| The mythology of the day. |
[Nov. 26th, 2009|06:28 am] |
Today, in the United States, we celebrate a story of a group of people who were fleeing religious persecution, and came to the New World for freedom.
It's a myth. There is some truth in it; there is other truth . . . missing.
We also may discuss a story of a continent full of various cultures, many of which are now completely gone -- we can discuss this day as commemorating a significant event in the whole process of cultural destruction that took place across most of the Americas, both North and South.
There is truth in that story, too.
And, of course, neither story is the whole story -- no story ever is.
I'd like to talk about another, third, story, which is also part of this. It's the story of a man named Tisquantum. Or, at least, CALLED Tisquantum -- it was probably a nickname, since it means something along the lines of "Wrath of God." Could that be because he had a terrible temper? Maybe. Or could it be because his life was cursed?
( Read more... ) |
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| On the Massachusetts open senate seat and health care reform |
[Nov. 19th, 2009|06:24 pm] |
So, one of the big issues that the Massachusetts senate race for Ted Kennedy's seat may turn on is whether or not the prospective senator would vote for or against a universal health care plan that included a version of the Stupak amendment.
(For non-USAans: right now, the bill that passed the House forbids the universal health care plan from covering abortion. Or from helping any organization, such as Planned Parenthood, that provides comprehensive care to women, which might include abortion. This is a HUGE step back for abortion rights.)
The arguments are, on one side, that this is a huge step backward for women's right to control over their own bodies. And on the other side, that this really sucks, but we need to go forward anyway in order to get SOMETHING.
Martha Coakley, Attorney General of Massachusetts, has stated that she'd vote against such a bill. Mike Capuano, a congressman from Somerville, has stated that he'd vote against such a bill, but only after flip-flopping publicly on the issue back and forth about three or four times in two days. (Which, to me, doesn't knock him out of the running -- I flip-flopped on the issue about three or four times in two days, too.) And some other candidate just robo-called me saying that he'd vote for it.
It just struck me, though . . . we in Massachusetts already HAVE universal health care. It sucks, and several people on my friends list are currently being royally screwed by it, and one is losing her house -- but we've got SOMETHING.
For people in Massachusetts, we're better off NOT having a bill with the Stupak amendment than having it. Yes, our current care is terrible, and it's nonetheless better than everywhere else in the country -- but a universal healthcare bill that forbids money to go to abortion providers will be worse than the current status quo in Massachusetts.
So, Capuano is still in the running in my books, because, while he flipped back and forth on the issue, eventually he came down on the right side. And Coakley looks even better for starting out there.
But, I think for Massachusetts voters, this ought to be a no-brainer. Everywhere else in the country, I can see why it might still be an open question. But here? It's pretty clear. |
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| SMBC videos |
[Nov. 19th, 2009|09:55 am] |
One of my favorite webcomics is Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, because it combines science, dumb sex jokes, and incredibly immature gross-out humor the way that only an underslept college student can. It also contains blasphemy.
They also do videos every week or so.
I like this one.
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 18th, 2009|10:20 pm] |
LIS: I moved your big dictionary, because the spine was getting damaged.
IAN: Thanks. You know, the huge vocabulary of English is because English cheats.
LIS: By taking words from every other language?
IAN: Yeah. In fact, we can claim that every other word in every other language is an English word, and we just haven't realized it yet.
LIS: . . . .hmm
IAN: Also, any compound word you can make from any combination of any of those. English vocabulary is arbitrarily large. Anything you can make up from any part of any language. . .
LIS: . . . is a perfectly cromulent word.
IAN: . . .okay, or anything you make up from whole cloth, too.
LIS: I grok what you're saying. |
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| Discuss the following |
[Nov. 18th, 2009|04:09 pm] |
Resolved: that a libertarian government on any scale larger than, say, a village will invariably turn into:
1. A theocracy
2. A corporate oligarchy
or
3. Some kind of unholy mixture of 1 and 2.
Discuss, pro and con. |
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| Adorable things about our cats. |
[Nov. 16th, 2009|01:39 pm] |
I can't say that they're "well-behaved", because, well, they're cats. They aren't obedient or good at following rules or anything -- but they ARE considerate. Last night, I hear them batting some sort of batting-around-the-floor thing around the bedroom floor. I don't know what it was; it doesn't really matter. A pencil or pen or some sort of thing about that size. I called out, "If you're going to play noisy, go play in the other room."
A few minutes later, I hear the batting-around-the-floor thing down the hall. They took it out of the bedroom to play with when I asked them too, because they're considerate like that.
Of course, they are in no sense OBEDIENT. They've gotten far enough to understand, "Don't be on the kitchen counters when I'm looking at you." Which is as much as one can expect from cats.
They DO obey the safety rule, though. They genuinely do NOT play with electrical cords of any sort. When they were kittens, we would hiss at them when they got too interested in them. I reserve hissing for actual clear and present danger sorts of things, things that will genuinely kill them. I'll YELL at them for getting on the counters, but I won't HISS. So they know the difference between "This is against the rules -- don't do it while I'm watching," and "This will genuinely kill you dead -- don't do it EVER."
The cats will generally be in whatever room I'm in, if I'm home alone. If Lis and I are both home, each cat will be in a room with at least one of us. Might be both with me, might be both with her, might be one with each one of us. But they always want to be near a human.
When I'm here at the computer, they curl up on a blanket right at my feet.
They like their kitty toys. Earlier, I heard a scraping sort of noise, looked up, and Nora was dragging the kitty stick into this room to be played with. Yeah, our cats will fetch their favorite toys to us if they want to play.
Of course, the fact that they are adorable, loving, and even considerate doesn't mean they're well-behaved. I had been making some vegetable soup stock -- vegetable peels, broccoli stalks, outer leaves of cabbage -- the sorts of things that still have food value, but I don't really like to eat, so I boil them and make a stock out of them.
