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akuperma: You don’t seem to get the point. From the point of view of this world, death may not be definitive (though it’s not that easy to see the world to come in regular life- our perspectives are limited in this world)- but still we cry when someone dies. Why? Why isn’t there a party? After all, they’re going to a better place!
The point is that as humans, death is sad and tragic, and you are coming across as supremely unfeeling. If you were to go and visit the families of those murdered in the Mercaz HaRav attack, for example, would you say, “Oh, this is normal happens all the time- just live with it”? My point with the Stalin quote (and obviously, it kills me to use Stalin as a positive example for my point) is that if one person was murdered, you’d feel all horrible (or even if one person just passed away of natural causes, you’d mourn), but if millions of people have been killed in pogroms, it’s just like “pogroms happen all the time.” You just come across as quite shockingly insensitive, even though I’m sure that’s not the way you intend to come off.
Derech Hamelech: My comment was entirely separate from the political issues- I was just utterly shocked at what nfgo3 called akuperma’s “cavalier attitude” toward the loss of Jewish lives. Whether this is better or worse than shmad doesn’t enter the picture (though I really don’t think that there is a straightforward answer), but comments like “pogroms happen,” “we are old hands at surviving genocide,” “to frum Jews, it’s a matter ‘oh, that again’,” and “live with it” just don’t, to put it way more mildly than it deserves, really show a lot of compassion, caring and horror when something like that happens.
As much as people (obviously) hate to admit Stalin was right, his quote about one person being a tragedy and a million being a statistic just seems to be pretty apropos. If something like this were to happen right now in Israel, would akuperma say “Oh, that again! Pogroms happen- live with it!”? I sincerely hope not.
Just out of curiosity: what are they doing about helmets? Are they having people bring their own (pretty annoying) or are they renting (I wouldn’t want to wear someone else’s sweaty helmet- ewwww) or just ditching it (I’d be very, very surprised)?
simbin: if I’m saying what you said, then either you’re misunderstanding me or I’m misunderstanding you.
I’m attempting to defend the right of the dati le’umi to respect “your” poskim and hold by their own. You seem to be doubting that they have any poskim who rule this way at all.
Is this what you’re saying, or do we actually agree?
Just BTW, I have dati le’umi friends and they most certainly follow the same rabbanim in both these matters and others. And no, this does not mean that they rely on kulos.
I agree with hatzolajew. You can argue that the draft may be harmful, but putting git on the level of comparing it to the Holocaust is mind-boggling.
akuperma: Nice to see what kind of regard you have for Jewish lives. Are you only saying this because it was other people who were killed and not you or your family?
This is harsher than I usually write, but, for a change, I think it deserves it.
fkelly: I do my best not to make sweeping statements- this is just what I’ve found to be true among people I know.
Yserbius: So does CB Weinfeld- the whole thing, to the best of my knowledge, is run out of Monsey and possibly Lakewood.
I have a theory about new- let’s say one newsmaking thing will happen on a given day per 1000 families (hypothetical numbers here), so that if Monsey has 10,000 families, 10 newsworthy things happened. The thing is, since there are only ten, you have to take what you can get- one of them may be genuinely interesting and different, but odds are it won’t be.
OTOH, in Brooklyn or somewhere bigger, if there are hypothetically 50,000 families, then they have 50 newsworthy occurrences a day, and can then afford to pick and choose only the most interesting stuff.
Or maybe Monsey people are just jaded and don’t think of corruption and fixed elections as news anymore…
SecularFrummy: This is old (I wasn’t around last night) but sorry- It was really late at night and I messed up reading :). I actually had a whole post that had something about how bacteria reproduce with binary fission (I didn’t bring up conjugation) but for some reason it never ended up posted- I probably just forgot about it :).
Sorry that I don’t mention who it is (I’m on a new page now), but someone had a great point when he/she talked about WHY schools don’t teach evolution. The concepts of evolution aren’t kefiradik- especially the stuff we’ve all been discussing, like natural selection, that’s all able to be empirically proven and applied now. Anything prehistoric could even be able to be taught just as applying the concepts you learn to a different (even hypothetical, if you so choose) scenario. The question is- why so scared to teach it? If you don’t want questions, why not? If you haven’t got the answers, I’d say that’s a bigger problem. If you do have answers, then what are you afraid of?
