I have some things collecting in tabs, so here's a hodge-podge:

• First, border-crossing. You've probably heard by now that border control in the US has gotten aggressive, including demanding passwords for encrypted devices and then taking them out of view for an extended time. You don't have to give up your password, but if you don't, they can confiscate your device for weeks or months for "review". The rights you have against unreasonable search and seizure in the US are not the same as those you have at the border. While they can't deny entry to US citizens, they can to others.

• It's important to know what you don't know. David Director Friedman has an interesting idea about applying economics to teaching -- specifically, grading exams.

• A lot of the Rands article The New Manager Death-Spiral sounds very familiar.

• We all know one of the Internet rules: don't read the comments. The parts of the net I frequent tend to be better than, say, a random sample of YouTube, which is due to a mix of conscientious participants and comment moderation. A while back I came across a comment-moderation policy described as "Victorian Sufi Buddha Lite": they require a comment to be at least two of true, necessary, and kind.

• I'm not sure that philosophy applies to windshield notes, but they sure are funny.

• How do we know Humpty Dumpty is an egg? The rhyme doesn't say so. Huh, I never thought about that.

• Speaking of things I hadn't thought about, have you ever noticed the similarities between fantasy-adventurer settings and westerns?

Originally posted at http://cellio.dreamwidth.org/2001710.html. comments there. Reply there (preferred) or here.

Orlando had a couple of teeth pulled today. When I picked him up this afternoon, the vet tech warned me that because of the anesthesia he wouldn't be hungry. I said "Orlando not interested in food??". Orlando said "challenge accepted".

When we got home he raced to where the food dish should have been and glared at me until I corrected that. I gave him a small spoonful, and he gobbled it up and looked at me as if to say "oh, we're doing appetizers now before the entrees? Well, I'm ready for the meal now". So I gave him more and he happily ate it. (And kept it down. :-) )

Overachiever.

Originally posted at http://cellio.dreamwidth.org/2001425.html. comments there. Reply there (preferred) or here.

What'll they think of next? Google is leveraging its cloud-based technologies in helpful new ways. Maybe they'll do Seattle next.


Originally posted at http://cellio.dreamwidth.org/2001277.html. comments there. Reply there (preferred) or here.

The rabbis are discussing things that are and are not automatically included in a sale. If a man sells a house the sale includes the door, a mortar fixed in the ground, and the casing of a handmill, but does not by default include the key, a movable mortar, or the sieve used with the mill. If he sells a courtyard the sale includes the houses, pits, ditches, and caves attached to it, but not movables. (R' Eliezer disagrees, saying he sells only the courtyard.) If he sells an olive press, the sale includes certain parts but not others. (My knowledge of olive presses is inadequate.) In all of these cases, however, if he says "I sell you this (whatever) and all its contents", the sale includes all those items that would otherwise have been excluded. (65a-b, 67a-b)

When I bought my first house I learned that if the contract doesn't specify certain things, they're not included -- even if they seem to "go" with the house, like window blinds. This seems to be like that. (Keys are automatically included in my experience, though.)

Originally posted at http://cellio.dreamwidth.org/2000918.html. comments there. Reply there (preferred) or here.

The mishna turns to laws of privacy. If two houses share a courtyard, the owner of one may not place a door facing the other's door or a window facing the other's window, nor may he enlarge ones that are already present. On the side of the street, however, he may do so. Where do we learn the rule for privacy? The g'mara tells us: from the story of Bilaam, who lifted up his eyes and saw Israel dwelling according to their tribes. This indicates (the g'mara says) that he saw that their doors did not exactly face each other, and this caused him to say: worthy are these that the Divine presence should rest upon them! Why then is there an exception when the houses are across a street? Because the one can say to the other: you have to preserve your privacy from the eyes of those on the street anyway, so you might as well from me too. (60a)

I expected the "across the street" argument to be about distance. Here the argument is "I'm not making it any worse for you".

Originally posted at http://cellio.dreamwidth.org/2000439.html. comments there. Reply there (preferred) or here.

When I started using computers, keyboards were practically immortal. I stopped using my first keyboard when a couple keys physically broke such that I couldn't get the caps to stay on. My last couple keyboards have not fared so well.

I have an inxpensive Logitech keyboard. "Inexpensive" wasn't actually one of the governing criteria when shopping; I'm willing to pay for a keyboard that delivers higher quality. But what's locally available in stores tends to not be high-end, and I'm not going to spend real money on a keyboard I can't touch first.

