Weaponized Hurricanes!

What Dave does, and where he's headed tomorrow, actually -apparently along with "throngs" of other physics students each summer? I asked him about this (a quote from the article) and he said, "Yeah, all ten of us..." Posted it for ya, dude. 

I've been reading another Leon Kass book. This one, Toward a More Natural Science, was written quite a while ago, 1985. He mainly addresses issues of bioethics - genetic manipulation and research, in vitro and test-tube babies, how long to prolong life, etc. His overall approach is probably summed up here: "I wish to suggest that before deciding what to do, one should try to understand the implications of doing or not doing. The first task, it seems to me, is not to ask 'moral or immoral' or 'right or wrong?" but to try to understand fully the meaning and significance of the proposed actions." Agreed. Several other times he indicates that his feeling about much scientific research (especially the bio-medical field) is that it is racing ahead without any direction or reflection. So, like any good Jewish discussion, this book gives the reader many more questions than answers - but they are very good and instructive questions. Maybe there's something in all of these book for my High holiday sermons. Hah!

"And now for something completely different" I'm going to try to read Julia Child's My Life in France - while I wait for Elie Wiesel's book on Rashi to come, and before Mom comes to visit and I pass the JC to her. 

Links, of varied topics:

Dave is further ahead in West's book, and apparently it's a page-turner. 

Morocco acknowledges the Holocaust?

The Israel Test.  "Do you admire and emulate excellence and accomplishment, even if it excels your own? Or do you envy and resent it? And try to tear it down?"

Onion News!

Remember my buffet of books? 

Over the weekend I finished Leon Kass's The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfection of our Nature. I'd highly recommend this as a first Kass book to read because - 1) it's his shortest 2) food is almost always a naturally enjoyable topic 3) it gives a sampling of the way Kass does philosophy without getting too far into the weeds, as happens in the book of his that I'm now reading - Toward a More Natural Science. 

The way that humans eat is, indeed, pretty striking when compared with any other member of the animal kingdom. And Kass proposes that the way we eat - our customs, taste preferences, manners, preparation, etc - can tell us much about our humanity. We enjoy good conversation with our food. We take time to prepare it (bread, for example, which is often synonymous with food). We bring the food to our mouths, rather than bringing our faces down to it. All of these things were fascinating as Kass brought them to my attention. 

I also like how he hits hard on the necessity and benefit of good manners and conversation skills. "Far from being an escape from the serious demands of life, witty and convivial dining - a species of high play - pays tribute to the meaningfulness of human life and its possibilities for community, freedom, and nobility - all in the act of sustaining life through nourishment. Further, the detachment needed for wit and laughter is akin to that needed for seeking truth, and the free play of the mind in conversation often provides food for deeper thought."

And: "Not surprisingly, incivility, insensitivity, and ingratitude learned at the family table can infect all other aspects of one's life. Conversely, good habits and thoughtful attitudes regarding food and eating will have far-reaching benefits. Self-restraint and self-command, consideration for others, politeness, fairness, and the art of friendly conversation, enrich and ennoble all of human life...A blessing offered over the meal still fosters a fitting attitude toward the world, who gracious bounty is available to us and not because we merit it..."

Food for thought. Har. Well, someone was going to say it at some point, anyway. Dr. Kass makes great points. 

Dr. Kass does delve briefly into "sanctified eating," that is, laws of kashrut. There is not much in that chapter that was new or surprising to me (though, again, I didn't disagree with any of it). That's probably because I had read these two articles at some point, and there is much in between the three discussions that is very similar. The second one even quotes Kass's book extensively, and approvingly. 

Robert Alter on kashrut. 

Meir Soloveitchik on kashrut. 

More links? Okay. 

Terry Teachout wrote an opera? Who's going to write the review? 

The Folk Song Army has got a turncoat. 

Jews and Christians. Very interesting. 

