Friday, December 27, 2002
A terrorist by any other name
Syrian President Bashir Assad, rejecting criticism of Syria allowing Hamas and the Islamic Jihad to operate offices in Syria: “Of course we don't have, in Syria, organisations supporting terrorism. We have press officers.”
A recent press release from the Jihad: four killed and three wounded during their Sabbath evening meal.
Friday, December 20, 2002
All you need is credit
I have often thought it ironical that Paul McCartney and I happen to share our birthday. Everyone in the world is either a Lennonite or a McCartneyite, and I am a fanatical Lennonite. Recently Paul has sunk to new depths by crediting Lennon-McCartney songs to “Paul McCartney and John Lennon”. Somehow this reminds me of the story of the two Buddhist monks who are walking through the jungle when they encounter a young woman stranded on the banks of a river. The older monk picks her up, carries her across the river, and keeps on walking. After a few hours, the younger monk breaks the traditional silence and bursts out, “How could you do that? We’re not even allowed to look at women, and you picked that woman up and carried her across the river?!” “I put her down on the other side,” replied the older one. “I see you’re still carrying her.”
Paul, poor pitiful loser, is still carrying his resentment at John for being better than he could ever dream of being, some 40 years after they made the agreement which Paul has now broken.
One in a million
The wise men of Chelm were discussing whether one would be better off to have been born or never to have been born. After seven days and seven nights they came to their conclusion: one would be better off never to have been born, but who is that lucky? Maybe one in a million.
Here is a quotation from Agnon with the same subtext, from the last chapter of Temol Shilshom:
קל להם לאותם שאינם טורדים עצמם בהרהורים יתירים, אם מחמת תמימות יתירה אם מחמת חכמה יתירה, אבל כל מי שאינו לא תמים הרבה ולא חכם הרבה מה יענה ומה יאמר?
My translation:
It's easy for those who don't trouble themselves with too much thought, either because they're too wise or because they're too simple. But someone who is not so wise and not so simple is left with nothing to say.
Friday, November 22, 2002
Remove the what?
Heh. Daniel is funny. For the record, you can get Chinese food in the Middle East, though you might have trouble ordering sweet and sour pork. I own a recipe book of “kosher Chinese cooking”, in which all the pork recipes have been changed to beef. It’s a rather sloppy job: the typeface is visibly different, and there are a few places which they missed, so you get things like:
Heat the oil and deep-fry the beef until golden brown. Remove the pork and drain on a paper towel.
Laughing Matters
The article I linked to a little while ago is the only article of mine available online in the “Jerusalem Post” archives, which is a shame. It was the less good of the two opinion pieces I wrote for them. Here is the first. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to submit it to a newspaper, if my ex-wife hadn’t been the editor of the Op-Ed page at the time. I was ranting to her about one of the issues of the day and she said, “Why don’t you write me an opinion piece saying that?”
Laughing Matters
In the past Israel Television has had plenty of time for Judaism, as long as it stays in its place. Half an hour of Hasidic music on a Saturday night, or the Chief Rabbis’ blessings at the High Holidays, for example. So Gil Kopatch�s section in Yair Lapid’s “Sogrim Shavua” is a remarkable new departure. Inviting someone known as a stand up comic to discuss the weekly Torah portion on prime time Friday night television — what a welcome innovation.
Kopatch’s style is no less remarkable. His props and flip delivery attract the audience’s attention without negating his obvious commitment to the study of the Torah and rabbinic literature and the seriousness of the lessons he draws. Even someone who doesn’t share Kopatch’s left-wing views should recognize the sincerity with which he said “We will stand by the Jews in Hebron: we are their brothers. But why get bogged down there?”, or “Any parent’s heart would be broken if they lost their 10 year old son.” Too much attention has been focused on whether Abraham invited the Tapuzina model to Isaac’s brit and not enough on the solid content of Kopatch’s talks.
Clothing serious messages in jokes and a slangy style is nothing strange to Jewish tradition. The great Talmudic teacher Rabba used to begin his classes by telling jokes and after all the sages had finished laughing he would pass on his teaching in reverence (Shabbat 30b). The style of ex-chief Rabbi Ovadia Yosef’s Torah lessons, said a recent article in Haaretz, was an inspiration for the Gashash Hahiver.