The failure mode is irritating, though. My keyboard works fine in most respects, but... well, let me show you a picture:



I can actually live with the worn-off letters because I mostly touch-type. (I'm mystified by what's special about 'L' and 'O'. No, not gaming hotkeys.) But, as a touch-typist, I rely on those little ridges on the 'F' and 'J' keys to tell me that I'm oriented correctly. In the days of typewriters that didn't matter much as you almost never took your hands off the keys, but with a mouse on one side and sometimes a drink on the other, plus things like arrow keys and paging keys, it's pretty essential to the way I use a computer.

My 'J' ridge is gone. And 'F' isn't doing so well either. WTF? That's supposed to be molded plastic!

(I'm open to suggestions, though keyboards are a matter of personal taste so I don't expect them. I require keys that actually have some depth to them; I hate the Mac flat keyboards, which is why I'm using a generic keyboard with my Mac. I also require "not clicky"; typing on anything makes some noise, but I want a quiet one as much as is feasible and definitely not one of the old-style extra-loud ones. I don't care about special keys or even, most of the time, function keys; you'll notice the pristine state of those keys in the photo, cat hair aside. I would prefer that Escape be full-sized. I need the little legs that raise the back of the keyboard.)

Originally posted at http://cellio.dreamwidth.org/2000164.html. comments there. Reply there (preferred) or here.

Earlier in this tractate the talmud discussed that it takes three years to take possession of someone else's property by occupying it. Now the mishna tells us: this rule of three years applies only to occupiers, but not to recipients of a gift or an inheritance (or those taking the property of a deceased proseylte, which is more complicated and I'm hand-waving it away today). The g'mara explains that the rule of three years applies when the acquirer has to make a plea -- if the original owner says "I did not sell it" and the occupier says "I bought it", that's an example of needing to make a plea and thus requiring three years. But a claim requires no plea in the case of a gift or an inheritance;, and all the occupier has to do to establish his claim is to start to build a fence or a door. (A modern equivalent might be changing the locks.) The g'mara then goes on to discuss how much he has to build in order for it to count. (52b)

Today's daf is 53.

Originally posted at http://cellio.dreamwidth.org/2017/03/16/bava-batra-52.html. comments there. Reply there (preferred) or here.

One machine-learning technique is to pit evolving neural networks against each other in cage matches and then learn from the results. This is called Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs).

At yesterday's Purim festivities somebody described the following cutting-edge research, and I remembered just enough keywords to be able to find the paper later:

Stopping GAN Violence: Generative Unadversarial Networks
Samuel Albanie, Sébastien Ehrhardt, João F. Henriques

While the costs of human violence have attracted a great deal of attention from the research community, the effects of the network-on-network (NoN) violence popularised by Generative Adversarial Networks have yet to be addressed. In this work, we quantify the financial, social, spiritual, cultural, grammatical and dermatological impact of this aggression and address the issue by proposing a more peaceful approach which we term Generative Unadversarial Networks (GUNs). Under this framework, we simultaneously train two models: a generator G that does its best to capture whichever data distribution it feels it can manage, and a motivator M that helps G to achieve its dream. Fighting is strictly verboten and both models evolve by learning to respect their differences. The framework is both theoretically and electrically grounded in game theory, and can be viewed as a winner-shares-all two-player game in which both players work as a team to achieve the best score. Experiments show that by working in harmony, the proposed model is able to claim both the moral and log-likelihood high ground. Our work builds on a rich history of carefully argued position-papers, published as anonymous YouTube comments, which prove that the optimal solution to NoN violence is more GUNs.

I haven't read the full paper yet, but on a quick skim it does not disappoint. More info.

I'm delighted to see that the paper was submitted to SIGBOVIK 2017. I had no idea that Dr. Bovik had his own SIG.

ETA: Not only was that paper submitted to SIGBOVIK, but SIGBOVIK is a real thing. How did I not know about this gem from my alma mater? (Sadly, this year's conference starts at 5PM on a Friday, which would be challenging. Maybe I'll have better luck next year.)

Originally posted at http://cellio.dreamwidth.org/2017/03/13/gan-violence.html. comments there. Reply there (preferred) or here.