A perfect morning: Finally the sun came out (where be my summer? Newport doesn't exactly have my version of Beach Weather, eithe) and I got in a beautiful walk, then got to sit on my balcony and pick from a veritable buffet of excellent books: Leon Kass's The Hungry Soul, Robert Altar's The David Story, and maybe some of Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism that I have been perusing over dinner lately. 

No summaries yet, but I do highly recommend the Kass book already. Especially the chapter on table manners and conversation. People. You know who you are. 

And in the Fascism last night, I came across this: "Utopia clearly reflected the influence of Georges Sorel's syndicalism on Mussolini's thinking...Sorel was deeply influenced by the Pragmatism of William James, who pioneered the notion that all one needs is the 'will to believe.' It was James' benign hope to make room for religion in a burgeoning age of science simply by arguing that any religion that worked for the believer was not merely valid but 'true'...

Aaaah! Dad, you were right. William James was the intellectual starting point for some pretty bad progressivism. Well, at least I wasn't totally won over, either. 

Some inspiring links:

Israel.

More Israel. 

Vatican City. 

Shabbat Shalom. 

A few morning work-ups....

Sorry, Dave, no idea how to categorize this one, except maybe under fantastic headline. 

Unsurprising about the URJ and the ZOA, but disheartening/depressing all the same. 

Probably of random interest to most, but helpful for me - at my chaplain training course, I expressed my own dumb surprise when one candidate identified himself as Anglican. I asked my buddy - aren't those called Episcopalians over here? Guess not. 

More to follow later - have a blessed day, all. Pictures! You want pictures? 

Links

I've got a lot of different books on the reading table right now and some waiting to be picked up from the library. I just finished Embedded by Wesley Gray and have started on The Strongest Tribe by Bing West - looking forward to comparing the two, and getting Dave's take as well (Dave, I hear, has the distinction of being the very first person to check out Bing West's book from the Stanford Library). 

So far it seems that Gray and West do have some similar take away lessons: it was a big mistake to disband the Iraqi Army, Iraqis do things very differently than Americans, and bureaucratic miscommunication at the top levels of the military has disastrous effects. 

I thought Bing's book would be a lot drier than Gray's more colorful "sea story" style of writing, but so far I'm wrong. 

One might ask: you're going to be a rabbi. Allright, probably one who is indeed in the military, but why would any rabbi need or want to read all these books about OIF? Shouldn't I put em all down and read some Rashi?

I've got a couple of reasons: One is that because so many other Reform rabbis have taken it upon themselves to preach politics from the pulpit, I feel an extra incentive to be truly informed about those topics. Second, OIF and Afghanistan are the major wars of my life so far. It would be pretty silly to find someone who lived through, say WWII and all that person could say was "Yeah, something to do with the Germans...and the Japanese, but I don't really know how they fit in exactly, and um...." I figure, I have a college education and am in graduate school - if I'm going to be considered an educated person I should at least make an attempt to be reasonably informed about what's happening in the world. And ten minutes of network morning news while drinking my coffee does not count for anything. That's like eating a Flintstones gummy vitamin and saying you have a balanced diet. 

But, anyway, I DO have some links that could fall under the topic heading "Jewish." (Dave has advised that I try to label my posts, to give some sort of context for the following links). 

The book comes out mid-August and I've ordered it. 

Great question, Mr. P! 352 pages, eh? No pithy Hillel-style on-one-foot answer? Well, looking forward to it, nonetheless.  I'm sure quite a lifetime of research was involved. 

I did not know much about this organization before. I have to say, Ms. Chesler's association with it certainly raises my level of interest, because from what I've read, she is not your typical "feminist" - she tends to be concerned with extremely important and very real womens' issues, like stoning and such in Sharia-dominated countries. 

Hopefully more to follow as I once again have my internet access. It was pretty spotty at the "Chalet" aka bachelor officer quarters of Navsta Newport. 

ExPML->getVal(0, i, k, j +fsi)

Indexing in a three dimensional space leads to headaches, but when its done, it works. Glorious.