This morning, we found boiled vegetables on the stovetop.
And a big ol' stalk of cooked broccoli stem on the floor of the kitchen.
After I got out of the shower, there was no longer a stalk of cooked broccoli stem on the kitchen floor.
There were then SHREDS of broccoli all OVER the kitchen floor. |
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| GOOSHYFOOD FOR EVERYBODY!! |
[Nov. 12th, 2009|07:26 pm] |
Canned cat food for Nick and Nora, and chopped liver for Lis and me. (I bought it at the kosher deli -- I didn't make it.)
Pretty much, we all got gooshy cat food. The minute the cats smelled chopped liver, they went noses in the air, trying to find the delicious smell. Even after I put the chopped liver away. |
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| Weird dream I had last night. |
[Oct. 29th, 2009|08:28 am] |
Placed in blockquotes just so everyone is clear that this is a dream, and not reality.
I dreamed that I was poking through our bookshelves downstairs, where we keep the fiction, and, under the "O's", I was startled to find two mass-market science fiction paperbacks by "Ian Osmond".
I had totally forgotten that, ten or fifteen years ago, right out of college, I'd had a couple of books published. They were pretty clearly the first two books of a trilogy, and Lis reminded me that I had actually written and published the third book, too, but we didn't own a copy.
I pointed this out to my friend Ben, who's our downstairs neighbor, and he rolled his eyes and said that he knew I'd written those, and also two short stories.
None of these works were any GOOD, mind you -- I'd gotten a very low advance on all three novels, and never even sold out the advance. I think they were tie-in novels, and written based on an outline that the holder of the media property had given me -- and not written WELL based on the outline. The short stories were a little better -- they were at least my own crap, rather than crap written to spec -- but not MUCH better. When I tried reading the novels, I got bored before even finishing a page or two.
However -- I HAD published three novels and two short stories, and therefore, if I wanted to, I could join SFWA. I had previously considered trying to write something and get published, just to be able to call myself a "pro" at science fiction conventions. And I'd totally forgotten that I'd already done so.
Just before I woke up, I'd decided to join SFWA, and see what their group health insurance policy was like. I figured I'd probably stick with being on Lis's insurance, but I just wanted to know . . .
I am sometimes glad that I don't believe that all dreams have meanings. If anyone wants to try to interpret it, feel free, but I think the meaning is just "I had a dream that, at one point in my dubious work history, I was a BAD hack science fiction writer." |
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| Nora helps me compute. |
[Oct. 28th, 2009|11:33 am] |
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Specifically, my cat makes sure to watch the mouse pointer, and attack it occasionally just to check that I'm paying attention. |
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| Actually, this is something that I LIKE about Lis |
[Oct. 27th, 2009|06:34 pm] |
I'm far more empathic than Lis is -- I tend to look at situations and see how they affect people. Lis looks at the situations and sees how they affect other situations.
Lis's focus on the bigger picture, and on lasting things, helps keep me grounded and is useful.
However, sometimes it can be annoying. But funny.
I phoned Lis to tell her about the box dropping on my head, and when she came home, she looked at it.
Her first comment was, "Oh, no. We don't have a replacement for that box; we'll have to go out and buy another."
Her second was, "ONE OF THOSE SCRAPBOOKS GOT DAMAGED! THE BINDING CRACKED RIGHT IN HALF!"
One thing that she DIDN'T say was, "How are you feeling? Are you okay?"
I mean, I would have liked a little sympathy -- but she knows that, if there WAS a problem, I would have taken care of it. In actuality, I rate in importance above the scrapbooks -- but she trusts that, if I wasn't okay, I would have done something about it, and if I was walking around, I was fine. And so she could get upset about the scrapbooks, because they were the most important thing that actually WASN'T okay.
Me, I focus on people. Thinking about the scrapbooks didn't even OCCUR to me. But she's right. At this point, since I AM fine, the scrapbooks ARE the next thing to take care of. |
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| Fortunately, my head is harder than Lis's is. . . |
[Oct. 27th, 2009|03:13 pm] |
A few days ago, Nora managed to drop a bookshelf on Lis's head. It was actually more like a book stand, that sat on top of our bookcases in our front room. Nora was sitting on it and knocked it over when Lis was underneath.
She was getting ready to go to work at the time, and emailed in to say that she was taking an hour or so of headache time before leaving. No injuries that required medical intervention, either human or veterinary, but Lis had a pretty good goose-egg on top of her head.
So, today, I suddenly hear pathetic meows. I see Nora on top of the bookcase. She's looking down behind the bookcase. And not meowing. And I don't see Nick.
Yes, Nick had managed to fall behind the bookcase and get stuck.
I managed to slide the bookcase over enough to let him get out -- he'd been unaware of the thing where, if a cat can get their head out, they can get their whole body out, but after I explained it to him, he managed to scrabble out.
In the process, however, I managed to shake the bookcase enough to knock a plastic 20-gallon storage tub filled with scrapbooks off of it. Which landed on my head. The tub, not the bookcase. Cracked in half, too. The tub, not my head.
I don't have any sort of lump, and there is no pain -- or blood -- but I think I am getting a little bit of a headache.
Nick is curled up at my feet, now, instead of back on top of the bookcase. |
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| The "ask me stuff" thing that's going around. |
[Oct. 24th, 2009|08:58 am] |
So, yeah, people are doing the "ask me stuff that you don't know" thing.
Here's how it goes. Because of the way that LiveJournal works, we tend to accumulate friends, or "friends"-meaning-people-on-our-LJ-friends-list-who-may-or-may-not-actually-be-friends that we actually don't know anything about.
