slow and steady... okay, mostly just slow

Earbuds always breaking? Use modular design.

2011-08-17T09:24:00.000-04:00

As a computer scientist (or perhaps more accurately, something in between a scientist and an engineer), I am always thrilled to see one of the core concepts of my discipline pop up in the wider world. In this case the concept is modularity - a continuum describing the degree to which a system’s components may be separated and recombined [see linked wikipedia article for citation]. Now, modularity well predates computer science - Henry Ford relied on it in building his auto empire and the idea wasn't new then - but we've definitely made it our own (G-d, I can't imagine what hell it must have been to program custom assembly code for each task, or perhaps I can and simply don't want to).

In the past couple of months, I've been occasionally providing advice to the Ironbuds Kickstarter project (not paid, I'm just really excited about it, although I will hopefully get to beta test their stuff down the line) that addresses one of my personal peeves - my earbuds are always breaking. Since I got my first smartphone, I've continually been disappointed in the durability of the earbuds I need to use the thing efficiently. All I need is something that project sound into my ears and collect sound from my voice while leaving my hands free. Sounds simple, right? In actuality, not so much.

Over the years, I've gone through literally dozens of pairs of earbuds/headphones. I've had bluetooth ones that hardly worked from the get go, other bluetooth sets that were really nicely designed but didn't hold up - the Plantronics Voyager 855 had a really neat design, but shoddy construction and when it broke after a couple of months, it had already been discontinued! I've tried a variety of wired headphones: from the crappy buds Apple includes with the iPhone to, most recently, specially ruggedized JBuds J4M. Most of these broke within a couple of months: an earbud stopped working (or completely disintegrated in the case of Apple's lovely buds), the microphone died, the cable attachment to the buds or jack loosened.

Now, I'm not going to claim I'm the most gentle fellow on my hardware. I'm physically active, travel often, and fairly wired in. That said, I don't walk around smashing my stuff with a mallet ;-) My average laptop lasts me 4 years and I only buy new cellphones because my contract is up and I see something enticing. So why can't I keep a pair of earbuds for more than a couple of months before they belly up? Probably because (1) they aren't made to last, (2) even if they were, it is likely that eventually one of their many subcomponents will fail, and (3) for earbuds, when subcomponent fails the entire item becomes essentially useless.

This is clearly a pain economically (I've spent hundreds of $'s just on earbuds/headphones). I do want to recognize that some of these companies are really great in replacing their product - particularly the folks at JLabs & Skullcandy, and the J4's hold up better than any I've seen yet. However, there are only so many times I want to go back to customer support and ask for replacements. Moreover, it is so wasteful. These things take natural resources to make and, so far as I know, just get dumped in a landfill, where they can eventually leach poison into my great-grandchildrens' (or someone else's) food and water. Finally it is just plain lame, which irritates the engineer in me. Modern design should be able to produce something better.

That's where modularity comes in. If one were to simply design headphones so that each individual subcomponent could be plugged into the others... well if one component broke, it could be easily swapped out by the user for a replacement. Less cost, less waste. Moreover, this kind of design would have immediate benefits w/ respect to unexpected jerks and pulls (ever got your cord stuck on the doorknob or had your phone fall while you were plugged in?). Instead of the maximum instantaneous load being borne by the cord (no matter how large), on a sufficiently strong pull, the connectors will just separate and you can plug them back in later! You can think of this as being a kind of circuit-breaker for physical stress - which I'm guessing will result in less breakage. I'm very much looking forward to getting my hands on a pair and playing around!

It shouldn't have taken decades for modularity to make its way into headphone design, but, then again, consider the economics. Breakable/disposable stuff can be sold again and again = $$$ for companies. Stuff you can repair yourself = $ for companies. Companies like $$$. Hence no modularity. Platforms like Kickstarter let folks like Thomas Young, who has worked in the industry for decades and is now co-founding Acoustic Forge to produce products like Ironbuds - modular, kit-based earphones, obtain funds from folks like you or I, sidestepping those blokes in the corporate offices who are trying to convince you to buy a disposable refrigerator and bathtub ;-) I'd recommend checking it out.

Google Chrome takes up 4.3G of space?!?

2011-08-08T13:20:00.005-04:00

Was just cleaning Linda's MacBook as it had run out of disk space and was hardly functioning. While doing so, I found something that completely shocked me. Google Chrome was taking up 4.3G of space - more than 50% of the storage taken by all applications on the computer!

So why does Chrome need so much space? Well it turns out that it apparently never deletes a previous version when it upgrades - wasting your hard drive space for no useful purpose I can see. This is simply sloppy Google! On Linda's computer there are no less than 47 Versions of Chrome (ranging from build 6.0.472.41 to 13.0.782.99) currently stored - each one taking up between 80-112M!

This is enough to make me consider removing Chrome from my computers.

For now, I'm just deleting the previous versions. For those of you who aren't familiar with the command line, here's a simple recipe:

make sure Chrome is closed
use Finder to open /Applications/Utilities/Terminal
in terminal type

$ cd /Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/Versions

$ ls -l

then read the output and find the highest number (e.g. 13.0.782.109)
in terminal type

$ mv 13.0.782.109 ..

$ rm *

$ mv ../13.0.782.109 .

replacing my example number with your highest number
type

$ exit

and close the Terminal program. You should be all set to restart Chrome.

Having said this, I take no responsibility should you come to harm by following the above. This post is for informational purposes only and implies no guarantee of positive results, your milage may vary.

The best defense is a passed defense

2011-08-05T16:23:00.004-04:00

I know I haven't blogged in quite a while. The main reason - well I've been trying to finish up my PhD. It hasn't really left me with any spare time, well at least not enough to blog.

So why am I blogging now? Because I successfully defended my dissertation. Apparently the whole "slow and steady" thing payed off! If you are curious as to what my dissertation was actually on, well you can try looking at my academic homepage in a week or two when I get a chance to update and streamline it (yes I know, the material there is currently about half-a-decade old). Or you can just email me.

Suffice to say, at the moment, I'm just about disserationed out (though I am quite passionate about the research upon which the dissertation was built). Am currently running some final experiments to round things out and plan to deposit shortly after the Tisha B'av fast (saddest day of the Jewish year) is done. Doing it beforehand strikes me as overly inauspicious.

Anyway, I'm really happy and may even start writing stuff again on a more regular basis... maybe.

Kombucha

2010-12-09T15:07:00.017-05:00

Preludes, Disclaimers, Caveats, and Notes:
THIS IS A WORK IN PROGRESS - everything below is my own opinion, feel free to follow or ignore it as you please - either way at your own risk ;-) Any information that appears more "fact" than "opinion" can likely be confirmed through the Wikipedia article below, which appears quite comprehensive, (though that may not be where I actually obtained the information). If you have any questions, please put them in the posts section (unless you'd like to keep it private for some reason) - that way everyone can see your question and the two-cents I'll eventually deposit in response.

Also feel free to email me at josh DOT reich AT gmail DOT com, I'll be happy to send you a dropbox invite w/ many alternate recipes, handouts and articles. Also if you are in the Columbia area and would like to drop by, I'm happy to provide starter.

What is it?
Kombucha is a beverage brewed using sweet tea and a Symbiotic Colony of Bacteria and Yeast - often referred to affectionately by it's acronym, SCOOBY, or called a mother (as in mother of kombucha), or mushroom (just a nickname, no mushroom in there). A scooby looks like a flat pancake of whitish material. It's actually a colony of lots of unicellular organisms that work together - when given an encouraging environment - to transform sugary tea into kombucha (same way yogurt starter makes more yogurt, sourdough starter makes bread, etc.)

Biology:
The particular little guys living in kombucha are:
- lactobacilli (they make sugar into lactic acid)
- yeast (they make sugar into alcohol and CO2)
- acetobacter (they make alcohol into vinegar) and can convert 108 glucose molecules per hour into cellulose! Cellulose is the same stuff that plants use to build their cell walls, although no one is quite sure why acetobacter make it (so far as I know).
- possibly some other guys - there's a bunch I don't know about kombucha :-)

How to make some of your own:
- Josh's Very Simple Instructions:
 1 Fill a pot w/ water
2 Add white sugar (1-2 cups per gallon)
3 Bring to boil
4 Add plain black tea (3-6 bags), steep 15 min.
5 Remove tea, allow to cool while covered, at some point transfer to wide-mouthed glass jar
6. When bathwater warm or cooler, pour in Scooby and starter liquid (at least a cups per gallon is a good idea)
7. Cover jar with cloth and secure w/ rubber band
8. Put in a non-sunny, clean, and warm place, wait. 

- Instructables has lots of good video demos
- Anise's Kombucha Recipe

Health:
There are lots of conflicting claims about the healthfulness about kombucha. So far as I can tell it seems to me like it might be helpful to you, so long as you are hygenic when preparing it (only use utensils and hands cleaned with warm soapy water (make sure no soap residue is sticking to anything though!) and pay attention to your nose, mouth, and body and use a non-reactive container - glass is best, definitely nothing that might leach metal. After all our bodies have evolved/been designed to detect when something is off. Unfortunately, our industrial food culture has discouraged, if not actively interfered with, the natural development our built-in defense mechanisms, so you may have to give your body time to relearn these innate skills - slow and steady wins the race! When in doubt / if you are worried, smell the object of your consideration for a bit, see if your body is interested in trying it. If so taste a bit. Seems okay? Eat a little, wait some time and see there seem to be any ill effects.

Truthfully, I think you are many orders of magnitude more likely to encounter food illness when eating food from your local restaurant (you don't want to see what happens in that kitchen) or your industrially produced food/food-like products at the super market (you really, really don't want to know about that) than the stuff you, your friends, or your local food producer make for yourselves. See the Misc. section for a couple more thoughts on that.

The sources below offer some "food for thought". In general, I deem articles w/o references significantly less reliable. The Mayo clinic and Wikipedia offer two different conclusion that are based on at least some scientific evidence. The link labeled "pure propaganda" is precisely that in my opinion. Of course, reputable sources citing reasonable sources can differ (as above). When evaluating these, I assess their arguments with my own common sense, and will often check the primary sources they cite. In this case, I find Wikipedia's take more persuasive than the Mayo clinic's - despite the fact that I trust the Mayo clinic in general more than Wikipedia. The link below these gives you an original copy of the CDC report providing one of the bases for the Mayo clinic's recommendation. Finally, you'll find a link to an in-depth Time's article discussing the various opinions held about kombucha.

- Mayo Clinic
- Wikipedia
- Pure Propaganda
- CDC Findings
- Both sides - "Magic Mushroom or Toxic Fad"

Misc.:
There's always some nonsense or hysteria floating around. Apparently the current fear is that people might become terribly drunk on commercial kombucha that has been sitting on the shelf for many months. I personally think we've got better things to worry about - like making sure our food is safe to eat, instead of worrying about whether it might in the off chance make a couple of folks ever so slightly buzzed.

From East to West

2009-06-25T13:45:00.002-04:00

At 30,000 feet, heading west over the US. I'm really, really tired. Haven't written in a while because things have been crazy. It seems the price of taking time off to have fantastic trips is the catch-up work that needs to be done after. So let me tell you briefly about what I've been up to for the past two months and where I'm heading right now.

I returned stateside on May 5th in the late evening, after 10.5 months away. Linda stayed behind in London to do a pastry internship at the Ritz. She just got back this past monday - we were apart over 7 weeks. It was really difficult, I missed her lots. But it was such a great experience for her professionally :-) And I had my fill of stuff to do, so having her away in some ways made it easier (I didn't have much else to do except work) but also harder (she couldn't be there when I hit the rough patches). My first week back was basically consumed by recovering from my illness in Morocco and taking care of 10 months of errands, doctors appointments, paperwork, and various other chores. Then I left for Tucson, AZ where I attended my brother's graduation. Was great to be there, but not super-relaxing as I spent half the time working and the other half doing family stuff. Then I came back and had 3 weeks to get my dissertation proposal done - a 30 page document outlining what I've got to do to complete my PhD and a talk in front of a faculty committee, defending that proposal. But even bigger than the paper requirements was the work that I needed to do to figure out what I've been doing and ought to be doing with the intellectual contribution that composes my PhD. I came up with something good enough, still wrestling with it, but I guess that's just the game.

So those 3 weeks were stressful and filled with work and angst. Missing Linda made it harder and knowing that I also had a major publication deadline looming two weeks after that distracted my attention as well. Thankfully friends and family were really supportive (my folks kept me housed and fed and my friends met up, bought me dinner, and occasionally put me up/lent me their apartments (particular thanks to Eli & Adi, Perry & Stephanie, Yair & Aviva, and Lawrence, who were really generous when it counted ;).

I passed the dissertation proposal, went out to dinner, slept. The next morning it was back to work, if anything even more intense. The past two weeks leading up to this one were basically 14+ hour days, every day except Shabbos. The second week I came ill and ran a fever much of the week. But I made it. And Friday evening as the sun set, I went downstairs, had dinner with my folks, took a bath, and collapsed. Thought I'd spend Sunday recuperating, but it wasn't to be.

You see, this past year has been a whirlwind. I worked on Wall St. at Credit Suisse for two months before things blew up. I travelled with Linda to the Indian subcontinent - spending two weeks traveling in Nepal before settling down in Bangalore to do an internship with Microsoft Research India. Spent three months there having just the most fascinating time - and doing some good work, sadly it came out a bit half-baked, but perhaps it will eventually lead to a publication. Left India ill after coming down with a cold my last week there (was really healthy otherwise). The illness followed me across three continents and back to America, but I think I may have finally kicked it. Spent most of a month in Israel celebrating the holidays with friends. Then went to France where I worked at Thomson's Paris Networking Research Lab for 5 months. Again, fascinating and growing and I got some really fantastic work done (although it only completely came together in the past two weeks). Then took a month, went to the south of France, Israel for the Passover holiday, Austria to visit family, Morocco for kicks (first time in Africa - we were told it would be rough and people would be aggressive - they were puppies compared to the Indian beggars and merchants) , and then for a brief stay with friends in London.

If you've been reading you probably know most of this. But what I haven't written about is that while I was in the south of France, my advisor emailed me and said - "here's an internship position in Microsoft Research Redmond, apply for it". So I did and I got the internship and I'm heading to Seattle in what appears to be act two of my big adventure - my fourth internship in just over a year! But first I'm taking a little time which brings me back to where I trailed off two paragraphs above.

I thought I might relax on Sunday and sleep. But we had to sublet our apartment (for obvious financial reasons) for our time in Seattle. So I ended up needing to drive into Manhattan and spend most of the day taking care of apartment stuff. Monday I picked Linda up from the airport and spent the day doing stuff with her. Tuesday I drove us to Staten Island and Manhattan to see family and friends and take care of apartment stuff. Wednesday was filled with making arrangements for the trip, returning deposits, taking deposits, packing up more stuff to take home and meeting friends for dinner. At 3AM this morning we made it back to West Hempstead, slept for a couple of hours and dragged ourselves out of bed. The rest of the day was a mad rush of sorting, cleaning, and packing - oh and running simulations for a tech report associated with the publication we submitted. We finished right as our cab pulled up at 5:30PM (okay he ended up waiting 13 minutes for us ;-) to take us to our flight. We will get into Seattle where our wonderful friend Rebecca will be picking us up and taking us in for the weekend - I'm eagerly looking forward to chilling out. We should land around midnight. I'm as tired as I've ever been. I'm also incredibly excited about the next two weeks.

So the last part of the story is that my mom had over a year ago finally booked the family cruise that she's been dead set on booking for the past several years. My parents, my brother, his wonderful fiancé Mia, my mother-in-lay Judit, Linda, and I are all going on a one-week cruise to Alaska! It will be my first cruise and probably the complete opposite of the rest of the travel I've done this past year (and probably pretty much the rest of my life as well). I'm really looking forward to a trip that's more relaxing than challenging - and to spending time with the ones I love and care about most in this world ;-) We leave this Sunday and return the next., Linda and I are going to take a week before I start at Microsoft. Monday July 6th, we will drive up the coast to Olympic National park and see the temperate rainforest. In the evening we will take the ferry to Vancouver Island and stay with our friend Eva at her family's vacation home in Victoria. Another 6 days of relaxing (I'll probably need to do a bit of work, but mostly I think I'll take down time - I'm definitely on the edge of burning out and I expect my internship this summer to be quite challenging) and then we start the adventure of living and working in Seattle. Insanity. I'm going to be turning off my email when we board the ship (it costs like a dollar a minute and I think I need to unplug for a week - everyone most important to me is going to be on the ship anyway). So I don't know when I'll write next, but I'm sure when I do, I'll have something interesting to say (although it's an open question if what I'll end up saying will be interesting ;-)

Thanks for reading.

Something You'll Never See in Paris: A Quick Primer on Dealing with the French

2009-05-14T12:50:00.010-04:00

Living in Paris was an amazing experience, but not always an easy one. When people ask me how I felt about it - I often answer that it was "difficult, but really worthwhile". I tend to feel the same way about the French themselves.

The single most salient stereotype that French have of Americans is that of fatness (as in overweight and over-consuming) and that Americans have of French is of rudeness (as in impolite and superior). As with most stereotypes both of these have a good deal of basis both in reality and also in misunderstanding of the other. In fact after many months of having lived in Paris, I have many adjectives - both positive and negative - that I can use to roughly characterize its inhabitants as a group. But rude isn't in there (although of course, like people anywhere else in the world, the French are capable of being rude ;).

So on a whim (and at risk of making enemies) here's a short list of much more fitting adjectives:

warm-when-shown-respect, intolerant of difference, fashionable, proper, inconsistent, appreciative of life, entitled, passionate, pessimistic, generous, passive-aggressive, liberal (e.g., socialist, gay rights), conservative (e.g., keep-the-status-quo, anti-immigrant) and last-but-certainly-not-least, proud.

And it's this last that prompted me to write this post. You see, I've recently returned to New York, which has been a great shock to my system and I've been noticing everything around me all the more (it doesn't hurt that we are having a lovely late-spring in New York right now). So a couple of days ago, I was walking by Morningside park in Manhattan and I saw the following, completely ordinary sign (pictured above), instructing my fellow New Yorkers to clean up after their dogs on penalty of law.

What struck me so strongly about this, is that you'd never see anything remotely like it in Paris. You see the French in general love their dogs. Paris is a city filled with people walking their dogs. But the thing is, almost none of these dog walkers would be willing to clean up after their dog - from what I'm told (often by other French), the idea of cleaning up dog poop is an anathema to proud Frenchman. This was a bit difficult for me to swallow - and for a good many French. After all why should everyone have to get shit on their shoes, and have to pay tax levied on all to clean up, because some think that cleaning up after the mess their pet makes is somehow below them?

But that's the way things are and I can understand how it has come to pass, given how proud I've found the French can be. And the French really are that proud - of their culture, contributions to history, language, dignity, etc. The thing is that they have earned the right to be proud - it's not like they are wrong about how wonderful the things their people and country have done. But often (as a group) they take it a bit far and go from a genuine appreciation of what is so good about themselves, to a tunnel-vision of the world in which the contributions and quality of other places and cultures are marginalized. In this they are actually ironically similar to Americans - in fact from what I could tell from conversations, to other Europeans, the French are the "Americans" of Europe (insofar as "American" connotes domineering, superior, relatively ignorant of others).

To me this proudness was reflected in many facets of French life - from the trivial (dog walking, to the primary/secondary education system which appears to place French poetry and grammatical complexity on par with Science, Math, History, etc.; to international politics where Former President Chirac walked out of a UN session along with the entire French delegation because a French businessman had the temerity to address the session in English (which happened to be the working language of that particular session)!