Even Kopatch’s notorious sexual references are actually less explicit than the original sources. “Rashi never said that Noah did a striptease. You made that up yourself,” fumed MK Shlomo Benizri. True enough, but look at what the foremost medieval commentator did say about the story of Ham and Noah in Genesis 9, 22: “Some say that Ham castrated Noah, and some say that he sodomized him”. “Dancing with his willy showing” is mild in comparison.
So why did Shlomo Benizri call for Kopatch to go? Leaving aside the fervor typical of the newly religious and the chutzpah that makes him claim to represent “the whole Jewish people” and the “wider community”, there is a very good reason why a Shas MK should be desperate to see an end to this kind of Torah study.
Benizri sees what a threat to the haredim Kopatch represents. The power of the ultra-orthodox minority in Israel would not be half so strong without the historical attitude of the secular population that Judaism in general and Torah study in particular belong exclusively to the religious, and that secular Jews have no interest and involvement in them, and perhaps even no right to concern themselves with them. So even those who disagree with everything a Shas spokesman says have accepted that spokesman’s claim to be the one authentic voice of Judaism and granted him the right to interpret the Jewish sources for them, instead of opening the Bible and Talmud for themselves.
In the last few years this has begun to change. We see secular and joint secular-religious Batei Midrash springing up on all sides. The in thing in fashionable Tel Aviv circles is a Friday night Talmud class. And this is not part of the return to religion movement, like Uri Zohar or Pupik Arnon twenty years ago. Secular Jews are setting out to repossess Jewish sources without abandoning their own world-view, and without submitting to the party line of this rabbi or the other.
And this is the last thing that Benizri and others like him want. Nothing was more revealing than his patronizing invitation to Kopatch to spend a Shabbat with him and the way he told young visitors to the Knesset on Wednesday to “come and hear me talk about the Torah portion. I can do it in a jolly style too.” This is how someone talks who thinks he holds a monopoly on the truth, someone how thinks that his interpretation of the Torah is right, and Kopatch’s (or yours, or mine) is wrong.
But Judaism has no Authorized Version and no infallible pope. “The Torah has seventy faces,” says the Midrash, and Gil Kopatch, like any other Jew, has every right to find one of the seventy, or even the seventy-first.
The article is full of topical references from Israel in 1996, but it doesn’t seem outdated. Exactly the same attitudes surfaced a few years later when a dance item at Israel’s 50th Independence Day celebrations featured music with a text from the Passover Haggada.
Thursday, November 21, 2002
Tefillin time
I never thought I would be able to point to something I have in common with Madonna, but now we have both been seen wrapping black leather straps around our left arm and the fingers of our left hand.
Saturday, November 09, 2002
One man's dignity is another man's heresy
I wish I knew more about the current controversy surrounding British Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks than I can learn from reading articles in the “Guardian”, “Jewish Chronicle” and “Jerusalem Post”. As reported, it makes very little sense. If it is unacceptable to say “In heaven there is truth; on earth there are truths”, will it be kosher to say “on earth there are multiple perspectives on truth&rdquo? Those objecting to Rabbi Sacks’ book are the same people who have fits at the idea of Jews with different values from their own even having the right to study Torah, let alone have a perspective on truth, and non-Jews? Don’t make me laugh. I have written about this before, and even been published.
Rabbi Sacks, who I knew quite well many years ago when he was a pulpit rabbi and on the faculty at Jews’ College, and I was a post-graduate student there, is unusual among religious establishment figures. He has a doctorate in philosophy (Kant, if I remember correctly) and is passionately concerned with spiritual and human issues. Call me cynical, but I think most high-ranking clergy are less involved in religion than in job security.
Nietzsche puts it like this in Daybreak:
Christianity has done its utmost to close the circle and declared even doubt to be a sin. One is supposed to be cast into belief without reason, by a miracle, and from then on to swim in it as in the brightest and least ambiguous of elements: even a glance towards land, even the thought that one perhaps exists for something else as well as swimming, even the slightest impulse of our amphibious nature — is sin! And notice that all this means that the foundation of belief and all reflection on its origin is likewise excluded as sinful. What is wanted are blindness and intoxication and an eternal song over the waves in which reason has drowned!