So there are a bunch of you who don't know the most basic things about me. Most of you don't actually care that much one way or the other about the things you don't know about me, and that's totally fine. If you know that I have kittens that I post pictures of, I teach Hebrew school that I post about, I tend bar that I post about, and post random things about religion, politics, philosophy, or whatever -- that's totally enough to know about me.
However.
If you're actually curious about anything else about me, feel free to ask. Actually, feel free to ask any time you want. But here's a post just specifically for that purpose.
I won't be offended at any questions -- but I reserve the right to not answer if I feel the answer is too personal.
Feel free to ask stuff even if you DO know me in person, if there's anything you're curious about.
As usual, anonymity is an option; IP tracking is off, anonymous commenting is on. |
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| The Hebrew Hammer at my shul |
[Oct. 23rd, 2009|05:36 pm] |
November 1st, for TBB Movie Night, we'll be screening The Hebrew Hammer.
Five PM. Temple B'Nai Brith in Somerville. Be there.
Seriously, it should be fun. 'Specially if you come! |
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| ASP's Taming of the Shrew |
[Oct. 21st, 2009|10:25 am] |
Drunk homeless guy staggers into a basement dive bar, rants incoherently for a bit, passes out on the floor. Bunch of guys with a sick sense of humor think it'd be funny to fuck with his head, make him think that he's actually a rich nobleman who's gone crazy and only THINKS he's a drunk homeless guy. At the same time, a bunch of actors can't pay their bar tab, and, in exchange for not having the bouncer beat the shit out of them, agree to put on a Shakespeare play to entertain the "nobleman." Unfortunately, they suck -- partially because there just aren't enough of them, so they're doubling so many roles that it's incoherent. Until the *cough cough* nobleman makes all the other folks at the bar take some roles -- and he ends up with the male lead. Playing against an actress who is an absolute raving bitch.
As is typical for my "reviews", this will be partly a review of the Actors' Shakespeare Project's opening play of their new season, and partly a general essay on the issues around it.
The Taming of the Shrew is one of the two most difficult Shakespeare plays for me to watch, the other being The Merchant of Venice, which, somewhat ironically, was directed last season by Melia Bensussen, who directed THIS Shrew.
So, where to start? With what I find so difficult and problematic about the play, or with what Bensussen does with that? Let's start with the problem, and then talk about ASP's solutions.
You could do worse as a starting point than this essay, which explains, among other things, that a man who doesn't respect a woman's boundaries in normal social discourse is pretty likely to not respect her boundaries at all -- or, in fact, to respect HER at all -- which means that he's a danger to her.
I just read that essay a couple days ago, and then Lis brought An American in Paris home from the library. We were enjoying it immensely, marveling at Gene Kelly's dancing, and loving the characters, and then Kelly, as the leading man, met the girl that he fell for (and she was nineteen, so I feel comfortable calling her a "girl" rather than a woman), and stalked her and pressured her until she agreed to go out with him.
At this point, Lis and I both realized just how uncomfortable we were with this, and turned off the movie. Of course, just for the record, Jerry Mulligan does end up with Lise, which goes to show you that stalkerish oppressive behavior gets rewarded, at least in Hollywood movies of the 1950s.
And in London stage plays of the 1590s.
Heck, in Shrew, it's worse. Lise gives in to Jerry because Gene Kelly is the hero, and is just so charming and sweet that she just falls for him because of his creepy obsessive stalkerish behavior, after only two or three days of him following her to work and stuff. Petruccio, on the other hand, uses starvation, sleep deprivation, and separation from familiar surroundings and control of social contact as brainwashing/torture methods. The most obvious way to read the play is of a domineering man using methods explicitly forbidden by the Geneva convention to inflict a Stockholm Syndrome condition on a woman, breaking her will and making her servile to him. To me, this is not the stuff that wonderful, frothy, lighthearted comedy is made of. And that's the challenge that a director coming to this play faces.
Mostly, you want to distance the audience somewhat from the uncomfortable bits, but not distancing so much that you've lost the point of the play. And Shakespeare gives directors a couple tools to do this. The most significant distancing tool is the Induction -- that the whole Taming of the Shrew isn't really happening -- it's just a play that the actors are putting on for the drunk homeless Christopher Sly.
But Bensussen has a couple other angles as well. Not only is the story actually a play-within-a-play -- but none of the people PLAYING in it are people that you want to identify with. Is the play deeply misogynistic? Yeah, sure it is -- but it's being played for, and by, a bunch of people who you wouldn't want to hang out with anyway, at least initially. So there's THAT distancing, as well.
But the most important thing that Bensussen does is choose to have Kate portrayed as a genuinely unpleasant person, played by a genuinely unpleasant actress (played in turn by the genuinely pleasant Sarah Newhouse). As such, Kate's "taming" doesn't feel like breaking the spirit of Woman, but rather a specific transformation of one unpleasant person into a better person. While Petruccio, in transforming her, is also somehow transforming himself (something which isn't supported by Shakespeare's words, but is done entirely by Ben Evett's portrayal).
I found myself surprised by how uncomfortable I wasn't, watching this version. I didn't feel that Bensussen had done violence to the message of the play -- but, she'd managed to make The Taming of The Shrew more into a taming of Kate specifically than a general condemnation of "uppity women".
In the Director's Notes, Bensussen talks about how her route into the play was to look at the theme of "transformation", and how various characters changed throughout the play. Related to that are questions of what people are REALLY like, and, in fact, what's real at all. As a cute way of bringing this message home -- Christopher Sly's clothing includes a Real Madrid t-shirt. Which just says "REAL" across the front. When Petruccio and Kate leave at the end, and Petruccio exits with his wife -- he's wearing the shirt again. Is Petruccio leaving with Kate? Is Sly leaving with the actress? Both?
