Arithmomaniac

Arcata

Bangor

Green Bay

Hempstead

Key West

Missoula

Muskegon

Myrtle Beach

Omaha

Ottumwa

St. Paul

They’re all terminuses of the Greyhound bus system, with connections to only one other city.

Lightly edited

Two months ago, Gil Student took up a topic that, in the grand scheme of things, is as important as almost everything I’ve seen on his blog in a decade of reading it:

To Medieval Jewish thinkers, pleasure never constituted a necessity nor a form of self-fulfillment. Physical pleasure is an embarrassment, something to be minimized. To contemporaries, it is the spice of a Torah life, part of the joys of being Jewish. To classical thinkers, a ban on a pleasure with no procreative or other purpose, such as homosexual relations, needs no explanation. It should obviously be avoided, in this case banned by the Torah. To contemporaries, though, any forbidden pleasure needs explanation. We enjoy our pleasures and find it frustrating that someone would be barred from such important pleasures.

I see the concession to pleasure as a wise, if difficult, decision. Of course, I am a beneficiary of the decision because I can enjoy my meat and potatoes with only a little guilt. Yet I try to regularly remind myself that, while permitted, this is not an ideal life. Pleasure is a concession to the wealthy society in which we live. I eat (relatively) well because I live constantly in a world of non-kosher temptation. Yet my loyalty, at least in theory, lies with a more ascetic ideal as described by the Rambam. When we forget our ideals, we run the risk of losing our balance and suffering the unintended hashkafic consequences of a bold bedi’eved. Medieval commentary on forbidden relations is a wake-up call, a reminder to realign our views, if not our actions, to classical Torah thought,

While an important overall point, I think it misses one element of the ethics of pleasure: the spiritual level of the person performing them.

Mesilas Yesharim explicitly discusses three levels of material interaction:

Everyone needs to follow halacha. This usually involves curbing/taming contrary desires. (homosexual relationships need to be broken up, gluttony needs to be avoided, etc.).

??

The elect pious should, and do, see the spiritual risks in material things, and should try to remove themselves from even enjoying permitted actions.

The holy are so attached to God that the material world become elevated when they use it; however, they still won’t use it much because it pales in comparison to the joy of deveikus.

The question is, what about step 2, the mitzvah-keeping unelect?

I think the argument for an ethic of pleasure is that between steps 1 and 2, one should enjoy pleasures, considering them a motivating tool to do the mitzvos. Like this (not to scale):

Once one’s at a place to begin real deveikus, they should start step 3.

As to why that might be more common today:

If you believe in yeridas hadoros, then it's simple why Rishonim were so negative, as more people could attain it. but now, we cannot.

A paragraph in a recent blog post about gay marriage in the Economist strikes me as disingenuous and dangerous:

It suggests that conservatives know they have lost this particular culture war. Now they simply want to be spared being called the bad guys, too. Unfortunately for them, they have little say in the matter. It's just one of those awkward consequences of being on the wrong side of history.

But of course they have a say in the matter. People can be on the wrong side of history and still try to define how they’re seen within it, and the victors can choose or reject the narrative (see the century-long rehabilitation of the Confederacy).

It’s people’s prerogative to paint supporters of traditional marriage / opponents of same-sex marriage as bigots (though it’s not necessarily true), but what the author does here is worse. He removes the moral agency from those who claim bigotry, and the freedom of action from those who deny it. Maybe the author should have stuck to the previous paragraph:

A funny thing happened on the way to a universal character set. Just when Unicode seemed to have even nailed down all of the East Asian pictograms, we got emoji.

At first, this seemed innocuous enough. Sure, different “fonts” on different systems displayed the symbols differently, but they were clearly text characters of a sort:

But then clients (and even some system fonts) stopped interpreting them as text and started reading them as signals saying “please, insert whatever image you want here.” Since this led to a complete unpredictability in how the recipient would see it, clients such as Gmail actually inline the image, thus making it impossible to treat it as text at all. Want green or underlined text? Too bad. It’s so hard-coded that we need to have emoji characters for different skin colors:

But even if emoji were implemented in a “text”y way, we’d still have two problems. One is that they are keyboard-unfriendly (though someone could probably adapt Swiftkey’s “word to emoji” system).