SecularFrummy: This is old (I wasn’t around last night) but sorry- It was really late at night and I messed up reading :). I actually had a whole post that had something about how bacteria reproduce with binary fission (I didn’t bring up conjugation) but for some reason it never ended up posted- I probably just forgot about it :).
Sorry that I don’t mention who it is (I’m on a new page now), but someone had a great point when he/she talked about WHY schools don’t teach evolution. The concepts of evolution aren’t kefiradik- especially the stuff we’ve all been discussing, like natural selection, that’s all able to be empirically proven and applied now. Anything prehistoric could even be able to be taught just as applying the concepts you learn to a different (even hypothetical, if you so choose) scenario. The question is- why so scared to teach it? If you don’t want questions, why not? If you haven’t got the answers, I’d say that’s a bigger problem. If you do have answers, then what are you afraid of?
HaKatan- the people here defending evolution are not claiming that this precludes the existence of Hashem. For instance, let’s take the Big Bang. Do we know the actual method that Hashem used to create the world? Neither do scientists- a G-d is not outside their realm of possibility, however much many disbelieve it.
The whole thing with the “anti-G-d” attitude of scientists is that it’s not even necessarily true- I mean, you get examples like Dawkins but it’s not a fairly applied stereotype- scientists don’t take G-d into account because such concepts are not empirically testable, and empirical testability is the whole point of science. All those Jewish scientists believe in Hashem and understand science at one and the same time- because spirituality and science by definition don’t overlap, there are no contradictions.
SecularFrummy: That makes sense. I also feel really dumb because in my whole megillah, right after I said that viruses and bacteria are different, I called MRSA a virus :(.
The whole thing with it being on a plasmid or the main chromosome never occurred to me- that makes so much sense.
What do restriction endonucleases have to do with it? Isn’t the whole point whether the gene pool is similar enough for two organisms to mate? Sorry, I’m just not getting it.
PBO: I took the AP course (college-level- at least, if I do well I’ll get college credits for it), and we learned a great deal about how evolution is behind so much of biology.
First off: evolution doesn’t mean one thing necessarily turns into another- it can also be something more complex developing from something simpler. This is why bacteria will never turn into a virus- they are two entirely different types of organisms, to use your example (viruses are arguably not even living).
Second: You’re spot-on about how MRSA developed, and this is where it gets murky, as what makes two different groups different species as opposed to differently mutated groups of the same species is whether the two groups are able to mate, and viruses reproduce by infecting cells, which doesn’t require mating. However, I’m pretty sure MRSA is a different species from what preceded it. (Help, anyone?)
Your example with the goats doesn’t really work, because the reason why there are no spotted goats is not necessarily because you don’t want spotted goats- it may be because there is a factor selecting against goats in general and one random goat (which has reproduced) has a random genetic mutation to help it survive this selection, so that it and its offspring can now survive. If this happens enough times, and you suddenly brought back one of those original spotted goats (Idunno, maybe they’ll be able to clone from fossils, whatever), if there are enough mutations that their genetic pools are exclusive, that is the creation of a new derivative species.
This can, of course, happen with multiple mutations, leading to multiple species developing alongside each other (as in the case of Darwin’s finches).
When I was a kid I always got my Shabbos shoes from Payless, starting from when I was about seven. They were fine. My family isn’t poor, ch”v, my mom just likes to get deals.
However, I can very easily see why a parent would want better shoes for his/her kids, especially if these are their shoes for the season. If someone is willing to donate the money for the shoes, and the parents decide that this is what they want to spend the money they receive on, then gezunte heit.
I always consider myself lucky that I b”h am fortunate to have everything I need and a very decent amount of what I want :)- I’m not going to make judgments on what other people have or get.
PBO: “you cannot show a new species by experiment since it takes a gazillion years”
Definitely not true. I think it’s yehudayona who referred to types of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which can develop VERY quickly. Remember MRSA? How long did that take to develop? Because yes, that is a new species- the bacteria has completely different properties.
I could also go into endosymbiotic theory and phylogenies, which show how different species are related due to how many structures and functions they share due to evolution, but let me just say that when the College Board set up evolution as one of the four “Big Ideas” in their new curriculum, they had reasons. It’s EXTRAORDINARLY important.
OblateSpheroid: Exactly.