Neither?
This is a production worth seeing, partially for seeing how ASP manages to deal with the textural challenges.
But mostly because it's a hell of a lot of fun.
Playing downstairs at the Garage in Harvard Square -- and they use the awkwardness of the space to their advantage -- through November 8. Tickets and details available at http://www.actorsshakespeareproject.org/ Blogger Gift Disclosure: actually, we didn't get press tickets this time -- this year, we bought a season subscription. But they DID make up an extra press kit for Lis and me. |
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| How often has this happened to you? |
[Oct. 20th, 2009|03:48 pm] |
You're sitting there at your computer, on your normal computer-desk chair, which is a totally normal office-chair type chair that you got at some normal place to get office chairs, like Staples or something like that, so it's a normal, regular, name-brand office chair, and, all of a sudden, it just breaks right in half under you while you're just sitting there.
Yeah.
Me?
Twice, now. I broke my desk chair, and then, since Lis doesn't use her desk, she let me take hers which hadn't been used in over a year.
Okay, fine, 225 is on the high end of weight for adult males, but it's not EXTREMELY high -- it's still within a sigma or two. Do I fidget around a lot and wear out chairs that way? |
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| Exercise results |
[Oct. 13th, 2009|08:05 pm] |
So, last Friday, I had my six-week fitness evaluation. I've been going to Fitness Together for six weeks, three times a week, for a forty-five minute workout. I've missed twice; once was when they were closed for Memorial Day, and the other was Yom Kippur.
So, what are the results? I'll start with the fitness-related ones, then do the weight-related ones under a cut.
Resting blood pressure: started out at 130/80, now 120/80.
Resting heart rate: was 90; now 75.
Heart rate recovery improved; I don't remember how much.
Started out only able to do 12 push-ups while on an angle of 45 degrees; can now do 20 push-ups flat on the floor.
Started out bench-pressing 55 pounds (25 kilos) for 3 sets of 12 reps, now benching 110 pounds (50 kilos) for 3 sets of 12 reps.
( Fat-and-weight-loss related things, under a cut for people who don't care ) |
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| On why I generally feel that arguing about atheism vs theism is a waste of time |
[Oct. 11th, 2009|11:45 pm] |
Okay. So, I've got a lot of theists on my friends list, a lot of atheists, a lot of agnostics, a lot of people who shift from category to category, a lot of people whose beliefs don't quite fit into any of those boxes. Even some people to whom the whole question is basically boring.
And the vast, vast majority of you, whatever your personal feelings about the existence or nonexistence of a god or gods, are very live-and-let-live about other people's beliefs. So long as their beliefs are not being used to attack or smother yours, or anyone else's, it's no big deal. A lot of you get real upset when people DO use their particular beliefs, or, less frequently-but-nonetheless-occasionally nonbeliefs to hammer on other people -- and I'm one of those who does -- but, so long as people aren't using their theism or atheism to hurt other people, I think the vast majority of us are pretty cool with whatever anyone else does or does not believe.
But I have watched atheist/theist flamewars on the Internet occasionally. And while it can be vaguely amusing, it gets old real fast.
See, I'm a bit of an amateur theologian, philosopher, and rhetorician. I don't claim to be GOOD at any of these things, but I enjoy them. And watching most atheists and theists debate, well, it's like someone who really enjoys chess watching two people sitting down at the board and trying to remember how the little horsies move.
The truth is -- in any theist/atheist debate, whomever gets to define the term "God" wins.
See, I can define "god" as "a being that lives on the top of that mountain over there, who looks just like a human, but somehow better, who has a physical existence and a physical location." And then we can go over to the top of the mountain, and we can look, and see that there's no physical human-like-but-better being living there, and the atheist side takes it.
Or, I can define "god" as "the phenomenon of self-replication, i.e., life, along with the phenomenon of self-awareness, along with the altruistic impulse (even if it's an emergent behavior), along with the existence of the sensation of joy." And if I define "god" that way, the theist side wins, because all of those things are observably extant. If "god" is those things, we can SEE that all those things exist, therefore God exists.
Further: I can start from either of those definitions, and tweak them without changing anything truly essential in their nature until I reach some sort of definition that the majority of people would recognize as being what they call "God." I can start from EITHER of those sides -- and not lose the fundamental nature of either of those sides.
I can argue for a God that most people would recognize as God, and prove that it is absolutely ridiculous to believe in, or just as absolutely ridiculous to disbelieve in. It all depends on which of those two points you start from.
Whoever defines the terms, wins the argument.
And that is why theist/atheist arguments are, generally speaking, simple foolishness. |
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| Musings on Sukkot and Ecclesiastes |
[Oct. 10th, 2009|10:45 pm] |
We Jews do "celebration" weird sometimes.
Sukkot is a holiday of joy. It is a holiday in which we are commanded to rejoice, and in which we are assured that we WILL be joyful. And it actually is a lot of fun.
And it's the holiday on which we read the book of Ecclesiastes, or "Kohelet", in Hebrew.
This is the season of our joy, in which we reflect upon how all things are simply emptiness, that life is meaningless, that we will all die and be forgotten, and that nothing we do can really have any effect on the world -- no matter what we do, it's been done before, and will be forgotten, and will be done again. And our entire existence is pointless, empty, meaningless, futile, and forgettable. That we may as well try to have fun while we're here, because that's really all there is to do -- but even THAT'S basically pointless, because whatever we do to have fun, we'll get old and not be able to do it later. That our life is bleak, meaningless, pointless, has no effect on the world, and ends in the grave. And that, fuckitall, dying is about the best we can hope to do -- it's better to attend a funeral than a celebration, because whatever you're celebrating is pointless, and, at least, at a funeral, SOMEONE'S out of the pointless rat race.
