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Thursday, May 15th, 2008
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6:42 pm - There must be some mistake
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I think I'm going to have to put in a complaint or something, this can't be right. It would appear, however, that as of today, May 15 2008, I am forty years old (whoa, epic fail, or epoch. When I first posted this, I wrote 1968 instead of 2008). Now, although I certainly remember things appropriately long ago, I'm pretty sure I was eighteen only a few days ago. So something must be amiss.
Seriously, it is kind of freaky. I know a bunch of you reading this (to the extent that I have a readership) have already passed this age and wonder why I'm making such a fuss. And I probably would be even more freaked out if I hadn't been expending little bits of freakage over the course of the past year. I guess a lot of it is thinking where I am vis-á-vis where "the typical" person, or people I know (e.g. my parents, teachers) were when they were this age. And there's also the whole, you know, mortality thing that my species is subject to. I have probably already begun more projects than a person could truly finish in six lifetimes, and I'm still making up new ones. Sometimes my friend Robin's plan starts to sound like a good idea.
I think I'll manage, and maybe I'll be able to get more of these little project-lets a little further along. Maybe I can motivate myself. I may be forty, but I'm going to keep the denial going a little longer. Years ago, I discovered the correct term for people like me. Pharmaceutical companies have used it all along. They have dosages for "Adults and children over twelve." That's me. A child over twelve.
Happy birthday to people I know who share this day with me... Ivan Derzhanski, my uncle Jeff, Mariah who goes to school with my kids and gets on at the same bus stop, Gini from that year in Israel, the girl I met in college in History of the English Language class... Probably others I've forgotten. And L. Frank Baum, apparently. (I know, I could look up a list in a heartbeat online, but I'm working from memory)
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| Tuesday, March 4th, 2008
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9:39 am - pyBlazon Announced
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Well, high time something I've been tinkering with (off and on) for over a year should get announced, at least, even if it isn't quite released. You can read up about my blazonry-to-SVG converter here, and even try it out on its online server. I told the folks at ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) sca_heralds about it; they've poked at it a little. I don't yet feel confident that it has enough pieces to release, but it will be released sooner or later, under some open-source license. Maybe actually find a few people who are interested, participate in issue-tracking, wiki-upkeep, things like that. Woo. Check it out, see what you think.
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| Sunday, February 24th, 2008
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2:22 pm - Happy Leap Day
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Just a quick note, as leap day approaches...
Yes, leap day is tomorrow, as I write this, February 25. I already mentioned this in an earlier entry, but now it's actually relevant. Whenever leap day is mentioned as approaching around my house, my kids are quick to point out that it's the 25th... My household probably holds more than half the people who know (or care) about that bit of trivia in the state. OK, well, in the county anyway.
Happy leap day!
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| Thursday, January 17th, 2008
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4:51 pm - Color Temperature
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You see it sometimes on the packaging of fluorescent light bulbs. ‘Color Temperature 4500K’ or something. What does that mean? And if you're really paying attention, you'll notice the “temperature” doesn't correspond at all to what we usually mean by “cool” and “warm” colors.
It comes down to black-body radiation. When things are heated, they glow, right? I mean, everyone knows what "red-hot" means, has seen metal or something hot enough to glow. And we know that hotter stuff glows brighter and yellower, even “white hot.” Well, it turns out that this is generalizable. Everything gives off radiation characteristic of its temperature (there are other factors that enter into it too; some substances glow for other reasons, other effects are there... but the point is that at least one major component is constant over all substances). Cooler things are dimmer and hotter things are brighter, but also the how much radiation of a given frequency depends on the temperature. The distribution's peak moves to shorter and shorter wavelengths (higher energy) as the temperature of the emitting object rises. Things we don't see as glowing are emitting very little radiation, and even less of it in the visible spectrum: their peak is usually somewhere in the infrared. This is how infrared thermometers work: by looking at the infrared “color” emitted by the object, they can estimate its temperature. This is also why the cosmic background radiation is sometimes called “3K radiation,” because its frequency distribution matches black-body radiation of an object at about three degrees Kelvin (more like 2.725K really). At that cold temperature, the peak is of such long wavelength that it's below infrared, into the microwave range.
Anyway, back to light bulbs, this relationship of color to temperature is used as a way to specify the color of light. Because we're not interested in the peak wavelength or anything, we want to consider the white light as a mixture of wavelengths (which it is) and see how that mixture compares with other mixtures. So a light labeled 4500K is telling you that its color spectrum resembles (not necessarily perfectly!) blackbody radiation at 4500 Kelvins. Which is a rather “warm” color in the artistic sense of the word: lots of yellow and orange, etc. Whereas various “full spectrum” or “daylight” bulbs sport temperatures of more like 5500K or 6500K, which is a much whiter white, a “colder” color in terms of it higher content of blue. It's actually a little counterintuitive to me, since I intuitively think of sunlight as yellowish, and yet full daylight has a color more like 6500K or even higher, depending on the season, and that's an almost bluish white.
Another number you'll see on fluorescent bulbs (and generally not on incandescent ones) is the CRI, the color rendering index. This is a measure of how well a discontinuous-spectrum light-source, like a fluorescent bulb, renders colors as people perceive them relative to a continuous-spectrum light-source of the same color temperature. Incandescent bulbs emit a continuous spectrum, a lot of it, in fact, the black-body radiation. But fluorescent bulbs and such emit by chemical processes, so only emit in certain wavelengths. With good choice of which ones and some creative use of filters, we can make them look pretty good and white, but it's still not a continuous spectrum, and that can be important when it comes to how wavelengths reflect off of colored objects. In an extreme example, consider sodium lamps, whose spectrum is almost entirely in the yellow range. You can hardly see any colors (except yellows) by its light. Mercury-vapor lights are whiter, but they tend to give things odd colors, because of their discontinuous spectrum. The CRI is a measure, up to 100, of how well something approximates a continuous spectrum when it comes to showing colors. So a light bulb of color-temperature 4500K and CRI of 74 is going to do a comparatively lousy job, compared to an incandescent bulb of the same color. (This is important to know when you're finding which suit and tie to wear to that big meeting) Better ones have a CRI in the 90s. But it doesn't do to compare them against light sources of other colors. A CRI of 95 at 3500K is not necessarily better than a CRI of 85 at 5500K (probably isn't, since 3500K is such a red color).