The talmud is (still) discussing adverse possession of property, chazakah. Last time we talked about real-estate; now we're talking about other property. We learn in the mishna that a craftsman (making repairs, for example) has no chazakah, and the g'mara discusses this at some length. Rabbah argues that this means only the case where the owner delivered the item to the craftsman in the presence of witnesses. If, instead, he delivered the item without witnesses, then the craftsman can say without fear of contradiction that he never had it or that somebody else gave this item to him. Or he might make the more probable claim that he (the craftsman) purchased the item, and in this case we believe him. According to Rabbah, determination of the owner's claim depends entirely on whether the owner has witnesses to the original transaction. Others, however, will argue that he has to see his item in the craftsman's hands; Rabbah would say that if he delivered it and the craftsman then hid or disposed of it, the owner has a claim. Others would say he does not have a claim if he hasn't actually seen it. (45a-b)

Today's daf is 46.

Originally posted at http://cellio.dreamwidth.org/2017/03/09/bava-batra-45.html. comments there. Reply there (preferred) or here.

The talmud is discussing hazakah, adverse possession of property. The general principle is that if you occupy somebody else's property long enough and the owner doesn't protest, you can claim ownership. The g'mara records a dispute about whether the owner has to make his protest directly to the occupier (as opposed, say, to going to a court). It records one argument that says that taking possession of a fugitive's property does not confer hazakah, and this is because the fugitive can't very well return to make his protest. But another says you can possess a fugitive's property.

Another argument says that the reason we allow three years for the objection if the owner is overseas is that we need to allow time for him to first hear about it and then return; if he could make his protest from where he is, we wouldn't need to allow time for him to return. Raba says the law is that you do not need to protest in the presence of the occupier (that part about returning from overseas is just good advice), because "your friend has a friend and your friend's friend has a friend" -- in other words, we're relying on the rumor mill to get word to the occupier that the owner has protested.

And what is a valid protest? If he says "So-and-so is a robber", this is not sufficient. If he says "So-and-so is a robber who has seized my land wrongfully and I'm going to sue him tomorrow", that's a valid protest. He must make this protest in front of either two or three people (there's a dispute about that), and he must not bar them from spreading the word. (38b-39a)

Originally posted at http://cellio.dreamwidth.org/2017/03/02/bava-batra-39.html. comments there. Reply there (preferred) or here.

It's the season of Purim Torah on Mi Yodeya. Here are some of my favorites:

From this year:

• My answer to a question asking what Birkat Amazon is and what giving thanks after a meal has to do with amazon.com

• What are we supposed to do about losing an hour of Purim this year? (I answered that one too)

• Why do we shake four heretics on Sukkot? (on Sukkot we shake the "four species", different plants; the word for "species" resembles the word for heretics)

• Can one go back in time to complete a minyan?

And some from past years:

• Perl programming in the Torah

• Surviving the zombie apocalypse

• Using the Force on Shabbat

• Rejecting others' friend requests on Facebook

• And one I had a lot of fun answering, Why don't Jews accept Our Lord and Savior?

There are a lot more where those came from, and the season continues for about the next two weeks.

Originally posted at http://cellio.dreamwidth.org/2017/02/28/purim-torah.html. comments there. Reply there (preferred) or here.

Today I got the following notification on my Android phone, allegedly from Google:



I haven't typed my Google password on my phone recently, nor has my account changed. Hmm. I saw a few possibilities:

1. Google legitimately wants me to re-enter my password, but their notice is wrong.

2. Phishing, though there's no obvious vector (no recent apps or suspicious web sites).

3. Compromised account, though that seemed very unlikely. (I use a very strong password for Google.)

When I got home (and thus to another computer) I verified that #3 was not the case. I then began searching for explanations for this notice. I had a wisdom of the ancients moment -- people have been having this problem since at least 2014, but no solutions were extant. I saw enough to decide that the notice really was from Google (so, #1) and re-entered my password, and lo, email returned to my phone.

So what was that? It's ok with me if Google wants to require re-authentication periodically on small, stealable devices with access to significant personal information, but if that's what happened, couldn't they tell us?

Originally posted at http://cellio.dreamwidth.org/1998656.html. comments there. Reply there (preferred) or here.

I disbelieve. How is he going to maintain connectivity while changing the battery? That takes a couple minutes (including the reboot time). He needs a whole spare phone!

Originally posted at http://cellio.dreamwidth.org/1998431.html. comments there. Reply there (preferred) or here.