The real one, though is that once you are representing objects, you can never have enough characters. (If you think that the Unicode Consortium will put a stop to it, see Emoji Additions: Popular requests (L2/14-272R2)).

To my surprise, I could find no comparison via Google of emoji to the least-known section of Gulliver’s Travels, when he visits the “heads-in-the-air” (literally) city of Laputa and its vassal city, Lagado (Part III, Chapter V). I’ll let it speak for itself (emphasis mine):

The other project was, a scheme for entirely abolishing all words whatsoever; and this was urged as a great advantage in point of health, as well as brevity. For it is plain, that every word we speak is, in some degree, a diminution of our lunge by corrosion, and, consequently, contributes to the shortening of our lives. An expedient was therefore offered, “that since words are only names for things, it would be more convenient for all men to carry about them such things as were necessary to express a particular business they are to discourse on.” And this invention would certainly have taken place, to the great ease as well as health of the subject, if the women, in conjunction with the vulgar and illiterate, had not threatened to raise a rebellion unless they might be allowed the liberty to speak with their tongues, after the manner of their forefathers; such constant irreconcilable enemies to science are the common people. However, many of the most learned and wise adhere to the new scheme of expressing themselves by things; which has only this inconvenience attending it, that if a man’s business be very great, and of various kinds, he must be obliged, in proportion, to carry a greater bundle of things upon his back, unless he can afford one or two strong servants to attend him. I have often beheld two of those sages almost sinking under the weight of their packs, like pedlars among us, who, when they met in the street, would lay down their loads, open their sacks, and hold conversation for an hour together; then put up their implements, help each other to resume their burdens, and take their leave.

But for short conversations, a man may carry implements in his pockets, and under his arms, enough to supply him; and in his house, he cannot be at a loss. Therefore the room where company meet who practise this art, is full of all things, ready at hand, requisite to furnish matter for this kind of artificial converse.

I like this solution to DC's taxation without representation: Making D.C. a State

Did you know you can unsubscribe from nearly all junk mail in just five minutes? DMAchoice

The Economist on how the history of antisemitism in America bodes well for Muslims: Islam in America

Ars Technica explains how and why Google has duplicate products

The Economist on how antisemitism leads to distrust of banks

Did you know you can send money questions to [email protected] for a psak? Here's an example.

Hi,

Many websites limit the number of articles one can read in a month by using cookies. Is it mutar to circumvent these checks by clearing cookies in one's browser?

Thanks, Avi Levin

--

Avi,

[...] The answer to your inquiry is that it seems that it is permitted since you have no agreement with them that obligates you to keep them.

G’mar chasima tova

Did you know you could filter Twitter searches by popularity?

A great column about the underlying unity of Orthodox Judaism: From Volozhin to Sanz, Gush Etzion to Talmon From the Toah Musings blog:

The Tikvah Yeshiva program

Why emuna is so hard

The Economist on:

The origins of Peanut allergies

How Firefox OS is having an impact on minority languages

My advice list for college has been sitting in a virtual drawer for a few weeks. I figured that with it bing O-Week at UChicago, it was time to pull it out.

Printing a lot? Use briss to crop the pages before picking them so you can fit two at a time. Also, got can fit three pages to a sheet of you use legal paper.

To study, take your invariably messy notes and rewrite them in summary form. (If you have extra time, do the same for any proofs.) Not only does this ensure a thorough review of the material, but you have coherent notes that you can reference years later.

Getting bored of taking notes? Imagine someone will pick them up centuries from now à la A Canticle for Leibowitz.

Use mechanical pencils? Use eraser caps and make sure they stay in by wrapping the lip with tape.

Instead of renting, use Bigwords to find international editions of your textbooks. You get to keep the textbooks, and it usually is still cheaper.