Which brings me back to my previously unexplained assertion that the French are not, despite the overwhelming stereotype, rude. My feeling is that foreigners mistake the way in which French react to a variety of situation as rude, when the French are for the most part quite proper and polite. You see the French are very proud and can be quick and brittle to react when their pride is injured, which it easily is. Consequently, a small matter or comment that an American or other foreigner likely wouldn't even contemplate having been offensive, can turn out to be a major insult to a Frenchman or woman - with the obvious cross-cultural mal-effects - the response to the insult usually will be nasty, dismissive, or otherwise bad, although often mildly so. Of course the foreigner, not having realized that their action had been interpreted as being insulting in the first place, will mistake this response for unprompted rudeness - which in my observation it rarely is.

So how does one deal with this? Well as regards the dog crap, all you can do is step carefully. And it turns out the same strategy works with the French as well (although a good subset of people living in France aren't actually that touchy at all, it's just that many are ;-).

Below are a couple of helpful rules for engendering productive interactions with the French:

Smile warmly and speak gently
Try to stutter something in French first, even if you can't speak much, before attempting English. At the very least, ask if they speak English es-koo-voo par-lay-le-francay? If you do this, you will find that most of the time, people who might had seemed distant or rude, will engage you warmly and try strenously to communicate with and help you. Under no circumstances should you abruptly start speaking to a Frenchman in English as if you expect to be understood! There are few ways more likely to keep you from getting anything out of the interaction. Most French have a little English and many actually speak quite well. But I've seen many times where a French person I knew could speak English reasonably well, pretended they couldn't understand even basic words like yes, no and tomorrow b/c they weren't treated respectfully (as per their understanding of respect).
Don't rush them (insofar as possible) or get aggressive. The French aren't focused on service or speed. They believe in savoring life and get very aggitated by the brusque manners of foreigners. Be prepared to wait.
Don't talk loudly, try not to cough in public, sneeze or be otherwise improper. Hard to avoid, but many French are very proper and hypersensitive (from my viewpoint) to this.
Remember that it's their country not yours - don't tell them how to be, even if it strikes you as a bit ridiculous. Not worth the fight - you're a visitor, try to treat them how you'd like to be treated (viz-a-vis their own cultural mores and norms).
Finally, avoid putting up any stickers (insofar as possible) on the mailslots or buzzers of an apartment you are renting. Parisians, at least, are irrationally sensitive (from my viewpoint at least) about this. We had a simple sticker listing our names on it placed on our mailbox, so we'd receive the mail. Sounds straightforward? Well it wasn't. First someone began ripping our sticker off periodically (but they didn't remove it cleanly so it looked much more messy than before). Never tried to contact us nor let us know who was doing it so we could discuss it (see what I mean about passive-aggressive?). Our landlady told us to just keep putting up new stickers. Eventually this started to get ridiculous as we were putting up a new sticker every day. Finally around this point, someone put up this note, written in illegible French on used, ripped paper, attached to the middle of the glass front door with scotch tape and a business card stapled to it. I had an idea of what this note might be, so I took a picture and asked a friend to translate. The gist is that 'no one should put stickers on the mailboxes or buzzers, because it is inappropriate and ruins the asthetic quality of our living space. Instead you must have a metal plaque made out with your name, business card attached. Thank you'. Of course it was signed by "Members of the Building Committee" (passive-aggressive again) and someone helpfully added to the corner (top-left) in a messy but legible scrawl "this is just normal, I did it when I moved in" (guess they weren't subletting for just a couple of month). So to summarize: the folks in my building were so aesthetically sensitive that they covered the beautiful glass front door of the building with a scrawled note on ripped, used paper, for two weeks to let me know I needed to buy a metal plaque in order to receive mail (notice any inconsistency here?) - My friend who translated (happens to be a Parisian told me that this apparently is characteristic, but also told me how stupid she thought it was, so did my landlady.

So this should help you get off on the right foot - although I admit the last point is a bit more of a rant than advice. But then again, most places the in world have some particularities that are bound to baffle anyone who wasn't born there (and possibly many who were). So take it with a grain of salt and enjoy - because there really is a lot to enjoy of the French and their country!

Reverse Culture Shock

2009-05-08T18:11:00.004-04:00

After 3 days of being back, I'm finally just starting to realize that I truly am here. And it's a bit strange, particularly the little details. One of the first things that struck me when I got back, the first morning in fact was how luxurious everything here is. My parents' house (where I'll be living until I head out to Seattle on June 22nd - a story for another time) is a nice, but not ostentious place. But I easily had the best shower of the last 11 months there. There was so much hot water and it was so hot, as hot as I could possible want it. And consistently so, no points where the temperature fluctuated - in most of the places I've been, while the hot water lasted (which often wasn't long) I'd spend half of the shower fiddling with the knobs as the water kept moving back and forth from too cold to scalding. There was just hot water, perfect temperature, and seemingly endless. Then I dried off and the towel was so soft. Softer by a good measure even then the towels at the resort in India where we stayed for a weekend so long ago.

And then there was the bed. I've always put a lot of weight on having a good bed - I mean the average person spends something like between 1/5th and 1/3rd of his or her life in bed. So I've always felt it was worth making the investment in a really good bed (I bought my first Tempurpedic when I was in college), even though I always sleep well as long as the surface is flat and not entirely hard. On our trip, we've slept in a lot of different places, and some of them actually were really comfortable (some weren't ;-) but nothing matched the feeling of lying down in the bed at my folks place.

After two showers (one in the evening and one the following morning) and a night's sleep at my folks, I told me day "you do realize that you live in the lap of luxury?". And I like the creature comforts - honestly I probably need them at this point: my health is a bit shot (I've had a cold on and off for over the last half-year), I lost a bunch of weight (was only 145 lbs when I got back - even after copious feeding by our friends in London), and I'm just generally worn out. But I've got mixed feelings about how nice things are in the States.

I think it's great to have a creature comforts, but some of them really cost - socially, environmentally, etc. Thankfully for the first time in almost a decade, I'm really feeling like Americans are starting to think about what the right balance for our society is - Costco apparently had a sale on composters just this last week, my mom went to pick one up, but the entire batch had already sold out!

In any case, returning to more of my observations, it really was the little things that got me. The money in the US is like nowhere else. I use a really neat plastic wallet called the JimiX it's a great alternative to the traditional leather wallet, with a small sliding cardholder case and an external money clip. But everywhere else I travelled I couldn't use the money clip because the currency was so slippery - Rupees, Euros, Shekels, Dirham, Pounds. Only the US bills which are apparently made out of cotten and linen rag paper don't slide around.

I took a drive today to do a couple of local errands, and again it hit me - after driving small manual transmission vehicles in France and Austria, my mom's Impala (a smaller car by American standards) felt both ridiculously easy to operate. It was silent, smooth, powerful, you can't tell the gears are even changing - I felt like I was driving a mountain. And as I said it's not a big or expensive car. It was nice, but if this is the simple car, what are the fancy, big cars? Before I left, US-style vehicles had struck me as wasteful in my rational mind. But coming back I experienced this same feeling in a much more viceral way. Not so much regards my mom's car, which is perhaps more than necessary, but a pretty conservative vehicle (and safe on the US roadways which are filled with hulking monster cars), but more by the idea that this is what passes for a conservative vehicle here. I have to say, it was nice to drive something so comparitively luxurious, and super easy - but I also missed the fun of interacting with the manual transmission.

Yup I'm having reverse culture shock.

Argan Oil Touring

2009-05-05T22:03:00.012-04:00

I don't remember when it was I first read about Argan oil. Must have been at least a year ago, probably longer. The story I read told how a rare and ancient tree grew at the edge of the Sahara. This tree, called the Argan tree, was a relict of Earth's Tertiary period - a living anachronism (although only 1.6 million years out of date - compare that to the California Redwoods which are something like 200 million). These shrubby, thorny trees grew stubbornly in the most dry and difficult climate, able to hang on for 200 years or so, but only viable in this small sliver of land so

far away.

Now the Argan tree bears a small green-yellow fruit. Not something humans would eat, but goats love it. And people have figured out a way to make use of this: The goats climb the Argan trees, nibbling on the leaves and eating the fruit. After ingesting the fruit the goats either (a) spit it back out or (b) poop it out (I've heard differing accounts). The core of the fruit and its seednut are not digested by the goat - much like the reknowned "catshit coffee". Locals then take this partially digested fruit, remove the seednut, crack it, roast it, and grind it. Once ground they knead and mix it with water until it forms cakes. They then squeeze the cakes and out comes the reward for this lengthy process - pure Argan oil. After tasting it, I can tell you that it is nutty and delicious. From what scientists are claiming it has more natural vitaman E then almost any other ingestible substance and all sorts of other healthful properties to boot. Because of these properties Argan oil has become all the rage with foreign companies buying up supply and using it for food, medicine, and beauty care products.

This whole story completely intrigued me - these ancient relicts living at the edge of the habitable world, the complicated procedure, and of course the goats. I dreamed of someday going to Africa and seeing it - but I figured it would happen one day in the indefinite and far future. What I didn't realize was that the main place in Africa where Argan trees grow is actually in Morocco, outside of Essaouria, at the northern edge of the Sahara desert. So when I found I, I was so excited and resolved that if Linda and I only saw one thing there, we'd make sure that we went to an Argan oil co-ops, see the trees, and hopefully see the goats as well.

On our second day in Essaouria we made arrangements through our hotel - the Riad Nakhala - to have a driver take us to one of th

e co-ops to see how the oil is made and purchase some. After that the driver would show us some local sights and hopefully help us find trees (lots of these) and goats (harder to find). We spent a bit on the half-day journey (400 MAD ~ 50 USD) but we definitely got our money's worth.

Our driver was Mohamed Elkhadir of La Arbah Rent A Car and he showed us a great time.

First we left town and stop at an overlook where we could see Essaouria and the surrounding areas stretched out before us in panorama. Then we took a drive to the Coopérative D'Argan Marjana. Now there are about a million co-ops selling Argan oil that have opened in the last decade. Most employ women (widows, divorcees, etc.), but Mohamed told us that this one was probably the best, owned and operated solely by the women for their benefit and that of the surrounding community. While there we met the women, who made the oil in the traditional way, by hand and got to taste the nuts (both roasted and unroasted( - boy were they strong and bitter (particularly the unroasted ones). I really enjoyed the zing the taste gave me. After learning a bit about the oil we went to the co-op store where they gave us moroccan mint tea (a bit lukewarm) and tastes of both the oil and Ambo - a delicious mix of Argan oil, local honey, and almonds. Both were delicious, but I liked the oil better and we ended up buying a whole liter of the stuff (cost us 450 MAD which was probably 150 to 200 above the market rate - but it was clearly highest quality and we felt like we were contributing to the community).

We left the co-op and went off in search of Argan trees and goats. Finding the trees was easy. They are all over the place - completely dominating the area. In many places all that grew was Argan trees, a bit of dried grass, and dirt. It's amazing to think that the population of trees is actually only half what it was two decades ago. The trees themselves are finicky - getting them to reproduce is something people are just starting to understand. Additionally, given how sensitive they are, climate change doesn't appear to have been good for them. Finally the people in this area are very poor. Argan trees were previously cut down to use for food, or overgrazed and killed by the goat herders. But know everyone realizes what a lucrative treasure these trees are and both the locals have become very protective as well as the government (it's a really big fine if you chop one down). So we stopped a couple of times to look at the trees, and look for their fruit (there was a drought the previous two years, this year finally raining, so few of the trees were fruiting). It was wonderful to see them up close.

But the real treat came when we found the goats. To do this, Mohamed drove us around for an hour or so, continually scanning the countryside as he drove. He took our request to see the goats really seriously. And finally perserverence paid off - we found two teenage shepherd boys with a flock of goats, 3 camels and some sheep. The goats were all over - different sizes, males, females, kids. All of them from the oldest to the youngest were climbing the trees (the little ones were really cute - being more tentative and less stable on the branches than their elders). Mohamed spoke with the boys and got their okay for us to

wander and watch to our hearts content.

And we did. Linda and I probably spent about half and hour just

watching the goats antics. They would place themselves in the most precarious positions. One goat had three feet perched practically on the same place on thin branch while reaching with its mouth for an even higher and significantly thinner branch. It tried several times to brace its fourth foot against what essentially was a twig, but eventually thought the better of it (goats aren't stupid, at least not terribly so ;).

I even got in on the action climbing into the tree with the goats - although the first time I did this I spooked them, which led me to be more cautious and less noisy on my second more successful attempt (the first one had ended with me sitting in a tree alone, all the goats having abandoned ship)!

It was an amazing and fun experience. When we left we gave each boy a 10 Dirham piece (about 1.25 USD) which was apparently a great gift for them. We then headed home, stopping for soda at Mohamed's house (he invited us for dinner, but we already had plans so we declined). Mohamed did offer as well to get Linda tagines for cooking and CDs of music we had heard in the car. So the next day we stopped by and went shopping (got two tagines for 50 Dihram which is basically nothing - 7 bucks). While we had been watching the goats, Mohamed also showed me the type of foodwear that the hearders use. They make sandals out of pieces of old tires, cobbled together with short nails. When he mentioned that he used to teach poor children, I asked him if he could find someone to use the pair of old shoes I was wearing and he told me that he definitely could and thanked me for my generosity. This was a bit humbling for me - I was going to throw these shoes out, they weren't worth shlepping around anymore, it wasn't any sacrifice for me - rather I was glad to have the opportunity to see they did something more beneficial than end up in the wastebin. So in addition to a great time, big help shopping, and hospitality, I also got to get rid of an old pair of shoes and bluejeans in a useful manner. The whole business made me really happy.

Touring in Morocco

2009-05-03T09:23:00.006-04:00

We've spent the last couple of days in London, resting and relaxing at the house of our wonderful friends Erica and Mike. This will be my last stop before returning to NY (I get in Tuesday evening) and I still haven't processed that fully. Probably won't until after I've gotten back home.

Our time here has just been so lovely. Particularly, Erica and Mike's warm hospitality has really been exactly what we needed after our recent journeys in Morocco. Last weekend we spent the Shabbos in Fez. After davening with the community (which we just barely found) we went back to our rather dank hotel and I made kiddush on a bottle of Leben (a type of middle eastern yogurt drink) and had that and an orange for dinner. This week Mike made a gourmet meal which we ate in their warm and comfy home, then retired to an airy, comfy guest room ;-)

But while our travels in Morocco were a bit rough, we did have a fantastic time there! We started our trip by traveling from Paris to Tangiers (we stayed overnight in Paris at our friend Marianna and Ana-Kaisa's). But as I've written previously we ended up spending most of that day in transit. I'll be writing (hopefully) at greater length on each of the spots we visited in Morocco, but this post is mostly about giving the overall scope and timeline of our trip.

We got to Tangiers on Wednesday evening and settled in, seeing a couple of sights in the evening. Thursday we took a tour of Tangiers and the surrounding areas in the morning and spent most of the late afternoon in an unsuccessful and incredibly frustrating negotiation. Friday morning we headed out to Fez on long-distance train ride. After about 5 hours or so we reached Fez, settled into a (not terribly nice) hotel (Linda was ill and we weren't able to shop around). In a bit she recovered some and we went out and managed to find the Fez Jewish community just as evening was coming in (okay we were late, but we did make it to services). On shabbos I went to shul in the morning, and we went on a walking tour of the medina in the afternoon. Sunday morning was rainy. We went to see the Jewish cemetery and then took a train to Marrakech. We ended up just missing the 10:50AM and had to wait until 12:50PM to go, but it was a really pleasant wait in the end (we sat in a cafe, drank tea, and I pick up some food for the ride).

The trip was supposed to be 7 hours, but it took 8 and a half. We were tired, and I was taking ill (finally succumbed to exposure to Linda's germs). Next day we did a half-day tour of Marrakech - I think I started running a fever towards the end of that. So we just hopped on a bus to Essaouria, a relaxed tourist town by the sea and decided to spend the remainder of our trip there. Really good call on that by Linda!

We got into Essaouria and spent a lovely couple of days seeing sights, recuperating a little, and generally having our most vacation-like times of the trip. Thursday midday we headed back to Marrakech. But of course our bus broke down and after much trial and travail I managed to get our hotel to send us a cab to take us to Marrakech. There were some other problems with the cab (a story for another time), but we finally arrived at 9PM. Made some friends along the way, including Alan, a North Irish trader of Moroccan goods, operating out of London. Ended up going to the Marrakech night market with him, having some great food, drinks, and fun times. Midnight we got back to a really low-budget hotel, got to sleep at 1AM for 4 hours and change, then met our (second) driver from the previous night, who took us to the airport. From there forward everything was smooth going and has been since. Looking forward to filling in all of the stories when I've recovered a bit more ;-)

Time Lag

2009-04-27T15:09:00.002-04:00

For those of you who check the twitter updates, you'll know we've actually been in Morocco quite awhile now. The "new" posts are simply older material that I managed to finish up now. I've got no idea when I'll find the time to tell you all about our adventures here (and they have been plentiful and good) So don't be too confused and if you want the quick lowdown just check my twitter log which provides quick and up-to-date bytes and where and when we actually are.

Stuck in CDG on the way to Morocco

2009-04-22T18:31:00.001-04:00

Rather irritated at the moment. Today we were supposed to leave Paris Charles De Gaulle airport for Tangiers just before 1PM. We even checked the flight before we got to the airport. Got here on time and checked our baggage with Royal Air Morocco downstairs (which incidentally is the only place one can change flights - after you've gone through customs you are stuck - you can't leave and you can't change). Everything goes smoothly (although the service is rather slow) and we get our boarding pass which lists boarding as being at 11:50PM. But the thing is when we get upstairs a couple of minutes later we are told that the flight isn't leaving until 4:30PM. They can't change us, can't let us go back downstairs, can't let us make a call to Morocco (to notify the guide who was supposed to meet us), and won't even give us gratis internet. They did provide some orange juice. Pretty sucky way to waste a day of vacation.

When I complained to one of the airline fellows he told me that 'the airline's job is to take you from point A to point B, the rest isn't our responsibility'. It's interesting and mildly telling that this was his view.
My view (which I expressed to him at the time, little good it did me) is that actually the airline's job is to get me from point A to point B at a particular time (which has been agreed upon by both parties well in advance).

Air Morocco is heading onto my list of $h!tty airlines, along with such esteemed company as Air Italia and the long defunct Tower Airlines. The only saving grace is that the part of CDG in which we've gotten to lose our afternoon has reasonably comfortable lounging chaises and it gives me time to catch up on writing blog posts and other work.

[Time passes]
So we are now much of the way to Morocco. The plane started boarding at the time they had previously claimed we would leave (4:30PM). It's not a bad plane, but they forgot our vegetarian meals, so I didn't have much to eat. They didn't have any hot water, so no tea, and there doesn't appear to be soap in the bathrooms. Definitely a $h!t airline.