Just a small product of an obsession I had with color vision a while ago. It was mostly about color-blindness, though; one of these days I'll have to write more.
(Yes, I know the Wikipedia articles are at least as informative as this; there's always a better page out there somewhere)
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| Sunday, December 30th, 2007
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4:16 pm - Viewpoints
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A week or two ago I was looking through some articles on www.cracked.com. Some really hilarious things, written very funny... I don't quite have enough pop-culture grounding to get all the references (I don't watch the right TV shows or movies). But also informative and interesting and occasionally thought-provoking.
So, reading the article 5 Awesome Sci-Fi Inventions (That Would Actually Suck), and number 2 is Teleporters (à la Star Trek). Why would it suck? Well, they would work, it says, like fax machines: it sends a copy and destroys the original (referencing an episode in which a Will Riker didn't get destroyed and showed up later to mess up the surviving Will Riker's life). Says the post:
Are you grasping the weirdness of this? The original is destroyed. That means when you step into a teleporter, you die. But, the rest of the world won't know you died, because a copy of you will step out of the other end of the machine. It won't be you, though, it'll be another you that happens to share your memories. To the outside observer the thing will always work fine, and the thing that steps out of the receiving end will think it worked fine. The one person who knows it didn't worked fine, can't tell anyone because they fucking died via total atomization the moment they stepped into the machine.
So, the first time Captain Kirk used the teleportation device to beam down to an alien planet, he was basically resigning himself to an immediate death and hoping that his twin would carry out the mission for him.
Now, I'd occasionally pondered this whole question as well, imagining that there are "viewpoints," and this kind of teleportation would be the end of a "viewpoint." Maybe even the "viewpoint" that is me once was you, or someone else, but our memories are only of who we are at the moment. How would you feel about uploading your consciousness, say, into a computer if it meant that your wetware brain would be roasted medium-rare? Would you use a transporter, understanding that it worked with this mechanism?
But then I considered: how do I know that this isn't precisely what happens, say, every time I go to sleep, or otherwise lose consciousness? For all I know, that "viewpoint" terminates and a new one, sharing its memories, arises the next morning. (Or does it only happen like that for unconsciousness due to, say, medical anesthesia? Maybe different kinds of sleep are different.) If you think about it, all your experience would be just the same if your "viewpoint" perished every night—or for that matter, if you changed "viewpoints" every time the number of minutes you've been alive was a prime number (the changeover doesn't even have to be during a state of unconsciousness). I think if you consider it this way, that really sort of puts an end to that kind of view. If these "viewpoints" exist, then they do not affect our experiences at all, and it is indistinguishable from the case in which they don't exist. In which case, in what sense can they be said to exist at all?
I've started thinking about it a little, pretending they did exist anyway, sometimes before going to bed. Thinking, "OK, well, this is it for this viewpoint, this scintilla of consciousness. I'll be a different me in the morning. Has this been a well-spent day, for my single day of existence?" A little sobering, but interesting nonetheless.
Also gives one something to ponder about death. If I've been "dying" frequently and never knew it, maybe it isn't so bad. Of course, there won't be anyone to take up the mantle of being me afterwards, but consciousness will still be enjoyed by other people. "I" won't have it anymore, but then, there really isn't an "I" anymore, and other people being conscious is sort of like the "me" that wakes up the next morning...
Gah. Not easy concepts to express.
I think a lot of what we humans blather on about comes down to a basic difficulty we have in understanding lack of consciousness. We really have trouble knowing what it's like not to be conscious, and considering that we spend a third of our lives that way, that's sort of puzzling, but there it is. Why is an afterlife a feature of just about every religion? Because we can't conceive of just "not being there" anymore. What happens to "you" after death? is the question; that it is an ill-posed question (due to the failure of existence of "you") doesn't seem to occur (what happens to a letter after you erase it? Well, nothing; it isn't a letter anymore).
We find ourselves anthropomorphizing all kinds of things, like pondering about "cruelty to animals." Mind you, I'm willing to believe that in general most of the "higher" organisms do have some rudiments of consciousness and can experience pain and even suffering. Certainly most mammals and birds. But is there really a concept of "cruelty" to, say, insects? Can they even be considered to suffer? Suffering is different from pain, too, since suffering implies (to me) a duration and a comparison with earlier states. There was a news story some years ago about humane treatment of fish by fishermen and the fish-packing industry. Can fish really be said to suffer? I'm not as sure about them as I am about mammals, probably because mammals are similar enough to me that they use pain-signals that I can understand viscerally.
There's more to this discussion, but I think I've reached the point where I need to respond to other people's responses to add much more.
Update 2/24/2008: Take a look at this video, which deals with some of the same issues, apparently for children from the National Film Board of Canada.
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| Sunday, December 23rd, 2007
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11:47 pm - More Calendars and Prayers
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Just to
follow up on my previous post (“Ancestor
Worship”): the rabbi of my synagogue happened to have a
talk on the subject of the prayer for rain and when to say it (see
my post from
last November again for relevance) just this Friday night
(right in time for the solstice). I asked him to read my blog
entries, since they were relevant.
His talk was
actually about the question of when (and if) to say the rain-prayer
in places like Australia, where the seasons are completely
different. In the lead-up to it, of course he had to explain where
the December 5th figure came
from, etc. And behold, one of his sources quotes the Abudraham in
informing all that the date to start saying it, sixty days from the
equinox, is, you guessed it, November 22nd. This was
written before the calendar was reformed by Pope Gregory, so it
hadn't shifted anyplace funny. Support at last! And the rabbi
carefully explained how the calendar shift moved the date to
December 5th from where
it started... but skated over the fact that since the whole point
of the calendar shift was to correct an error, by not shifting with
it, the custom was failing to correct
for that same error! Ah well.
And it turns
out, there is a fair amount of disagreement about the prayer.