Want a digital backup copy of a book, or too lazy to check it out of the library? Use LibGen, or search for a complete sentence of the book on Google.

Find a professor in your third year whose work you like, and get to know them. Try and do a research project with them if you can.

Get rid of those fuzzy math formulae on Wikipedia by turning on MathJax.

And some UChicago-specific advice:

Need parking? Park at Midway and Dorchester. You can take the 171 or 172 to school and the 53rd Street Express back.

DON'T take Language and the Human.

Seriously consider Civ in Paris.

Don't forget to download your free copies of Office and Visual Studio.

It's been a while since I've done this, but I'd like to return to the habit.

Handy list for each airline: How To Keep your Airline Miles From Expiring Without Flying

Ars Technica: The little-known Soviet mission to rescue a dead space station

A "only Jon Skeet" intro to SQL injection: The BobbyTables culture

If you want an timely example of how Hashem can really give anyone anything, read Timothy Dexter's Wikipedia page.

Okay, I'm a little late on this bandwagon, but I couldn't pass it up.

Three seforim that taught me and define what it is to be human and Jewish:

Mesilat Yesharim. In relation to one's self. [HM: Everyday Holiness, a sort of Kitzur Shulchan Aruch for Mussar.]

R' Hirsch's Commentary on Chumash. In relation to one's community. [HM: his Nineteen Letters].

Future Tense, by R' Jonathan Sacks. In relation to the world. [HM: his The Great Partnership, on religion and Science].

Three books that introduced me to my favorite disciplines and career aspirations:

Super Crunchers, on data analytics.

Tim Hartford's The Logic Of Life, on micro-economics. Think Freakonomics with substance instead of sensationalism.

Tools of the Trade, by Paul Sally. My introduction to serious math.

Three works of fiction:

Harry Potter. My introduction to novels, and an endless source of family discussion and bonding.

Asimov's Robot Trilogy, my introduction to science fiction and still my favorite sci-fi author. [HM: Robert J. Sawyer's novels. He captures a lot of what made Asimov great with a thought-provoking emphasis on religion. Also, the entire Asimov sci-fi corpus, especially the short stories.]

Halo: Fall of Reach. This relatively short book introduced me not only to the vast scale of Halo (the only thing I'm a "fan" of), but of the idea of a fictional Expanded Universe.

One "Great Book":

Locke's Treatises on Government and Essay on Toleration. A fantastic introduction to Enlightenment deductive reasoning, and a constant challenge to my notions of what society should be like, and why.

And two bonus books that didn't quite qualify:

Noah and the Space Ark. My not-so-gentle introduction to environmentalism. (Booklist: "Cecil's dire vision of a future earth is somewhat disturbing...". This is a picture book.)

It also only lets you handle weapons you know how to use in real life.

I think that this would adapt well to commercial first person shooters. Right now, playing games earns "experience points", which unlocks weapons and such. But instead of explicit experience points, why not just have people get gradually better at the weapons they use a lot? Or become more "fit" the more often they play?

The retailer began refusing orders late Thursday for coming Hachette books, including J.K. Rowling’s new novel. The paperback edition of Brad Stone’s “The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon” — a book Amazon disliked so much it denounced it — is suddenly listed as “unavailable.”

In some cases, even the pages promoting the books have disappeared. Anne Rivers Siddons’s new novel, “The Girls of August,” coming in July, no longer has a page for the physical book or even the Kindle edition. Only the audio edition is still being sold (for more than $60). Otherwise it is as if it did not exist.

I'm now doubting that I'll be renewing my Prime subscription.

But please, can we cut the following nonsense out?

Amazon, effectively handed a monopoly in e-books by the DoJ, is already abusing it. I’ve stopped using my Kindle. http://t.co/T6UxaRV3mC

— Janak J Parekh (@janakj)

May 23, 2014

The DOJ did nothing of the sort. Amazon is a monospony, abusing buying power. What the DOJ shook down Apple and the book publishers for was monopolistic collusion over the price of ebooks.