One thing that really got me - and I can't claim this Air Morocco is the first airline I've gotten this from - is that when we asked for our meal, they looked at our tickets, told us there was no special meal marking, and then implied it was because we had failed to "confirm" our special meal at check-in. Now as I've just said, other airlines have given us the exact same line - despite our having a printout from the airline confirming that we are booked for such-and-such flight w/ vegetarian meal (or kosher meal or whatever we happened to order). I just don't get airline logic. If I request a special meal when I book my ticket and the airline confirms that choice in writing on a receipt, what possible justification is there for that meal not to be present? I mean, (a) I've checked in, (b) I've previously requested the special meal and (c) the airline has confirmed receipt of that choice. Thus in my world (a) AND (b) imply that the airline ought to put a special meal on the plan since I'm on the plane and (c) implies the airline is aware of the above conclusion. Yet, still apparently it is somehow my responsibility (despite no airline every having informed me of this obligation beforehand) to "confirm" my meal choice. I give up. Although I did get soap when I managed to find a stewardess to ask. But all the bathrooms were occupied by that point. Fu&*ing airlines.

Großmugl / Schillingers

2009-04-21T16:22:00.009-04:00

One of the first things we usually do when we travel to a new town in check happycow.net
Happycow lists vegetarian restaurants worldwide w/ reviews and other info - and they do it fairly throughly. This usually determines where I'll be eating out in a given city as I only eat at either kosher or vegetarian places.

My dietary restrictions (strictly vegetarian, mildly kosher) often prevents me from sampling local cuisine, although I do my best to try what I can since I love trying new things and experiencing the places I visit as throughly as possible (and I'd argue eating is one of the most fundamental modes of experience). So when I visit a place like Austria where most of the traditional non-dessert, non-beverage cuisine is throughly meat, I tend to be a bit sad.

So when I read about Gasthouse Schillinger, I was really excited. Schillingers is traditional Austrian guesthouse/pub/restaurant located about an hour outside of Vienna. It first opened for business in 1793 (so order of magnitude its as old as the US) and has been continuously owned/run by a man named Karl Schillinger ever since. Something like 7 Karl Schillingers have run this place and the current incarnation decided 10 years ago to make the place vegan. Yup, vegan. They serve all the traditional Austrian meat dishes, just they don't happen to be meat. The existence of a 200+ year old authentic Austrian guesthouse where I could get as close to eating true Austrian cuisine as any vegetarian is going to blew my mind a little.

So with the kindness of Zsofie and Gabor (Linda's cousin and her husband) who lent us their car and GPS, Linda and I took a road trip there on Sunday evening. Before I continue I should also thank Perry & Stephanie Vais without whose instruction in the art of driving a manual vehicle some weeks before and willingness to rent a manual vehicle (respectively) - I wouldn't have known how to drive - and my mother's willingness to mail me the replacement license (which arrived shortly before my 29th birthday) - without which I wouldn't have had a legal license.

Anyway returning to the story, we drove out to Großmugl where Schillingers is located and really enjoyed the sunny afternoon in the most beautiful countryside. The trip was mostly uneventful until we came within about 5 minutes of our destination, at which point a huge mound rose out of the gently rolling countryside. The huge mound was topped by a huge (but much smaller cross) and a group of Austrians we later learned were having a picnic! The appearance of this thing answered one question that had been on my mind while opening another. You see on the Schillinger website in the directions page, a large mound with a cross on top was displayed, and not much else. I had no idea what to make of this, until of course I saw the mound. After seeing the mound, it was clear why this previously cryptic picture had been displayed. Of course, the new questions was "what the heck is it?".

As much as I wanted to stop, evening was coming and we were running late for our reservation. So we went to the restaurant, found they weren't too crowded, and Linda graciously agreed to return for a visit to the mound.

We got there, walked around, and then climbed up (rather steep and a good 50 feet up). At the top we met a collection of Austrians about our age having a picnic. They explained what the mound was - a 3000 year old pagan burial heap, the largest of it's kind in central Europe (its even got its own webpage) apparently at was probably closer to 60 feet high when it was made. This not only answered my question, but also explains the town's name - which translates to English as "Big Hill". We chatted with them a bit - really friendly folks. Looked around, savored the sunset on the countryside, took some pictures and then headed/slid down. Really neat and really unexpected! The only part that miffed me a little was the cruxifix. It seems a bunch of folks stuck it up there a couple of years ago. The locals seem to have a penchant for crosses - the locals crucify a Jesus figurine and stick the 2 meter (6 foot) business right at the roadside wherever someone dies in a traffic accident - the first one we passed gave me a bit of a scare. Anyway, so they took this historic, ancient, and oddly beautiful pagan burial place and went and stuck a 3 meter (9 foot) high cross at the top, like it was some kind of bizarre wedding cake needing decoration. Now I'm not a pagan (and I'll admit I've got no love for crucifixes or other instruments of torture), but I do respect the dead and it honestly seemed a bit wrong to put that crucifix up there - the mound builders went to what was evidently alot of trouble to bury their dead according to their belief system and then 3000 years later some folks decide to desecrate (from what I'm guessing the mound builders point of view would be) their gravesite with paraphenalia from a religion that wouldn't even be born for a millenium.

Returning to my main narrative: we waved goodbye to our Austrian friends (they had been tickled to hear what brought us to Großmugl) and drove back to town for dinner. The ambiance of the place was great. Drinking and smoking (which I don't love, but will admit creates a certain mood) Austrian (apparently locals) filled the place. Next to us was a group of guys with a large dog that occasionally started to bark at people. The benches were wood, the floor was wood, the place just seemed like it had been there forever and would continue to do so for as long as it pleased. But the waitresses foamed soy milk for the drinks and everything was vegetarian (most was vegan). We ended up ordering Amdudler (the Austrian national softdrink), two traditional soups, and a huge tasting plate. It looked awesome and I loved it. Linda loved the ambience, experience, and concept. Food-wise, well for her it just wasn't the real thing, but she didn't eat badly. I was a little sad we didn't both savor the experience (at least the gustatory part) equally, but as well as we work together there's always going to be some culinary gap between a relatively unrestricted carnivore and a vegetarian - but I don't think that's a bad thing :-)

After finishing up most of the meal, I couldn't resist ordering another dish to go - Deer ragout, bread dumplings, and pear and beery sauce! We shared an excellent berry tea while we waited. Then we drove home in the moonless (or what seemed like it), countryside darkness. Fun!

Technical: Mac OS X Permissions Issues - ACL

2009-04-10T07:18:00.005-04:00

Today I've spent much of the day cleaning up my computer (which had started stalling and doing other sorts of strange things indicating that it was unhappy). I sorted through all the files that had accumulated in random places during the made rush of first work and then traveling which left me with little time (and more importantly little emotional energy) for the process of sorting them. Then I attempted to back everything up.

This went well up until the time I attempted to made an image of my Documents folder. This is the place where I keep all of the important non-media (e.g., non-picture, song, or movie) files. I keep this in a separate hard-drive partition so I don't have to recopy it everytime I want to swap the OS in and out. However, it is important to keep at least one, preferably more backup copies of this very important directory kept elsewhere.

But here I ran into a problem. When using the Mac OS X Disk Utility program to make an image of the directory (from folder), I kept receiving errors along the line of "unable to create Documents: permission denied". Now this was quite irritating, so I went and checked the permissions on the directory. Permissions are essentially just a bunch of data about your file stored along with your file (metadata) that tell you what different groups of users are allowed or prohibited from doing with your files. User groups include: you, everyone, and custom groups of users that are more than yourself but less than everyone. Actions include things like reading, writing, and executing the contents of a file.

Being fairly familiar with permissions from over a decade of *nix experience, I expected to solve this quite easily but reseting everything to some reasonable default (e.g., chmod -R 770 Documents - which means me and other special folks can do everything and people who aren't us can't do anything) but strangely this didn't work. So I had to search.

What I found was that Mac OS X uses an extended permissions system called ACL, which in theory is probably really nice, but in practice seems to be mostly a pain-in-the-ass.

To explain: regular permissions look something like the below.
The first character lets you know of the file is special, e.g. d (a directory), l (a link), or - (normal).
The next 3 sets of three characters lets you know if the file is readable r, writeable w, and executable e, respectively. The first set is for the owner, the second for the group and the last for everyone (else).
drwx------ 4 reich staff 136 Apr 10 02:34 Desktop
The stuff on the line following this lets you know who the owner of the file is, the group of the file, it's name and other identifying info.
Here is a slightly more complicated entry for a symbolic link
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root staff 27 May 11 2008 Documents -> /Volumes/storage/Documents/

Not too complicated (although perhaps a bit daunting for the beginner), but in systems using ACL some entires might have a + symbol after the 10 character permissions string. This indicates that the file has extended ACL permissions as well. To actually see these permissions one types
ls -el
(technically only the e is need to see the ACL stuff, but I like to use l as well to get a more complete picture)
Here's an example of what you might see:
drwxr-xr-x@ 6 reich staff 204 Oct 7 2008 Movies
0: group:everyone deny delete
also you might notice that instead of the 11th character being a + it is a @.
This indicates that not only does this file use ACL, but its using some type of extended attributes thing. My suspicion is that the @ symbol doesn't necessarily imply the + symbol, but that when both apply the @ wins but I'm too lazy to find out right now.

Anyway it turns out for reasons I haven't bothered to discover that Mac OS X sometimes decides to do weird things to the file permissions - giving them special ACL-based restrictions - that cause the type of errors I experienced. So the quick solution is to kill all of these irritating ACL metadata (no guarantees that it won't cause your computer to explode, but I've not had any negative reactions from doing this)
Each ACL permission that is attached to your file will have a number indicating which rule it is.
All my problem have come from rules that look like
0: group:everyone deny delete
so you want to delete rules with these numbers (in this case rule 0)
chmod -R -a# 0 username
and after that things should be much more hunky dory.
Good luck!

Where I'll be for the next bit

2009-03-29T17:27:00.002-04:00

Haven't posted in a while. Just too much work. But I'm taking a break for the next month-and-change (or at least much of it). Hopefully might even find some time to blog. But for now, I'm just going to provide a quick overview of where I'll be/what I'll be up to and instruct those curious to check my twitter updates until I find time for more blog posts.

Tomorrow, Linda and I leave Paris early in the morning. We are heading down to Nice, where we will sight-see and relax until Thursday evening. Then we head to Israel on an overnighter. Get in Friday morning and spend the next two weeks seeing friends, catching up on sleep and a little work, and celebrating the Pesach holidays. Leave Israel after the holiday, stop in Paris for a couple of hours to see friends from New Mexico, then off to Vienna to visit Linda's cousins and newborn child! Couple of days in Vienna and then back to Paris for the night of the 21st of April. 22nd we head to Tangiers, Morocco. After that Fez, Casablanca, Marrakesh (and maybe other places in between). Then at the end of the week (can't remember if its the last day of April or first of May, we go to London for an extend weekend with good friends. Then I return to NY and work at Columbia (May 5th in the eve) and Linda will be travelling, learning, and cooking in Europe until June 21st. Okay now to sleep b/c I have to get up EARLY.

Just Plain Stupid

2009-02-06T02:07:00.003-05:00

"Phelps Disciplined Over Marijuana Incident" - give me a break. What? Now the world's best athlete is being disciplined ovr using a performance dehancing drug?! Marijuana couldn't do anything but make you a worse swimmer. Negative effects of inhaling burning toxic gas aside (a.k.a. "smoking") it's probably one of the most innocuous drugs ever used from a pharamacological perspective (okay chocolate for the non-chronically obese probaly is a tad milder, tea likewise, although coffee is questionable and alcohol definitely much stronger).

I feel a rant coming on, so I'll cut myself short and simply end by observing that I don't see anything wrong with a octuple gold medal winner enjoying a smoke. If he's done it before (overwhelmining likely) it surely didn't cause (and evidently didn't prevent) his success, and if you are going to argue that it somehow degraded his drive, mental acuity, or physical health - well, I'd probably call you a nut. Not that there would be much, if any basis, to such a claim based on medical evidence (but that never stopped morons or politicians from making them).

Addition: The other quick thought I had was that the majority of athletes who use illegal substances to cheat rarely get penalized on this level (if at all - those in lucrative sports like baseball pretty much get carte-blanche even when it's common knowledge they pop steriods like a third-world traveler uses petol bismol) - either legally, professionally, or financially. People generally get in a huff over drugs (even when it is reasonable to do so) when the targets are athletes in random niche sports that Americans only give a damn about once every 4 years.

Missing New York

2009-02-06T02:00:00.002-05:00

Everything is a lot better. But with the good comes the busy (at least at this stage in my life). So not much time to blog still. However, I might find time to do the occasional short post.

We've settled into Paris at this point and I'm really enjoying myself. Still got a bit to the trip - should just have gotten home in 3 months (Linda will probably travel for another month-and-change after), but definitely at the point where I'm thinking fondly of home. Then I saw this NY Times blog post - I LEGO NY. I never thought LEGOs could evoke home so well!

Feeling Foggy

2008-12-22T17:39:00.002-05:00

I haven't written in awhile. Lot's of reasons for that.

I've been really busy - spent the week before last in Madrid, first attending CONEXT, then taking the weekend to explore w/ Linda. It was a really excellent time, perhaps at some point I'll write a post about it. I got to see my advisors for the first time in half-a-year and spend some time with each of them, which was really nice. Linda and I were welcomed by a very warm Madrid Jewish community, and we slept, wandered, ate great food, and just generally enjoyed being with each other somewhere new. It was our first trip since we've arrive in Europe. Really low key. Which I needed b/c the rest of the time I've been working - at least as much as I can which goes to the second reason.

I've been ill. I really haven't felt well since leaving India. I've done two rounds of antibiotics - first for my fever illness and then more recently for Bronchitis. I'm now a bit better, but still a couple of weeks later am not very strong. Just took a flu vaccine which I think wiped me out further, but at least that's one less thing I'm likely to catch. My immune system neads a rest. Being ill of course means that I'm generally less productive, end up working fewer hours, and can't excersize. All of which tends to add to my stress level which leads to reason three.

I've been stressed. I spent my time in India really opening up to new experiences, going with the flow, staying incredibly engaged, and just not worrying. It was amazing, transformative, and I'm so proud of myself. But as with all things elastic, if you stretch your personality radically, there tends to be a bit of bounce back. Since I've gotten here, I've been worried (about work, future, money, health), distracted, and generally down. That's not to say, I'm not happy to be here, but just that it hasn't been easy and luck hasn't been with me. Although more truthfully, I left myself open to much of the "bad-luck" - worrying isn't good for the immune system and not paying attention to the task at hand made it possible for the laundry machine to break. Oh, the epilogue there is that I'm listening to the new machine whirl away and do my laundry. I had to replace the machine. The total damage to my wallet was 425 EUR (about two-and-a-half times the high end estimate from the fellow in the store). At the time the unexpected expense freaked me out. The truth is, I was being an idiot. It was not pleasant to have to spend the money, but it wasn't nearly worth the amount of emotional energy I lost on it.

I've been foggy. I just haven't been focusing well. Not on my work and not on being in-the-moment. That of course is wrapped up in all of the above. But also I've been trying to figure out what this whole trip means. What I want to do in the future. Whether I'm good at what I'm doing. Whether I'm living my life in the most meaningful way that I can. And I've only just started to take the time I need to quiet my mind and let some of this play out.

I've been a bit socially disconnected. Oddly we've had a harder time making friends here than in India. We've also travelled much less, which enhances the feeling of isolation. Thankfully my colleagues at Thomson are a wonderful bunch and likewise for Linda's classmates at pastry school. We've also had the company of my friend Jen and her husband David. But aside from that we haven't really connected here. I tried going to the nearby shul. No one was unfriendly.
Many shook my hand and said "shabbat shalom", but not a single person, including the Rabbi asked me what my name was or where I was from. This was accentuated when we visited Madrid where the first words out of the Rabbi's mouth upon seeing us was an invitation in hebrew to stick around and join a shabbat dinner for 20-30 somethings (the security guard had previously let us know about this when we first showed up).

I'm also down at the moment, b/c I received two paper rejections this week. So both disappointment and additional work should I resubmit. Mostly because rejection is rejection. Never a fun feeling.

So right now I'm trying to find my way out of all this and get back on track. It will probably be slow, although I'm so looking forward to the arrival of my brother and Mia this Thursday. It will be so good to see them! I'm also trying to be more focused on the moment and engaged with whatever it is that I'm doing. Trying to let go of worries and think more about process and less about result. I'll keep you posted on how it goes.

Thanksgiving in Paris

2008-11-30T06:58:00.007-05:00

This was the second Thanksgiving that Linda and I have spent outside of the US (the first was two years ago, when we visited her father in Hungary). Now probably the main thing about Thanksgiving outside of the US which may come as a surprise to many of my countrymen, is well that it isn't the most celebrated of holidays ;-) Seriously, I recently did a little looking online - it seems that at best, less than one out of every five Americans even holds a passport for foreign travel, much less has traveled abroad. I think if there was one thing that would be most helpful in guiding the US towards better foreign policy and interaction with the world, it would be getting more Americans abroad. The best (and perhaps only) way to really begin to understand the way the rest of the world functions, lives, and sees things, is to actually go there (and there are so many places to go). Of course there is one caveat - you actually have to be there, staying at a resort or going on a cruise where you keep yourself segregated from the local population isn't really traveling - it's more like experiencing a live-slideshow with nice weather. Anyway, I'll now return to Thanksgiving.

This meant that Linda and I were absolutely thrilled to be invited to such a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner. One of my friends from college, Jen (you may have seen her mentioned several posts back when I first came through Paris), married a fantastic Parisian fellow, David and is currently in town. Well it turns out David's cousin, Michael (might be misspelling this), is going out with an American girl, Lindsey, and they decided to make a Thanksgiving meal, to which we were then graciously extended an invitation.

It really was one of the most Thanksgivingy meals, I've ever been to - mostly because of the inspiring efforts of Lindsey and Jen. You see they didn't just make a Thanksgiving meal; they brought Thanksgiving with them across the Atlantic!

In her luggage, Lindsey brought all manner of Thanksgiving decoration (a banner, shiny Thanksgiving sparkles for the table, etc.), Stoufers stuffing, cranberries for the sauce, and some other foodstuffs as well! Jen wowed us even more. She brought an entire Turkey (free range & organic) in her suitcase, along with fall squashes and other somesuch. I'm not a carnivore, but I was pretty blown away by the effort (not to mention the risk - I mean what do you say to the customs officer if they question you about this one?).

So we ended up gathered around a table with all of the fixings, from cranberry sauce to American pie for dessert, with a group of 20-something American expats and Parisians having a lovely time. The company was great, the food fantastic, and after being out of the States for the longest stretch in my life (around half a year now - I've done a lot of traveling, just not very long-term) it was really nice to be celebrating the most American of holidays the way it should be celebrated - with large table full of great food surrounded by new friends and old!

The Lighter Side of Presidential Transitioning

2008-11-22T14:16:00.007-05:00

I've not been posting much lately. Mostly that's because I've been sick (apparently, it's Bronchitis - so far the antibiotics have not made much impact) and generally a bit down (been thinking about all the mistakes I've made in the recent and not-so-recent past), a little bit because I've been busy with other stuff. And of course, there's always inertia. I think we would perhaps had been better off in Sir Issac Newton hadn't invented the damn thing ;-)

Anyway, in between naps (I've been sleeping most of the day since that appears to be my body's main desire at the moment), I figured I'd put up a brief post of two amusing post-election tidbits, both passed forward to me by my wife, Linda.

The first is a video clip of our now-lame-duck President. Usually lame-duckness means that the President loses much of his influence over the legislative process and other matters that lie outside of the sole purvue of the executive. However, this is the first time I've seen it translate into major public snubbing by practically everyone at a major world-leader's conference (the G20 summit). It was pretty telling, Bush even started slouching his head and shoulders towards the end, before forcibly straightening himself up. Almost enough to make me feel sorry for the guy. Emphasis here goes on almost.