Friday, October 04, 2002
It bugs me
It's interesting to read that Microsoft has hit upon the idea of “adding an option for customers to go to a Website where they can learn more about and even fix the errors they report.” Perhaps we should sell them a license for Bugzilla.
In the same article, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is quoted as saying, “About 20 per cent of the bugs cause 80 per cent of all errors, and &ndash this is stunning to me – one per cent of bugs cause half of all errors.” Personally I find that self-evident rather than stunning, but what do I know?
It was good for me. Was it good for you?
How about that? Yesterday's pathetic plea for attention was answered, and I lost my link virginity.
Thursday, October 03, 2002
Matras, anyone?
Life is so hard. How will I ever be famous if even people who acknowledge me don't link to ?
That article was interesting to read. I always thought that it would be obvious to anyone that the Hebrew numbering system is so straightforward that a child can master it, but for someone looking at the rules from the outside, without knowing the language or the culture, it somehow starts to seem “insanely complicated”.
The whole issue of complexity and simplicity is full of oddities. Even bearing in mind what I said above about looking at things from the outside, it seems to me obvious and objectively true that the Roman alphabet is beautifully simple while the Roman numbering system is ludicrously unwieldy; and that the Hindi numbering system in all its variants has the simplicity of genius while Devanagari script (which I am just trying to learn) is a nightmare of complex rules and special cases.
Thursday, September 26, 2002
Ritual Mocking
Joel Spolsky has been reading Peter Trudelle and Matthew Thomas, and draws the conclusion that distributed open-source development doesn�t have the bandwidth to achieve results — a conclusion which Matthew himself doesn�t agree with.
I have noticed another characteristic of a project like Mozilla as opposed to a conventional development project within a company. To get a job in a company, you need to go through some kind of screening and interview process. Everybody uses this system because nobody has thought of a better one, but it has serious problems. Entry-level applicants face a classic Catch 22: they can�t get through the hiring process without experience, and they can�t get experience until somebody hires them. The system also favours people who know how to package themselves but aren�t actually very good, or aren�t particularly productive once they get hired.
In an open source project, on the other hand, the hiring process is replaced by a kind of ordeal by combat combined with ritual mocking. You get into the clique (and in my experience OSS is the most cliquey environment on the planet) by submitting patches and solving problems. If you can�t deliver the goods you just aren�t going to get in. Even if you can deliver the goods you had better be ready to be treated like an idiot before you become accepted as one of the guys.
The applicant with the glossy packaging doesn�t stand much chance here, which is one up for trial by combat, but where this model falls down and the interview process scores is that the interview process gives employers more chance to select people that they will be able to stand working with. Getting through an interview requires basic social skills. This makes open source projects the natural home of the folks who write really cool code but also happen to be total dorks.
Saturday, September 21, 2002
I have been working on a paper on Hebrew numbering, which is on my people.netscape.com site together with my paper “ The Story of Bidi Mozilla” from the last Unicode Conference, soon to be available in a native HTML version instead of that rather nasty Powerpoint to HTML conversion.
Friday, August 30, 2002
I love praise as much as anyone else, but I have to confess that this is a little bit over the top. Anyway, I hope it attracts a lot of new users to the Hebrew Mozilla site.
Sunday, June 23, 2002
I read Golden Gate by Vikram Seth this week, a book I have been keeping an eye open for for years, and was not disappointed. When I read An Equal Music a few years ago I thought it was one of the best books I had read for a long time (although I later found A Suitable Boy impossible to digest).
Golden Gate is a rare tour de force: a novel in verse. The whole book, including the Acknowledgments, Dedication, Table of Contents, and endnote about the author, is written in fourteen line sonnet-like stanzas with a strict meter and rhyme scheme. There is no sign that these constraints have done anything to inhibit the author’s freedom or expressive power.
Here is a beautiful example, describing one of my favourite places, the source of the book’s title, and also of this site’s colour scheme:
They park the car by the Marina.
