modernity does not have an easy definition.  Wikipedia employs these subheadings in the attempt to define it: politically, sociologically, culturally and philosophically, secularization, scientifically, artistically!  The explanations then focus on the use of reason and loss of "God" concept, and the incidence of a prescribed set of institutions in government and economics.

Basically this verbosity exposes the term as a weak one.  Being centered on the experience of those who use it, its meaning may change from one place to another and from one decade to the next.  In fact, the discussion forum for this course has featured some debate or complaint over the use of the word "modern, not modern, or modernity." 

Still, it is a reasonably useful term because I know what it means, you likely do too: it relates to things of the new age that are not things of the times past.  It relates to things from the bringers of new things (USA, say) and not things we have known for generations (the customs of my people, say.)  I think it is easy to get annoyed with the term if one does not identify with the European dominant culture that defines it.  This may be the case for Iran, as it is often the case for Africans, Muslims, Texans, and others who are beset and besieged by this new dominant power. 

In this course, we learned that there are four idealized responses to modernity that have been adopted in the Muslim world, and that they are Secularism and emulation, religious Reformism, traditionalism, and fundamentalism.

Turkey has tried to jettison its own culture to chase after the West.  It changed its writing and dress, abandoned its religion, adopted new laws, bureaucracies, and secular rationalism.  Today, it has a strong economy alongside a nagging feeling among citizens that it should "be itself" sometimes.  Who knows if the Europeans will ever admit Turkey into their club - the EU - or if Turkey will stop caring? 

Iran had its phase of emulation, when the royals enjoyed foreign travel and racked up debts to finance it.  Perversely, they even "emulated" the tactics of their tormentors in 1951 by nationalizing (claiming their rights to) their own oil. 

Egypt, like Turkey and Iran, has a grand ancient history.  It has had a Western-backed secular leadership over a largely religious population, with a constitution that was nominally Islamic but allowed reform and interpretation to suit the modern elite.  Today it's in the midst of a bloody struggle and for six months has been ruled by the military. 

The people of the Gulf, in Saudi, Kuwait, Oman, Yemen, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and so on, may not have had great civilizations, but they are proud of their fiercely independent history in the desert.  So far, they trade with the West - oil for modern goods - but have not adopted its laws.  Will they need to change from their traditionalism to Western laws and bureaucracy to manage modernity, defined here as close contact with the rest of the world and its objects and ideas?  I believe that process has already begun, as they purchase state-of-the-art education and financial centers.

Iran too is no slouch technologically (two words: nuclear weapons) but how quaintly Islamic its constitution is!  It permits a bureaucracy to function, but at all times inferior to and checked by the ayatollah.  I can't imagine how, except through fear and force, the Iranians have maintained this government for more than 30 years.  The Iranians I've met are barely Islamic in lifestyle, so why do they accept the authority of a purported voice (sign) of God?

References:
1. Wikipedia: Iran http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran
2. E. Afsah's video lectures: https://class.coursera.org/muslimworld-001/lecture/index
3. Course discussion forums
4. Wikipedia: modernity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernity
5. My experience in Western, Muslim, and other countries.
6. Aljazeera.com and Al-Jazeera TV.

Note: I wrote this essay this week as part of an excellent online course on 
Constitutional Struggles in the Muslim World

Here was the writing prompt:

This course has presented four distinct response patterns to the challenge of modernity. These four Models of Adaptation are, to recapitulate:

1. Emulation/Secularism
2. Religious Reform
3. Traditionalism
4. Fundamentalism

In the preceding weeks, you have been presented with one country or sub-region that embodies each of these response patterns. But do remember that these models are ideal types, that is that we can generally see elements of all four simultaneously at play in any given society. Iran, that you have just learned about in this week, is a good example of this general fact: we can find elements of all four models of adaptations throughout its modern history.