The second tidbit is a rather amusing piece of graphics design that takes a popular Israeli snack Bamaba and renames Obamaba, purportedly in honor of the new US President. Now I'm pretty sure this isn't real, given that an artist's name and email address are on the bottom left hand corner. I'm guessing this fellow is probably the one who made it (it would be pretty low to pass this sort of thing off as one's own work) - he's got a page up at http://mochito.deviantart.com/ I have to say it's really quite good, especially when you compare it against the original from the
Osem Corporation's English website.

He's even managed to turn the somewhat creepy (at least in my opinion) "Bamba baby" into a chocolaty-good Obama baby. Not sure whether I'm tickled or disturbed. Linda sent me this one from jcarrot the pioneering Jewish food blog.

Chief Justice Roberts Knows Law, Doesn't Know Math OR The Difference Between Polynomial and Exponential

2008-11-16T06:17:00.010-05:00

In yesterday's New York Times online, I read the recent news that the Supreme Court Rules for Navy in Sonar Case. For those of you who aren't familiar with the case: environmental groups challenged the legality of the Navy to conduct training excersizes using mid-range SONAR (an underwater object detection and localization method that uses pulses of sound) while aquatic mammals were in the vicinity (and some other circumstances).

As I understand things, their main argument was that these tremendous pulses of sound cause damage to marine mammals (much like someone setting off a firecracker right next to your ear, possibly multiple times in a row) that could potentially result in outcomes such as failure to reproduce, beaching, and death, being that these mammal rely strongly on their ability to hear in order to figure out where they are going.

Meanwhile the Navy argued that (1) it doesn't hurt the marine mammals so much and (2) national security is more important. While lower courts put a hold on the Navy's ability to conduct exercises while the mammals where nearby (agreeing with the environmentalists), our Supreme Court ruled that courts should not second guess the military, or at least not overmuch.

I honestly don't know all of the details of precisely how often the restriction the environmentalists argued were called for by the National Environmental Policy Act and other statutes. Although, my bias is to guess that the Navy probably could have managed to conduct their exercises under these constraints. However one part of the majority opinion text authored by Chief Justice Roberts floored me for both it's lack of precision and misleading nature.

Quoting the aforementioned NY Times article:
Chief Justice Roberts took issue with both restrictions. The Navy had agreed to shut down its sonar if marine mammals were sighted within 200 yards. The appeals court’s requirement that it increase the zone to 2,200 yards, Chief Justice Roberts said, would “expand the surface area of the shutdown zone by a factor of over 100,” given “the exponential relationship between radius length and surface area.”

Now our Chief Justice may be a brilliant legal mind, but he could use a primer in college math 101. The relationship between surface area (A) and radius length (r) on a plane is actually:

A=pi*r^2

(where pi is approx 3.14 and ^2 denotes the operation of taking a number and multiplying it by itself - e.g. 5^2 = 5 * 5 = 25). This relationship is what is know as a polynomial relationship, this one in particular being of degree 2.

What this means in plain English is that as the minimum legal distance allowed between the Navy ships and the aquatic mammals for Navy SONAR use increases, the amount of potential area in which a mammal can show up and disrupt exercises (shutdown zone) grows increasingly faster.

And what the Chief Justice wrote is that this increase is not polynomial, but rather exponential, which is a whole different ball game in terms of fast as can be seen by the graph above. Namely exponential growth works essentially like a doubling process. If that were true in this case, of every single yard increase in distance, the size of the shutdown zone area would double! After a 100 yard increase or so, the shutdown zone's size would far exceed the surface area of the earth (and possibly the milky way, I'm not going to bother checking on this). Anyway, it really gets my goat - particularly given how precise with their language these Justices are supposed to be (I mean for the past 50 years at least, folks have been arguing whether the 2nd Amendment protects your right to a semi-automatic based on the presence and positioning of a comma)!

But mathematical correctness aside, there's a rhetorical issue here that bothers me. Yes, by increasing the distance at which the Navy needs to be away from an aquatic mammal (which is the right way to argue the restriction since the level of the sound is related directly to how far you are from its source), you increase the shutdown area by a larger factor (in geek-speak we call this super-linear). So ten times as far means 100 times more shutdown zone. So what?

The rate of growth, be it linear, polynomial, or exponential only matters if you are presupposing that there is a growth process in the first place. If the assumption is that if the envionmentalists win then they immediately go back to court demanding an even larger safety distance be imposed, and that if they've won once they will win again, then I guess I see how the rate of growth matters. But otherwise, it's empty rhetoric.

The only real issues are (1) what distance won't cause damage to our aquatic friends (2,200 meters claimed by the environmentalists), (2) what the physical size of the shutdown zone will be in order to accomodate that (just around 5 square miles according to my calculation), and (3) whether that is compatible with our national security interest (my guess being yes, given that there is something like 20,000,000 times that amount of oceanic surface area today). The geometric properties relating distance and surface area matter only insofar as they allow us to calculate the value in (2) from the value in (1). Aside from that the relationship really doesn't provide any insight or value into the decision making process. The only other use you could find is a rhetorical one: "look at how quick this function grows, giving up more than one yard for one yard is a bad deal". It sounds good, but has no intelligence to back it up.

So to summarize: Chief Justice Roberts' opinion was both factually incorrect, being ignorant of basic college math, and misleading as well, using mathematical relationships to make a point that was essentially a non-sequitur (10 times increase in distance = 100 times increase in area) to the real question (If 2200 meters is needed for the safety of marine life and that implies a 5 square mile shutdown zone: can a 5 square mile shutdown zone be compatible with our national security interests?).

Washing Machine Woes

2008-11-14T10:32:00.008-05:00

One of the nice things about our apartment in France is that it has a washing machine. Back in the States, we have to walk down the hallway to use the machine, which is with many folks, some of whom don't leave the machines and driers in a clean state after use, and others of whom will pull your stuff out and dump it on the dirty machine tops if you are more than a minute late to pull your clothing out (plus the machines never run according to time so it is nigh well impossible to get there on time - you are either early or late). And this is pretty good for a student apartment living - the folks living in the building next door have to come to our building and then go upstairs to do their laundry, which has got to be an awful pain.

In India we didn't do our own laundry. It was taken away, done for us, and eventually returned folded. The problem was that it wasn't done particularly well. Several times, items were washed in such a way that colors bled unto one another, ruining a couple of my shirts. Moreover, even when this didn't happen, the clothing was often returned not fully dried and smelled moldy.

So getting to have our own washing machine has been such a pleasure. That is until this past Thursday evening. You see, here in France things are smaller and use less power. The clothing is mostly air-dried (dryers being energy hogs). And one of the innovations they've made are really small, yet efficient top-loading washers (they've got these in Israel also). Traditional top loaders have a cylinder which rotates along a vertical axis, which makes sense since it's sort of difficult to put clothing in through the wall of the cylinder. But these aren't efficient water or energy wise. So often side-loading washers are used instead, which lets the cylinder rotate along the horizontal access. The problem with these is that they take up too much space. So where both space and efficiency are at a premium, a new design was introduced that allows the cylinder to rotate along the horizontal access which still top-loading, namely but putting a set of metal doors into the cylinder that must be latched together before starting the machine. This is the type we have, a Whirlpool AWA6094 to be precise.

Therein lies the problem. Thursday night, tiredly I almost certainly forgot to latch these together before closing the top lid (yes, I know - a properly designed piece of equipment wouldn't allow the top lid to close unless the cylinder was locked). I pressed the on button and shortly heard very unpleasant noises. I shut the washing machine off and found that the cylinder had rotated down, dragging the doors with it, and thereby jamming further movement. It was pretty upsetting - I mean how the hell should forgetting one step and pressing a button result in significant damage to the machine (in but a moment - it's not like the machine was making complaining sounds which I ignored for an hour and then found repeated movement had caused the damage), requiring an expensive repair visit! It's a frigging washing machine, not an automotive vehicle for G-d's sake!

But the damage was done, and after looking at the machine and poking about, I concluded that even with my mild engineering background, I wasn't going to fix this without more effort than the cost of a repairman (I'd have to buy the right tools, somehow find a servicing manual, spend a couple of hours working on the thing, and then cross my fingers that I hadn't screwed it up worse). I was really upset. I didn't sleep well. Thankfully, at least Linda was really understanding.

So in the morning I asked around the office if anyone had encountered similar problems (they hadn't), then called my landlordess. She was pretty useless on this one, telling me she couldn't do anything about it, and that I could contact Darty (an appliance seller/servicer) and see about getting it repaired. Wasn't so much her content (I should arrange for repair) as her presentation - a big part of what got my goat is that she said "well the machine is new" and shortly after told me it was out of warrantee. I then asked how long the warrantee ran, she told me 3 years. So I of course said "but didn't you say it was new?" to which she replied "it is new, it is rarely used". Now I know English isn't her first language, but she speaks it reasonably well and I have trouble she doesn't know that "new" and "like-new" are two very different things.

But either way the bottom line was the same and I found myself in Darty where I met a nice fellow who spoke a good English. He told me that once this sort of thing happend it was really difficult to get unstuck without professional help and gave me the repair number. While there I also inspected the machines and found two items of interest: (1) the new ones don't close unless the cylinder locks (wouldn't have had that problem with a truly new machine) and (2) they all had two protruding pieces of plastic that kept the cylinder from turning unless it was closed. The other thing that I found out was that while unpleasantly expensive (just having the repairman visit will be 60-70 EUR) I probably wasn't in for an inordinate amount of financial pain (he said he'd have trouble believing the repair would be more than 100 EUR on top of that) so I'm probably in the hole for 100 to 200 EUR b/c of a stupid mistake and bad luck.

I got home and looked at the machine again. It turns out that it did have the two prong safety mechanism, have being the operative word in that sentence. In my mind there are two possibilities: (1) the plastic got old and brittle and snapped quickly to my misfortune and (2) they were broken off previously (my landlordess did mention that one of her previous subtentant had some problem with the doors). I'm very curious to see if the broken pieces of the safety mechanism are in the machine (imply option 1 more likely) or absent (implying option 2 with almost certainty) on Monday when the repairman comes.

I'll follow up with a short post to let you know how it works out, or maybe just put something in the comments.

Chinchilla!

2008-11-10T10:09:00.004-05:00

The latter part of this past Sunday took us past an outdoor pet market. One of the first animals we encountered there was a friendly, charismatic, and personable rodent. I guessed it was a Chinchilla, which I have confirmed after checking wikipedia. The video should make clear why I'm bothering with a post about this.

Yerba Maté

2008-11-09T07:28:00.006-05:00

This week, along with really starting to settle into to work at Thomson (as opposed to really actually get much work done (okay I did get lots done, but I don't yet feel truly productive) which is my aspiration for this week) I had a new experience.

Fabio a half Argentinian, half Italian member of my lab kindly introduced me to Yerba Maté. Another new (to me) legal psychoactive drug. Yes, for those Coffee and Chocolate users out there, you too are psychoactive drug users, get over it and move on with your lives.

I had only had maté via a fairly lame "iced tea" variety beverage, which wasn't particularly tasty or impressive. However, I knew that maté was the beverage of choice in Brazil for filling there the same ecological niche in the world of human ingestibles as that occupied by coffee in the West and tea in the East. It turns out I only knew half. Yerba apparently is the hot beverage of choice in Argentina , eastern Paraguay, western Uruguay and southern Brazil. Moreover, while many of it's psychoactive properties are similiar to those of it's beverage cousins, it appears that yerba maté has a superior chemical profile insofar as it increases attentivness to a greater degree than tea (which I've always found quite mild) without the jitteriness induced by coffee.

Of course everything has its tradeoffs and maté is a finicky drink. As Fabio showed me, to make yerba maté properly one first has to loosely pack the yerba herb into a cup (preferably with a gourd shape) into which a special spoon (essentially a straw with a slotted spoonlike bottom). Then hot, but not boiling, water needs to be slowly poured into the herb. The water cannot be poured to fast as it needs to slowly seep into the spaces between the herb particles. If poured too fast the herb will become blocked and little and inferior beverage will result (ditto for using too much water). If the water isn't hot enough, you won't get the enjoyable warm that I at least associate with a good cup of tea, and if it's too hot it will burn the beverage resulting in a very bitter brew.

To drink, you sip through the spoon/straw (otherwise known as a bomba) and then slowly refill your cup with more warm/hot water. It's a fun ritual to share with friends and fairly relaxing in and of itself (I tend to drink my tea compulsively while reading the news, which defeats half the purpose of taking some time to drink a hot soothing beverage). Also while the setup takes quite awhile, once the cup is ready, one can make many washes of drink from the same packed cup (you can probably use a prepared cup of yerba every day for a week before it's time to clean and repack)

I enjoyed drinking maté. I liked the preparation, the taste was a bit strong/bitter and takes some getting used to. I also felt a mild increase in alertness while at the same time felt quite mellow. Of course this could be due to a million other factors including the placebo effect. Nonetheless it was neat and I'll probably add yerba to my collection of drinkables.

So the pros of maté:

nice psychoactive properties
fun parephenelia
soothing preperation ritual
can reuse the herb for many washes

the cons:

not as tasty as tea, although far better than coffee (yes I don't like coffee, I try it every chance I get, but I still think even the best coffee tastes like a cross been funky chocolate and burnt cigarettes - okay maybe not that bad, but you get the idea)
easy to muck up and a bit finicky
somewhat difficult to find in many places (both paraphernalia and herb)

We Did It! (Mostly)

2008-11-08T15:20:00.005-05:00

Obama won! And the Dems now have majorities in the Senate (albeit not Filibuster proof), House, and US Governorships! I'm really happy and so are the folks here in France (at least 85% of them) as you can see below. On Wednesday morning I went around the office toasting Obama with a bottle of Cidre Brut (hard cider). Then in the afternoon the lab head broke out the Champagne for another toast with guests.

And Prop 2 passed in California - which makes me truly happy and will improve the lives of millions of farm animal. After spending most of my life being mocked for my belief that animal suffering is an important and valid concern, Americans finally seem to be coming around to the idea (the French though treat vegetarians the way Americans did 20 years ago).

I got almost everything out of this election that I wanted. Although I guess it's a law of the universe you can't get everything you want. Still it really stinks that a bunch of bigotry against gays, dressed up as ballot measures, passed in several states - the most prominent of which was California's Prop 8. The whole thing makes me sad and angry. It's also quite fascinating to me that the Mormon church LDS has put so much effort into defending "traditional marriage" - given that they are a group that had to flee the US, in part, because their marriage arrangements were rejected by greater US society!

I believe in equality - if two given people (say Joe and Mary) have the right to join in a union to live their lives together, gaining both societal recognition, and a variety of benefits big and small in doing so - I see no reason why the legality of that union should be based on one particular combination of sexual genetalia. I'm no lawyer, but it definitely has the stink of an "equal rights" violation - I mean have a century after the civil rights movement we've still effectively got separate water fountains (which is what I'd call a civil union) - that is when gays even get a water fountain in my analogy.

It also gets my goat that so many anti-gay advocates (particularly the evangelicals) make this seem like a linguistic concern 'we are fighting against the re-definition of marriage from time immemorial as the union between one man and one woman' or some other such intellectually dishonest tripe. Have you read the Bible lately? How many wives did Jacob have? It wasn't "one man and one woman". But really if it's just a language issue, let's throw legal marriage out the window and have everyone get civil unions. Then marriages (which seem in this view to be a religious or quasi-religious institution) can stay where they belong in a society with a church-state separation (namely in church, synagogue, or mosque) and civil benefits, rights, etc. can be guided by a completely secular institution. But that probably won't ever happen.

Also I was a bit sad that my friend Roy Simon lost his bid to unseat Republican State Senator Skelos, the third most senior Republican in State government. Have to say, I'm a natural skeptic - Roy was running a seriously uphill battle - but I really admire him for doing it!

So in sum, I'm terribly excited to see what Obama and the D-crats do in the next couple of years. Hopefully it will be magic that will make everything better - but more realistically they'll just stop screwing things up and institute some mild improvements. Either way, I'll be happier and sleep easier knowing our country is out of hands proven to be incompetent and into ones that think "reality-based decision making" is a valid way of governing! This is still just the beginning of the fight to improve things (like in Obama's speach - 'continually striving to perfect our union'), but I'm feeling hopeful - like it actually might be a begining. I guess we'll see where things go.

Watch the Election Live!

2008-11-04T07:05:00.002-05:00

I've spent my entire adult voting life being continually frustrated that my candidate never wins. G-d, I hope Obama wins b/c I don't want this to be the third presidential election that ends with me crying.

Who I Voted For

2008-11-02T05:38:00.014-05:00

Of all the elections I've lived through, this one definitely seems to be the one that has people the most riled up. I've been slightly surprised at how many folks from back in the States have asked me if I've made sure to vote (yes) and pleasantly taken aback by the interest the people in the countries I've visited have taken in the US election and whom I'm voting for (Obama - Biden). In the past when I've walked through international border control the kind of questions I've gotten have been "why are you coming? how long are you staying?" whereas the last time I passed a checkpoint the question was "Obama or McCain?"

People in the countries I've visited are excited, curious, and extremely interested in the US elections and US politics in general. And for those of you knee jerkers who think all non US folks are for Obama and against McCain, well it's simply not the case. Lots of them just aren't sure what they think and some are outright scared of Obama. But having said that, I'll admit most of the folks I come across are really excited that the US may have a change of heart and leadership (I for the one do agree with the implicit assumption here that McCain won't be much of a change), inspired by Obama's message, and impressed that a man of color looks likely to be elected to the presidency.

While every person has their own unique opinion, I've found generalizations can be made. So I'll give you my very brief, unscientific, not-terribly-in-depth, and admittedly biased by-the-country impressions.

India: The average person on the street here tended to know the least about politics, although the educated knew a lot and had fairly strong opinions. With all of the bombings going on there and the Muslim/Hindu tensions there is quite significant concern with terrorism, Islamic militant groups, etc. As in most places, this tends to push the fulcrum towards a more positive view of aggressive/militant US policies and support of both Bush and McCain (by proxy). The perception of toughness and strength resonates strongly in the culture, although the better educated tend to dismiss the implicit premise that [ toughness/militancy = actually having a positive effect towards stopping terrorism ]. I'll admit though, I've come to the belief that being able to reject this emotionally appealing notion is one of the contemporary hallmarks of an ordered, logical mind - or for those of you who are geeks, a second order Turing test (the first order test being something that indicates capacity for written language and use of tools). Now this isn't too say that I don't think there aren't valid arguments for supporting specific military actions taken in specific countries (although I may strenuously disagree with said arguments), but it is to say that I complete reject the notion that being "tough" without regard to whom the toughness is directed against, nor without regard to whether such "tough actions" have any likelihood of succeeding or being sustained, is, in one word, assinine - and to the highest order.
But I digress.

Along with the Indians, there were many foreign travelers that we met. In particular, I had a very animated conversation in Coorg with a very nice Colombian couple with whom we became friends. We spent about 2 or 3 hours talking about US politics - they were really upset with their own country's leadership and thought about the same as I of Bush: namely that his actions and leadership have been disasterous. We also spent quite awhile talking about US funding of what essentially is civil war in Colombia. I've got much to say about this, but will keep my comments (relatively) short:

US polititians are far too eager to declare "war" on problems than actually understand those problems
we haven't won anything we've declared war on in far too long (be it drugs, poverty, illiteracy, terrorism, or crime
we have injured lots of people (our own who languish in jails at rates far exceeding on a per-capita basis any other country in the world and who die in pointless wars abroad and of poor medical care since we'd rather spend money fighting "wars" than paying doctors properly, and those of our neighbors who are killed in civil wars our dollars fund and by the societal disorder our invasions engender - not to metion those accidentally killed by our bombs) and have little to show for it.
Consequently, we really ought to consider trying a different tactic.