The g'mara on today's daf discusses two cases of disputed ownership. In the first case, a man said to another: "what are you doing on my land?" The other said "I bought it from you; here's the deed of sale". The first said it's a forgery; the second then said to Rabbah "yes it's a forgery; I had a real deed and lost it". Rabbah rules in favor of the man occupying the land, saying why would he lie? He could have claimed the deed is genuine; since he instead told us this story about having had a deed, we accept his lesser claim. But R' Yosef objected, saying it's mere clay (and he's admitted it!). Rabbah wins this round.

In the second case, a man said to another: "pay me the hundred zuz you owe me; here's the bond". The second says "that's forged". The first again told Rabbah that yes it's a forgery but he had a real one before. Rabbah again says "why would he lie?". And R' Yosef again says it's mere clay. R' Yosef wins this round.

What's the difference between the two cases? R' Idi b. Amin says in the land we follow Rabbah because we say "let the land remain in its present ownership", and in the money we follow R' Yosef because we also say "let the money remain in its present ownership". It's not about land verses money; possession, according to this g'mara, determines the outcome absent proof. (32b)

Originally posted at http://cellio.dreamwidth.org/2017/02/23/bava-batra-32.html. comments there. Reply there (preferred) or here.

Can you believe that I've been online since the ARPAnet and yet, in 2017, do not know the nuts and bolts of domain-name management? Perhaps you, dear reader, will point me toward the clues, and I promise not to be offended that you're quietly snickering there.

The recent LJ upheaval is far from the first signal that really, if you care about durable links, you need to own your own domain, but it's the one that's finally gotten through to me. Instead of relying on Livejournal or Dreamwidth or Medium or whomever else to provide a durable path to my stuff, I ought to control that, so if a service goes belly-up, the old, public URLs still work (with content migrated elsewhere).

What (I think) I would like (please tell me if this is flawed): some domain -- I'll use cellio.org as my example, though that one is taken so I'll need another -- where www.cellio.org points to my ISP-provided web content (which I can easily edit), blog.cellio.org points to my DW journal, medium.cellio.org points to my Medium page, and I can set up other redirects like that as needed. So I can't do anything about links that are already out there, but I can give out better URLs for future stuff (stop the bleeding, in other words). Bonus points if the durable URL stays in the URL bar instead of being rewritten (unlike pobox.com redirects), but that might be hard.

I do not want to run my own web server.

Now I already pay pobox.com for, among things, URL redirection, but it's to a single destination. And it's not at the domain level -- www.pobox.com/~cellio redirects to my ISP-provided web space. It'd be ok, though a little kludgy, if I could manufacture URLs like www.pobox.com/~cellio/blog that do what I described above, but unless there's something I can drop into my own web space, without requiring access to my ISP's web server, I don't think I can do that. Also, this leaves me dependent on pobox.com; owning my own domain sounds like a better idea. pobox.com has been solidly reliable for 20+ years, but what about the next 20?

I understand that I need to (a) buy a domain and (b) host it somewhere, and if I were running my own server then (b) would apparently be straightforward, but I don't know how to do that in this world of distributed stuff and redirects. Also, I'm not really clear on how to do (a) correctly (reliably, at reasonable cost, etc).

So, err, is this a reasonable thing to want to do and, if so, what should I do to make it happen?

Originally posted at http://cellio.dreamwidth.org/2017/02/19/domains.html. comments there. Reply there (preferred) or here.

Me: What do we need, that is available from Amazon, that costs $4.02?
Dani: Is this what's known as a first-world problem?
Me: Not the most egregious I've seen, but yeah.

Free shipping: modifying buyer behavior since...whenever they started that. But it works because of their enormous catalogue; you can find something to fill out an order. (For personal orders this is pretty much never a problem, but I was buying house stuff and thus using shared money.)

(This post is a minimal test of Dreamwidth's Markdown support. Let's see what happens.)

Originally posted at http://cellio.dreamwidth.org/1997794.html. comments there. Reply there (preferred) or here.

We have already discussed restrictions near a property line, if what you do on your property can cause damage to your neighbor's property. On today's daf, the mishna says that carrion, graves, and tanyards (tanneries) must be kept 50 cubits from a town (on account of the smell), and a tanyard must be placed only on the east side of the town. Rabbi Akiva, however, says it may be placed on any side except the west, provided it is kept 50 cubits away.