Maimonides
quite emphatically insists that it should be said at the times of
year when rain is needed in the country you live
in, not the sixty-days-from-equinox until
Passover period, which was worked out for and by the Rabbis in
Babylon (keeping in mind that in Israel, they start saying it on
the 7th of
Marcheshvan, a date not directly dependent on solar events. They
just wanted to make sure to wait two weeks after the end of the
holiday to give the holiday pilgrims time to get home before
praying for rain, which makes it hard to travel). Rabbeinu Asher,
who was one of the leading Rabbis of his generation, felt it to be
his duty to try to convince communities all over Europe to say the
prayer for rain at times appropriate for their growing seasons, and
not just to follow the Babylonian dates. So he felt that it should
be said until Shavuot, another seven weeks after Passover, since
they still needed the rain there. And apparently, nobody was
interested in listening to him.
This was all
lead-up to the big question of the night: what about Australia? He
showed a copy of a fascinating letter to the Chief Rabbi in London
from the nascent Jewish community in Melbourne in 1848. Generally
really wonderful to read, to get a feel for life in the
19thcentury, and
also because people just don't write letters like that anymore. And
the letter asked that very question. The response, we are told,
followed the answer which had earlier been given to the first major
Jewish community south of the equator, in Recife Brazil: don't
say משיב
הרוח
or טל
ומטר,
at all, at any
time of the year, and if there was need to pray for rain, the
phrase could be inserted in a different place in the prayer
service. Just so as not to contradict earlier practice. More
recently, the Rabbinate in Australia has apparently been
encouraging people to say the prayers exactly as they are said in
the Northern Hemisphere (even though the seasons are completely
wrong for it). This in order to affirm the centrality of the land
of Israel in Jewish life, and the land of Israel is in the northern
hemisphere. But that isn't how they do it in Israel either! In
Israel, they start on the 7th of
Marcheshvan! Sigh...
I suppose my
point is a lot less ambitious. I make no claims as to the sense of
the Talmud's rule, or to its applicability anywhere. I'm just
whining that the religion isn't even applying its
ownlogic
properly, let alone anyone else's. Viewed from the other side, my
goal is every bit as tradition-bound and nonsensical as any other.
After all, it still boils down to “following the practices of
our forefathers,” I'm just choosing the nature of that
practice differently, and choosing to attend to the explanation and
not the method of observance they worked out.
Ah me. Look
at all these huge posts, and I'm only mildly interested in the
topic anyway! After all, it really doesn't matter when people
decide to mumble particular words. Maybe I'll find something
broader to comment on next time.
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| Thursday, December 13th, 2007
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2:22 pm - Ancestor Worship
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(Woo, I'm about to take the great chance of blogging in response to a more popular and respected blogger...)
A friend of mine mentioned and pointed me to a March 27, 2007 entry of Eliezer Yudkowsky's renowned blog Overcoming Bias. It has some interesting points, and it got me thinking about some related stuff I've mentioned.
Eliezer mentions the Talmudic dictum that humanity is declining with succeeding generations, and each year our understanding is less, because we are that much further removed from the ancient revelation, when presumably we knew much more than we do now. This leads to some oddities in Judaism, some of which particularly annoy me (some don't; just part of the quirkiness of religion). So even when studying the Talmud, if a sage in the Gemara (later work of Talmud, commentary on the earlier Mishna) disagrees with an opinion in the Mishna, the discussion of the Gemara immediately turns to try to find a Mishna-age opinion that supports the Gemara-sage, since someone from the Gemara is simply not permitted to argue on his own strength with opinions from the earlier age. (I recall hearing that once, in the case of someone who was one of the very earliest Gemara sages and may even have been quoted once in the Mishna, the Gemara finally ruled that he did have standing to argue, being of the Mishnaic age. Babylonian Talmud, Eruvin 50b).
Eliezer's example of later knowledge overruling an earlier decision, based on spontaneous generation, that a worm in an apple is kosher, is actually not a particularly good one. This is simply because this is a matter of the later ruling applying a stringency, and you can (and rulings usually are) always be more stringent. It's getting a leniency accepted that won't fly, and that is more and more true these days, as the observant community tends to become stricter and stricter in a sort of knee-jerk reflex. Eliezer's observation about science always gaining knowledge while Torah always loses knowledge, in the third paragraph, is genius and definitely somthing to ponder.
This self-disenfranchisement of Jews with respect to their own tradition is a fascinating phenomenon. On the one hand, it makes Judaism almost uniquely ill-suited to deal with the changing developing world. It's bad enough if your world-view doesn't align with what is being discovered, but surely Muslims and Christians don't have to deal with things that they know are no longer relevant that they simply "don't have the authority to change." That kind of limitation is peculiar to Judaism, and probably part of Judaism's whole identity as a religion of exile (you probably can't really talk of Jews as Jews until after they were exiled). And yet for all that, even the most Ultra-Orthodox Jews seem to be able to deal with the world at large better than the more extreme fringes of Islam. (That might also be part of the exile mentality: since we're in exile, we don't have the authority to go correcting all these evils ourselves.) I think, though, that on the whole it has gone too far, and I find myself hoping for the Jewish establishment to reclaim its heritage. (this ignores, of course, the problem that no two representatives of that establishment will ever agree on anything).
Which brings us to my blog entry of last November. I whined about how the established practice was to consider the Autumnal Equinox to be sixty days before December 4th (i.e. October 5th, right?) rather than when it actually is, on September 21st, because the reckoning was done on the Julian calendar and never corrected. And indeed, people have pointed out that this case has been made, and the decision is based on the fact that the sage Shmuel worked out the math for all this, and computed the length of the seasons of the year, working out to a year-length of 365.25 days exactly, and we are not authorized to gainsay his ancient wisdom. See http://www.lookstein.org/articles/veten_tal.htm, about halfway down. I don't buy it. Shmuel's stated goal was to calculate an astronomical phenomenon, the "tekufot." The fact that his calculation was wrong doesn't have to do with his superior spiritual knowledge. Nobody minds that candle-lighting times are all published with sunset calculated according to modern ephemeris data; people are always checking their watches and calendars for the ends of various segments of the day for morning or afternoon prayers... and nobody complains that we aren't doing this the old-fashioned way. And if you wait long enough, the error accumulates, and what are you going to say? When we start praying for rain in March (when the rainy season is ending) are we really going to say that this still makes sense, because that's what Shmuel wanted? Shmuel wanted us to start saying the prayer for rain a little after the start of the rainy season, sixty days after the equinox to be precise. So doing that would be following his ruling more accurately, I would think. The same issue occurs with the Jewish calendar, which eventually will not have Passover in the spring anymore, but the error there is much smaller and has not accumulated to much yet. And there is what appears to be a sensible proposal for rectifying it, though I have every confidence that nobody will agree on things enough to make any suggestion like this stick in the foreseeable future. Still, I applaud the effort and the hint, even, that we Jews of today have the right to participate in our culture and not just watch it. Ooh, and even a quote from Maimonides in support of using modern figures.