THIS is the book we read to rejoice.
By contrast, when we want to focus our minds on the seriousness of the state of our soul, to focus on repentance and forgiveness, we read a funny story about a wacky "prophet" who got eaten by a fish. I think the Jewish soul has a deep tendency toward ironic humor in how we view the world.
Now, there are simple, un-ironic reasons suggested for reading Kohelet on Sukkot. One school of thought says that the reading of Kohelet was instituted because people were getting so wild and out-of-control on Sukkot because they were having such a good time, that they had to institute reading the most depressing book of the Tanach in order to keep a lid on things.
But that's too boring a reason to POSSIBLY engage with. I mean, even if that WAS the actual historic event -- and there's no real reason to assume that it is -- what can you DO with it?
We can get much juicier and more interesting trains of thought going if we start trying to jam the concepts of "joyous celebration before THE LORD" and "nihilistic bleakness in a godless meaningless universe" together, and see what happens when you decide that there MUST be something that these two concepts have to say to one another.
In other words, "reading Kohelet on Sukkot" is one of those things that you do to deliberately break your brain, to see if you can't put your brain back together again better, later. It's an exercise. "Can your mind hold these two clearly opposed concepts simultaneously?"
"Can I simultaneously feel joy before THE LORD, while studying the reasons that neither true joy nor THE LORD really exist?"
Tradition says that Kohelet, the guy that wrote the book of Kohelet, was actually King Solomon. Which, historically, probably isn't true -- nor is it claimed internally: Kohelet says that he's a powerful king over Israel, and a descendant of David, who has lots of wives, and a lot of study beneath his belt, which certainly describes Solomon, but could describe lots of other people, too. But "King Solomon", besides being a historical person, can also represent a concept, of "extremely wise person." And it leads to speculation of what kind of person could write both the Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes, which is another brain-breaker, in its own right.
Here's what made me think of this, though: I was looking through Wikipedia for a particular Jewish story -- and I noticed what I hadn't noticed before: that the story is set around Sukkot.One day Solomon decided to humble Benaiah Ben Yehoyada, his most trusted minister. He said to him, "Benaiah, there is a certain ring that I want you to bring to me. I wish to wear it for Sukkot which gives you six months to find it." "If it exists anywhere on earth, your majesty," replied Benaiah, "I will find it and bring it to you, but what makes the ring so special?" "It has magic powers," answered the king. "If a happy man looks at it, he becomes sad, and if a sad man looks at it, he becomes happy." Solomon knew that no such ring existed in the world, but he wished to give his minister a little taste of humility. Spring passed and then summer, and still Benaiah had no idea where he could find the ring. On the night before Sukkot, he decided to take a walk in one of the poorest quarters of Jerusalem. He passed by a merchant who had begun to set out the day's wares on a shabby carpet. "Have you by any chance heard of a magic ring that makes the happy wearer forget his joy and the broken-hearted wearer forget his sorrows?" asked Benaiah. He watched the grandfather take a plain gold ring from his carpet and engrave something on it. When Benaiah read the words on the ring, his face broke out in a wide smile. That night the entire city welcomed in the holiday of Sukkot with great festivity. "Well, my friend," said Solomon, "have you found what I sent you after?" All the ministers laughed and Solomon himself smiled. To everyone's surprise, Benaiah held up a small gold ring and declared, "Here it is, your majesty!" As soon as Solomon read the inscription, the smile vanished from his face. The jeweler had written three Hebrew letters on the gold band: gimel, zayin, yud, which began the words "Gam zeh ya'avor" -- "This too shall pass." At that moment Solomon realized that all his wisdom and fabulous wealth and tremendous power were but fleeting things, for one day he would be nothing but dust.
So -- perhaps that's what Sukkot and Kohelet have to say to each other. Perhaps that's how one may rejoice before a God who doesn't exist in a universe without joy. גם זה יעבור
No matter how bleak things look, we know that God loves us too much to leave us that way, so we have every reason to rejoice. גם זה יעבור
No matter how powerful we are, we know that we are nothing but dust. גם זה יעבור
No matter how badly we fuck up, we know that, basically, it doesn't matter -- stuff that bad has happened before, and been survivable. גם זה יעבור
This, too, shall pass. But it hasn't passed. What we have is now. And now is all there is.
We rejoice, because we exist now. We rejoice because this too shall pass. We will die, we will be forgotten. But we exist now. We will always have existed. We, too, shall pass, just as everything shall pass -- and we are therefore as important as anything else there is. |
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| Our sukkah |
[Oct. 10th, 2009|03:38 pm] |
I'm rather proud of this thing. My narration is somewhat misleading, I realized. 'Cause I was talking without thinking. For instance, the sukkah is made out of plywood, two-by-fours, drywall screws, and the lattice. The lattice isn't holding things together. It's just . . . the way I said it, I ended up with a dangling modifier. Oops.
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| Best comment on Obama's Peace Prize yet: |
[Oct. 9th, 2009|10:43 am] |
From ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) arib:Yo, President Obama...
I'm really happy for you, and I'm gonna let you finish, but Auguste Marie François Beernaert and Paul-Henri-Benjamin d'Estournelles de Constant's Nobel Peace Prizes were the Peacefullest Peace Prizes of all time... |
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| (no subject) |
[Oct. 7th, 2009|12:08 pm] |
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Why does my cat keep trying to French kiss me? Besides the interspecies creepiness of that, his breath smells like cat food. |
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| Hah! I have achieved sukkah! |
[Oct. 5th, 2009|11:02 am] |
Okay, a couple days late, but still. Dad, who, as a contractor, has access to Truck, dropped off the stuff I needed on Saturday. 'Cause it's a good idea to do mitzvot on Shabbes, right? (Don't answer that.)