So what's all this squiggly stuff bouncing around the screen? More electromagnetic wave simulation using a finite difference time domain method (FDTD). What makes this so special? This modulated gaussian pulse is propagating in modeled free space, mostly, that is there are no absorbing or reflective materials in this small modeled domain. However, the modeled space is "coated" with a Perfectly Matched Layer (PML). This means that once the waves reach the boundary of the modeled space, there's extra stuff added to absorb the incident waves. It is much like making an anechoic chamber. There are a bunch of special constants that have to be set and accumulators that have to kept track of so as to just perfectly attenuate the incident waves.

If you read the title properly, you'll discover what has kept this simulation from running properly for the last few days.



Also interesting to note is that the dipole radiation pattern is clearly visible in this brief simulation.

Tour Season

We are well into this year's Tour De France. It started back on July 4. So far, the Americans are doing quite well. Lance, believe it or not, is in second in the GC, only milliseconds behind the current leader. Thanks to an impressive effort by Team Astana (Lance's Team), folks from Team Astana dominate the GC, like Contador, Leipheimer, and Kloden.

Interestingly they just rode through some of the small amount of territory I have ridden in Europe. How exciting. Here are the results of Stage 6, Girona to Barcelona. While I haven't done all of this particular ride, I have done bits and pieces of it, probably more of the climbing out near Girona. There's a very pretty road up there that snakes along the cliffed-out coast overlooking the Mediterranean.

Outside Girona, Jesse discovers that Powerbar + CamelBak != Crepe + brandy.

Tomorrow, they race all the way out of Spain, through Andorra. There will be some climbing involved to get up to the Pyrenees.

Here's another race, that sounds like oodles of fun: Breckenridge Epic. While I'm perhaps glad to not have to ride at 10,000+ft, it is undoubtedly beautiful up there.

Happy Fourth!

So, ten-hour days of instruction (oh, and then there's PT before that....) at the chaplains school in Navsta Newport have left precious little time for reading anything. Wait, that's untrue. I have been reviewing SECNAVINST 1730 in all its beautiful iterations for a few hours each day. And if I tire of that, I can always turn to the Marine Corps or Coast Guard instructions as well. Or the MILPERSMAN. Sound off if you LMA. (love military acronyms). 

BUT we do get three day liberty this week so I've been sleeping and eating lots of fresh fish and catching up on some reading. 

I liked this piece on the sacred nature of marriage. 

Gardening Moms. Gave me a whole new appreciation of my own mom's masterful artwork in the yard. 

This review was pretty informative just on its own. It also stands in contrast to this. The latter, I thought, was not very well done at all - far too anecdotal, for one, without any real data to back it up. Because of that, it comes across as some cranky old guy who doesn't understand "young people today." Well, how is that anything new and/or interesting? 

I mentioned Kirsch's review here because I find it odd that Myers (the author of the second link) didn't seem to do very much extensive research. If he did, he might have mentioned Tablet's website. Are they all irreverent hipsters? 

And a saved round: Myers' mention of Matisyahu in the hipster context shows Myers' own ignorance. Matisyahu identifies himself as some sort of neo-Hasid and refrains from performing on the Sabbath. If Heeb magazine publishes borderline porn, they are not exactly the same sort. 

And I have to say I wasn't much impressed by this article, either. Just seemed sort of same old-same old. Furthermore, the trend that she examines has been going on for quite a while and has been described in the same way by many other publications. 

And maybe Roger Simon is just hanging with the wrong crowd? I agree that things look fantastically hopeless in the world of politics, but dude, spend some time on a military base. I hope (and think it's not entirely implausible) that the next generation of strong political leaders will be the set of young men and women who fought in Operation Iraqi Freedom. For example, I'd vote for these guys. If you can make even a semi-functioning municipal government system work in Iraq, I have no doubts that you could repair whatever mess we get into in the next four years in Washington. 

Take some time to pray for all our troops. Pray especially hard. 

Definitely time to watch some of We Were Soldiers on the base tv channel before heading out to watch da booms, drink local brews, and look at fancy boats down in Newport! Happy Fourth of July!