That's in a nutshell why I support Obama over McCain. McCain's a war hero and has done some impressive stuff. But aside from making himself a serious sellout over the past couple of years, and demonstrating such terribly bad judgment as to pick a VP who seems to be a female version of W (but even less informed, experienced, intelligent, and knee-jerk - which I previously hadn't considered within the realm of likelihood) when he'd be the oldest president elected, a recent cancer survivor, and of potentially damaged health from his long stay in the Hanoi Hilton: I think McCain is basically more of the same old failed policies. I tend to believe Obama might be different. And even if he isn't, honestly all I want from a US president at this point is that he (or she) doesn't do anything to screw things up further. World peace, universal healthcare, riches for all - all these would be bonuses for me. I'd be happy if we just took the time to obtain a UN resolution before invading any more countries.
Damn, I've digressed again.

Anyway, to sum it up: in India ill-educated people loved Bush, but were intrigued by Obama. Better educated people tended to prefer Obama to McCain (although not always). Most of the foreigners we met were very pro Obama.

Israel: Here the mix was similar to India, although it tended to divide down the same lines as general Israeli politics. Leftists tended to be open to Obama and Rightists tended to go for McCain. Most of the American Israelis I hung out with were strongly for Obama (and sent their ballots in). However, whereas the uneducated in India were likely to be impressed with Obama, in Israel at least one I met asked me "didn't I think he was dangerous?". When I asked why, I was told "because he's a Muslim". I explained that "No, Obama isn't a Muslim, actually he's a Christian and a fairly observant one" (I didn't bother following this up with the question "so what if he was a Muslim though?" which while more directly attacking the deeper prejudice underlying that statement, was something I simply didn't think would be productive or for which I'd have the energy). He wouldn't accept my explanation telling me, "but his father... I've heard Obama is a Muslim". I then told him that people will tell any lie they like if they think it will help their cause and other people will repeat it, simply because people like repeating crap and hardly ever check to see if what they've been told is true. He was wavering on this, so I followed up by bringing up an example that hit close to home - blood libel. I said, "plenty of people say that Jew's drink Christian baby blood and also make matzah out of it, no connection to reality whatsoever, but it doesn't stop them from saying it. Same here." I think that may have convinced him.

France: Not terribly interesting politics-wise. Everyone here (with whom I've interacted) hates Bush's guts, and supports Obama openly and loudly. Politically, it's just like being home in NY! So I get lot's of props for my answer to the oft posed question: "you're American! who are you voting for?" In my first day or two here, I snapped the picture above of an Obama-Biden sign hanging from an apartment in my neighborhood of Butte Aux Calle. Today the vendor pictured below gave us free food for our response (said he would have released the dogs if we had said McCain) although I think he was mostly trying to make a sale. He was successful. Later on after having a wonderful vegetarian brunch at La Victoire Supreme du Coeur we even saw Obama boxer shorts!

So now you know something about my thoughts on US politics and the adventures we've had traveling during this unusual and exciting election season. It's cool when the border guards are more interested in which candidate you are voting for than how long you'll be staying and whether it's business or pleasure ;-)

Post Script (P.S.): I forgot to mention that the attitudes Linda experienced in Italy mirror those we've found in France. Apparently, she needed a cab and the folks there were only willing to call one for her after she confirmed that she was voting Obama! (although, all such comments we've encountered have been light-hearted and good-natured - I highly doubt Linda would have been denied help calling the cab if she had claimed to be a McCain supporter)

What I Did Today

2008-10-26T18:39:00.007-04:00

Do laundry (already running)
Assess kitchen and determine what I need to buy
1. cookware
2. foodstuffs
Start Kashering Kitchen
Go to the nearby cheapo supermarket to by more Avocados (on sale 4 for 1 EUR!)
Go to the Kosher Butcher for
1. Kosher cheese and other foodstuffs at Ki Tov II Kosher Market
2. Learn about the nearby Jewish community - Meet Jewish Expat
Stroll Through Farmer's Market and Buy Some of Everything!
Go to Chinatown for
1. Cookware
2. Groceries
3. Sightseeing
~~Have lunch~~ Wolf down a baguette w/ some kosher Guda
Fold up laundry and begin figuring out where all my clothing should go
Do likewise for electronics and other miscellaneous stuff
Meet up w/ Ariane
1. Paperwork
2. Payment
3. Hot water
4. Additional Apt. Info
Nap
Have dinner w/ Jen & David at Tayelet - delicious!
Computer Stuff and Prepare for Work Tomorrow (gather paperwork, etc.)
Have a bath, tea, and get a goodnight's sleep

What I'm Doing Today

2008-10-26T04:54:00.005-04:00

I just spent more time than was perhaps advisable writing about Cholent. Can't quite explain why I did, but sometimes my typing-hands just run away with me. I always say "I'd write a book, if only I had something worth saying, but the problem is that I don't really have anything that worthwhile". I mean what great insights do I really possess that someone else hasn't already shared with the world? The nice thing about blogs is that they don't have that barrier of quality. So I can spew all the crap I want. Which is probably less-than-productive, but at least has the benefits that my great-grandchildren will know something about me (if I'm fortunate enough to have them and the server doesn't die and lose all of my posts).

Right at the moment, I'm sitting in my comfy bed, in my comfy apartment, feeling somewhere between great and really-ill. I'm finding it very difficult to believe that tomorrow is my first day at my last-and-final internship before returning to Columbia. And thus, quite likely, my last-and-final internship ever (since I don't think they call them internships anymore once you've got a Doctorate - I think the word then is job). I'm also not terribly happy that I'm still feeling sick, since I haven't really every gotten completely well from the illness from which I was suffering when I first arrived in Paris, and it appears to be trying to stage a comeback. Slightly comforting though, was the effect a cup of hot samurai tea (which I bought in the shuk in Israel).

So I'm not feeling too badly. Would like a hot shower though and something is up with the hot water - hasn't been working since before Shabbos :-(

But I do need to get myself up and about, b/c I've been told things close early here on Sunday (if they are open in the first place). So know I'll take a moment to lay out what I need to do today:

Do laundry (already running)
Assess kitchen and determine what I need to buy
1. cookware
2. foodstuffs
Go to the nearby cheapo supermarket to by more Avocados (on sale 4 for 1 EUR!)
Go to Chinatown for
1. Cookware
2. Groceries
3. Sightseeing
Go to the Kosher Butcher for
1. Kosher cheese and other foodstuffs
2. Learn about the nearby Jewish community
Have lunch
Fold up laundry and begin figuring out where all my clothing should go
Do likewise for electronics and other miscellaneous stuff
Eat
Meet up w/ Ariane
1. Paperwork
2. Payment
3. Hot water
4. Additional Apt. Info
Nap
Computer Stuff and Prepare for Work Tomorrow (gather paperwork, etc.)
Have dinner w/ Jen & David
Have a bath, tea, and get a goodnight's sleep

Hopefully this covers everything b/c frankly I'm a little overwhelmed!

Cholent-in-a-Can: It's Everywhere!

2008-10-26T04:27:00.004-04:00

So I had an odd experience in Israel the week before last. My good friend Yair, with whom we were staying pulls out a can and says "look at what I've got. Cholent in a can!" To which I responded "huh?". It appears that they are now making Cholent in a can, convenient for any occasion: from intimate dinner parties to overseas jaunts.

Now for those of you who aren't familiar with cholent, or as it's known in the Sephardic Jewish world (and I believe the Talmud as well) as Chamin (a slightly different variation on the same theme), I will give you a brief explanation. In the olden days most Jews were quite poor, particularly in the Eastern European shtetl (village). This isn't to imply that most Jews today aren't poor, although at least in the US they often don't lack for food anymore (although there are exceptions particularly with the elderly which is why I believe unwieldy, high-overhead traditional Jewish charities like the UJA are still important and relevant since they are the ones who so often make initatives like JASA possible). Anyway back to my main point. The Jews were poor. So come the end of the week they needed something to eat for Shabbos that would be nutritional, palatable, and filling - that could be made from low quailty ingredients like old veggies, bits of meat, hardened beans, dirt and whatever else they could find (the last part about dirt was a joke, mostly). So they used the brilliant invention of Cholent: a stew into which everything could be put and cooked, continously for 24 - 36 hours straight until it had all become a nourishing stew with properties all its own. Plus since it's always on the fire, it can be kept warm without running into all sorts of technical Sabbath prohibitions about heating food. It als can be really quite good (and incidentally my friends Jen & David who are coming over tonight have offered to lend me their crock pot for the duration of my stay here in Paris, so I'll definitely be cooking up some Cholent while here if you want to try).

So now there is Cholent in a can. Seems a bit oxymornic to me, since Cholent is something that needs at least 18 hours of time to make - it's not the kind of food you'd think of as a microwave meal (except leftover cholent). But I can see the utility and Yair tells me it's not too bad. Apparently folks all over the world agree, because while I was in Le Marias (the touristy Jewish area of Paris) I was shocked to again see my new acquantaince, Mr. canned Cholent - he's everywhere!

Oh and for those meat-supramacist/veggie-haters/hardcore-Yavnehites (the Orthodox group at Columbia U. whose members seemed pretty opposed to my assertion that Cholent could be vegetarian) out there - guess what? Cholent in a can is vegetarian & parve no meat, but it's clearly callin' itself Cholent.

I was always really irritated by folks who claimed that Cholent "by definition requires meat, and if your's doesn't have meat you can't call it Cholent folks". Because (1) why do you need to deride someone else's cusine when it's made with care and love simply because no animals were killed in the process? And (2) they are idiots (or perhaps simply ignorant) - after all Cholent is simply whatever arises through stewing whatever you've got available for as long as advisable (perhaps a good deal longer) - my Cholent definitely fits that definition ;-)

The View from Here

2008-10-24T04:46:00.003-04:00

Just woke up for good, going to collect myself and meet my friend Jen in Le Marias for lunch and some wandering. Still very tired but slept really well, it's nice to have a real bed again.

I wanted to share the sunrise view I managed to capture with my broken (lcd doesn't work anymore) camera. Don't be too jealous though - I had to lean all the way out the window to get a clear shot. Still it's really fantastic.

Settling In

2008-10-23T18:23:00.003-04:00

So I've just had my first bath in over 4 months and for those of you who know what an avid bather I am, you know how big a deal that is! I'm laying/sitting in a huge comfy bed in my new apartment in Paris. I feel warm and cuddly and happy. Really, really tired as well [French lesson: je suis très fatiguée - I am very tired].

How did I get here you ask? Well when I last left you I had just met Idan Raichel at a stopover in Prague. So he got on his plane and an hour or so later, I got on mine.
The plane wasn't overfull so after we took off I wandered to the back and thought I'd take a nap on an empty row. Instead, I ended up talking with the French stewardesses for almost the entire flight. You see when they came by they asked me what I'd like to drink and I tried to answer in French. Haltingly. Okay actually barely comprehensibly. Somehow they were entirely charmed - perhaps akin to the way one is charmed by watching a newborn puppy stumble around and walk into a wall, falling on its hind legs and looking confused. But then, I give my French too much credit.

In any case they began teaching me more French, and eventually talking politics with me. It was really nice. I gave them my name and the blog address, perhaps they are even reading this. It was a nice intro to France. In generally, I've been pleasantly surprised at how welcoming and helpful people have been with my incipient and garbled attempts at French. I've also been pretty happy with the Pimsleur French lessons to which I'm listening. What I've learned from listening to about 4 hours of these lessons accounts for roughly 40% of the French I understand and 87% of the French I can actually speak. On the comprehension side, another 25% I got over the course of 4 French lessons back in April and subsequent work in the Barron's French textbook and the other 35% from knowledge of latin roots.

I took the Paris metro (first RER and then subway) to my new friend Ruth's house. She was intially an acquantaince of a friend (Marni) but was kind enough to let me crash on her couch for the evening since my apartment wasn't ready until afternoon. She's a lovely person and invited me back for Shabbat. I think I'll go, although the bed at my new place is temptingly comfortable (another thing I haven't really enjoyed except for one occasion in the past several months).

I could tell you more, but that covers most of the interesting stuff. I'm happy to finally be at a place I can really call my home, if only for 5 months :-) Night. Oh, one last thing - I've now got a working mobile, check my twitter posts for the # if you want to call me.

Prague Airport: Apparently a Good Place to Meet Israeli Music Superstars

2008-10-22T19:13:00.011-04:00

My trip to Paris was quite nice, albeit long (but that's what a student budget gets you). But I've found that sometimes having stopovers in random places can be quite interesting in and of themselves.

On this particular trip, I left Israel to head to France, the third and final location where I will be interning (faire stage). I was a bit sad to leave my friends and felt like I hadn't managed to have quite as much of a vacation as I would have liked (I also still managed to break my promise to myself to go to the Dead Sea, my third consecutive trip to Israel on which I've sinned in this manner). However, I was also really excited to be heading to France - both because of all the wonderful things I imagine France has in store for me (professionally, personally, culturaly, adventurally ;-) and because I am so excited to finally be living in my own apartment with just Linda and I, a real kitchen and no house boys living on beds outside our front door! I'm also really looking forward to luxuriating in the bath tonight; I haven't had bath since I left the States, almost half-a-year ago now.

So I got to Ben Gurion 2000 airport (construction completed 2004) without much event. Although there was minor event. Namely on our sherut (airport shuttle) there were 4 Israeli Arabs, I noticed this mostly in passing when I heard Arabic, although it was brought to the forefront of my attention when our sherut was stopped at the airport security gates, and they were asked to get off, remove their luggage, and undergo inspection. This took 15 minutes or so. And of course, the one true tourist on the sherut who just had to take a picture of everything, no matter how banal (this would be me in India ;-) decided it would be a good idea to snap a shot of the Arab passengers being escorted off the sherut by Israeli security. This obviously did not go over well with said security officers.

Some rapid apologizing and picture erasing ensued, although thankfully the tone stayed light after the initial angry response by one of the security guards (who I think may have initially thought the tourist was a peace provocetour or somesuch and was thus gearing up for a big and nasty argument). The Arab passengers were cleared and we all finally went on our way. Unlike Linda who tells me she was grilled as a potential terrorist, I was waved through security, bypassing even the pre-check-in luggage screening. I checked in, went through customs and got to see the airport. Boy is it different than the old Ben Gurion.

First off you enter through a gorgeous Jerusalem stone lined passageway whose wall is currently an exhibition of Israeli poster art (featured here is one I really liked of the generations intertwining).

Shortly afterward, I arrived in the main outbound waiting area of Ben Gurion. It was a circular space centered about a large skylight through whose edges water fell into a pool below. This structure was surrounded by really fancy (and comfy looking) leather chairs, a walkway, kiosks, another walking area and finally stores. It was really impressive. Free wifi was available throughout the entire airport and the kosher falafel wasn't bad, although it was fairly overpriced.

So eventually I had to leave the wonders of Ben Gurion 2000 to fly to Prague which turned out to be quite interesting. The flight went smoothly and I got through customs equally so and then stopped at a duty-free store on my way to the gate.

What I found there was interesting - namely a row of different types of Absinthe , the green-colored liquour that is rumored to cause hallucinations and a trigger brilliant onset (in certain legends Van Gogh was purported to have drunk this before cutting off his ear) - the current CW is that it doesn't do much at all beyond alcohol.
Additionally they had Cannabis Vodka - which apparently is vodka flavored with Cannabis seeds (not psychoactive stuff since THC doesn't reside in seeds).
Both seemed like neat things to buy, but I decided to save my money and went to the gate.

That's where I met Idan Raichel, the man behind the Idan Raichel Project .
He was at the counter joking with the attendants, trying to make sure his luggage would get tranfered in time for his connecting flight. He started offering them CDs and then I thought to myself, what Israeli with rasta dreadlocks would be offering CDs except for Idan Raichel. So I asked him "Are you Idan Raichel?" to which he responded "Yes, you know who I am?". He seemed half suprised, and I assured him that "of course I knew him - he's an Israeli music superstar". He then offered me a CD to help get the baggage transfered to which I replied that I'd be happy to have the CD but couldn't guarantee that I'd be able to do anything helpful with the baggage. He had his concert manager give me a CD anyway :-) He also took a picture with me which you can see at the beginning of this post. For those of you who aren't familiar with his music, check out the link I posted above - it's really good stuff, which I've been enjoying while writing this post. Hopefully I'll get to enjoy another of his concerts in the not-too-far future (last one I saw was downtown at the Museum of Jewish Heritage with Linda and our friend Marni, a month or two before we left the States).

Hampi B'Kitzur (in brief) or Elephant Blessings or Why I Haven't Written for Awhile

2008-10-19T17:27:00.007-04:00

I know I haven't written in a while. It's not because I've lost my fondness for all of you. Rather I've been busy. Very busy.

In brief: I arrived in Israel. I was really very ill. I recovered partially. There was a paper deadline. I decided it was very important to try to make the deadline. I also decided to try and contact some Israeli researchers to network - I met some really nice folks at Tel Aviv University, Yuval Shavitt's research group. I managed to get the paper done right before the Succot holiday started. I was very, very tired, still a bit ill (relapsing to a certain extent actually) and hadn't really taken care of anything else (preparations for arriving in France, email, finances). Finally have mostly caught up, but am still really tired and discombobulated - and I leave Israel in only two more days and start work in a week. I'm excited for both but feel like I could really use a vacation. I'm out of it.

So I hope that excuses my lack of posts, and I have done some fun stuff here as well - I hope to tell you about it some time ;-)

But for now enjoy these two short videos, they were taken at the main temple in Hampi and should be relatively self explanatory.

Now I will go to bed.

Yom Kippur in Jerusalem

2008-10-09T16:30:00.004-04:00

Today, I celebrated my first Yom Kippur in Jerusalem. It was a wonderful experience. I'm not one much for Yom Kippur (which is the holiest day of the Jewish year) generally. The idea of a day in which the judgment of all creatures is sealed works for me - I think it's powerful and really internalize the main message of this sacred period between Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, on which all creatures are judged and counted and Yom Kippur, 10 days later on which this judgement is sealed: namely that Teshuvah, Tefilah, U'Tzedaka Mavirin et Roah Ha'Gezarah - Repentance, Prayer/Introspection, and Acts of Loving Kindness/Charity remove evil from the decree. The ritual fasting (no food, no water for 25 hours or so) and all-day prayer marathon make sense to me. They just often don't reverberate.

I don't really enjoy long prayer services - I get bored, tired, detached. And fasting is never terribly fun. Mostly, I'm just sort of preoccupied with life - I've got lots to do, pulling myself entirely out of that is pretty much beyond where I am emotionally, and the exhaustion my body feels the day after a fast is never conducive to catching up. From what I understand though, that's pretty much the point of the whole thing, to take you entirely out of normalacy and make you focus on the fundamentals of existence. My problem is that most of the time that's basically a chore for me.