(For non-Jews -- construction is one of the things you are SPECIFICALLY forbidden to do on Shabbat, so I was breaking Shabbat in order to make a sukkah. . . )
Still, it's done, and it's really nice. I think I'm going to sleep in it tonight if the weather co-operates. I'll take photos of it some time. |
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| Today continues to be frustrating. |
[Oct. 2nd, 2009|12:24 pm] |
I came up with an entirely new sukkah design last night, that ought to work well.
I went to Home Depot to buy all the parts for it. And rent a truck to get the stuff home, since I can't fit 4-foot-by-8-foot plywood in my car.
To rent the Home Depot trucks, you need your driver's license, credit card, and the registration of the car that you're leaving there as you rent the truck.
Our car registration is missing from our glove compartment. |
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| Also, Lis doesn't let me have any fun. |
[Oct. 1st, 2009|07:58 pm] |
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Lis won't let me buy the five cargo containers of coconuts that I just found online. It's only a thousand bucks for five full container loads. And I had this really great idea involving a SkillSaw, drill, coconuts, and a Dremel tool. She says boring things like "you don't have a produce import license", and stuff like that. |
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| Well, fuck. |
[Oct. 1st, 2009|07:38 pm] |
The design that Lis worked out for our sukkah doesn't work.
Apparently, Lis doesn't think in angle forces and vectors. I'd been mentioning problems with the design, and Lis kept redesigning it, so I figured that she'd fixed the problems. Nope; turns out that she actually didn't see the problems in the first place.
I figured, she's an engineer, that's what it says on her business cards. Turns out, "software engineers" don't actually have to understand architectural forces. So I should have done all the designing myself, since I DO see forces and stresses.
I've now got one day to fix the design, rebuild the sukkah frame, and buy and put up the walls, roof-lattice, and schach. |
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| You think a Blendtec is impressive? |
[Oct. 1st, 2009|02:12 pm] |
The folks at Top Gear invent a blender that is, by my calculation, approximately two hundred times as powerful as a "Will It Blend?" Blendtec.
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| Followup on the raccoon situation, with some deductions about what happened and why. |
[Sep. 24th, 2009|05:38 pm] |
So, the timeline:
This spring, a mother raccoon had a litter of three babies, in the walls of our house. We had Bay State Pest Control trap them out, once the babies were old enough to leave on their own -- we DIDN'T want to trap the mother, then leave babies to die of starvation in our walls. Not only is that cruel, but we just don't want rotting carcases.
Over the next couple weeks, into the early summer, we trapped out all three juveniles. We never trapped the mother, but, since we'd left a baited trap there for a week, and nobody took the bait, we figured that the mother had left on her own, once the young'ns were gone. Anyway, we weren't hearing any noise from the walls.
So they blocked up the holes where the raccoon had been getting in and out.
That night, and the next night, Lis said that she thought that she'd heard someone trying to get back in, and sent me outside with a flashlight to see if a raccoon was bashing on the exclusion to try to break back in. And I didn't see anyone.
She must have been hearing the raccoon bashing on the INSIDE of the exclusion, trying to break OUT. And, around two in the morning, the raccoon found a hole that went to the INSIDE of the upstairs apartment, and our upstairs tenant saw it.
One other piece of data: at one point, when the raccoon was hunkered in the china closet, we turned out the lights to try to make it unpanicked enough to make a run for the porch. One of the police officers turned his flashlight on the raccoon, and then away. And I saw a glowing spot on the raccoon's ear. There was a glow-in-the-dark tag on it.
So, somebody had tagged the raccoon. Which means that it had been previously trapped, tagged, and released. Which is why we couldn't trap it -- you can only trap a raccoon once. If you release a raccoon, it will then understand traps, and never be caught again.
We expect, and hope, that this particular raccoon is terrified enough that she's NEVER coming back to our house. And, in any case, nobody can get in through the former holes which are blocked up. |
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| Fun with home ownership |
[Sep. 24th, 2009|09:18 am] |
All summer, we were battling with a family of raccoons who made their home in our walls. We got rid of three of them, and never got the fourth, so figured it had left. And on Tuesday, we finally had the pest control people come and put sheet metal over the holes that they got in, and counted it as Done, Problem Solved, Mission Accomplished.
Last night, at about 2 AM, our upstairs tenants call.
There was a raccoon IN THE APARTMENT.
( Read more... ) |
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| Open invitation for kitten therapy. |
[Sep. 21st, 2009|12:59 pm] |
Right now, way, way too many people I love are going through hard times. There are actually SEVERAL divorces/splitting ups on my friends list, as well as other relationship troubles that do not involve splitting up but involve lots of pain and trying to re-organize things.
And there's not a hell of a lot I can do for any of you.
But those of you who are local-ish? I'd like to offer kittens.
There's not much I can do. But we've got Nick and Nora, and I've got a flexible schedule, and kittens make things better.
They're getting to be teenage kittens, but still very snuggly, and I think they'd be possibly useful for those of you who are going through loss, change, and strife.
So.
Open invitation. If you think that playing with and snuggling cats will help you, and you don't have cats of your own, and you can get reasonably close to here, please come. |
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| Have you ever seen a piece of research that is CLEARLY going to win an IgNobel? |
[Sep. 20th, 2009|08:51 pm] |
http://prefrontal.org/files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.jpg
That's a jpg, which, obviously, those of you who are blind won't be able to see. So let me extract a couple of the important quotes:
METHODS
Subject. One mature Atlantic Salmon (Salmo salar) participated in the fMRI study.
The salmon was approximately 18 inches long, weighed 3.8 lbs, and was not alive at
the time of scanning.