The surface of the cobalt bay
Is flecked with white. The moister, keener
October air has rinsed away
The whispering mists with crisp intensity
And over the opaque immensity
A deliquescent wash of blue
Reveals the bridge, long lost to view
In summer’s quilt of fog: the towers,
High-built, red-gold, with their long span
—The most majestic spun by man—
Whose threads of steel through mist and showers
Wind, spray, and the momentous roar
Of ocean storms, link shore to shore.
It is an interesting coincidence that both the books by Vikram Seth that I have enjoyed so much have been about places that I have been familiar with. In An Equal Music almost every location, especially Kensington and Venice, was resonant with my own memories, and Golden Gate is set in my new home, the San Francisco Bay area.
Wednesday, June 19, 2002
Happy Birthday to me,
I am forty three.
I have four sweet children
And a wife who loves me.
Sunday, May 26, 2002
Dang. Matthew Thomas has beaten me to it, and posted a blog saying exactly what I was going to say about Mozillazine’s comments on CNET’s review of Netscape’s newly pre-released browser. He even links to the same article by Joel God-comes-to-me-for-advice-on-software Spolsky that I was going to link to.
So I will have to either shut up (fat chance), or think of something else to say on the subject. How about this: if the browser crashed whenever it loaded a web-page containing the word “goat”, and a few reviewers suggested that this was less than ideal, would you still shrug it off by saying “It's in the release notes”?
Tuesday, May 14, 2002
Tonight we experienced our first California earthquake. It was magnitude 5.2 on the Richter scale, which is classified as “moderate”; the amount of energy released is equivalent to a 32 kiloton explosion, which seems like a lot to me, but is only about one thousandth as powerful as the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989.
It's interesting how one reacts to something totally unexpected like an earthquake. At first I heard the cups rattling in the cupboards, and then noticed that the house was shaking. At this stage my mind was still working hard to fit what was happening into some category that it was used to, like “Ahinoam is knocking over the glasses” (she was getting us both a drink of water at the time) or “Aviad is jumping around in his room”. Then, as the shaking gets stronger and the rattling gets louder, there is a sudden leap to a new interpretation: “It’s an earthquake! Everybody get outside!” (This turns out not to be the right thing to do.) In this case, by the time we started moving outside everything was over, and I was left to deal with the after-effects of the adrenalin rush and calm down the children, who were dealing with the same effects, very nervous and full of questions.
My usual policy in such cases is that it’s more important to be reassuring than strictly accurate:
Is there going to be another earthquake?
No, there’s no more likely to be an earthquake now than any other time. A big lie, because I know all about aftershocks.
Aren’t seismographs a dreadful waste of paper?
They were in the old days, but nowadays all the data is stored on computer. A shot in the dark, but apparently accurate.
Friday, May 10, 2002
I’m sorry that I returned Antoine de Saint-Exupery’sThe Wisdom of the Sands to the library without having read much of it. I found it difficult to get into, I don’t know whether because of something in the book itself or because of defects in the translation.
Chiefly though, it isn’t really a book to take out of the library, read through and return after three weeks. I would like to have had it around for a few months and dip into it from time to time when feeling thoughtful, not race through it on the bus to and from work where I do most of my reading, which is fine for unwinding with a thriller after a long day’s hard concentration, but an injustice to a book full of ideas like this one.
I took the book out in the first place because Matthew Thomas pointed me towards it on IRC as the source of something I have been misquoting for years:
La perfection est atteinte non quand il ne reste rien � ajouter, mais quand il ne reste rien � enlever. [No translation will be provided this time, chiefly because every translation I’ve seen is lame. If you care, find out!]
The trouble with the book is that it has no particular structure. It is full of fascinating gems like that, which you could remove from the frame story and turn into an excellent common-place book, but the frame story itself never seems to get going nor to lead anywhere. There is no doubt in my mind that this is a totally superficial judgement on my part based on a very sketchy reading, but I (arrogantly) blame the book itself for not drawing me in to a less sketchy reading.
The parts that made the most impression on me were those where he talks about giving and receiving. Not so much the frequently-quoted “when you give yourself, you receive more than you give,” as the concept that in order for you to give, there must be someone to receive. This is not so frequently quoted &mdash I can't find any page on the internet with the exact text, and the point is a subtle one.