The g'mara then discusses R' Akiva's restriction. When he makes an exception for the west, is he saying that you can build closer there (the 50-cubit restriction applies only to the other directions), or is he saying you can't build there at all? The latter: R' Akiva says that the west is a "constant abode". Well, that just raises more questions -- a constant abode for what?

Shall we say it is the constant abode of winds? No, because there are four winds. No, it's the constant abode of the Shekhina (the divine presence), as it says in Nechemiah 9:6: "and the host of heaven worships You" -- meaning that the sun and the moon in the east bow down to the Shekhina in the west. R' Aha bar Yaakov objects, saying that this means when the sun and moon are setting, i.e. are in the west, so they bow to the Shekhina in the east. R' Oshaya objects to both of them, saying the Shekhina is everywhere, and R' Sheshet agrees with him. R' Abbahu then argues that the Shekhina is in the west because 'Uryah, a word meaning "evening", is equivalent to avir Yah, meaning "air of God". (25a)

Not addressed here: what about the next town to the east? Fine, I place a tannery to the west of my town to avoid putting it in my west, but haven't I then put it in theirs (if there's a town there)? And is it really unlimited distance, or is it more "out of sight (smell), out of mind"?

Also, the sun and moon might bow toward the west (according to some), but when we pray we humans bow toward Jerusalem because that is the "divine seat", so to speak. For me, that's eastward (and south some).

Originally posted at http://cellio.dreamwidth.org/1997529.html. comments there. Reply there (preferred) or here.

A few days ago I wrote about the first session of a class applying talmudic reasoning to modern legal cases. The first class covered cases of unintended benefit: somebody, in the process of committing a crime, accidentally causes benefit to the victim -- does he deserve leniency? I noted that the class gives CLE credits and wondered in passing how that worked; why would the American Bar Association care about Jewish law, interesting as it is?

I've now had a chance to read an essay that was an appendix to the class materials, and that essay did a good job of drawing connections. I also learned a new term from it, "moral luck", which I gather is a term of art in some circles. (I'm not sure why "moral" exactly.) Example: a driver recklessly races down the road and hits a pedestrian. Another driver, equally reckless and speedy, almost hits a pedestrian but the pedestrian manages to jump out of the way. In both cases the drivers had the same intent and behavior; it's only that the second one got lucky and didn't hit anybody. But even though the drivers were the same, one will be punished much more severely than the other; the one who didn't hit anybody benefited from "moral luck".

We saw this in the case of the fisherman who saves a child from drowning. The sages in the talmud disagree about whether he is nonetheless liable for violating Shabbat (he didn't even know about the child so had no intent to save him); later the halacha is determined as I described in the previous post.

The essay then contrasts this with how US criminal courts operate. Courts deal in crimes, the author notes, and not primarily in outcomes (caveats to follow). It notes that in criminal law the interested party is the state; criminal law doesn't much care about victims per se. Because a criminal case is prosecuted on behalf of the whole community (bundled up into the state), a positive outcome for the victim isn't very important. Laws are about establishing the rules of society, in which smashing car windows to steal laptops from inside just isn't ok. (Smashing a car window because you saw the dog that was going to die from heatstroke is different, and not addressed.)

However, the essay goes on to note, prosecutors have discretion in whether to bring charges and which charges to bring. Further, there is wiggle room come sentencing time (assuming a conviction), and victim impact statements are often allowed.

While it appears that intent is secondary to action -- we prosecute for what people do, not what people want to do, and that's how the one reckless driver evades penalties -- the concept of punishing intention isn't absent from American law. We have laws about "hate crimes", which is purely a matter of judging intent. (I have, I think, written in the past about how I think these well-intentioned laws are nonetheless flawed. Thought-crime laws give me pause, and laws that seem to value different victims of the same crimes differently seem pretty iffy to me. But they're a thing, and they're a thing that's probably not going to go away.)

That's all about criminal law. The essay then turns to torts, which are between people (not the state) and involve the payment of damages. It uses the legal principle of "reasonable foreseeability" to argue that the thieves get no leniency for saving the dog because they didn't reasonably know about the dog, but then contrasts this analysis with the "eggshell skull" case, in which if you accidentally gravely injured/killed someone because of his unusual medical state (which you could not foresee) when you only meant to hurt him a little, you're held liable nonetheless. It appears that under American law you can't benefit but can be liable if consequences are not foreseeable.

The essay, written for the class and with many citations, is by Menachem Sandman, an attorney from New Haven, CT.