Just to clarify one of my sentences, even though I doubt anyone reads my posts to care, but I realized that this sentence doesn’t make sense
“Once a hypothesis is tested and accepted to be true, it’s called a theory, and it’s pretty much the same thing.”
and instead it should end
“…it’s called a theory, which means that it is accepted as true and proven with a scientific reason for why it is true.”
Do they have phones with text? Do they have email?
Most people I know who do neither live in these places nor speak Yiddish (though there are exceptions- then again, I put that in the same category as my friends who speak Russian, Spanish and Farsi). Yiddish just isn’t nearly as common among non-chassidish girls as it is among non-chassidish boys- my brother’s in fifth grade and he can scrape by in Yiddish just from picking it up, and I wouldn’t understand the first thing you’d say to me.
The thing is, these are YOUR gedolim. The people who think frum Jews should be in the army certainly hold these gedolim to be gedolim and hold them in reverence and respect, but they may not necessarily hold by their psak in this matter. It’s the same way that you may hold a chassidishe rebbe in high esteem, you won’t necessarily follow his rulings. They have other rabbanim whose psak they follow in this matter.
The whole “your gadol < my gadol” thing is irrelevant- “the gedolim” may all be great, but if these people happen not to follow their psak in this matter, you’re working in different spheres.
Sam2: I don’t think Brony was arguing against your position, just against the position that evolution is made up.
My AP Bio class was taught evolution in much the same way. (Actually, evolution was an optional take-home unit in case anyone would get offended and not want to do it, but this should only be done at your own risk, as it comes up on the AP exam and you can’t exactly skip.)
Evolution isn’t even that hard to memorize just to put on the test- it’s pretty much intuitive, except for the terms.
Also- people who say that something’s just a “theory”- in science, the word theory does not mean what we think it means. When you think of something as a theory, a scientist would call it a hypothesis. Once a hypothesis is tested and accepted to be true, it’s called a theory, and it’s pretty much the same thing. (Not to be confused with a law, which is just a rule to which no exceptions have been found. Though they’re not to be confused, I have often done so anyway. I hate terminology.)
The problems:
Needs to be short and sweet- there’s a reason why OMHBH never caught on.
Needs to be in a language spoken by teenage girls- NOT YIDDISH.
2scents: If you live in Monsey, it’s dull as math class. I mean, oh my gosh! Measles in a grocery store I never shop at! A fixed election- never had one of THOSE before!
Yserbius: The ironic part is that the editor in chief lives in Monsey. If even he can’t come up with anything to write about…
jmh: great for avoiding knurdness (knurdity?)
This isn’t the thread for me to rave about how much I loved AP Bio, is it?
HaLeiVi: No, that’s just the only one that works that smoothly to explain :). The next highest register would be the same except that the D is different fingering.
I only started relatively recently, but I can play the low, middle, and up to G of the high register.
Yes, two flutes could each play half of the piano music, but what’s the point? I like playing by myself as well as with others.
Besides, lots of times piano music has those weird chord notations on it. I don’t play the piano, so I don’t really know a lot about what I’m talking about except that I’ve tried to use piano music occasionally and haven’t been able to.
The thing with drinking is that alcohol is both more accessible and less stigmatized. If you want to start a cigarette habit, you need to get the cigarettes from someone, which if you know where to go may not be so difficult, but you can’t walk up and take one yourself the way that any teenage boy can walk over to the drinks table and take a shot. Not only that, but you’ll always have those fathers who think it’s so cute or whatever to give their little kids alcohol (they drive me crazy)- if people think Tatty approves of that amount, well, this is only a bit more… It’s a bit of a gateway.
I said it then and I’ll say it now- how do they dig this stuff up? NOTHING HAPPENS IN MONSEY!
The flute keys aren’t like piano keys. There are fewer buttons than there are notes, so different combinations of keys (called fingering) are used to make different notes. The C scale goes from C (with only the left pinky) down to C (all fingers except right thumb, which just holds the flute up), with each lower note adding a finger on a key.
If that was more involved than you had in mind, sorry :).
tl;dr: Flutes only play one note at a time.
Do you know where any other songs are available (I don’t know that one)?
I’d especially appreciate only the melody line and NOT piano music (I play the flute and no, you can’t always just use the top line).
PBO: Sorry, I didn’t put that well. I meant that the null hypothesis would have to be rejected, meaning that I would obviously not regard that as a statistical result to take seriously. In my posts, I’ve been emphasizing that I talk about statistics that have already been proven valid.