Now, in the grand scheme of things, the calendar and certainly the date of she'ela are not really major matters. I'm not even going to touch the whole question of Second Day Diaspora Holidays, which I know are simply too entrenched. But it's a larger issue. The issue is, as I said above, participation in our culture, and a culture as a living thing. Yes, these kinds of arguments are neatly countered by invoking "faithfulness to the culture of our ancestors," and there is something to be said for that as well, but I think something sensible comes out of having the interplay between both forces, of inertia and of change. It doesn't seem right that our own laws are no longer ours. Politics aside, I think the Rabbinate's creation of Israel Independence Day as a holiday with religious connotations (changes in prayers, etc) is a wonderful thing, and I like to think I would think well of their proactive stand in that instance, even if I were opposed to the State of Israel on religious grounds.
The tendency to ascribe infallibility to comparatively late and non-prophetic sages is a little disturbing, especially since they didn't believe it themselves. The Talmud is a long and rambling work, and touches on all kinds of issues. For example, it discusses the importance of a healthy diet. But of course, their understanding of human nutrition wasn't the same as ours, so the recommendations are out of alignment with things we know seem to work. The answers I have heard aren't even "well, their diet was much different than ours, and in combination with what they were eating, it really wasn't healthy to eat vegetables or whatever," but rather that human nature itself is different, so they're still right. That's a pretty disturbing answer. If human nature has changed, maybe it's different in other ways too. Maybe killing people isn't really murder anymore, since what passes for humanity isn't the same kind of "life" as it was in the time of the Talmud. If our nature is so different, maybe we should just pitch all the laws of Kashrut, since we aren't even talking about the same kinds of creatures eating the same kinds of creatures. Surely the whole "waiting between milk and meat" analysis is no longer accurate. It's a disturbing step to take.
And indeed, the rabbis themselves never claimed to have all the answers. There's a great discussion in the Talmud, Pesachim 94b. Their discussing the "thickness" of the sky, and at any rate they say that Jewish sages say that the sun travels below the sky in the daytime and at night it goes back to the east above the sky, which is taken to be opaque, like a big dome over the earth. As opposed, they say, to the gentile sages, who maintain that the sun travels back to the east under the earth. And lo and behold, Rabbi Judah HaNassi, the redactor of the Mishna, says "Their opinion makes more sense than ours, since well-water is warm in the daytime and cool in the night." The accuracy of either statement isn't the point. Note, though, that a sage in this very Talmud is admitting that there is knowledge that might be better than theirs. If he could believe it, why can't we?
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| Sunday, December 9th, 2007
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2:40 pm - More 2lifemagazine.com
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I've been featured at http://www.2lifemagazine.com/ again. This time I appear to be quite literally the cover story. My big ol' face on the cover, and my real-life one in a two-page article about me. And apparently it will also be going into a small real-world magazine as well. Though he misquoted the difference between Jews and Samaritans. Oh well.
Also connected with me, there's http://whyisthisnight.com/ Years and years back, someone my mother knew from her choral group had been collecting translations of the Four Questions from the Passover Haggadah into various languages. He heard about me, the Orthodox Jewish expert on the Klingon language, and contacted me through my mother, and I made a translation for him, translating the Questions into Klingon. I remember I even made a recording for him, not just reciting the questions in Klingon, but actually singing them in the usual melody, except in Klingon. This was all in something like 1994, so it was a long time ago...
And then, just recently, the book came out. My parents gave me a copy (signed and given to them by the above-mentioned person, who is a co-author) over Thanksgiving. I have to say, I'm impressed by the effort it represents. Three hundred translations, each printed in its own script (just the typesetting involved is impressive), each with a little blurb about the language and the translator, with pictures and everything... Plus a CD and a DVD with performances/recordings of most if not all of the translations. Wow.
And according to the introduction, some of it is due to me. Says Murray Spiegel,
A critical event for our project occurred when I discovered that the world's "most accomplished speaker of Klingon", an Orthodox Jew, worked in my company. He developed a translation for Klingon in 1994. Although Rickey [the other co-author of the book] and I sang in the same Jewish choir, remarkably we didn't know about each other's passion. He overheard me talking about the Klingon translation and asked me what I was doing, not believing anyone else would do such a thing. He'd been collecting the text and I, only audio, so we joined forces and began obtaining translations with renewed passion. Within one year we had over 50 translations, within 10 years we had 250.
Wow. So my involvement led to the meeting that made all this happen. Amazing.
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| Tuesday, October 9th, 2007
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3:28 pm - Hebrew Typography (II)
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This entry will concern the "Simanim" Bible, © Shmuel Meir Riachi, published by Feldheim. I already had their earlier publication of Psalms, but this is a different matter, and it's interesting to see how they made different choices in the two.
The basic motivation for these editions seems to be to give concrete, written expression to even the subtle, little-known distinctions in reading that usually don't get their own symbols. So of course the much-debated HEBREW POINT QAMATS QATAN (U+05C7) has its own symbol, as it does in several other published works, but so does the "moving" schwa (schwa mobile), the one which is pronounced, as distinguished from the "resting" schwa, which is silent. Several otherwise-identical (or similar) cantillations are given distinguishing shapes (qadma/pashta, tipeha/dehi, yetiv/mahapach, though interestingly the yerah ben yomo/atnah hafukh distinction is not made, even though it is made in the earlier Psalms edition.)