It's possible, perhaps probable, that the lawyers taking this class for CLE credits knew all that already, but a lot of it was new to this non-lawyer and I'm glad to have the additional context. It looks like each lesson has an accompanying essay of this sort -- cool!

Originally posted at http://cellio.dreamwidth.org/1997136.html. comments there. Reply there (preferred) or here.

I've taken a few classes put on by the Jewish Learning Institute (they teach concurrently in many locations worldwide) and am currently taking this one. The title is "The Dilemma", and they describe it as: modern dilemmas, talmudic debates, your solutions. Each class looks at a group of real incidents around some theme, after which we discuss what principles ought to apply before delving into relevant texts (talmud and later commentaries). It's a pretty neat class, though I keep identifying aspects of the problems that aren't the core point of the lesson and thus get set aside.

In the first class, the theme was cases where someone in the process of committing a crime does unexpected good -- should he be treated more leniently because of that? The cases were:

1. A terrorist attacks someone, stabbing him in the gut but not killing him. The victim is rushed to the ER, where doctors find a cancerous tumor that would have killed him within the year.

2. On a hot day, thieves smash a car window to steal the laptop sitting on the front seat, allowing a dog inside to escape the heat that would have killed him.

3. Civil law prohibits possession of alcohol, but someone nonetheless keeps a private stash. A disapproving neighbor smashes his kegs. Later that day, the civil authorities conduct a surprise inspection but find nothing with which to charge the person.

I noted that the three cases had different types of unintended benefits -- saving a human life, saving an animal's life, and saving money (the fine that wasn't paid). (On the transgression side, one is against a human life and the other two are against property. We were mostly focused on the benefit side, not this side.) I also noted that there were three types of culpability on the part of the victim -- the guy with the alcohol was knowingly violating local laws, the guy with the laptop recklessly endangered the dog, and the terror victim was an innocent bystander. I thought that both of these axes of variation would be relevant to the discussion, but that's not where the class went.

We then talked about some other cases, most significantly a passage from the talmud about a man who goes fishing on Shabbat and inadvertently catches in his net a child that had fallen into the water, thus saving the child from drowning. Fishing is not allowed on Shabbat, but saving a life takes priority over Shabbat laws. Does saving the child bring him any leniency for violating Shabbat? If he knew about the child there would be no question; pikuach nefesh trumps Shabbat. But in the case of an accident? The talmud rules that it's pikuach nefesh, saving a life, even if you didn't intend it, and so the fisherman is not guilty of violating Shabbat.

(Rabbi: "What do we learn from this?" Me: "If you're going to fish on Shabbat, have a child on hand to throw in." Rabbi: "..." What? It reminded me of always mount a scratch monkey. But I digress.)

From there we talked about applications, and learned that if the act itself causes the positive outcome then there is leniency -- for example, breaking the window to steal the laptop and freeing the dog -- but if the benefit comes only later, it doesn't. So the knife-wielding attacker doesn't get any leniency for the cancer discovery, and the person who destroyed his neighbor's alcohol stash owes him damages.

There was more, and also some material in the book that we didn't get to and that I haven't read yet. I don't claim to have learned all the answers, but it was an engaging class.

The second class was about taking the law into your own hands -- for example, you know that that guy right there is the one who just stole your iPhone and he's about to hop into a cab, so can you physically intervene? More on that later, I hope. (I had to miss the end of this class so I'm waiting for the recording, plus there are materials I need to read yet.)

This class gives CLE credits, which kind of mystifies me, so a lot of the students are lawyers. Apparently I fit in with them, dress aside. I'm not sure how talmudic studies help one be better at practicing Pennsylvania law, but if I were a lawyer I'd be tickled to be able to satisfy a professional requirement through torah study.

I was discussing this class in Mi Yodeya's chat room and somebody mentioned the book Veha'arev Na, which collects things like this -- real, modern question with Jewish-law interpretation. That sounds like something I would quite enjoy.

Followup post

Originally posted at http://cellio.dreamwidth.org/1996860.html. comments there. Reply there (preferred) or here.

