daf bit: Bava Kama 116 (and software)

[cellio]

The g'mara discusses cases of group loss. If a caravan is travelling through the wilderness and robbers threaten to plunder it, each person's contribution to buy them off is proportional to the value of his goods. (The cost is not divided evenly among all the people.) This is because the robbers want the goods, not the people. However, if the journey was dangerous enough that they hired a guide, then the number of people must also be accounted for, because a guide guards life too and not just property.

If a ship at sea is threatened by a storm and those on board decide to lighten the load, on the other hand, the division is made according to weight, and each person must remove the same weight. This is so even if one removes gold while another removes copper. (116b) (The factor in the case of the storm is life, not value, so all share the burden equally.)

By the way, Davka currently has the Soncino Talmud on sale for an unspecified period of time. I think they do this about once a year, maybe less often. The current version has features that the one I bought c.2002 (on sale) doesn't have, and I'm going to want a Mac version soon anyway. (I've sometimes felt the lack in not having this software on my iBook, and my next desktop machine is almost certainly going to be a Mac too.) Does anyone out there know of anything better in this space? I do need the English along with the Hebrew. The Windows machine isn't going away (yay VNC), so if I don't buy it I'm just losing out on the laptop and newer features -- I won't lose access completely. But it'll be more of a hassle.

Comments

[yuggazogy.livejournal.com]

A new Mac should be able to dual-boot both Windows and MacOS, so you could put a small Windows partition on the new computer so you have a portable copy of the Talmut available if you so chose.

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

There's nothing better in this space right now. That's why I created the Dafcast. 22 dapim down, 2,689 to go. :-)

[http://users.livejournal.com/merle_/]

Hmm. It would seem to me, if a ship is threatened and things need to be tossed overboard, that an exchange between the gold and copper merchants would be more equitable if agreement can be reached, so the copper is tossed and the gold is shared around. But that gets into tricky concepts of relative value (maybe the copper is in the form of family heirlooms), so the original is probably a better general rule.