daf bit: Bava Batra 2

We now begin the last of the "Bavas", a trio of tractates related to torts and property claims. (I've been told that they were originally one very large tractate.)

Bava Batra begins by talking about fences. If joint owners of a courtyard (that is, the owners of the houses bordering it) agree to build a wall, they should make it down the middle and each should contribute half of the building materials. If in the future the wall falls, it is assumed that the place it occupied and the stones/bricks belong to both equally. In a place where fences are not customary, like in a cornfield, one who wants to build a fence cannot compel the other to share in the effort. If they don't agree, the one who wants the fence must build it set back from the property line, making a facing on the other side. If the wall later falls, we assume that it will all still be on his property and it will be clear that the land and the materials belong to him. (2a)

Today's daf is 4, and it's in the middle of the g'mara discussing this mishna.

warm fuzzy shout-outs

Cool! I made the Stack Exchange Year in Review. :-)

If you enjoy analyzing data about the Stack Exchange network, 2016 was your year. Community member Monica Cellio wrote a tutorial about our data explorer, which is maintained by another community member, Tim Stone. A resident data scientist, David Robinson, released StackLite, a lightweight version of community data. To see it in action, consider scripting language trends on Stack Overflow. In December, we connected our data to Google's BigQuery. People are already finding interesting results. Our data team has been posting analysis on the blog, if you crave more.

(There are other links in that paragraph that I didn't recreate in this post. You'll need to go to their blog post to get those.)

The link in the quote is to the blog post where they announced the tutorial (in June):

Have you ever wanted to get a statistic about your favorite Stack Exchange site, but been baffled by exactly how to do that? The Stack Exchange Data Explorer (SEDE) may be just what you're looking for. SEDE was created to make it easy to query and browse the public data that we release periodically for all Stack Exchange sites, but a lack of familiarity with SQL has been a barrier to many of you who would otherwise benefit from it. Now, thanks to friend of the company and moderator extraordinare Monica Cellio, you have a tutorial to guide you in using it!

[...] But even though SEDE is nicer to work with than a raw data dump, it can still be pretty intimidating to new users, especially those who aren't trained database engineers. Up until now, the Data Explorer's own help docs have been a little thin, and mostly covered very specialized, advanced features. We've wanted to expand the guidance there for a while, but never quite got around to it. Then Monica rewarded our procrastination by helpfully volunteering to take on the writing.