YOUR TASK:

Write a well-argued, clearly structured, exposition that addresses at least three key questions:

1. What is special about modernity and which challenges does it generally pose to traditional societies?
2. Which challenges did Iran face from the 19th century onwards and what had these to do with modernity?
3. Which elements of the first three response patterns can you make out in modern Iranian history, and what accounts, in your view, for the ultimate success of the fourth in the shape of the victorious Islamic Revolution?

REQUIREMENTS FOR YOUR SUBMISSION:

This is a short writing task of maximum 1000 words (less is acceptable, INCLUDING references)
...

Is this the future of the internet?

 According to the material in this course, it has been about twenty years since the internet was founded.  The internet and world wide web seem to have changed EVERYTHING since then.  We buy and sell online.  We meet friends and get news online.  We work in many cases by getting on the internet.  Then we play on the internet too.  Could this technology get any more pervasive?  Will the internet of 2033 be much different from the web today? 

Yes, obviously. 

The interfaces will be different, I think.  Today, many internet users don't connect through clunky teletype machines, large computers, or even small laptops, but through little, brittle smartphones.   I remember just five years ago working with a colleague who was developing a touchscreen and about ten years ago the research news pieces on haptic - touch-based - interfaces.  In the next five, ten, years, users will communicate their intent to the computer world without needing to use a keyboard.  They will wear their interfaces - in their gloves, for instance, or implanted in their heads to sense neural signals.  They will wear their interfaces as glasses, as in Google Glass and all the knock-offs and pirated versions that will develop. 

The availability will be different too.  Today, a lot of the world is not online but is rapidly getting on.  For instance, I live in Africa where it is very palpable how the available bandwidth is small but increasing from month to month.  In my newspaper today was a pullout advertising "swift networks" with a new unlimited speed plan - they don't really mean that, but at least they mean it will be fast - for only 50% more than the plans advertised at 1Mbps which actually deliver about 100kilobits per second.  A couple of companies invested in submarine cables to the coast of Lagos and in the past three years the news has covered the so-called last-mile challenge - that is, the difficulty in getting all that available bandwidth to the end user.  Hundreds of kilometers inland, in my land-locked home state, the government wants to lay fiber at least in a small part of the state capital.  My point is that there will be internet everywhere in twenty years, not just in the US and the wealthiest countries.  To not have reliable internet will be a mark of poverty, as it is a mark of poverty now to not have electricity (for the record, where I live we barely have electricity, we get maybe 10 hours a day on-and-off unpredictably every day), or to not have pipe-borne water (ditto, we have our own private water system - bore-hole, pumping machine, overhead storage.) 

The uses will be different, more democratized.  The elite first users came up with elite uses for the internet: research, geeky games, stock-market trading, bookselling.  The masses will come up with different uses.  I can imagine hysteria about the illuminati and the end of the world.  Incomprehensible doodling all day - already the users of the internet have degenerated from theses and paragraphs and correct spelling to " sup, aw u 2day gr8 tym i no der is."  Ah well, now they'll just scribble a line straight from their brains onto the doodoo wall.   On the other hand, the potential for craftspeople in the middle-of-nowhere to reach their markets in New York, or for a design from a teenager in Hawaii to be adopted by a multibillion yen company in Tokyo will remain, and will grow dramatically. 

Because location will become less important, the world will seem even more to be one uniform place.  Today we have multinational brands in Dubai, Paris, Johannesburg, Mumbai - the same hotel names, the same clothing lines, same sandwich shops.  By 2033, it will be sickening just how the same every city is.  It will take effort to find a place with character.  Maybe by this time, people will have so much material things that they'll finally stop chasing after material things.  Local, and by this I mean national governments will work hard to get their people some time off the internet to create local relationships, national cohesion and culture outside the global internet.  Please marry, they will say.  Please exercise.  In a few years, the most modern governments will finally cut down the workweek to four, then three days to encourage such perceived greater goods as the workplace efficiency being too high will produce more unemployment, more unhappiness, and - unless someone can come up with a large project to mop up human effort - more utterly useless goods. 