There is a difference between giving and meeting demands. The worst thing that one partner can do in a relationship is to cross that thin line between receiving a gift and demanding a service. Saint Exupery compares this kind of relationship to prostitution — you can’t give a prostitute anything, you can only supply her with the payment that she has earned.
If there is a doublet of this post below, it’s because I haven’t worked out how to cancel a blogger post with errors in it. Grrr.
Monday, May 06, 2002
Reading Netscape Time by Jim Clark, I was struck by the following passage
After all, it’s monkish work to write line after line of instructions in arcane computer languages day after day, month after month. The task must be something like translating the Bible from Hebrew and Greek to English (or rather, the other way around).
I’m not sure what “the other way around” is in this context, but never mind that. What this irresistably reminds me of is the statement in the Jerusalem Talmud: וכל האוכל מצה בערב פסח כבא על ארוסתו בבית חמיו [eating unleavened bread the day before Passover is like sleeping with your fiancée in your father-in-law’s house], and my response to Jim Clark’s statement is the same as Smolenskin’s to the Talmud’s: ניסיתי את שניהם ולא מצאתי דומים [I’ve done both and I didn’t notice the resemblance].
Thursday, May 02, 2002
I am having an ambivalent reaction to fixing a bug that has been resisting me for the last nine months.
Of course it’s immensely satisfying to have a result from the many hours that I’ve spent in the debugger chasing it down. Debugging is like a scientific research product (not that I’ve ever done one of those). As you acquire more data, a picture slowly emerges. Hypotheses suggest themselves, and are tested and rejected, or accepted and become the basis of another layer of hypotheses. The process that your bug is a small part of, which may be completely obscure and unfamiliar when you begin working, becomes intimately familiar to you. In extreme cases, you may even dream about it.
By the way, I have never had a Kekulé-like experience and fixed a bug in a dream, but more than once I have found a fix by taking a smoke break. During the debugging process, with my face deep in the details, I often fail to think things through and make deeper connections, but when I stop debugging, get out into the fresh air and think about something else for a few minutes, a solution will often just pop into my mind, seemingly out of nowhere.
You may be in doubt about the value of the possible solutions that you experiment with early in this process, but once you are totally “in the zone” and living and breathing the code, you have no doubts. If your fix is hacky, you feel low, even unclean (though you may accept it out of frustration), but if you discover the One True Fix ™, it will shine out of the screen at you like the Holy Grail. My wife says that she can tell when I have fixed a bug just from the tone of my voice when I pick up the phone, or by seeing the way I walk out of the office.
However, the fact is that last night I felt a bit let-down. Maybe it's the lack of anything substantial produced by all this effort. In the amount of time invested in fixing this bug, I could probably have written a book, designed a cathedral, or produced a play. Instead of that, I have produced one line of code, and no special new or cool functionality that I can point to in the program. It just does what it should have done all along.
And maybe on some level I’m sorry to say goodbye to the bug that I've come to know so well. It’s like splitting up with a partner — even if you know that the relationship was wrong for you and you are better off apart, there is always some sensation of regret.
Or maybe there's some significance to the nine months that this bug has existed. Could I be suffering from post-natal depression?
Monday, April 29, 2002
I don’t know if I am more relieved or frightened to discover that astronomers have even less clue than software engineers on how to describe their subject to beginners.
I borrowed The Moden Amateur Astronomer, ed. Patrick Moore, from the library. It’s one of a series with the general title Practical Astronomy, and according to the blurb,
If you already own an astronomical telescope and want to know how to use it to the best effect, or if you are thinking about buying one and are wondering where to start, then this is the book for you.
The four pages of Chapter 2, Buying a Telescope, by Patrick Moore himself, are clearly written and left me with a clear picture of the pros and cons of different kinds of telescope and what to look for if I was buying one, but every other chapter gets bogged down in details that I (as a beginner) don't understand rather than explaining general principles, and shows no awareness of what I need to hear and what order I need to hear it in if I am to make any progress.