DY: To draw a comparison to something going on in current events, let’s look at Myriad Genetics and its monopoly on the BRCA-1 and -2 genes. Why do people think that’s a problem? Because this company now has exclusive rights to the gene, so that they have no motivation to outdo anyone else to find a cure for breast cancer. In addition, no other company is able to look for a cure.
That, I feel, is basically what’s happening here. NASI takes over the airwaves, saying that the whole reason for the shidduch crisis is the age gap, period. You see it happening here- people say, well, maybe it could have something to do with this, and then others shoot it down screaming, “AGE GAP!” Now, every other possibility needs to fit within the framework of the age gap, and people are specifically focusing efforts on the age gap.
Another issue I have with all these limitations on dating bichlal is just that does this mean that anybody can marry anybody? I was under the impression that there is one bashert (maybe more at different stages according to some shittos), and let’s say your bashert is five years older than you, with this method you’ll never meet him/her. Perhaps this is just my misunderstanding the concept of bashert (which as I’m in eleventh grade doesn’t seem all that applicable to me yet… 🙂 ), but it’s something I don’t really understand. My parents are six years apart- if NASI had been encouraged back when they were dating they may never have met, and does that mean that they would never have gotten married or (scarier idea for me, at least) that they would have married other people?
PBA (sorry, PBO): When I say a scientific survey, I assume that statistical analyses have been performed, such as standard deviation and chi square. (Trust me, I’m an ex-AP Bioer- I know of what I speak…)
A study such as one you describe would never pass these tests, as you point out.
benignuman: Statistical tests such as the ones describe above could be helpful in disregarding a statistic WITHOUT just doing so because it feels right.
Just as an illustration of what I mean-
Let’s say the American divorce rate is 50%. But wait- where I live, I know of very few people who are divorced or who have been divorced? That, however, is because I live in the Orthodox Jewish community, and there are fewer divorces.
That, as I mentioned, is what I don’t like about NASI- they lump all problems together, when specialization to uncover the roots of the problem may be a better idea.
“I am not talking about some fictional scenarios like the one you painted. I am talking about in the real world today. Statistics are a useful way to analyzing evidence, but if they are contrary to widespread well known anecdotal evidence (even if that evidence has never been formally subject to a study) then the statistics should be rejected. My point is that while generally statistical evidence is superior to anecdotal evidence, that is not always the case.”
I used YOUR scenario. (Why would I randomly bring up chickens? Uuurgh.)
If anecdotal evidence differs from scientifically collected and analyzed data, the first thing to think shouldn’t be, “hey, the stats must be wrong.” The first thing to think should be “so WHY do conditions where I am completely counteract what the statistics say is typical?” Remember, we’re not talking about statistics pulled out of a hat- we’re presuming that someone went out and actually did take a scientific survey. (Which, of course, means that this whole conversation is completely ridiculous as there has been NO such study of the shidduch crisis.)
If such a survey was taken, and this counteracted YOUR PERSONAL ANECDOTAL EVIDENCE- well, that just means that you’re in the wrong place. Let’s say that in general, the study shows that 77% of girls get married within 3 years of sem. In your neighborhood, this is only the case in 34% of cases. All this means is that your neighborhood tends to fall more in the 23% of people who do NOT conform with the majority. That’s fine. The question is, WHY? Maybe your neighborhood has some particular issue that’s preventing its girls from getting married.
This is just an illustration, but in general, it’s not a good idea to throw away statistics because they really can be beneficial in narrowing down the problem.
My views on applying this to the shidduch crisis and NASI are above.
Love the title! Was the pun intended?
I’m gonna assume so, as I’m pretty sure it was something different before…
benignuman: If all my chickens died five minutes after I cut off their heads, and someone did a carefully controlled, randomly selected scientific study of chickens and found out that 77% of chickens last a week without their heads, then I’d conclude that all of my chickens are part of the 23%. Then I’d have to figure out- why MY chickens and not the chickens they chose? Am I taking care of them differently? Are mine the wrong breed?
The point is that once a statistical study emerges, the anecdotal evidence doesn’t necessarily cut it anymore.