What sort of project might that be, the modern day great pyramids, like industrial automation in the 20th century or business-process automation in the last twenty years?  Would it be a space-travel, space-energy and stardrives program or a down-to-earth training/indoctrination/acculturation program utilizing software to help us learn everything from programming and kung-fu to languages and pottery?  Would it be a program to end death as we know it or a program of mass aggression?  Ha, I can't tell you that.  I don't exactly have a crystal ball.

 References:
The reference thing is irrelevant to this essay because I read a lot a lot a lot, so how can I say the ideas came from these two to five places? 
1. Coursera (Inside the Internet - this course)
2. Google Glass (a proposed product)
3. The Matrix and The Matrix Reloaded (movies)
4. Technology news sources

Note: I wrote the above essay in November 2013 
for a massive open online course on

Internet History, Technology, and Security.  

This was the writing prompt:
Write an essay that imagines how the Internet will be different 20 years from now.  Justify your answer by connecting your ideas to the history of the Internet that we have learned in this class and through outside materials.  Your answer can focus on how technology will change or how people will change or how governments and policy will change or even how society might change.
--- For references:
Please enter your references here. Only use this space for references (i.e. don't continue your essay in this space). There is no specific citation format. While there is no minimum nor maximum required references, most essays will have somewhere between two and five references. If your references are web sites use the URL. If the references are papers include enough information to identify the source using APA http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/01/ format. Graders will not take points off for syntax errors in references, but they are welcome to suggest how the syntax of references can be improved.

Like my hard-working students, I earned this

Crazy girl

Was at Unilag earlier and bought myself this novel for 500 bucks.

Mema, by Gabonese writer Daniel Mengara

Back at home, gave this look ooh yeah, look at my present from me to me.  Then I airkissed it.   
That's love.  The book had better be good.

2013 music-video experiences: My A++ list

1. Blurred Lines: Headbobbable, Legshakeable awesomeness. 

2. Redemption: Originality and perfection.

3. Feelin' Myself: Gahdemi'yurtheshi'yurtheshi'yurtheshi'

That's all.

will.i.am and others (Miley Cyrus, French Montana, Wiz Khalifa) in Feelin' Myself


Robin Thicke, T.I., and Pharell in Blurred Lines.


Jesse Jagz in Redemption

Do you want to see some regular A+ music and music videos?
Here's a little list:

Started From The Bottom, by Drake.  His happiness was overflowing and infectious in this video, so much that I easily aped his dance moves when I heard the song again, and I could see why it won BET Best Video Awards.


Rich and Famous, by Praiz was actually released in December 2012.  Beautiful voice.  And he did make good and buy his mum a Range soon after the video :)


Suit and Tie, by Justin Timberlake from January 2013.  This preview "lyric video" is many times better than the later "official video" for the track.   Enjoy it.  Learn some cool from the master.

Girl Power!

Let's check out some music videos to end the year.
This first one will make you dance.  I love it.  It's called Somori.  By Omawunmi.  She's dynamite!
What in the world does Somori mean anyway?

I just found this jazzy tune and artsy video by a Malian (Malinese?) singer named Inna Modja.  She's such a hottie.  It's called French Cancan or Monsieur Sainte Nitouche.

Then there's a new artiste in Nigeria named Seyi Shay.  I love her dancing in this video for Irawo (Yoruba: star).  She has some other excellent music and drama-filled videos too.  

This is only the beginning: I want to put up my best five (music videos) of 2013 in a couple of days.  Hint: none of these three makes the list.  What are your top five?
Happy holidays.

Coursera, edX, ...

You may have noticed my new obsession with free online courses, the so-called MOOCs.
Here are the courses I'm actually taking/seriously considering: 

My current online courses - Coursera

 My experience so far is recounted here. 

My upcoming online courses - Coursera

I have ambitious plans (too many courses) for January/February.  Will probably drop something.

My upcoming edX courses

Happy holidays!

The world has gone mad again?

It's hard to believe these headlines are from 2013: purging and executing, ignoring refugees,protesting and barricading, executing by hanging, captured rogue CIA.  Crazy day in the news.