So spending Yom Kippur in Jerusalem was particularly nice. The entire city shuts down. Nothing is open. No cars drive down the street. There are people walking everywhere instead. Secular Israelis bike everywhere (apparently it's the day with the highest bicycle accident rate). Everything slows - I really liked it. In the evening we went to the shul where we had bought tickets (managed to get there for a couple of minutes over the two days of Rosh Hashanah, so it was good to be there for a full service). The davening (prayer) wasn't as stirring as Rosh Hashanah's had been, but it was still quite nice. There was a speech in between afternoon and evening prayers. I was pleased to follow most of it, even though it was all in Hebrew, then I dozed. During the evening prayer I prayed during the important parts, read Heschel's God In Search of Man (not sure how I feel about it yet - the writing is really stilted, and some of the ideas seem a bit presumptious/avoid key issues, but I think there's some stuff in there that I will find worthwhile), and joined back in whenever the singing grabbed me. As I walked home, I felt happy.

Today I slept until 9AM, slumbered (and talked with Linda) not wanting to go anywhere until noon, then fell back asleep until 3:30PM. I woke Linda and we dressed and decided to head to the Kotel (the Western Wall). We almost decided to go back to the shul for which we had tickets, but going to the holiest spot for Jews on the holiest day, at the holiest hour was too much of an opportunity to pass up - who knows when or if we will be back on this day whose prayer ends l'Shana Ha'baah B'Yerushalayim - Next year in Jerusalem?

We walked on what looked to be the shortest route on the map, but in fact took us deep into a valley from which we had to trek up a steep staircase to the Zion Gate to enter the old city. Linda was even weaker than I and we stopped to rest for 15 minutes. All-in-all the walk took us almost an hour.

As we approached the wall, travelers from all directions slowly came together like beads of water turning to streams, joining into a river that flowed to the Wall. No baggage x-ray today, only visual checks, and we were through into the plaza. Linda and I went to the separate sections for men and women, joining the Chovevai minyan. 10 men make up a traditional minyan (more modern strains of Judaism will use 10 adults or 10 men and 10 women) and at the Wall there were dozens of groups, each praying in it's own way - Sephardim, Ashkenazim, Chassidim, Misnagdim, Zionists, Orthodox Centrists, Jews from every part of the world and of every race. A uniformed border policeman with a rifle davened next to a young man in an orange sweatshirt reading "L$D". Brestlover chassdim with long payes davened with a pierced Israeli in shorts. Everywhere the sounds of prayer were heard in different accents, but the same words. The plaza itself was filled with Jews, praying and beyond them further away from the wall, simply watching those who prayed - perhaps to be part of it in a different way, perhaps out of curiousity, perhaps just waiting to hear the Shofar (Ram's horn) blown at the end of the day to signal the closing of the gates of repentance and end of the fast. I prayed, walked to the wall, meditated, walked back and forth to soak in the experience, accidentally walked right in front of a group as they began the prayer of the priests, and ran behind them to be included. My friend Yair, at whose apartment we are staying was there. I found him and we spoke. The prayers came to their conclusion as the moon rose over the Kotel. One after another the groups of prayers began to recite the Shema prayer and then sound the Shofar. One group blew and then another and then another - it was a beautiful, cachaphonious chaos. Yair and I left to beat the crowd. We grabbed a drink at the fountain and shared some of my chocolate. Linda met us at the water fountain bearing rugelach that she had grabbed from the stand set up by Lubavitch (and apparently founded by the State) and we headed home to get some more substantial food. It was the most meaningful Yom Kippur that I've had in awhile.

Journeying: 10 hours in Paris

2008-10-07T14:53:00.024-04:00

I arrived in France dead tired, but happy that I wasn't shivering or soaked anymore and excited to drop off my baggage and see our new apartment. I grabbed my luggage, got a cab and headed off to meet up with our soon-to-be landlordess Ariane at the apartment, 35 Rue De L'Esperance.

View Larger Map

It was a truly amazing ride. The contrast between the Indian subcontinent where I'd spent the last 3 months and France was so striking (and refreshing for me). I got into a beautiful cab. The music that played over the radio was smooth French jazz, no loud half-Hindi-half-English-half-Tamil bahngra. We drove at speeds (60+ mph/100+ kmh) I hadn't attained since I had left the states. The road was so smooth and all the cars simply moved in their separate lanes. Nothing was on the road except for the cars, no cows, goats, dogs, carts, people, donkeys, camels. No dust, potholes, contruction equipment. Just smooth asphalt and cleanly delinated lines with beautiful countryside passing by. The sun came in at that beautiful fall gold you only get at temperate latitudes. It was delicious. I dozed, comfortable in a way I hadn't been for months. I was back in the West.

Within 30 minutes I had reached my destination - a cobblestone street in a part of the city that seemed more like a village than a metropolis. So clean, so quiet, so quaint. Golden fall sunlight and a crisp fall morning chill in the air with heat wherever the sunlight fell directly. I left my luggage near the building's door and crossed the street to sit half in a sunny patch and just absorbed the Sunday morning calm. After about 10 minutes Ariane arrived and I got to meet the person with whom Linda had spent so much time making arrangements.

A brief detour to tell you how we came to be in touch: Linda had been working at the JCC of the Upper West Side. One of the several classes she taught was a mommy & me cooking class for 3-4 year olds. One of the mothers in this class became quite friendly with Linda, and happened to have close friends in Paris, whom I'm quite excited to meet at the end of this month. These friends were close friends with Ariane who is an actress and was also looking to rent her apartment right around the time we wanted to rent one. So things worked out in this fortuitous way they often do for me (I'm truly a blessed man) and we ended up agreeing to let the most lovely apartment from a person I discovered to be just a tremendous sweetheart. I would arrive in Paris before my internship without having to search frantically for an apartment or find interim housing. What was even more fortuitous was way back when I was booking tickets to Israel, it turned out I had a choice of a very short stopover from Bangalore-Paris to Paris-Israel or a 10 hour stopover. I really didn't want to stretch my trip out, I mean what was I going to do for 10 hours in Paris with all of my luggage? But I also didn't want to get stuck missing my connecting flight. So I opted grudgingly for the 10 hour stopover. I can't imagining it having worked out better. Because you see we subsequently discovered Ariane and made arrangements with her and I ended up being able to go see the apartment, meet her, drop off my luggage for storage in her basement, and put down our deposit! Not only that but freed of my luggage I could explore Paris a bit and wouldn't need to shlep it back-and-forth to Israel.

But things worked out even better than that for two reasons. It turns out Ariane is just the nicest person. And the apartment was really nice as well - it was a sunny duplex at the top of the building with floor to ceiling windows that opened completely unto what I'd describe as an-almost-balcony. A tiny refrigerator was more than offset by a real oven (oh how I've missed thee), a washing machine, and a real dishwasher! I loved the place, the only drawback being that the sole bathroom was upstairs through the master bedroom - it will make having guests a bit more difficult, but we are still looking forward to hosting. I don't have much French, but from the little I know the perfect word to describe her apartment is charmante. After making me tea at the apartment and showing me around the building (and waiting patiently while I took care of getting the Citibank customer service rep to manually set the permissions so I could take out enough money from the ATM), Ariane began showing me around the neighborhood - and what a lovely neighborhood it was. Then there was the second thing - my friend Jen who recently married a Parisian was in town visiting the in-laws for the chaggim. So she came and met us and we all walked around together. We passed quaint shops and cafes. Shops in Paris are fantastic - instead of simply going to a supermarket, they have specialty shops. You get your bread at the bread store, your cheese at the cheese store, your fruits and vegetables at the fruit and vegetable store. Heck right down the street from us we passed a store which sells only honey - all different honeyies (and for those of you who know my love of honey, you know how excited this made me ;-)

I really needed some new bacteria for my stomach and was also quite hungry so our first two stops were to grab a 4 pack of activa yogurt and my first French baguette (the above picture of Jen and Ariane is outside the Boulongerie where I bought the baguette - Jen is on the left, Ariane on the right)

At this point, Ariane had to go and get some of her own stuff done, but she very kindly invited me to come to Le Marias where she was staying if I wanted to take a nap or shower before heading back to the airport (did I mention how kind she was). Jen and I spent most of the next hour or so wandering about the neighborhood. We had a baguette in a quaint nearby park, where I made a shechianu (blessing on something new) on my first French baguette - it was delicious.

After this we walked over to the nearby freshwater spring. Yes that is correct, a freshwater spring. Paris has almost no heavy industry and very strict pollution laws, which means that this 600 meter-deep spring produces mineral water as high quality as anything you'll get in a bottle. The residents walk to the fountain fed by this spring and fill their bottles and jubs to drink - Ariane tells me she goes twice a week on the average. In fact this spring is such a good water producer that the oldest municipal pool in France was built right adjacent, fed by the spring water - I can't wait to go swimming there! The water was copious and quite tasty. I hadn't been able drink water that hadn't been filtered and UV'd for months and here I was drinking straight out of a fountain in the middle of Paris fed by the freshest of freshwater springs. I felt refreshed and cleansed (got a whole bunch of it on my face an up my nose - which helped clear out some of my terrible congestion).

I then took a moment to enjoy the artwork drawn along the a wall across the street. On the same plaza was a quaint little tent - Jen and I did a bit of exploring and found it to be a tent for children's puppet show (so cute). We wandered about for a little while longer and then headed towards the Place D'Italie where I would take the train to Le Marias (by the point I was feeling a bit feverish again, strained from carrying my heavy bag, and just generally in need of a break). I bit Jen adieu at the Metropolitan and had a quick trip to Le Marias (I like subways but will write about the Paris Metro some other time).

When I exited the train I was right on the Seine river. I was really wiped but had to see it. How beautiful it looked in the afternoon light. The day had gotten quite warm and I was a bit sweaty, but the picnicing people at the riverside looked like they were emininently comfortable. I decided I was really looking forward to living in Paris :-) Traveling is nice, but it is so wonderful to be able to live in a place and really absorb it. I made my way to the apartment where Ariane was staying.

The walk to the apartment was a bit circuitious - mainly because I took a wrong turn. But it was a fairly nice wrong turn as I got to walk straight through the center of Jewish Paris. What I found was that they are obsessed with falafel. I saw more kosher falafel places (with people lining up to eat) on that block than I've seen since I got to Israel (if this is an exaggeration, it's not a big one). when entering the area I stopped a group of orthodox teens and asked them where kosher pizza (pizza kasher) could be found. The girls were really nice and helpful (although they didn't seem too sure on the pizzeria's location) but the boy who was with them was actually quite rude saying "Bye bye" and pushing the girls down the street. I'm really hoping that this isn't indicative of what I should expect in future dealings with the French Jewish community.

By this point my shoulders were really hurting (my carry on bag was still quite heavy), I was feeling sicker again and terribly exhausted. Thankfully it was only a short walk further and I arrived at address Ariane had given me. Her friend's place was gorgeous - two fully stories, beautiful furniture, kitchen, and a roof garden with a small tropical tree. Walking on the roof I got to savor even more of the fall - it was quiet hot in the sun and the stones the sun touched were quite warm, but those in the shade had a deliciously chilly feeling.

As August ended and September came in, I had begun to feel the end of the summer and that inoxerable, melancholy and beautiful pull the fall has. Every fall in the North-East I soak in those transitional days - the color of the leaves, the crispness of the air, the amazing golden quality of the sunlight, the change in the ocean that I find so difficult to describe but so relish on my all-too-infrequent autumn visits to the shore. But none of this was in India, they don't even have a season called fall (nor one called spring) - the seasons there are winter, summer, and two monsoons. Perhaps there was the slightest hint of fall in the air in Bangalore, or more likely my mind grabbed unto the slight cooling of days as September came through as some tangible manifestation of the fall season that was coursing through my veins, even though I was so far from home - like a transplanted temperate tree dropping its leaves in sultry weather. But for one day in Paris I truly got to enjoy fall. It wasn't quite the fall of home, the warm gulf-stream current moderates Frances climate too much for that. But it was so close, and so wonderful. I would have been very sad to have a year without fall and this was really a gift. As Yom Kippur quickly approaches fall is in the air here in Israel as well, but it's nowhere near the same (although it's still nice), and by the time I return to Paris at the month's end, fall will have transitioned to its dying phase, fall in a minor key, with few leaves left and the summer heat but a memory. I am truly blessed that things little and big have worked out so well for me. I know this is a difficult and scary time, but I'm truly feeling hopeful. I think this year will be one sealed for the good, despite its difficult beginning and I wish you all to be sealed for the good.

Perhaps continuing now is anticlimactic but I want to finish my Paris story. After arriving, I was able to take a shower (which really helped the feverishness that was returning), neti for the first time in 3 months (ironic that the only place I couldn't use the nasal cleansing technique developed in India b/c the water quaility was so bad) to clean out my clogged sinuses and change into a clean set of clothes. After really taking my time in the bathroom, I had only 20 minutes to nap, but I took advantage of them - swallowing down another container of yogurt and lying my broken body down on a couch. The clock ticked in the background and a fly buzzed, but otherwise there was nothing but silence. Silence was another thing I had really missed - it doesn't really exist in India, except in the deep wildnerness (which is a different thing and also usually full of cricket buzzing and other animal noises). I dozed.

I woke, packed, had a spot of tea and Ariane took me to the Metropolitan and helped me get the right ticket. But that wasn't all. Gracious as ever, she accompanied me all the way to the train that would take me to the airport so I wouldn't get lost. I said goodbye, looking forward to returning. Then I jumped on the train and began my journey again.

The ride was a bit hot, filled with the noisy conversation of some African-French men sitting across from me (I'm not sure why he needed to yell everything he said, but I liked his accent at least - couldn't understand a thing). Sunlight slanted in and in a daze I watched the suburbs pass me by. I arrived at the aiport found my way to the check-in, waited and was on my way again, now to Israel - to see my friends (mainly Efrat and Yair) and be reunited with Linda. But I'll tell you about that in a later post.

Shanah Tovah, v'Gemar Chatimah Tovah - Happy New Year and may be be sealed [in the book of judgement] for the good.

Journeying: Bangalore to Paris

2008-10-07T12:39:00.001-04:00

Note: this journey took place on the eve of Rosh Hashanah the Jewish New year - I left Bangalore at 10:30PM Saturday night, Sept. 27th and arrived in Jerusalem at 6:30AM on Monday morning, Sept. 29th - just about 12 hours before the start of the Rosh Hashanah. I took me over a week to recover from my illness enough to put out the first blog post!

In a trip of many difficult journies, traveling from Bangalore to Jerusalem may have just been the most difficult.

I began feeling ill towards the middle of last week but didn't get really sick until Friday night when I found my temprature had risen to 102F. That afternoon I had already felt pretty bad which made my last day at Microsoft Research somewhat more rushed than I would have liked (especially the goodbyes) as most of the day I had been moving in slow motion. However, I did manage to finish up many of the things I had hoped to and say goodbye to most of the folks I now miss. I was really privledged to be there, and to work with such a fantastic bunch of people as the MNS group led by my wonderful advisor Venkat.

Anyway I was pretty upset to be so sick and had difficultly sleeping, eating, packing - all of which were quite necessary actions as I was due to leave for the airport at 10:30PM, just a couple of hours after the Sabbath ended. But I perserved, and so did my fever, despite my taking two doses of antibotics I had secured that Thursday. So after Shabbos ended, I immediately called the lovely doctor I had seen, Priya Ravi, my colleague Ram's wife. Priya is exactly the type of doctor I like to see - clear, concentious, easy-going, willing to explain the whys and whats and answer the innumerable questions I always have. She was so helpful. She increased the dosage of my then-current course, prescribed backup antibiotics and several other goodies to bring down my fever and clear up my breathing, and arranged for all of these to be delivered to my apartment before I left. She really was a lifesaver!

I did manage to finish packing around 10:45PM a couple of minutes after my cab arrived. We stopped at MSR to drop off some books lent to me by my friend Chandan (a series of graphic novels on the life of the Buddha - very nice stuff) and many bags of donated goods (weight limit concerns precluded me bringing them on the plane) and we were off to the airport. I was sweaty and half-delirious w/ fever but quite proud of myself and rather sleepy.

We arrived at the airport, I bed farewell to the transport folks and walked in. Various skinny Indian men approached me. One waved a dirty yellow ID tag saying "Lufthasa? I help!" and attempted to paw the baggage cart out of my grip. I asked him if he would be taking me to the check-in counter and when he nodded, explained kindly that I could find it myself. Another fellow began jabbering at me "Come for wrapping! For safety and security". After some miscomunication I asked him if this was an extra paid service. When he nodded, I explained that I didn't at the moment need that service. Then finally there were no more people trying to grab me and I slowly rearranged my baggage and proceeded to the check-in line.

Check-in went uneventfully until my baggage was weighed. At that point things became less pleasant. You see, I was informed my baggage was 22kg overweight (apparently the allowance was 20kg split between two bags). This was more than I had hoped, especially since I had called ahead to my travel agent and inquired how much the weight overage fee would be (5 Euro per kg was the answer). 110 Euro is alot for an iterant student intern, but I figured I'd argue a bit and then suck it up. A wheedling sentence to ask if we could reduce the charged amount by a couple of kilos formed in my throat. The check-in attendant said overage would be 30 Euro per kilo. I choked. 30 Euros per kilo?! Is that some type of sick joke. No apparently this is simply Lufthansa policy now, or so I was told. Still not sure if I can believe it. A quick mental calculation said I now had one of two options: (a) pay $1000 for my baggage or (b) throw all of my stuff out into the airport garbage can. Since neither of these struck me as satisfactory I chose option (c), raise a ruckus (at least insomuch as one can half-delirious with 102F fever with clothing soaked through by sweat).

The check-in lady was up to the task.
That's tremendously high.
That's our policy.
I was told 5 Euro per kilo by the travel agent.
You were told wrong.
But I was told 5 Euro.
I'm sorry.
After some of this type of back-and-forth I asked to speak with a manager.
This is where luck began to favor me.

The fellow who came to the desk was a turbaned Sikh with a very pleasant manner. After assessing the situation he looked over my iternarary and concluded that since my ticket had been booked as a series of flights originating and terminating from New York, I was entitled to the US baggage allowance (23 kilo per bag!) and didn't need to pay an extra cent! What a relief - from $1000 bucks of overage fees to $0. The only hitch was that one of my bags was 26 kilo while the other was 18. I needed to move 3 kilo from the heavier bag. I thanked him profusely and rushed over to the weighing station. But try as I might, I was unable to cram an extra 3 kilo in the other bag... I was sweaty tired and nearing the end of my emotional resolve. But then I had an image of a thin young Indian man blathering at me "wrapping for safety and security".

Eureka. I shoved a bunch of extra items in between my bag and it's slipcover. Would have never held through the flight by itself. But with several layers of the shipping equivalent of saran wrap, loss would be a non-issue. I had the bag wrapped for 200 rupees ($3 and change) and returned to the counter truimphant.

The initial check-in lady was as dense as before. "Your luggage is still 42 kilo, you need to remove more items". "No", I told her. "I just needed to switch 3 kilo from the heavier bag to the lighter one". The manager was quick to correct her when we asked. I asked him if there was somewhere I could send a note praising his excellent service. He gave me two email addresses and his name, Pushppreet Singh Chandoke, which I took gladly and then finally proceeded to the boarding location (after taking a couple of moments to sit down and collect myself).

The next leg of the trip was very long, but not terribly remarkable. I continued running a high fever and felt pretty aweful. I dozed a bit, moved from position to position to ease my sore muscles and generally abided. I had gotten stuck in a middle seat, but I had nice neighbors on either side. After 10 hours of flying we finally arrived in Frankfurt, Germany.

