daf bit: Eruvin 41

There is a limit to how far one may go "from one's place" on Shabbat. A mishna on today's daf teaches: one who was brought, by non-Jews or by an evil spirit, beyond this limit has no more than four cubits in which to move. If he was brought back, however, he is regarded as if he had never left and has the usual range of movement. If he was taken to another town or put in a cattle-pen, there is a disagreement about whether he can use the whole area (which has a boundary) or is limited to four cubits.

Once, this mishna says, people were on a ship on the eve of Shabbat and the ship did not enter the harbor until dusk. They asked R. Gamaliel if they could disembark. He said yes, because he had carefully observed where the ship was before Shabbat started and determined that they were within the limit. (41b)

I don't know if this means that estimation by sighting, without measuring, is always ok, or if R. Gamaliel had special status as a sage.

random bits

The tulips are starting to appear in my yard. We sure went from snow to spring-verging-on-summer in a hurry. But it's supposed to be in the 30s over the weekend.

The (expiration? best-by?) date on a frozen-food package is "Jul 19 2014". This raises two question: (a) such precision -- would July 20 really be different, and is July 18 better in that case? And (b) why isn't frozen food that's good for more than a few months immortal? What exactly is going to happen to my vegetarian corn dogs in a year and a quarter? (The question is academic; I'll have eaten them by next week.)

Someone on Mi Yodeya passed along these really nifty photos of a "teapot" that is so much more. He found it on Reddit, where the claim was that this was used by crypto-Jews during the inquisition. I'm not sure about that, but even if not... wow, cool. Like Russian nesting dolls on steroids. Take a look.

My rabbi blogs now, and I was particularly struck by this recent post about inter-faith relations and more. The part (attributed to someone else) about being neither jerks nor jellyfish when it comes to faith stood out for me.

I saw a job post recently for a (very) technical writer, principal-level, to do programming (API) documentation. That's pretty rare, so when something like that crosses my desk I always look even if it's neither local nor telecommute, to keep tabs on the state of the art if nothing else. On this one, as I was reading down the list of desired skills, past specified programming languages and technologies, past XML markup standards for documentation, I came to... MS Office. This is really not the tool for that particular task. It was then followed by DITA (an XML doc specification that makes DocBook look like child's play), Javadoc, and Arbortext Epic (a tool for editing XML-based documents). I guess somebody decided that throwing in more desired skills was better, or something. Either that or they're not actually doing any of this yet but they aspire to. Which is fine (I've done that), but not clear in the job description.