One day last week on my way out of the office, I encountered a pair of college-age women who looked a little lost. One politely asked if they could ask me something, so I said sure. (Cue ominous music ( Read more... )

This weekend I attended a celebration of Mi Yodeya's fifth birthday, hosted by the site's patriarch and his family, who had the decency to move this summer to within driving distance of my house. So I got to go. I had a great time ( Read more... )

On Shabbat we had a visitor from Kibbutz Lotan (in the Negev desert in ( Read more... )

Those of you who enjoy the religion-related posts here might be interested in this new blog (see intro post) for questions and answers about the bible, particularly the Hebrew bible (Tanakh). There's a link there for question submissions, and there are a bunch of posts there so you can get a sense of what to expect ( Read more... )

I've been accumulating browser tabs for a while, so here's a "misc" dump. (Aside: this new LJ "choose your icon by browsing pictures, and by the way we won't put them in alphabetical order or anything nice like that" interface really stinks. Grr.)
siderea posted The Music Theory Song: Intervals (YouTube)For anyone who's trying to work on ear training ( Read more... )

I don't think I've ever seen mammatus clouds before. They sure are pretty.

This information visualization on population per land area surprised me at the extremes (Bangladesh and UAE).

Avram's letter to his parents on leaving home, an interesting little d'var torah for Lech L'cha (starts with Genesis 12).

A few weeks ago I played Quack in the ( Read more... )

This week was my congregation's annual shabbaton. We take over a cabin in the "suburbs" of Zelienople and have a grand time. This year was the largest I've seen at 42 people, and all of them seemed to be engaged in it. It was great.
When nobody feels pressure (got to get upstairs to the bar mitzvah, got to ( Read more... )

The Shabbat before last there was a beit midrash (study session) after morning services, but I had to be somewhere so I couldn't stay. But I always take study materials if they're available, so I picked up a packet. The topic was one line from the passage about Moshe at the burning bush. The materials included a page of commentary -- a few lines ( Read more... )

Our torah-study group has been talking about the akeidah (binding of Yitzchak) for a few months (just finished). One opinion that some people expressed is that, in addition to the individual and family tragedy that would result if Avraham had not been stopped, this was a national threat: if Yitzchak died then that would end the whole ( Read more... )

On Shabbat we had a discussion about one part of the week's portion, where Miriam and Aharon speak critically about Moshe and Miriam (alone) is punished with tzara'at ("leprosy"). I found that translation hinders rather than helps understanding in this case.
Numbers 12:1 says: וַתְּדַבֵּר מִרְיָם וְאַהֲרֹן בְּמֹשֶׁה, עַל-אֹדוֹת הָאִשָּׁה ( Read more... )