My fever still hadn't broken but I had to go through customs. It's a good thing we had an hour-and-a-half stop over b/c the famed German efficiency I had heard about was nowhere to be seen. Frankfurt International had the very worst queuing I have ever seen in an airport (and I've seen lots of bad queuing in my time ;-) After almost an hour, I finally made it through and got on my plane to Paris.

Now by this point, I was pretty wiped out, but the plane was quite empty and I had a whole row to lay down in right near the bathroom. This was particularly good since my fever had just broken (I was so happy). But you see the same antibiotics that had finally started to wipe out the bacteria making me sick, had been much more effective and wiping out the commensular bacteria in my intestines that allowed me to absorb water. Thus to put it politely I had more than a bit of stomach upset, making proximity to the bathroom very valuable.

I had initially thought to put my journey entire in one single post, to really provide the feeling for how long a trip it was and how transitional. But while I had to do it that way, I'm starting to feel there is no reason for you to do so. Just read the posts back-to-back-to-back and you'll get the idea. So I'm stopping this post here and will continue with my arrival in France in the next post.

Technical: Running iPhone Apps in the Background: How to Find the Application Bundle Name

2008-10-07T04:53:00.011-04:00

UPDATE: Newer versions of the backgrounder software come with a GUI interface that lets you do this stuff, so unless you are using an old version (can't think why you would) the below instructions are deprecated.

This post probably won't be terribly interesting to those of you looking for travel adventures, but I figured if I've got a blog, I might as well keep track of useful things I learn how to do and share them with the world. For now my plan will to start any such post this with the string "Technical: " so that the uninterested reader may safely skip over it.

I've recently started using a fantastic jailbroken application for the iPhone: Backgrounder. The beauty of this application is in it's simplicity. It lets you do a straightforward thing that for some reason Apple entirely prohibits, namely run applications in the background.

Why would you want to do this? Well the default behavior for any third-party application is that as soon as the home button is pressed and that app disappears from view the application stops running entirely. Now this is good in many circumstances, but there are times when it's a real pain or worse. For example let's say you are using the new Fring client on your phone. Wonderful you can make and receive calls using Skype (or another SIP provider). There's only one hitch: you can only receive incoming calls if you have the application open. This means you can't even check your email if you want to be certain not to miss a call! Here's another one. Let's say you use NetNewsWire to read your news and you quickly close the program to do something else. When you go back to NetNewsWire, you'll have to wait for the program to start up and then renavigate to the story you were reading - what a pain! Another app for which backgrounding is essential is Pandora (I'll let you piece the why together).

Backgrounding lets you avoid all of this pain. However the default behavior is that you need to manually enable backgrounding for the applications you desire each time you start that application after having rebooted.

There is a way around this, by specifying the applications that you want to automatically background, as explained on the Backgrounder documentation page. However, you need to know what the application bundle name is and no one seems to fully explain how to do this.

So how do you do it? Well if your application is from Cydia then all you need to do is look at the package Details and use the contents of the ID field as your application name. However if your application comes from the app store things are significantly harder.

First you need to find the directory in which your applications is stored:
find / -name *youAppNameHere* -print
example: find / -name *Fring* -print
/private/var/mobile/Applications/A6864F56-1004-4243-B45E-43C10803813C/Fring.app

Yes Fring.app/ is a directory.

Once you've found the proper directory cd into it and look for the Info.plist file (theoretically if you've got the BSD subsystem running you should be able to see it using more, however in practice I had to first scp it over to my laptop and examine it there). It should look something like this:
bplist00^A^B^C^D^E^F^G^H
^K^L^M^N^O^P^Q^R^S^T^U^V^W^X^Y^ZESC^R_^P^OCFBundleVersion_^P^RCFBundleIdentifier]NSMainNibFil
e_^P^RCFBundleExecutableYDTSDKName_^P^XUIRequiresPersistentWiFi_^P^YCFBundleDevelopmentRegion
^DTPlatformName_^P^]CFBundleInfoDictionaryVersion_^P^]CFBundleResourceSpecification_^P^SCFBun
dleDisplayName_^P^QCFBundleSignature_^P^SCFBundlePackageType\CFBundleNameW1.0.1.4_^P^Scom.Fri
ngland.FringZMainWindowUFringZ(SDK_NAME) RenXiphoneosS6.0_^P^SResourceRules.plistUfringT??
??TAPPL^@^H^@%^@7^@L^@Z^@o^@y^@<94>^@^@^@^@^A^U^A)^A?^AL^AT^Aj^Au^A{^A<86>^A
<87>^A<8a>^A<93>^A<97>^A^A^A^@^@^@^@^@^@^B^A^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^\^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@
^@^@^@^@^A

The string following CFBundleName highlighted in green is the actual app name. For whatever reason there will be a series of characters that appear to specify the app version along with some garbage characters before the actual app bundle name, which terminates at ZMainWindowUFringZ. Often it's fairly straightforward to find the bundle name as the convention is that is starts with com. however not all developers obey this convention so sometimes you'll just have to make an educated guess.

Anyway once you've gotten the name you can put it in the preferences files at /var/mobile/Library/Preferences/jp.ashikase.backgrounder.plist . To test that backgrounding is in effect simply open the application and then hold down steadily on the iPhone's home button, if you get a message saying "Backgrounding Disabled" then you know you've done it right (on the other hand if it tells you "Backgrounding Enabled" you are either using the wrong name or have otherwise messed up the instructions for enabling automatic backgrounding of that application).

Sadus & Monkeys & Leaving India

2008-09-22T21:38:00.013-04:00

I can't believe how quickly our time here has passed. Well actually, considering my past experience, I can believe how quickly it has passed, but it still seems the right turn of phrase - even if inaccurate. I mean after all, is there anything that happens in the world that is truly unbelievable? And if there were, why would you believe it if I wrote it? Anyway leaving philosophic/linguistic concerns aside, I ought to return to my point, which was that our time here is at an end.

Linda leaves Bangalore tomorrow in the early morning for a brief day in Mumbai and then a next-morning flight to Israel. I'll be following at 2:05AM this Sunday, stopping in Paris for the day (10 hours or so in which I'll drop off some luggage and finalize apartment arrangements and hopefully see a good friend), then arrive in Israel myself the morning of erev Rosh Hashanah.
The next couple of days will likely be quite crazy w/ internship wrap up, packing, last minute errands, etc. I feel like there is so much I want to write about (some of which I've been promising for quite awhile now). However, I don't got the time for all that (hopefully I'll catch up in Israel). What I do have time for is to give you a quick bite of our final trip in India to Hampi this weekend (and not even all of that).

Given the way we've done this India experience - which is to say, just about as fully as I can imagine having done it - our final trip was a great last hurrah. We left town after a full day of work - I went straight from MSR to a MSR party, jumped out of the cab before getting there, stopped to get some pants and shirts custom tailored, got to the party, drank, danced, ate (in the space of 40 minutes) went to the train, overnight trainride, early morning arrival in Hospet, and rickshaw to Hampi.

We spent 3 wonderful days in Hampi before taking an overnight train home, getting in at 6AM.

From the train station, I dropped my luggage at home, showered, changed, and had a quick bite, then off to the office. In the office till around 7PM, then to MG Road to try on

the tailoring, and meet folks for a goodbye dinner for Linda!

So I've got much to say about the trip itself, but since I have little time, I'm just going to share one experience with you.

Sunday morning we left a bit before sunrise to journey to the monkey temple several kilometers from our guest house. We climbed to the top, the early morning air initially cool around us, but threatening warmth and stickiness as we and the sun climbed. The monkey temple was a beautiful place and had inspiring views. But the monkeys, well I think they are pretty vile creatures.

They will attack you if you give them reason - and reason can be anything from looking at them wrong, to having a nice hat, to carrying food. Of course a full grown adult could beat a monkey to a pulp, but they will scratch and bite - and thus if you are an Indian and worry little about contracting Rabies you chase them, while if you are a foreigner you mostly let the monkies bully you b/c you don't want to fly to Singapore if bitten.

So we watched a beautiful sunrise, somewhat marred by the

occasionally aggressive monkey - and of course got to watch them pull tapeworms out of one anothers behinds (a tasty snack for a monkey apparently) and practice raping each other. Disgusting creatures.

It was when we descended the hill that we really started having a good time. You see as we had begun climbing the hill that morning music had began emanating from a small building at its foot. This music was still continuing when we descended and we stopped to watch it's makers - a group of Sadus (holy men) who one could loosely say are Hindu mystics (although they aren't always Hindu - just ask about Sidharrtha). Anyway the rhythmic chanting drumming and clanging drew us in and we stood watching. However, we only stood a short while as they quickly welcomed us to join them on their mat with gestures and smiles, giving us a pair of finger cymbals to play. This was truly the best side of Indian religion - warm, welcoming, and beautiful.

The cymbals were difficult to manipulate at first, but a I fancy that I eventually was able to make some passebly musical noise with them. After some time, I felt that I had gauged their bearing well enough to see if they would be willing to let me take some pictures. It turned out they not only were willing, but quite eager to be recorded. You can see them smiling at the camera in the video above. Linda got some really wonderful shots which we will post for the google group later.

These unassuming holy men asked nothing of us, welcomed us into their celebration, gave us tea and friendship - such a contrast to other "Sadus" who roam tourist areas attempting to dab red spots on your forehead, sprinkle water on you, or ask to have their picture taken, only to then demand payment. We stayed with them playing and meditating for an hour - it was a really beautiful experience and when we left, smiling faces were left behind us.

Casual Anti-Semitism Depressing Me

2008-09-15T03:58:00.003-04:00

Today I had an encounter that really got me down. I was sitting at my desk working when a collegue stopped by. This collegue then proceeded to start chatting with me and after a minute or two casually mentioned that 'No Jews were killed during the World Trade Center attacks'. My collegue continued, in the same matter-of-fact way, to inform me 'The Jews were all warned about the attack beforehand, that's why none of them came to work that day'.

Now I'd heard about this new "blood-libel" where people ignorant and/or hateful have been saying that Jews were behind the attacks, that they new about the attacks - that in some quite literal sense, I as a Jew was directly responsible for causing the death and destruction of thousands of my fellow New Yorkers. Maybe I had been plotting, maybe it was just my people, or maybe I could have prevented it and turned a blind-eye. I had read that these people out there, somewhere, were saying that I wanted this to happen in order to provide the pretext for an attack on Arabs and Muslims everywhere by Israel and the US. Maybe I was even the mastermind (I mean any Jew could be right, so what better disguise than for it to be a Jew who is also a lifelong vegetarian, is known to think hard before killing a mosquito, and would vocally opposed the war in Iraq from the get-go?).

But it was another thing entirely to hear what I can only describe as a filthy lie, degrading the dignity of me and my people, pass from the lips of a co-worker at a major international research lab. Now this co-worker isn't malicious and the statement wasn't made as an attack in an aggresive tone, nor is this co-worker one of the researchers (works in a support role). It was simply stated as something that happened, perhaps the coworker was even curious to get my reaction. I honestly don't think this individual had connected all the dots to conciously recognize what this simply statement implied. But still, it hit me hard. Hundreds of Jews perished in the attacks. They've got names, you can visit their graves, their families still cry about it at night. The names of the victims were published in the international press and read at the site where the Towers once stood just a couple of days ago. I mean this only happened 7 years ago and all you need to do is simply do a quick websearch and you can read all about it. You can even read some of their obituaries.

I'm rambling, but my point is that as far as vicious libel goes, this one is pretty easy to refute. Official estimates are that between 10-15% of the victims of the WTC attack on 9/11 were Jews. Jews make up 12% of the population. You don't need to be a rocket scientist to figure out what that means. But people don't bother to check facts and don't bother to think much. They will repeat something entirely unproven as fact without any reservation - even if at its root the statement they are making, leads inevitably to the conclusion that my people, and I by inclusion, are homicidal terrorists who will stop at nothing, no matter how vile, to achieve our bloodthirsty ends. What do one do about that?

I honestly don't know, but I've attached the text of the email I wrote to this collegue shortly after our conversation (identifying information about my college removed). This email followed my immediate reply in our converations that the statement made was completely and utterly deviod of truth. My collegue's first reply that was to utilize the power of circular logic by explaining to me 'but the Jews must have kept from being killed because they were warned by the Israeli government to stay away, so they stayed away and didn't get killed, which proves Israel and the Jews knew about the attacks in advance' after which I again patiently explained that 'yes actually hundreds of Jews died in the attacks, no one knew, what you've been told is a complete and utter lie, just look and see' after which my collegue began listening (I think) to what I was actually saying.

Hi [Collegue's Name Here],

Just to give you some published estimates: between 10-15% of the world trade center attacks appear to have been Jewish.

About 12% of the New York city population is Jewish. You can do the rest of the math.

Figures taken from link below.:

http://usinfo.state.gov/media/Archive/2005/Jan/14-260933.html

If you find the US government a less-than-trustworthy source of information here is a link to a google q&a that lists a variety of other sources, all of which provide similar figures:

http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=331277

People in my community died, lost friends or relatives in the attacks – it really saddens me that there are anti-semites out there who spread lies claiming that somehow Jews knew of the attacks, or even further were somehow behind them. I guess if people want to hate Jews they can always find some type of lie to spread about us (100 years ago it was that we liked drinking Christian baby blood http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_libel_against_Jews )

It also hurts that people are willing to believe and repeat these kind of vicious lies without even looking to see if they have any basis in reality.

If someone said [my collegue's ethnic/religious group here] were behind the bombings that occurred last month [in Bangalore] or knew about them and failed to warn anyone, I’d be very careful to check the basis of that claim before believing that your community was responsible and, most definitely before repeating it to others as if it were fact.

-Josh

Adventures in Coorg

2008-09-08T06:15:00.012-04:00

This weekend Linda and I were in Coorg, a beautiful area about 5 hours away from Bangalore filled with coffee & spice plantations. We stayed at the most beautiful organic farm in the rainforest, the Rainforest Retreat , which also (and unsurprisingly given the name) doubles as a retreat/guest house owned by two former molecular-biologists turned farmers (the funds from which are used to fund the owners' very forward looking organic farming/preservation non-profit). We had the pleasure of getting to know the wife Sujatra and taking a tour of the farm with her which was fascinating (and of course, right up our alley). Linda liked it so much she is staying the rest of the week on a work-exchange, teaching the already quite able cooks there some new tricks, in return for lodging and getting to see how they do things.

We had a magical time there, getting in midday Friday and basically loafing in our guest house near a burbling stream, interspersed with some delicious meals and the occasional hike/walk for the next day-and-a-half. We had good company, making friends with a lovely Columbian couple with whom we shared walks and meals.

Sunday was a much more intense day - quite wonderful, one of the best days I've had in India. We got up early and were picked up by a driver par-excellance, Prince. Prince took us first to the Elephant camp at Dubare where we got to meet, bathe, and I got to ride elephants (Linda didn't want to). We also got to see a mischevious and terribly charismatic baby elephant. Oh, and I stepped in some elephant crap. That stuff both sticks and smells. This morning when I got back to my apartment at 4AM, the first half-hour was filled with scrapping them off, so the stench would abate! Anyway I still wouldn't have traded the experience.

Our next stop was the Golden Temple, a buddist shrine built by a community of Tibetean refugees given a land grant in Karnataka some years back. Really neat place.

From there we proceeded to a quaint homestay arranged by Sujatra (they were her friends), where we spent the rest of our perfect day. First we washed off and had a delicious lunch. Next we took a walk through the small plantation, across a mile of rice paddy, and down to the Cauvery river. We spent two hours sitting underneath a tree, talking, resting (I took a short swim at the end). It was soooo relaxing and was the first time we've had in India where we've been outdoors in a large open space, but also been alone. Alone is much harder hear where there is such a mass of humanity, even much more so than a crowded place like NY, and it's really precious.

After coming back from the river, through the paddy again, we had some tea, washed off and settled in for a restful nap. Towards 7 we had another delicious meal, packed and headed back to town, where Prince dropped me off at 8:30PM. I was really sad to part with Linda, but super happy that she is going to have such a nice time (she doesn't have much in the way of email or phone connection though, so don't worry if you don't hear from her for a bit). I was also anticipating a boring wait until my bus left at 11:15PM with everything closed in a dark, sleepy, unfamiliar town. But things seem to work out for me.

I turned out that this particular night was the one on which Madikeri had chosen to throw it's big Ganesh Chaturti festival and the streets were filled with revelers, floats, and music. I was repeatedly draw in to dance and being the only foreigner there was a source of much excitement. Of course I didn't want to disappoint and spent about an hour-an-a-half dancing with the natives and generally enjoying myself. I think over a hundred people came to shake my hand and ask me where I was from, really crazy stuff.

My one sadness was that Linda had all of the memory cards so I couldn't take any pictures or video - except using my iPhone which doesn't do too well at night with pictures and didn't have the software to take video. But I thought, well maybe the open source community made some progress with their video utility and while dancing checked for upgrades through the Cydia software distribution system. Again luck strikes, there was an upgrade and my cellphone's interent was good enough for me to download, install and then begin filming - all while continuing to dance, carrying all of my luggage and smelly boots! So I had a great time waiting for the bus and can really share the experience with you too. The video is choppy (taking video on a cellphone at night, using beta software you can only expect so much) but actually conveys the experience quite well. In this clip you can watch the music start off slow and build to a frenetic conclusion (also keep your eyes out for the ganesh float partway through). Enjoy!

Final thoughts: when Linda returns to me, I'll pepper this post with some more pictures and video, or post another, so those of you who get email should most certainly revist the page itself to check for updates. At around 10PM, I left the revels and headed to the bus station, where I chilled out before my ride and managed to sell my extra ticket (sans a handling fee from the agent, or graft, not sure which). You can read about the mostly non-eventful and nicely quick ride on my twitter posts.

Ganesh Chatruti

2008-09-04T09:14:00.012-04:00

Last night Linda and I got to see a real India festival right around the corner from MSR (or rather up the block and across the way). Indians are now celebrating the festival of Ganesha Chaturthi. It's bigger elsewhere (Mumbia) but we still enjoyed it thoroughly.

For those of you who might not be familiar with Ganesh, he is a rather interesting character. The son of Shiva and Parvati, Ganesha wasn't the most beloved of his rather violent father, who beheaded him for getting in the way. Parvati desperate to help her son, performed what would be the first animal-to-human organ transplant, replacing his head with that of the first living creature she found, an elephant.

Ganesh is a fun-loving god always fat and happy looking with his wonderful trunk - he looks particularly good on Roni Rosenfeld's desk where I last saw him lying on his side like a swimsuit model.

The idea behind how the worship is to be conducted goes as follows if I understand correctly:

1) You build a Ganesh idol out of mud.

2) You optionally paint him with garish, lead-based paints which are very bad for you and don't improve his looks.

3) You do a puja (religious ceremony) with him at

home/temple

4) You dance some

5) You take him to the nearest body of water (or bucket if you are following the eco-friendly governmental advice being promogulated through the radio this year) while ringing bells and/or shouting as you proceed.

6) You pray in front of him and shout things loudly, waving fire or bowing over fire, or generally doing fire-related activities in front of him.

7) You carry him to the water where you immerse him several times (sounding familiar anyone?)

8) You drown him (possibly leaving toxic waste if you haven't been careful about where you do this and what Ganesha was painted with).

It doesn't quite make sense to me, but it was a whole lot of fun to watch and the celebrants were quite excited to see us (oh so many picture requests).