What's particularly nice is that they have designed a completely new Hebrew typeface for this edition, one that looks quite good to my eye and is easy to read, and also allows them to play the various games they need to play to make all these distinctions. Probably the most creative piece of the fontmaking is their special symbol for the Hebrew letter Sin, to distinguish it from the Shin. Oh, sure, the letters are normally distinguished, in pointed writing, by whether there's a dot on the upper left (Sin) or upper right (Shin) of the letter, and this text is certainly pointed. But since it's easy to miss that in obscure words where your experience wouldn't tell you, they actually altered the shape of the Sin letter itself, raising its leftmost head slightly higher, to emphasize the position of the dot. I'm not sure I'm really used to seeing it like that, but I do have to admit that it's innovative.
I note that even Rafael Frank, designer of the classic Frank-Ruehl typeface, was thinking about ways of distinguishing SHIN from SIN. See this scan of his paper (in German); look at page 30. Looks like he was thinking of making the base of the SIN pointy, with the SHIN wide and square. (There's a Hebrew translation of the paper here, if your German isn't so great. If you don't have German or Hebrew, you're out of luck here, sorry).
Other tweaks of the letterforms involve using stretched-out letters for things like MAPPIQ-HEH, where the final letter HEH, normally silent, is sounded consonantally. This is indicated by a dot in the letter, but for extra emphasis they use a wide version of the letter. They also do this for mid-word HEHs that are to be pronounced as a consonant in syllable-final position, which is something not usually noted. This happens in very common words like "lihyot"/"to be", which should (according to them) be pronounced not as "liyot" nor as "lihiyot" but as "lihh-yot", with the medial HEH sounded like a mappiq-heh. They also stretch out letters AYIN and ALEF in the same situations, and by extension from mappiq-heh, also letters AYIN and HET at the ends of words when pointed with a furtive patach. It gets a little overdone after a while.
I'll have to see about putting up some scans.
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| Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007
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4:55 pm - Building the Sukkah
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I know it's late, but I did want to get this up. I took this picture on September 25, while building my sukkah in preparation for the holiday in whose throes we, at the time of this writing, currently are. Mm, what a sentence.
First Post!!
OK, I had to say it. :) Anyway, the holiday proceeds apace, did finally get the sukkah finished, albeit on the afternoon of the day before the holiday (leaving it a little for the last minute...), and got cooking and whatever done. And now going through much the same for this weekend--except building the sukkah. Which is good, because I cut my finger bad last week on Thursday. One of those moments when you know you're doing something stupid, and you know what's going to happen... Suffice to say: don't wash the blade of a sharp knife with just your fingertips, or you might not have fingertips. So I got a bonus holiday tetanus shot on Sunday (it was a clean knife, but you never know.)
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| Sunday, September 16th, 2007
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8:32 pm - Hebrew Typography (I)
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Happy 5768.
So let's talk about Hebrew typography.
Hebrew has a surprisingly long history of typography for a non-Latin language. Jews were "early adopters" of movable type printing back in the 15th century, for a variety of reasons: (a) they had a much higher literacy rate than the general populace; (b) they had more books being studied; (c) they didn't have a clergy with a vested interest in keeping its occupation as scribes and copyists; (d) Jewish books had the oddest tendency to catch fire every few decades, usually when seized in response to some papal bull or just on general principles. And there was even a certain popularity of printing Hebrew books among some of the Christian early patrons of printing, as it was a classical language, and to foster study of the (Hebrew) Bible in its original languages. Indeed, Christians such as Daniel Bomberg were probably the most important Hebrew printers in history. So we see such statistics as the fact that of the twenty-four incunabula titles printed in Portugal, the first eleven were in Hebrew (I have a reference. I don't have to cite it, this isn't wikipedia). Because of this early adoption, a few very old, early printing features persist even into much later Hebrew printing (e.g. "catchwords", the first word on a page being repeated on the bottom of the page before). Probably a discussion in itself.
Similarly, some of the giants of non-Jewish printing were Jews (the classic case being Gershom/Hieronymus Soncino)
So there were some very early Hebrew fonts, and some of the greatest type-designers were involved with them, e.g. Gillaume Le Bé. And of course from such early printing came various things like the "Rashi" typeface and what it's used for, and some famous German lettering styles, and Gothic Hebrew fonts, and all kinds of stuff. Which I should probably talk about someday.
But by more modern times, leaving aside the Rashi fonts and other alternate typefaces, the classic square Hebrew font for printing was some form of the "Meruba" or "Drugulin" font. Go to the Culmus project's page and/or look at their sample for examples of these fonts. Drugulin is the fourth font on the first page. It's characterized by a strong contrast between very heavy horizontals and almost spindly verticals (thick horizontals have been a feature of Aramaic-derived scripts since about 750 BCE; Phoenician and (Paleo-)Hebrew scripts had, like Latin, thick verticals) and well-developed line-end flourishes.
Modern Hebrew text printing (as opposed to display), as in for staid normal books, seems to use only a handful of fonts, or font-styles I should say (since I can only tell the difference between the styles and not the individual instances). Though it seems to me that they tend to use rather more text fonts in a single book than I would expect or think necessary, and ones that don't go together too well either.
Certainly religious books still come with a lot of Drugulin in them, but it doesn't look very popular for ordinary secular printing. For that, look to the font that most people see in their heads when they think "Hebrew": Frank-Ruehl (last font on the second page of the Culmus sample). The thick/thin contrast is still there, but not as pronounced, and there's a more curvy, sculpted look to the letters. This is Hebrew Times-Roman, the "unmarked" Hebrew for most people. It's actually a comparatively recent design, from 1908 according to MyFonts.com. For all that it feels perfectly at home in religious texts; most of them are printed in FR too.