Ready to form Voltron

Activate interlocks! Dyna-therms connected. Infra-cells up; mega-thrusters are go!
Let's go, Voltron Force!
Form feet and legs; form arms and body; and I'll form the head! 

This is still how I think about collaboration; I like to say "let's form Voltron." 
I wasn't a HEAVY Voltron watcher, but I noticed the usual story-line: the individual lions might try and fail to defeat the powerful enemy but - gen-ghennn - after forming Voltron, the evil ro-beast was soooo dead.

Of course I identified with the pink lion - what was her name???

Missing iGoogle

We've had 16 months notice, but I'm still going to miss my iGoogle page.  We've come a long way together.

I'm using an alternative portal called igHome. Who knows, I may come to love it too.

Lagos swallows up Kano three times

For those who have been in Kano, can you report on the underground dwelling places of the good people of Kano?  Or perhaps the city is organized into highrise buildings?  I ask these stupid questions because of the stupider fact that according to official records repeated everywhere from wikipedia to a website of professional urban planners (I won't be asking their services, thank you very much), Kano and Lagos states are in a dead heat for greatest population in Nigeria. 
Hmm.
An eagle flew over the country and said no freaking way.
Check this out:
This is the densest of Kano, and contains almost all of the city.  Outside the "city" of Kano shown here, there is no spot of dense population in the state, i.e. you'll just find one "main street" with no branches/junctions. Let me zoom out and show you:

 Here's a photo of the crowded city of Kano that I nabbed from Google Maps.

Now let's compare with a few other Nigerian cities.

Aba, with its famously dense city center, seems to be close to the same size as Kano, or at least you'll agree that pop_Aba + pop_Ilorin > pop_Kano.  That's quiet Ilorin below.  Its population may be close to half that of Kano. 

Here is Ibadan, with its famous "brown rusted roofs" - great novel of that title, get it. 

When I was a kid (the 1980s), Ibadan was said to be one of the "largest cities in Africa."  Today, it is far from the largest, but in size and population it certainly dwarfs Kano.  This is nothing to be proud of or ashamed of; it just is so. 

Above is the Northern half and below, the southern half of most of the city of Ibadan.

Putting these two maps together, I'll just go ahead and guess that Ibadan has twice as many people as Kano.  What do you think?

And now for Lagos
Lagos is massive.  Lagos is growing.  Oh Lagos has parts that you never knew were there.  In Ikorodu, there's practically a brand new city sprouting.  Lekki-Ajah - disgusting how fast the place has become crowded.  Neither of those places made it into the three non-overlapping maps of some of the most densely populated parts of Lagos.  Also doesn't show West of Festac all the way to Badagry.

This is some of Lagos north of Ikeja.  Note that all of these maps, from Kano to Lagos, are at the same scale.

This is Lagos around Ikeja.   

Lagos around Surulere-Apapa-Yaba, south of Ikeja.  On the bottom right is a peek of Lagos Island, but not including Victoria Island, Ikoyi, and all the way to Epe.  

My credentials
I went to school, plenty of school, that's true.
But what you didn't also know is that I once won a contest to guess the number of candy pieces in a large (maybe two feet high) bottle.  I won hands down.  I guessed almost to the exact count of like a thousand pieces of candy.  Really, just apply a little geometry and it's not that hard - area/circumference of a circle, volume of a cylinder and whatnot.  My prize was the candy-filled bottle, which I moved to my dorm room, and then to my friend's room since I don't actually eat candy and might have never finished it.  Hi Z.I.!

False figures
Here's hoping somebody does the more detailed estimation before I have to.  There are satellite images that could be used to make very good estimates of the population and settle this needlessly contentious matter of how many people we are in Nigeria and how many in each state/region/so-called geo-political zone. 
Until then, this data is thrash.  There is no universe in which Kano has a larger population than Lagos state. 

 Links:
Perform your own investigations (before somebody rigs the satellite images lol) using these interactive maps of Nigeria.
Read a brief history of census attempts in Nigeria

Advertisement: Read my books.