What you’re talking about now (which is NOT what you said before) is that if you DON’T HAVE STATISTICS, anecdotal evidence works. Perhaps, but with ONLY anecdotal evidence you can’t be sure you’re reading your information correctly. You see the evidence of your own eyes, true, but you don’t know what’s the cause and what’s the effect- and that’s what I think is the problem with NASI, not so much that they’re necessarily WRONG (they may well be right for all I know) but that they think theirs is the ONLY right answer, which locks out so many other possibilities.
Yes, I know this is popa. But why OPRAH? Did I miss a good thread?
Bigger question: WHY?!?!
benignuman: That doesn’t make sense. Why would there be statistical evidence that chickens can live without a head if it wasn’t true? If you trust the source of the statistics, then you would have to believe that you’ve just seen those chickens that don’t survive that long.
One cannot prove that there are no black sheep by counting a million white sheep, but counting just one black sheep is enough to disprove the hypothesis.
My cousin was 19 and back from sem for about thirty seconds when she dated her first guy, her brother’s friend. (He was in his early twenties.) He decided to take her out to Dave and Buster’s, which was fine and dandy, until they walked through the door and into the bar for sodas, where my cousin was carded. I don’t think it occurred to them that they had alcohol. Since he wasn’t old enough to “chaperone” her, they got kicked out and went back to her house.
They are currently married :).
Speaking of which, because he was a family friend, they already knew each other, and one day before they started dating, when he was in town to date a different girl and didn’t have a car, my uncle decided to loan him their car. So he went over to their house to pick it up, and my cousin was the only one home (she was on her way to a wedding) so she went out to give him the keys. Their neighbor, who knew both of them very well, was on the porch, and when she saw them on the deck, all fancied up by the car with the keys, she shouted down, “So you’re finally going out! It’s about time!” They turned BEET RED and the guy jumped into the car and drove off, leaving the neighbor openmouthed, like “Was it something I said?”
She then proceeded to call my aunt, explain what happened, and ask why they hadn’t gone out already. The rest is history.
At the weddings I’ve been to, I think a lot of it had to do with how big the family parties were. At all of my cousins’ weddings, the pictures have been after the chuppah, because my extended family is quite small, so it was quick to take the pics. Non-family weddings I’ve been to, where the extended family is large, usually did things the way ds9 said.
I still have all my dolls from when I was a kid, but they’re mostly there for decoration (fancy china type) or just because if I put them in the basement they’d get thrown out. Also, like Vogue says, I want my kids to be able to have them later on if they want. I remember being little and finding all my mom’s old stuff from when she was a kid and thinking it was AMAZING, the coolest thing ever.
Imaginary friends? Now THAT’S weird.
Torah: While I don’t think that what Vogue describes is normal, aren’t you being a bit extreme?
Difference of opinion? Alternate view?
The shidduch crisis isn’t part of the Jewish religion. We have 613 mitzvos, and one of them is NOT “thou shalt freak out over the age gap.” That would seem to be even more bal tosif than the notion of needing to cover your face in front of men at your wedding.
/stupidreferencetodifferentthread
In short, duh no you’re not a kofer. You become a kofer, IMHO, when you believe so much in the shidduch crisis that you lose any hope of finding a shidduch and forget that it’s actually in the hands of Someone higher than statistics.
squeak: “My take is a bit different. Unfortunately, this is part of a larger problem of taking random stories and elevating them to Tziddukki Torah. Without context, the story must be taken literally and a kitchen receives the din of a ladies restroom. But most likely, what she intended to say was something along the lines of “I’ve got it this time”.”
I know, right? My aunt says the same thing- she doesn’t let her bochurim in the kitchen because she’s got it under control and she doesn’t need them underfoot. If you want to argue that she’s not on the level of Rebbetzin Kotler or something like that, and that she had some kind of a deep meaning behind it, then fine, but it’s not a mitzvah min hatorah.
Remember R’ Chiya used to cook food for his wife (apparently not on Shabbos only)- he would make her one thing and she would say she actually wanted something else.
Awww… thanks! 🙂
It’s cute! (Now that I finally figured out what it means…)
gaw: With all of that…STUFF in those things, what are the odds they’re kosher?
And they talk about fillers in regular hot dogs…
ItcheSrulik- Do they really?
I thought they were Israeli?!?!?
That’s really strange…
Mazal tov!!!
May you be zoche to build a true bayis ne’eman beyisrael!
HaKatan: Why would classical music not be a problem? Listen to that and tell me with a straight face that there’s no expression of the soul…
Harrys?!?!?