Task. The task administered to the salmon involved completing an open-ended
mentalizing task. The salmon was shown a series of photographs depicting human
individuals in social situations with a specified emotional valence. The salmon was
asked to determine what emotion the individual in the photo must have been
experiencing.
Design. Stimuli were presented in a block design with each photo presented for 10
seconds followed by 12 seconds of rest. A total of 15 photos were displayed. Total
scan time was 5.5 minutes.
Okay? Putting a dead salmon into a MRI and asking it about the emotional contexts of various photographs ought to put one into consideration for an Ig.
However, in order to actually get an Ig, the research has to actually demonstrate something useful, not just be weird. Why were they doing this and publishing the results?
Because they found data that made it look like the dead salmon WAS doing things.
With the extreme dimensionality of functional neuroimaging data comes
extreme risk for false positives. Across the 130,000 voxels in a typical fMRI
volume the probability of a false positive is almost certain. Correction for
multiple comparisons should be completed with these datasets, but is often
ignored by investigators. To illustrate the magnitude of the problem we
carried out a real experiment that demonstrates the danger of not correcting
for chance properly.
So. THAT'S what makes it Ig-worthy. They MRI-scanned a dead salmon, on purpose, to demonstrate the baseline random-chance error, and show how it can make things LOOK like statistically-significant things are happening, even when you're, y'know, scanning a dead salmon. That's useful.
In other words, I think this is a shoo-in. First, it makes you laugh -- but then, it makes you think. |
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| On exercising with a person guiding you |
[Sep. 16th, 2009|10:46 pm] |
So, I do 45 minutes three times a week with a personal trainer, Brian. He’s got a schedule of exercises and muscle groups, designed so that any muscles I’m using, I get time for them to rest, but still get a fair bit of work on everything.
I’m working for 45 minutes on strength training, but at a high enough intensity that my heart rate is elevated to about 150 bpm for 45 minutes, which is enough to get SOME cardiovascular benefit, although I need to add in actual cardio work, too, eventually.
Anyway, today, I really attempted to attack the exercises, and I managed to finish what he’d planned with some time left over at the end of the session. He jokingly said, “Okay, we’ve got some time left, so we’ll just go through the entire workout again, starting with the bench press.”
He then looked at me, and said, “And you’d do it, too, wouldn’t you?”
And I would have.
Apparently, I put more effort into my workouts than a lot of his clients do, and I was thinking about why.
Seems to me that, in strenuous physical activity, you’ve got two limits -- your mental limits and your physical limits. Your mind is likely to stop you from doing things before your body really does.
And that’s by design. Having mental limits that are BEFORE your physical limits gives you a safety margin. If you get too close to your physical limits, and actually exceed them, then you injure yourself. So your mental limits are SUPPOSED to be before your physical limits. It’s just good safety engineering. You WANT to stop when things get strenuous, so that you don’t actually do damage.
However, the closer you can get to your physical limits on a regular basis, the faster your limits expand.
And that’s the advantage I’ve got. I can entirely IGNORE my mental limits, because Brian, who has a BA in physical training and is working on his MA in physiology, is standing right there. I feel entirely comfortable ignoring my own mental limits, because I trust that there’s a professional who is watching me and will prevent me from actually injuring myself. He can tell me to stop, or go, and I can trust that his judgment will keep me safe enough.
I think this is one of the real advantages to working with a personal trainer, or under a coach or sensei or other trainer. If there is someone directing your physical training, and you trust that person’s skill, you can safely learn to ignore your own mental limitations, trusting in THEIR ability to keep you from injury. |
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| Two things that popped into my head recently. . . |
[Sep. 13th, 2009|03:41 pm] |
I don’t want George Jetson’s flying car. I want George Jetson’s car that folds up into a briefcase so you never need to find a parking space.
Kids are in far more danger from people they know -- youth group leaders, religious leaders, teachers, parents, other relatives -- than they are from strangers. Very, very few molestation events, kidnappings, beatings, or murders are committed by strangers -- they’re almost always people we know.
But there are parents who don’t let their kids walk to school, even when it’s within visual range of their own houses. Parents who always wait with their kids at the school bus stop. Parents who always need to know where their kids are, because they’re afraid of their kids being harmed by strangers.
Why are we scared of strangers, rather than the actual danger of people we know? Because the idea that it’s people we trust that we ought not trust, rather than people we DON’T trust is too scary. We’re scared of strangers because that’s less scary than being scared of what we OUGHT to be scared of. |
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| Yesterday, navrins pondered a question that has truly profound implications |
[Sep. 5th, 2009|02:09 pm] |
And the REASON it has truly profound implications is that, to me, it's so obvious that nobody would ever think about it -- but that many (most?) people don't, because it's NOT obvious.
He was considering the fact that, in mathematics, you have sets, and you can always tell, except in a very few Goedel-type cases, whether a given entity is in or outside the set.
But that, in real life, there are many sets that aren't like that. For instance, the set of "buildings". I can tell that a towel isn't a building, and my house is, but if someone is building a building, at what point does it turn into a building?
There used to be a tradition/superstition, by the way, that, at some point when the frame was completed, but before the walls were started, someone would drag a small tree up to the top of the thing. And so, by that tradition, you could get an answer -- it's a building after someone's dragged a tree up it.
I haven't seen anybody do that in YEARS, but it brings up an important point. The very category of "building" isn't a real thing. It is something defined by humans, and therefore may be defined in any way we wish.
But it doesn't really exist. The concept of "building-ness". Sure, Plato hypothesized that all categories have actual examples of Platonic forms: that a "chair" is any approximation of the Platonic form of "chair-ness".
But in reality, there is no such thing as "chair-ness" in itself. It is purely a human-created artificial definition. It doesn't exist per se -- it only exists in our minds as an idea.