Another commonly-seen Hebrew font in ordinary text is David (second font on second page of Culmus sample). David has a much more informal feel; its strokes show much less contrast between thick and thin, and they look more "drawn" than sculpted. It's a great font; I like some of the little things about it... the way the leg of the DALET just peeks up a tiny bit above the roof, another visual hint to make sure your eye can't mistake it for a RESH... the curve of the TAV's leg and the angle at which its foot cuts off, also leading your eye so you can't mistake it for a HET... the huge YOD, in no way a shortened VAV, and big enough to hold its own as a letter. Probably wouldn't want the family Bible in David, but for a novel it's dandy.
Then there's Hadassah, which you won't find in the Culmus project; you can check it on MyFonts.com. Its main claim to familiarity nowadays is the fact that it is used for everything Hebrew that ArtScroll prints. So, a nice, serviceable font, clear, easy to read, modern-looking... but it screams "ArtScroll!" at least to some audiences. Which may not be a problem, depending on your application, but should be considered.
I also see a fair amount of Koren font in books, though usually only in the colophon or page-header or something. Koren's a nice font, with kind of a "primitive" feel to it (in a good way), and the folks at Koren publishing really know something about how to typeset well. They really pay attention to the layout, to laying out poetry line-by-line, etc... They do a good job, and they don't have the problem of using too many fonts that too many other Hebrew publishers do. Just Koren throughout, though they have subtly different Koren fonts for different applications.
What do I mean by using too many fonts? I have here my Hebrew edition of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. I'm leaving aside fonts on the front cover, and if it used different fonts for people's handwriting like my English version does, I wouldn't count them either (but it doesn't). The body-text of the book is in a Frank-Ruehl style. The blurb on the back cover and the inside flaps looks like Narkissim, as do the title page, chapter headings, most of the text on the copyright page... and yet, the page-headers are in Koren... I dunno, I suppose it isn't really that many fonts, but some of them just seem gratuitous.
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| Wednesday, September 5th, 2007
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9:34 am - New Server
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The little computer I use to run my website and handle email and other things like that has started hinting that it would like to die sometime soon. I shouldn't find myself repairing the filesystem twice in as many weeks. And it's an old box, and a small one. I lifted it (well, with permission) from the Yeshiva I taught at way back when, and it was already old when I got it.
Financially speaking, the timing is particularly bad, but it was necessary: I had to replace the machine. And with a new one, the whole point being to get a disk drive that didn't already have a zillion miles on it.
It gets a little ridiculous these days. I walk into Best Buy, march to the computer section, and declare that I want *the* *cheapest* machine they can sell me. And they're all concerned, "Gee, this one only has 120GB of disk space..." My current one has 70GB, and most is unused. Look, guys, you can't sell me a computer that's underpowered for what I'm using it for. They don't make them like that anymore.
Which of course is true: it's amazing how powerful the lowest-end machines on the market are, and how much you can accomplish with them with a judicious use of software. OK, with 512MB of memory the new box might not be able to handle the Windows Vista it came with all too well, but then I'm not running Windows Vista. Wipe the drive and install a nice, clean, easy-to-maintain Linux dist. Until now I've been running an absolutely ancient version of Slackware, patched and messed-with, bleah. Modern distributions really can be maintained and updated, and really do work.
So I've now switched over DNS and web services to the new machine. Mail will be the last to go. Let me know if my site seems to be acting strange since the move.
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| Wednesday, August 29th, 2007
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10:26 pm - Clock Making the Rounds
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Well, it seems that in the past few days, a clock I designed years ago has been getting some attention. Seems to have started at neowin.net, in this thread, got hit by Digg, and so on...
I made the clock when I joined The Triple Nine Society, a high-IQ society (for people in the 99.9th percentile, get it, triple nines?)—was working through some inferiority issues, I think. So I made a clock wherein all the numbers would be mathematical formulæ using only the digit 9, and using it precisely three times. There are a lot of ways to do that, it isn't tough. But it is awfully geeky, now that I think about it. I've had one hanging in my living room for years now. It's available at their cafepress site.
Another few minutes in my fifteen minutes, but then, Digg hardly qualifies as actual "fame."
Someday, someday, I'll work out how to blog frequently.
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| Tuesday, July 10th, 2007
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7:15 am - Example Note 2
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So, a guy I know on Second Life has been reading up on the Jewish laws of slavery. You know (or maybe you don't), all that stuff in Exodus 21, Deuteronomy 15, Leviticus 25, etc. Naturally, like everything else in the Bible, the rabbis went and worked out all the details, all the laws and everything. (That's another story: there's even a situation in the Bible which the rabbis said never happened and never will happen, and yet they still worked out the laws and details for it.) He figures that it's interesting that you have this group that just left slavery that is going and making slavery laws. This, too, is ground for some fun discussion, but that also isn't what I'm getting at. :)
So in his wanderings and attempts to research this, he came upon some article on some hate website saying how Jews believe that after the Messiah comes, all the gentiles will be their slaves, and oooh, look how horrible and racist that is (and no, I don't feel like finding you a link). And it brings various sources from the Talmud and other rabbinic literature. Naturally, such things are presented very selectively and also the relevance to modern Jewish thought is left out, but you don't need to be told how such things get distorted. But I realized, upon reading it, that even if you take everything in the article at face value, if everything he says about Judaism and Jewish thinking is precisely accurate, well, so what? After all, the claim is that Judaism prescribes slavery for non-Jews, and that is "bad"... but then, Christianity prescribes hell for non-Christians... which, really, is worse? I suppose you could argue whether or not slavery is worse than hell, but that isn't the point either. All religions with the "there's only one true religion" concept are "racist" in that sense, i.e. in the sense that they believe that their followers will have things go a lot better for them than followers of other religions. Islam has the same, of course, stated even more strongly if anything.
Serve me right for expecting logic from such a source, though.
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| Wednesday, May 30th, 2007
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2:32 pm - Months and Leaps
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Overheard a kid talking at my kids' bus stop, about "how many months" or "how long months were" before Julius and Augustus Caesar added July and August...