In a section on photography in the chapter on Auxiliary Equipment, I read that “…the most important features to bear in mind are the accessibility of the focus and the vignetting of the light cone.” Vignetting of the light cone, eh? What is that exactly? Is it something I should be avoiding like the plague or something I can’t do without? I read on and discover that it is “one of the most irritating problems in deep-sky photography and can easily ruin an otherwise excellent photo.” Yes, but what the hell is it? How will I know whether my pictures suffer from it? It turns out that I can avoid it if I buy “a low-profile focuser with a draw tube of at least 2 inches in diameter.” So all I have to do to clear up the subject is find out what a focuser is (and where I get one), and how I recognize a low-profile one. (As opposed to what? High-profile? Low-fullface?)
I searched in vain for a straightforward answer to these questions, though I did learn that “to determine the optimum focuser and secondary mirror size for your system, a simple ray diagram, showing the light cone, needs to be drawn,” (so simple that there is no need to supply an example).
Turning to Chapter 9 on Astronomical Spectroscopes, I read in the first paragraph that “75% of all our knowledge in astrophysics derives from observing spectra.” This sounds exciting, but the rest of the chapter has little to tell me on what this 75% is made up of. It provides me information like the following:
The wavelength shift of the observed stellar lines when compared with their rest wavelengths gives the star’s radial velocity via the Doppler formula
v = 3 × 105((λ0 - λ1) / λ1),
where v is the radial velocity in km s-1, λ0 is the observed wavelength of a line and λ1 is the rest wavelength of a line,
but nowhere bothers to tell me what the radial velocity of a star is or why I should care about it. The same treatment is given to all the other subjects touched on in the chapter, like emission line stars, Hertzsprung-Russel diagrams, and Fraunhofer lines.
I could give many more examples from this chapter or almost any other. Compared to this book, Linux HOWTOs are a model of clarity.
Friday, April 26, 2002
I have now completely redone the blog template and CSS, and although it frightened me at first after I republished by claiming to be unable to access the site, things now seem to be working OK, more or less. The layout problems I was experiencing were largely due to incompatible expectations by the template and my own entries, which I have managed to synchronize better now. I doubt if I will ever get the results to validate with all the stuff that gets added automatically, but at least it lays out as intended.
I'm sure I could do better if I took the trouble to read the instructions, and maybe I will even do that at some point.
Hmm…once again I am experiencing the problem that when the text box for entering the content starts to scroll, I can no longer see the Post and Publish buttons. Could this be another Mozilla bug?
Thursday, April 25, 2002
OK, what's going on here? In my naïveté I understood that “blogging tools” were supposed to make web publishing easier. I have just spent far longer in a cycle of editing, publishing, re-editing and re-publishing the previous entry than it would have taken me to write the whole bloody thing out in HTML source in emacs and ftp it to a web site — and it still looks horrible.
My first attempt in MozBlog went to the trouble of translating my HTML tags into plain text by converting “<” to “<” etc, and though moving to Blogger solved that problem, nothing I could do would straighten out the funky line wrapping. Yuk. Yuk. Yuk. And where do the buttons at Blogger disappear to after you write a few lines? Heaven knows how I will ever publish this rant.
It was interesting to discover that Mozilla has had a severe Bidi bug in print headers just about for ever. Print headers didn't exist when we designed Bidi; we never noticed the bug when they sneaked in a few months before we started checking code in to the tree; and nobody has ever noticed it since. It just goes to show that people don't print much, or don't look very hard at the results.
Tuesday, April 16, 2002
The latest edition of the usually excellent LangaList recommends me to go to ContentAudit for a good laugh, but as I enter the site my (admittely paranoid) alarm triggers are going off one after the other. Why does the site want my email address? Why does it redirect me to a page saying
“Attention Netscape Users
Content Audit is currently designed for Internet Explorer only.”
However funny the results, if the site wants to scan my hard drive from within the browser while online, and is only willing to do this through IE, I think I'll give it a miss and get my laughs somewhere else.
Sunday, April 14, 2002
Everyone else seems to be doing it, so why not me? The title, if you were wondering, is "על הא ודא", which is Aramaic for "On This And That".
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