This has profound implications for Bad Science.( Read more... ) |
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| Nora's at the vet's, getting spayed |
[Sep. 3rd, 2009|02:37 pm] |
Just got the phone call; she's doing fine and will be ready to come home in a couple hours. But Nick is so clingy when she's gone -- just like she was when HE was gone to get neutered.
It's a good thing we've got the two of them. . . . |
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| A PDF Jewish calendar |
[Sep. 2nd, 2009|03:49 pm] |
This person couldn't find the Jewish calendar he or she wanted. So made it.
There are a few spelling errors here and there in the Hebrew, but nothing serious, and it's a really good idea. My "Jewish calendar" that I have on the wall is actually a Gregorian calendar with Jewish dates put in in the corners. This one is actually a Jewish calendar, with Gregorian dates put in. (There are two different versions; one has the US holidays as well). Every month shows the lunar cycle.
And . . . it includes on the OTHER half of each page some of the brachot that you're likely to need unexpectedly -- meeting a friend after not seeing them for over a year, seeing a rainbow, seeing an unusually beautiful person, hearing good news, hearing bad news -- that sort of thing.
It DOES include some variations of G-d's name for the brachot, so if you print it out, treat it with respect. It's designed to be printed out and carried with you -- the cover page is a separate file, so you can print it on cardstock or the like, to keep the whole thing together.
It's designed to be printed double-sided -- if you do it that way, and then fold the pages in half, the months are sequential, and then the brachot are sequential after them. |
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| A thought about exercise |
[Sep. 2nd, 2009|02:56 pm] |
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I'm pretty sure that the whole "exercise makes you feel better" works 100% on the "hitting yourself in the head with a hammer" mode of feeling better: it just feels so good when you stop. . . . |
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| (no subject) |
[Sep. 1st, 2009|12:19 pm] |
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"The primary difference between these two subspecies of Formicidae is that the one on the left has longer legs and therefore a greater height from the ground," Tom Swift said tolerantly. |
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| One thing that I think has gotten lost in all this health care brouhaha . . . |
[Sep. 1st, 2009|11:29 am] |
. . . is that even if we liberals get absolutely everything we're pushing for, we don't get anything particularly impressive.
What we're asking for is a federally-funded insurance program to help insure people who aren't getting insurance by the commercial market.
That's it.
That's what "the public option" is.
The whole SocializmGonnaDestroyAmericaDeathPanels thing is -- an extra health insurance plan that goes in addition to our current system. No government-run health care. No NHS. No health care rationing. Just a program to help insure the people who aren't insured.
One idea about this is that there's not going to be a "needs test" to get in. If you're rich, and you want to go with the public option, sure, go ahead.
And THAT'S what the insurance companies are so worked up about. They don't think that they have the ability to offer anything remotely as attractive as what the federal government can offer.
Government incompetence and waste? The insurance industry is convinced that the government incompetence and waste is going to be so much LESSER than their OWN incompetence and waste that nobody's gonna want to go with THEIR things.
And THAT'S the big deal. The insurance industry is convinced that they have made such a god damned mess of the whole thing that anything the federal government can scrape together, no matter how pathetic, is going to be SO much better than THEIR shit that nobody's gonna want to buy their shit any more.
That doesn't really inspire confidence in them, does it? |
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| By posting this, I may, unfortunately, jinx it, but we'll see |
[Aug. 30th, 2009|10:27 pm] |
LIS: [from the kitchen] KITTENS! Get out of there!
IAN: What did they do this time?
LIS: Well, I WAS going to ask if you wanted any more of the rice and vegetables, but the cats have finished it off.
IAN: Weren't you telling me about a website that said that grain was bad for cats?
LIS: Rice isn't as bad as a lot of the other grains. Anyway . . . I've got to say, I'm pretty impressed with their iron gullets so far. They've been sneaking bits of EVERYTHING.
IAN: . . .true. And they haven't even puked once yet.
LIS: Well, they did that one time when they were over with felis_sidus. But that was after they ate the tub of Vaseline . . . |
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| Lis just pointed out that it sucks to be Mitt Romney right now |
[Aug. 27th, 2009|08:01 pm] |
Think about it. Massachusetts has an OPEN senate seat. The Massachusetts Republican party has nobody to put up for it. They USED to have Mitt Romney. Romney burned all his Massachusetts bridges by badmouthing us during his attempt to get the presidential nomination. He's less popular than sewage outflow right now -- after all, the Deer Island Waste Water Treatment plant provides more jobs than Mitt ever did.
He must be kicking himself right now. He woulda had a chance to be a Senator. |
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| Also: in more adorable kitten updates: |
[Aug. 26th, 2009|11:18 am] |
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The vet's office phoned to check in on Nick and see how he was doing. The vet tech said that everybody LOVED having him there, because he was being totally affectionate to everyone. Since Nick and Nora were sleeping on my desk right in front of me, I asked if she wanted to say hi to the little guy. She said sure, I held the phone up to him, and I heard her say "Hi, Nick!" Nicky started purring immediately, and I heard the vet tech squee. He is just that much of an affection fiend. |
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| I'm certain this observation isn't original to me . . . |
[Aug. 26th, 2009|11:14 am] |
I was watching our kitties, and thinking about why geeks are so often cat people. And it really DOES make sense.
I mean, what do cats like? Laser pointers, shiny objects, Slinkies, yarn, fast-moving games where you whack things and they make noise, sunbeams, high-protein low-carb diets . . . pretty much, cats and geeks like the same things. |
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| Poor squeaky kitty. |
[Aug. 24th, 2009|09:30 am] |
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Nick's gone into the vet today to get neutered. This is the first time that Nick and Nora have been separated. Nora is walking around the house mewing for him constantly I keep telling her that Nick will be back this evening, but it's like she doesn't understand English or something. |
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