No. There were always twelve months in the (Roman) Calendar. Because that's how many times the moon waxes and wanes in a year. Yes, I know, it doesn't work out right anymore since they aligned the year to the sun, so yeah, they stretched the months out, but there were still twelve of them. If not for the moon, what motivation do you have to whack the year up into ten or so pieces? I could see maybe four or six pieces or so (seasons, more or less). And of course month/moon are related linguistically (hmm... given "Luna" in Latin for moon but not month, does that mean our word "moon" derives from a root for "month" and not the other way around? Yes, English doesn't come from Latin, but I mean in the whole Indo-European etymology). Anyway. No, the Caesars didn't "invent" a pair of months where none had been before them. They just named the months after themselves. They had other names before (Quintillus and Sextillus, I think. Which matches the other numerically-named months, September through December). Note that the numbers don't match the numbers of the months (September is 9th, not 7th, etc). That's because the year used to start in March (which is intuitive: things start growing in the spring, seems reasonable for the start of the year). And of course, that's why leap day is in February: you stick the extra day at the end of the year.
That's a whole other interesting topic. It's a great bit of trivia: what day is added on leap year? Technically (at least according to the Roman calendar on which ours is based), it is not the 29th of February. It's actually the 25th of February (and of course the month is a day longer because everything gets shifted down). The Romans used to give the date not as "day X of month Y", but as number of days before or after particular days (Calends and Ides) of each month. So today, May 30, would be called something more like "The third day before the Calends of June" (see why "third" below). You can find the correct terminology; I'm too lazy to look it up for you.
So leap years were always referred to as "bissextile" years (even long after Roman times; you can see it in colonial almanacs etc.) because the "sextile" day, the sixth day before the calends of March (beginning the next year) was doubled. So the progression went "seventh day before calends, sixth day before calends, second sixth day before calends, fifth day before calends, fourth day before calends, etc..." The Romans counted what we would call the day before the calends to be the second day before the calends, since the calends itself is considered in the count. Yes, it's illogical to us, but language is rarely logical. So in our numbering, February 28 is 2nd before calends, Feb. 27 is third, Feb. 26 is fourth, Feb. 25 is fifth, and Feb. 24th is sixth. When that day is doubled, its double becomes our 25th and everything after is shifted down one. So leap day is really the 25th of February, not the 29th.
I knew this a lot better when I was going through my calendar obsession, and of course see my website for my calendar converter and links to other calendar pages. And see my previous blog (about six months ago, or maybe two entries) about the effect of the Julian/Gregorian changeover on Jewish ritual practice. I seem to recall that some country so totally screwed up the changeover that they actually wound up with a February 30th one year. Gotta love it.
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| Monday, May 28th, 2007
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3:31 pm - Bits and Pieces
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No, I won't talk about why I haven't written in so long, or about how it's going to be from now on.
So I've brought an interesting project to ready-for-prime-time status. I started playing on Second Life last fall, and have been spending way too much time and effort there. I had an idea, since you could build things and make model building there, of building a model of the Second Temple there, but the Temple is an awfully big thing with lots of pieces, and even if I could find a place to support that many objects, I doubt if I could sustain my own interest long enough to see something like that through. So I decided to pull back to something similar, but smaller. I built a model of the Tabernacle. As described in the Book of Exodus, as interpreted by assorted Rabbinic and traditional interpretations. The whole thing, with lots of detail and lots of explanation. I looked through a book of someone's real-life, small-scale model from the sixties, read the commentaries on the verses, read Maimonides' "Hilchot Beit Hab'chira," read the Mishna, tractates Middot and Tamid, read other modern commentaries, looked up stuff online... I really did do my research. Every item has a notecard that it shows you when you touch it, with sources and other information about the item. Obviously there are always multiple interpretations, and the notecards try to mention those also. In one case (the menorah) you can actually replace the version shown with an alternate interpretation, temporarily. I hope to do the same with one or two other articles.
I think this is enormously cool, and I'm trying to see if actual normal people think so too (wrote to some reporters); it just seems to have such potential for research and history.
The Tabernacle exhibit is in the newly-opened Jewish Historical Museum, on the newly-opened island of Ir Shalom (billed as the first Jewish city on Second Life), through the courtesy and generosity of Carter Giacobini, who arranged for most of the city. You can't teleport directly there, but http://slurl.com/secondlife/IR%20SHALOM/221/44/38 will take you to the city at least, and you can follow the beacon. Or just look around for the historical museum. There's a teleporter inside, near the entrance, to get to the second floor; right-click and choose "sit" on it. I hope to have more news on this in the future.
Otherwise, puttering along. Been working furiously on the Samaritan project that I went to Seattle for in the fall. I stopped for the holiday, have to get back onto it and keep at it. It struck me a week or two ago that I had spent the week poring over a manuscript in Samaritan Hebrew, and on the weekend was relaxing by reading some Welsh, and that it was quite possible that nobody else in the world could do both of those things. And if there was someone who could, he probably wasn't any good at origami or Klingon. Wow.
Amazing how much Welsh I seem to remember. Vocabulary is always my weak point, and even there I could make sense of so many of the words. And the grammar too, even obscure forms were coming to mind. Very nice.
I'm stopping here.
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| Monday, November 20th, 2006
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11:41 am - Sixty Days
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(Wow, it's been a long time since I wrote last. And all kinds of things have happened since then that are probably worth writing about. And I'm not going to write them now, since it would be very boring.)
A bit of Jewish ritual esoterica this time around. Soon we are coming upon the time when we say the "she'ela," ותן טל ומטר, in our everyday prayers. We stop saying that each year at Passover, and start saying it again... when? That's right, as everyone knows, December 4th (or 5th or 6th depending on various oddities of the calendars). Why December fourth? Why is it a civil date and not one on the Jewish calendar? I've been asked this question a few times. Can it be that, say, the Talmud actually says to start on December fourth?! Of course not. Too much effort to get you the exact quotes just now (maybe I'll find them later), but what the Talmud and Rashi and others say is that we start from sixty days after תקופת תשרי, the autumnal equinox. That makes sense; it's a weather-related matter, and tying it to the solar year is sensible (it does beg the question about משיב הרוח ומוריד הגשם, but that's another matter). All right, then, sixty days after the autumnal equinox is December fourth then? Certainly not! The autumnal equinox is on September 21st (more or less), and sixty days later is November 21st! (depending on just when you start the count, is the 21st of September Day 0 or Day 1... whatever. It's around then, anyway). Hey, that's this week! What's going on?