The talmud now turns to things that, while done on your property, can encroach on your neighbors and so are further restricted. The mishna lists several things that must be set back at least three handbreadths from your neighbor's wall, including ditches, olive refuse, dung, salt, lime, and flint-stones, unless he plasters them. (In the case of the ditch it means plastering the sides so it can't erode and undermine the wall; it's not clear to me how plastering would apply to the others.) The g'mara then asks: it says his wall; does this mean that if there is no wall he can place these right up against the property line? No, they still have to be set back, but the mishna mentions a wall because these are all things that can damage a wall if in contact. The mishna also lists mill-stones; here the reason in the g'mara is that the vibration from milling can cause damage (and there is no plastering contingency). Ovens, too, because of the heat. The g'mara then adds that one may not open a bakery or a dyer's shop under another's storehouse, nor place a cowshed there, though if the cowshed was there first he may keep it. (17a mishna, 18a g'mara)

Originally posted at http://cellio.dreamwidth.org/1996707.html. comments there. Reply there (preferred) or here.

Hey, Dreamwidth folks... I've syndicated Universe Factory, the blog of the Worldbuilding Stack Exchange community, here on DW. We started the blog late in 2015; you can see a complete list of posts, including some from me.

Some specific links:

- Fight Earnestly and Hit Them in the Gaps, two articles from a HEMA (Historic European Martial Arts) student.

- Articles on generating rivers, using cellular automata to generate terrain (yes, like in Game of Life), and using distortion fields to generate continents. I believe the author of this series is our first contributor who found us via Medium instead of via Stack Exchange.

- An article on calculating political power.

- Building a Truly Alien Alien.

- When Am I? Navigation for Time Travelers

That's all in the last two months. Among older articles, you might enjoy:

- Building the World of Pangaea, an interview I did with Michael Burstein (mabfan) about the worldbuilding behind a shared-world anthology he was part of (edited by Michael Jan Friedman). That reminds me: wasn't book 2 supposed to be out around now?

- Nature's Oven, a short story.

- Worldbuilding As You Go: A Case Study, which is about how I approached writing The Sisters' War (Chapter 1, summary of the story so far).

- What if the world was (completely) round?

- My Revelation for RPGs series (link is to the index).

Originally posted at http://cellio.dreamwidth.org/1996317.html. comments there. Reply there (preferred) or here.

The g'mara spends a couple pages discussing tzedakah and charity. On today's daf we get the following story: it is said of King Monobaz (a foreign king in the first century CE who embraced Judaism) that he distributed all the hoards of wealth he accumulated, and also the hoards he inherited, in years of scarcity. His brothers and other members of the household objected, saying "your fathers saved money and added to the treasury, and you are squandering it". He answered: my fathers stored up below and I am storing up above. My fathers stored in a place that can be tampered with, and I store in a place that cannot be tampered with. My fathers stored something that produces no fruits, while I have stored something that does produce fruits (reward in the world to come). My fathers gathered treasures of money, but I gather treasures of souls. My fathers gathered for this world, and I gather for the world to come. (He brings proof-texts for each of these statements.) (11a)

Originally posted at http://cellio.dreamwidth.org/1996223.html. comments there. Reply there (preferred) or here.

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.

Originally posted at http://cellio.dreamwidth.org/1995955.html. comments there. Reply there (preferred) or here.

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.

Originally posted at http://cellio.dreamwidth.org/1995750.html. comments there. Reply there (preferred) or here.

We previously (2 days ago) learned in the mishna: if a man lends money to his fellow he may take a pledge (collateral), but only through the court and there are restrictions. If the debtor possessed two articles, the lender may take one and must leave one. He must return the pillow by night and the plough by day. However, if the debtor dies, he does not need to return the pledge to his heirs. The g'mara further expounds that the debtor retains his basic standard of living; a rich man must be allowed to keep the comforts he's used to.

Now on today's daf we learn: a man may not take a pledge from a widow at all, whether she is rich or poor. That is the mishna, but R' Shimon says in the g'mara that he can take a pledge from a rich widow but not a poor one. This is because you must return the poor person's pledge each night (for a garment). That's ok in the case of a male debtor, but if a man shows up at a widow's house every night to return her pledge, that looks bad in front of the neighbors, who won't know it's to return a pledge and just see a man visiting every night. Therefore we just don't allow taking the pledge in the first place for a poor widow, but a rich widow wouldn't need to have the pledge returned each night so that's ok. (113a, 115a)

The g'mara here does not consider changing circumstances. I speculate that R' Shimon would require the man to return the pledge (and then not retake it) if the rich widow had a change of circumstances.

Originally posted at http://cellio.dreamwidth.org/1995377.html. comments there. Reply there (preferred) or here.