I need this blog like a...   

The following is an excerpt from the forthcoming sefer Internet K'hilchasah by Rabbi Issur Gamor, which will IY"H be published this Spring by Akom Books. Due to hakachic issues discussed in the book, however, it will not be available for sale on our website. Chapter 127: Blogging and Shabbos 1. One who submits a post or comment on shabbos is chayiv mishum boneh. There are those who say that this is dependant on whether it is shabbos in the location where the blog server resides. Since we do not usually know this info , it is not meleches machsheves and therefore mutar. Aval l'aaniyas daati, the binyan occurs locally before the post is transferred. Therefore, one should not blog on shabbos. 2. Certain blogs are dedicated solely to attacking others. To post on these could be an issue only of soser, which is d'rabbanon. Therefore, if your post is a d'var mitzvah, yeish l'hakel al y'dei akum. 3. One should be careful not to post on erev shabbos samuch l'shkiya in order to avoid creating a michshol for readers. The amount of time before shabbos one must post is the time it takes for another to read it, formulate a response and respond. In our times, however, rov b'nei odom do not think before they respond, so we need not include this time. 4. One can print out a blog post before shabbos to read on shabbos. Some say this should not be done because it will cause you to be preparing your response on shabbos for after shabbos. Baal nefesh yachmir. A Freylichen Purim!!!

David Geary writes today about how great Shale will be. It's basically yet another web framework...this time a JSF implementation which will attempt to circumvent the crappiness that is JSF. Fine, whatever. He writes (as any honest person should) that the best web framework out there is Tapestry. But then he says:

Do I use Tapestry? Heck no. I have a mortgage to pay. Besides, I'm so comfortable with JSF that I don't know if it'd be worth the investment for me to switch to Tapestry. Also, JSF already enjoys more industry support and that gap will widen considerably over the next couple years as Tapestry maintains a small but rabid group of followers in a niche market, whereas JSF will dethrone Struts as the reigning king of Java-based WAFs.

Hey, I hear him. I have yet to get a client to agree to let me use Tapestry. But should we just give up and say "hey, we know JSF is a big mess and there's a better alternative out there, but JSF is the standard so let's just go with it?" I imagine he's not alone in this view, but it's very disappointing. If even the coders are becoming conformists, then who's left?

For some reason, my sister appeared in the most recent issue of "Shalom Toronto", a Canadian Israeli newspaper. The article, I'm told (the image is too small to read) is about Israelis moving to Canada.

That's interesting, considering that my sister is not Israeli and has never lived in Canada. She does look good in the picture, though.

BTW: It looks like they swiped the image from the front page of Nishmat's website where my sister actually did attend.

Some others out there in the blogosphere have had a difficult time understanding this post. They seem to believe that there are some incompatibilities between Torah and science that must be reconciled through the modification or reinterpretation of one or the other. The problem is that they do not understand the true purpose of science...

If there is one thing I learned from Isaac Asimov, it is that it is inappropriate to classify a scientific theory as “right” or “wrong”. Aristotalian physics was the prevailing theory for almost 2 millenia because it explained much about the world which one could observe. Newton’s theory came along and replaced Aristotle’s because it was more useful in that it explained a greater number of natural phenomena. As technology improved our ability to measure, it became apparent that some phenomena could not be explained by Newton’s theory and Einstein’s theory came to replace it. Now it turns out that there are these problems with quantum physics and special relativity, so we are looking for something else. To refer to Newton or Aristotle or Einstein as "wrong" is to miss the point. Contrary to what many believe, the purpose of science is not to uncover truth about the world for if that were so, we would be required to disbelieve them all as all theories are eventually replaced by more useful ones. Rather, science endeavors to provide useful explanations of the world around us. An interesting example of this is that most schools still teach Newtonian physics. They do this because even though Einstein’s theory superseded it, Newton’s theory is much more convenient for describing everyday phenomena in a straightforward manner.

Torah, on the other hand, does purport to reveal truth about the world. The Torah is emes, but emes does not need to be useful. And, while everything in it is true, it is not necessarily straightforward. That is OK, for to treat the Torah as a book of science would be a misapplication. To look to the Torah to learn how to build an airplane would be foolish; to look to science for ultimate truth would be equally so.

Saw this in shul this past shabbos and had to put it up.

Enjoying our kitchen renovation