short takes

Recently apod (astronomy picture of the day) has had some stunning shots.

I found a large display of half-price Easter candy in the grocery store today when I went to get lunch. We were hard-pressed to find chocolate bunnies in a different store Tuesday, and decided then to settle for chocolate chicks for the annual bunny melt. So I picked up a couple bunnies today so we can be all proper about it. (The bunny melt involves the ritual slaughter of half-price bunnies followed, soon thereafter, by fondue. My friends are delightfully twisted.)

I used to file spam complaints, but it became clear that talking to the originating sites is a bad idea and the independent services required too much work, usually cut-and-paste into browser forms. Now that my mail provider is using a blacklist based on SpamCop, I decided to reconsider them. I figure it's in my best interest, as well as being a community service, to report spam that makes it past SpamAssassin to the organization that's producing our blacklist. Much to my delight, SpamCop now accepts forwarded email for reports. Unfortunately, you then have to go to a confirmation page when their auto-responder confirms receipt; this is apparently part of an effort to keep the spammers from attacking them with DOS attacks. (They also require a real email address.) It's not onerous, though, and it does let me see what information they distilled from the spam (along with running commentary like "yum, this spam is fresh!" if you send it in promptly).

Why do car speedometers compress the useful part of the scale so much? My current car uses about 300 degrees of a circle to display 0-160. More than half of that represents speeds I will never reach. It would be much more useful if they gave me more space for the lower part, either by a graduated scale (if the mechanics behind the dial permit it) or by truncating. In my previous car, the 12:00 position represented approximately 50 MPH; in my new car, that's 80.

This Pesach I sampled three different sorts of (identifiable) store-bought macaroons. The results: Manischevitz chocolate: good (thanks siderea). Rokeach almond: ok. Shabtai almond: yes!! (thanks lefkowitzga). The orange peel adds a lot to the flavor of the last. Pity I didn't find these earlier, but I'll know for next year.

a torah thought

During the Omer (which is now, from Pesach to Shavuot [0]) we're supposed to read from Pirke Avot, a tractate of the mishna that is basically collected wisdom. There's a lot of good stuff in there, and I recommend it to anyone who hasn't read it before. (To those who have, my recommendation is irrelevant.)

Tonight my rabbi commented on two similar and famous passages. (One is part of the liturgy.) In one place, it says the world stands on [1] three things: torah, divine service ("avodah" [2]), and acts of loving-kindness ("g'milut chasidim"). Elsewhere, another rabbi says that the world stands on a different trio: shalom (literally "wholeness", conventionally "peace"), judgement ("din"), and truth ("emet"). So, my rabbi asked, what's going on?

He argues that the first set represents our obligations to God -- keep the torah, serve God, and treat each other appropriately -- while the second set represents obligations to other people -- seek peace, act justly, and be truthful. I can buy that, but I had been thinking in a different direction. I found myself looking for parallels between the two.

The first is easy: torah is truth. If it isn't, none of the rest of this matters. Matching up the others is a little less clear, but I can see a parallel between din and avodah, because both involve specified processes to produce correct results, whether it's temple ritual or ensuring that contracts are appropriate and thieves pay for what they take and so on. That leaves g'milut chasidim pairing up with shalom, and one could certainly argue that doing the former will ultimately lead to the latter.

Now that I've taken my stab at it I'll have to see what the sages say, perhaps over Shabbat. Other comments welcome, of course.

[0] Tonight is night ten of the Omer. We're supposed to count it explicitly.

[1] I think, actually, that one of these says the world "stands on" three things and the other says "depends on", but I'll have to look it up and I can't now say which would be which.

[2] "Avodah" means "work" or "labor" -- not the kind of activity forbidden on Shabbat (that's "melacha" [3]), but a different kind of work. However, it is also used specifically to mean the "work" of conducting the temple ritual, and it's apparently pretty clear that this is the sense in which it's meant here.

[3] "Melacha" is creative work -- not "creative" in the "I'll think up a melody for a song" sense, but rather in the "making things in the world" sense. So plowing your field is melacha, but singing isn't. Painting a landscape is, but walking in the park isn't.