The answer as to why we use December fourth is simple enough... and somewhat silly. When they worked this out, they were working with the Julian calendar. The Julian calendar is a bit too long, and over the years the calendar started sliding forward with respect to the solar year (see my Calendars page for some examples, and explore the rest of the web). By now it's around two weeks off. Currently, we use the Gregorian calendar, which was corrected for the error back in the 17-20th centuries (depending on where you live), and incorporates a correction factor to keep it in better synch with the seasons. So our December fourth is November 21st on the Julian calendar, sixty days after the autumnal equinox would have been if the Julian calendar was right (which it isn't).
So wait a second. We are arranging our rituals to keep aligned to the Julian calendar, not a Jewish invention or device at all, in preference to following what the actual rabbinic rule is and counting sixty days from the autumnal equinox!? It's one thing when we do stuff that no longer makes sense because of adherence to rabbinic decree (e.g. keeping two days of Yom Tov). But here, why we are working to make sure not to disrespect the calendar of Julius Caesar? What rabbinic force does a discredited gentile calendar have over what is actually taught as the law?
I don't know about you folks. I'm starting she'ela this week.
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| Friday, September 22nd, 2006
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3:49 pm - More opportunities
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Don't really have much time to blog; I'm waiting for my wife to come home so we can head up to my parents' house for the holiday (presumably after she's yelled at me for what I am assuming is insufficient packing. At least, I haven't been stressing enough about getting packed, so I must be doing a bad job).
The interesting thing, though, was yesterday, when talking to the doctor who treats my son's Asperger's Syndrome. As all too often happens, I wound up talking about myself more than my son, thereby letting the cat out of the bag and revealing to the good doctor just what a pathologically diverse and multi-interested person I am. He asked if I'd ever considered that *I* might have Asperger's. I've considered it; I definitely do not, but I definitely do have *some* of the autism-spectrum symptoms. The obssessions I always right about are almost diagnostic of autism, I think, and I certainly had plenty of social difficulties growing up, and even now. It helps me to understand my son, though. He sometimes is a little freaked out by how well I can understand his motivations.
Anyway, the doctor was interested in me and my interests, not just because of what a fascinating guy I am, but also because of a project he's trying to put together. He wants to try to bring autism-spectrum people (particularly kids and teens) together to work on their confidence and generally to cross-pollinate. As he puts it, he knows these kids who are barely fitting into society bagging groceries or something, and that's okay in that they are part of the general public... but on the other hand, owing to their narrow but deep interests, these kids are also absolute experts in, say, Jewish history, or Star Wars trivia, or mathematics, and what a waste of expertise to have them just stuffing celery into grocery bags. Whereas with some confidence and slow work at broadening their fields, they can really accomplish something. His example being Dr Temple Grandin, an autistic who has become basically the top of her field, in a field she almost invented. She is the authority on slaughterhouse design, how to build and operate a slaughterhouse in the most humane fashion. Yes, that sounds strange, and strange that her love of animals should lead her to working out nicer ways to kill them, but that's not the point. She grew up with (and of course still has) autism, and yet learned to deal with other people enough, and to have confidence enough in her own work and knowledge, to become a success. And he is hoping I can help out in the project. Hey, I'll try anything. Twice if it doesn't hurt. And I really might be perfect for what he needs. So I left him my email and website URL (he's probably reading this blog: Hi, Dr Cartwright!) and we'll see what we can do. Should be interesting, no doubt!
Meanwhile, I'm out of touch until next Thursday night, because of the trip with my son's class. I'm considering taking along my laptop, which is almost certainly a bad idea, and useless at best (I doubt there's net connection)... but just to stave off computer withdrawal effects. See you when I get back!
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| Wednesday, September 20th, 2006
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8:14 pm - Decorating
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Still obsessively working on the blazonry project. ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) broca and I are also working on the even more important task of coming up with a name for it. On the one hand, it's pretty powerful already; on the other hand, there are some aspects it hasn't even started on, and so it seems there are few blazons it can really handle.
All in all, though, it's been a Good Thing, because I sure can code in Python a lot better than a few weeks ago (when I couldn't at all). Definitely got the hang of the language now, even though I have to look in the references all the time and often don't use simple solutions because I didn't know them. I almost wound up writing a function “decorator” to accomplish something, and actually did write several attempts, but eventually determined that I didn't need a decorator after all. But I did get the practice in writing it.
Despite my Java experience, I never really studied decorators in Java, so it was something new and slick to me. And unlike so many features, I even found a reasonable situation where it would be useful (though it turned out not to apply in my case). Say I want to add some functionality to the gazungy() method of the class Frobnitz, say to log it. But I can't subclass it. Why can't I subclass it? Because then I'd also have to subclass all the classes descended from Frobnitz (which I use heavily). And you know, that really is a good answer; it doesn't have an elegant solution in ordinary subclassing (unless the author of Frobnitz had already put in all kinds of hooks...)
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| Monday, September 18th, 2006
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8:45 pm - Too much, too little
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Have I got nothing to report? No, maybe I have too much to report. But too much of it has been obsession, and I'm still working on not feeling guilty about working on those.
The obsession with heraldry has not been abating, and I've been tinkering with a project for it. Sometimes to the exclusion of almost everything else. It's kind of sickening how much progress I've made in my blazonry-to-SVG compiler (now being aided and abetted by broca). And that also includes, as an added bonus, some SVG obsessing too. So I've had fun crafting the occasional SVG file by hand.
Looks like I'm going to be away next week. My son's sixth grade class is going on a four-day trip to some nature camp, and I'm going as a chaperone. Also, my son probably needs a little extra looking-after; four days with sixth-graders is tough on someone who isn't too good at social situations (Asperger's syndrome, remember). And don't forget all the holidays coming up. Should be a fun month. At least they're mostly on weekends.
Wow, it has been a while. I even had time to start and abandon projects since I last blogged. I started working on a blog of excruciating detail on Deuteronomy 32, maybe good for a sermon somewhere... I'll have to finish that up sometime.
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