So we walked down in the moderate darkness, complete semi-organized chaos (lots of police) and thankfully the dunking was in a pool cordoned off from the rest of the lake (this took place at the Sankey Tank, just up the road from MSR). I'd write more, but am tired and should have gone to sleep awhile ago already.

Tomorrow morning early, Linda and I are heading to Coorg for an extended weekend where we will stay at what looks to be a fantastic eco-retreat - the rainforest retreat. So we won't be easily reachable for a couple of days, but you can check for twitter updates (on the right sidebar).

I'm so tired

2008-09-02T12:21:00.020-04:00

So I've been tardy with my posts. But not without good reason. I've had alot on my plate these past couple of weeks. As you may know, my lovely wife Linda spent 3 weeks up in Jaipur, sometimes known as "the pink city", but actually more accurately described as the "animal-filled-dusty-seething-like-a-boiling-pot city" (the tension in the air was palpable), studying at the Chakrapani Aryuvedic Center . You may not know though that along with missing her lots, starting to cook my own food again (which was actually quite nice, when I wasn't too tired), and generally muddling through on my own - I had quite a bit of work.ut
Namely, I needed to get a significant amount of work done in order to take off some time to see her. This comprised not only getting my Microsoft research done, but also getting a major publication submission for Infocom (in Rio Di Janerio this year, fingers crossed), finishing up reviews for the CoNext Shadow Program Committee on which I'm serving, and finally taking care of several lengthy administrative tasks. So I really didn't have much spare time.

Then on the Thursday evening before last, I traveled to Jaipur to be reunited with Linda. I got to meet her wonderful friends, collegues, and her wonderful landlady.

So Thursday night we spent in Jaipur, got up early, had a wonderful breakfast, then went to Chakrapani. There I had an Aryuvedic assessment, and some interesting treatments - a neat massage, preceeded by at least half-an-hour of having hot ghee (clarified butter) poured over my forehead. I was prescribed some Aryuvedic medicines, which I'm hoping help with my acid reflux (more crossing of fingers here).

The second half of our day was a real adventure. The folks at Chakrapani (who were truly wonderful) arranged for a cab to take us sightseeing. But the cab never showed up, so after being delayed an hour, they found a patient who had wanted some business to take us around. Unfortunately, he was possibly the worst cabbie in Jaipur and a liar to boot. But I'll tell that story another time.

In the end we did see some cool stuff in Jaipur, got back a bit later than we planned, switched to a much better driver in a much better car and headed off with our friend Irene to Pushkar, the city surrounding the holy lake where it is said Brahma let a lotus petal fall and mark his spot of worship on the earth (as everyone we saw was fond of repeating "push means hand, kar mean petal" or perhaps it was the reverse, the repitition obviously was counterproductive with me ;-)

On the way there we also got to stop at the Dargar Shariff, tomb of one of the Mughals - a beautiful Mosque/Tomb and a really powerful experience (it's amazing how much cleaner the tomb was than the vast majority of the Hindu temples we've visited).

Pushkar was fantastic, such a beautiful place - it reminded me of Tzfat in Israel - something about the atmosphere of the place seemed light, holy, and a bit crumbling. Pushkar was such a breathtaking place, the entire city surrounds the lake, to the point it almost seems like it was a huge man made pool, it was perhaps one of my most favorite places in India We had some serious adventures leaving (took an overnight sleeper bus to Udaipur upon which we were the only non-Indians) but those stories are best told in person.

In Udaipur we met up with Lucy, another new and fantastic friend. We saw a Krishna festival during which human pyramids were built (more about this later as well), the palace, took a boat ride on the lake, shopped for pictures, and generally unwound (I haven't written much about this, but I've inserted 3 pictures which I hope help tell the tale).

Oh, also we bought some beautiful artwork from a really nice artist who had Israelis raving about him in Hebrew in his guest book - we are really looking forward to hanging it up when we finally return to NY!

Another overnight trip (this time 2nd class a/c sleeper train) took us to Agra where after a good nights sleep we awoke to be picked up by a very competent/honest driver and guide in a nice A/C car. We saw the Agra Fort, the Taj Mahal (as breathtaking as advertised), and the Tomb of Akbar on our way to Delhi.

Got into Delhi (it seems the further into our trip we got, the hotter it got) late and had dinner with wonderful friends Mansi and Guarav. The next morning Lin was really sick, so I had to head out by myself. Despite having the second worst driver in Northern India, I still managed to see the Baha'i Lotus Temple, the India Gate, the President's Residence (apparently the largest of any President's residence in the world), and finally made it to see the construction site of the Cervantes Institute (the Alliance Francias of Spain) in Delhi, where I met one of the many friends we made while caught in the riot in Nepal, Oscar - a scholar of Sanskrit, the human condition, and just an all-around wonderful guy. We went to a fantastic vegetarian (Oscar is also a veggie) Rajastani restaurant, where all of the food was "Rajastani ____", even if it was water ;-)

We had a great time, would have been a perfect afternoon if my idiot driver didn't fail to pick me up, leaving us to wait in the 100 degree (or what felt like it) heat for 40 minutes looking for him, w/ me stressing about getting back to help sick Linda pack and get us to the airport in time. In any case with Oscar's patient help and Mansi's as well, we got to the airport and came home.

I was so tired. Six cities in six days in serious heat over long distances was ambitious and wore me out! But I still had to get my Infocom submission done, make progress for a meeting at MSR, and finish my last CoNext review. I managed to do it all, but it's been a little while recovering. I am so grateful to have this experience though, even with all the difficulties - it's such a privilege to live here!

Portion Sizes & People Sizes

2008-08-17T00:07:00.006-04:00

In my previous post, I didn't cover all of my Indian festivities. The other thing I did (aside from work) was go to the bank (which shockingly wasn't closed/out-of-order/suffering from some other problem). On my way back I passed Baskin Robbins and decided to get myself a vanilla milkshake. The store's ceiling was completely covered with balloons - it was quite a sight - and the store itself was the hottest ice-cream store I've ever been in (hotter even than Carvel in NY during the power outage of '05). I bought my favorite since I was a kid, a vanilla milk shake. It cost 79 Rupees ($1.83) - expensive by standards around here, but quite affordable to me. The shocker was the size. It was tiny. (seemed about 12 ounces) Now I knew how bloated American portion sizes have become (just pop into a 7-11 and look at the size of the smallest slurpee container), but getting this teensy weensy milkshake brought it home in a viceral way. Any you know, it was just the right amount. I really enjoyed just that much, more would have been fine, but my thirst was slacked and my ice-cream hankering was as well. More would have just been more, not better (and possibly less healthy). I think I'm going to try to keep that in mind - I'd alrady jumped on the bandwagon of "better food, more moderately consumed", but this was a great experiencal reminder.

Now this is good for a wealthy foreigner like me, but the flip side is that food, albeit incredibly cheap by our standards, can be quite expensive for regular folks here. Bangalore is one of the wealthiest, most modern cities in India. Most of the people here are, in fact, doing alright by local standards. But while we eat too much, they don't get enough, or perhaps if they get enough, relatively few get more than they need. I'm a really skinny guy, but I look really solid compared to the autorickshaw drivers who drive me around (also compared to most of the MSR drivers). Now these are full grown adults and probably can afford to eat as much as they need (at least the MSR employed folks), but I think if you've not had quite enough as a kid, maybe you're body loses some of the capability to store fat? This is baseless conjecturing on my part. But what I do know is that the kids in the playground and on the street are thin. Not emaciated, not malnourished, but really thin. And it seems to me they don't grow quite as large because of it. People around here really aren't in great shape:
part of that's b/c there isn't a fitness culture or nearly as much general health awarness - when I took a jog yesterday, there was no were to run but the street with cars whizzing by and bleching smoke out of their converted-lawnmower engines. There aren't any parks or tracks, not much green space at all. No pollution controls - the air is visible. And people don't even know what you are doing - you get these confused looks from pedestrains (why the heck would anyone who could afford to take a cab ever lift their feet?) and from drivers as well (one autorickshaw chased me for the better part of two blocks, over an overpass until I finally convinced him that I wasn't interested). Perhaps pushing yourself physically is considered menial? I don't know, but I did pass at least one Indian cyclist while jogging at maybe 55% of maximum speed.

Part perhaps is b/c people are too busy working.
But some is definitely b/c they aren't getting overmuch food. And on the flip-side, to compensate the food people eat when they can is super oily, rich, and suggary. Consequently, if you get more than just enough of it, it will make you sluggish, ill, fat, or just plain sick after a while (at least if you are a westerner like me - since Linda left, I've really taken to cooking at home)

So that's another taste of my life in Bangalore.

Jai Hind!

2008-08-16T22:35:00.007-04:00

This past Friday was Indian Independence day. I didn't do much to celebrate - mostly just went to work. Thought about going to a flower show with some other interns, but decided against since I had been told it wasn't great by one of the full-timers at MSR (also I don't care that much either way about flowers). For a bit I felt like perhaps I had made a mistake in not immersing myself in Indian culture, but as it turns out, I currently think I made the right choice for two reasons:
1) The interns never ended up making it to work (and I really need to get stuff done now so I can visit Linda next weekend in Jaipur)
2) I ended up having quite an Indian experience nonetheless!

Apparently, if one wants to celebrate Indian Independence day, the place to be is Spencers grocery store. Yes you heard correctly, Spencers grocery store. This was the second place I went when I took an hour out of work to do shopping. The first place was the Rebok store - I needed sneakers and they were having a sale that let me buy my pair for 55% off. My feet are really happier now, I'll have an easier time excersizing and even perhaps playing some ball (at my request, MSR has ordered a basketball for the lab) and the folks in the store were nice - it's good just to go somewhere, try on what you need, make a decision and leave. But I digress.

So I get to Spencers and the whole outside of the store is decked out with pictures of Indian heros, streamers, and banners - lot's of other shops had some decoration, but Spencers really went all out. You'll see right past the entrance a fellow dressed as a soldier who handed out Indian flags, paper flags w/ shirt pins, and celebratory sweets. He helped me with my pin, although I declined the candy. Next step was to leave my bags at the security desk (you can't bring a bag into a grocery store around here) manned by Mahatma Gahndi himself! A bit further into the store were various characters decked out with turbans, saris, swords and shields - various Indian folklore heros.

At this point a crowd had gathered around me while I shot photos (my iPhone is always a big hit around here). And I inquired what the traditional independence day greeting was (Jai Hind - "Victory to India"). Everyone was merry and I had a fantastic time! Subsequently, I actually did buy some groceries and probably even got an okay price b/c everything was on sale for the holiday (finally a bit of home ;-)

After finally leaving the festivities of Spencers, I did a bit more shopping then started to walk home. People were all over the street and there were far less cars than normal. Close to MSR (Microsoft Research Labs for those of you newcomers) I saw a fellow with a corn cart, and thought to myself, "why not buy some corn". So I got some hot spicy corn, took more pictures of donkeys resting outside of MSR, and then got a great shot of an autorickshaw as it was passing by (all of the auto's were sporting Indian flags). Finally I took a couple of the security guards who were quite tickled to see me walking around with Indian flags. They were so pleased, they even gave me a special Indian celebratory dessert (much better than the pre-packaged candies at Spencers. I went upstairs and back to work quite pleased with my adventure!

Jews in South India - Part 2: Cochin and Kerala

2008-08-13T01:00:00.020-04:00

I started working on this post several months ago, but with so much to do and so little time, I never finished it. Now it is the festival of Pesach (or Passover) during which we celebrate the exodus from Egypt and commemorate it by removing all leaven from our houses (the Jews didn't have time to let anything leaven when they left Egypt, the bread baked flat on their backs, so the story goes and so goes our tradition). It seems to me that my arriving again in the promised land on this Pesach holiday is an appropriate time to write about the Jews I left in India.

So I've written previously about the beginnings of modern Jewish life in the new, dynamic tech city of Bangalore. Now I'll tell you about the opposite - my brief encounter with what seems to be the final days of one of the most ancient Jewish communties in the world due West and slightly South in the city of Cochin, the major port of the Indian state of Kerala.

The Jews of Kerala have been there for a very long time, the first of them may have arrived in 72CE, as refugees right after the destruction of the 2nd Temple and subsequent exile. This unique community persisted, maintaining its Jewish identiy observing the same holiday, laws, and traditions (with their own unique twists) as those of Jews thousands of miles away, while welcoming new waves of Jews who arrived over the next two thousand years. This makes them one of the oldest Jewish permanent Jewish communities anyway (only the Italian, Greek, and perhaps Iranian communities are older to my knowlege) . The Jews of Cochin now look like Indians (or at least many do) but when I prayed with them, the prayers were surprisingly familiar - their liturgy is even more similiar to my own Ashkenazi (Eastern European) tradition than that of the Jews of Rome.

Now that you've got an idea of the historic context of things I can tell you about the fun stuff. Our friends Roni and Ilana (Roni was a visiting professor at MSRI while I was there), invited us to come along on their weekend trip to Cochin. As we'd been really interested in seeing Cochin for a long while and had determined that it would definitely be one of the places we visited while in India, Linda and I were delighted to accept their invite.

We flew from a dry, cool Bangalore early morning and arrived in a sultry, rainy Kerelan late morning. An old, British taxi drove us to our destination in Fort Cochin (a mildly touristy area) - the car looked like it was made out of cast iron. After an hours ride we made it to Fort Cochin, dropped our bags of at a quaint 200 year old Dutch-style inn, and then met Roni and Ilana for breakfast.

Later that day we visited Jew Town - the area of Cochin that the Jewish community has inhabited for several hundred years, possibly since the very founding of the town around 700 years ago. Although the Jewish community of Cochin was robust (numbering between 1000 and 2000 Jews) as recently as several decades ago (preceeding the mass migration of Cochin Jews to Israel after the founding of the State), there are now only 13 Jews in Cochin proper and perhaps three times that many in the surrounding area (who generally only come in three times a year for the main holidays). Consequently being there was a bit melancholy for us. It was amazing to be in one of the oldest continuous Jewish settlements but sad to think that that continuity will almost certainly be broken within my lifetime. Although the Jews of Cochin have lived little persecution for a longer period than almost any other Jewish population worldwide, the economic realities made aliyah (moving to Israel) the clearly right choice for the vast majority of Jews here. The few that remain are almost all elderly. There are no children and of the several synagouges in the area, most have been taken over by the government and turned into museums.

We spent a bit of time wandering about in Jew Town. Mostly we saw old buildings and lots of souvenir shops set up by immigrants from the various *stan countries to the north of India. But we were able to get a peek at the outside of the synagouge and find out what time services would be that night. We then stopped at the post office where we wrote a whole bunch of postcards since, at this post office the India government offers a special "Magen David" (Jewish Star of David) for tourists. Although apparently it is essential to make sure that all postcards are very clearly canceled - otherwise people will peel the stamps off the postcard and resell them! So we spent a bunch of time running around to buy postcards, fill them out and then get exact change to buy the stamps. Good fun.

We had hired a car, and from Jew Town the car took us north some 36 kilometers to an old synaguogue in Chendamangalam, now a government museum. Although 30 kilometers isn't much of a distance in the West, it took us a bit over one and a half hours each way. We dozed during much of the drive as we watched the lush foliage, people, animals, and waterways pass by.

The synagouge at Chendamangalam was really neat. On the front lawn, before the entrance lies what the lonely planet claims in the oldest grave in all of India. The rock was incredibly weathered, but we could still make out some of the hebrew writing. Interestingly, although old, the grave isn't terribly old compared to many we saw in Europe in Israel - perhaps 800 years or so. The reason why it is so old for India (a place full of the ancient) is that before the arrival of Muslims and Christians, Jews were the only group to practice burial in the ground (native Indian religious choosing cremation or "sky burial"). Hence this gravestone being perhaps the oldest remaining in India.

We really enjoyed visiting the synagogue. It was surrounded by a wall on three sides that joined to the buildings facade in the front. When we entered we were instructed to take off our shoes in the courtyard and then proceeded through a second set of doors into the synagogue proper. What was inside was half house of worship and half museum but still beautiful. The ceiling was covered by a wonderfully restored pattern (apparently the building was in quite bad shape before it was taken over by the government) and the atmosphere seemed to me both holy and sad. I spent a while standing on the bimah thinking.

Upstairs on the balcony where the women prayed was a second bimah. This was very interesting and unusual. Whereas in most traditional houses of Jewish worship the Bible (Torah) reading was always conducted from the men's section, here a couple of times a year the scroll was brought upstairs to where the women prayed and read from there. This struck me as really thoughtful and something we western Jews could use to learn from.

We stayed for a while, but couldn't dally too much as we wanted to get back to town in time for afternoon and evening services. We hoped that perhaps we might make a minyan or quorum of 10 men needed for services (in more liberal circles, of which I wholeheartedly approve, it can be any 10 Jews regardless of gender) - currently there are only 5 men of the elderly 13 remaining Cochin Jews. In the end there were actually 17 men and slightly fewer women! We were privleged to pray with the first minyan the community had had in 5 months or so. As it was sabbath we have no pictures, but it was a beautiful service in a beautiful building. The room was lit by dozens of floating colored lights, handing from the high ceiling and the floor was covered by dutch-oriental tiles, each of which had a picture only slightly different than the others, but still with some unique detail. I prayed without shoes, even though here I was not a tourist (who during tours had to remove their footwear) but a guest of the community. I attended only two services during my time in India, but what they lacked in abundance they more than made up for in meaning.

After synagugoue ended we stayed for a while in the dark street outside (power outage) and talked with other travelers and natives. We stopped at the house of Sarah, who has lived there (her house is shown in the first picture of this post) since before partition. She told us stories of the community and we wished her a good shabbos before walking home for the evening. Later Linda and Ilana returned to speak with her and buy some judaica (Lin got me the neatest purple Cochin kippa with crazy gold magen davids :-)

Later in our trip we also were able to stop by the Jewish cemetery. It was gated and locked, but the proprietors of the store across the street let us go us on the roof from which we could overlook the cemetery. Like the gate, it was beautiful and old.

But the sun begins to set here and I find I've got to end. Shabbat Shalom from Jerusalem.

Jews in South India - Part 1: Tisha B'Av & Chabad of Bangalore

2008-08-10T00:47:00.007-04:00

A good friend wrote me today: "Amazing realization that with you being a physical and mental world away from us, we will still both be observing Tisha B'Av..."

Some background: today is the fast of Tisha B'Av (the 9th of the month of Av), the saddest day of the Hebrew year. Basically the story is that today marks the destruction of both the first and second temples, the 2000 year exile of the Jewish people from the land of Israel, and numerous other tragedies we've suffered. So we fast (no food, no water 25 hours and change), sit on the floor, try not to smile, and generally think sad thoughts. Although usually by mid-afternoon most of us are exhausted and end up sleeping or watching TV.

It's also the only Jewish holiday that will be happening while I'm in India (we came right after the Shavous holiday and will be leaving 2 days before Rosh Hashana - the new year). I figured I'd spend it alone (Linda's away in Jaipur) and read Aicha (the sad book we read on Tisha B'Av), which made me sad. But it turns out ironically that there was something to make me happy - the newly launched Bangalore Chabad - through which now I could share my sadness with other Jews. We had initially searched for Chabad (Chabad is an emissary organization launched many years ago by the Lubavitch sect to provide religious/cultural services to Jews in far flung places spiced with mild internal proselytizing called "kiruv") a couple of months before we came to Bangalore, but no dice. Then a couple of weeks ago in at the Synagogue in Cochin, we met two young Lubavitch men who told us a Chabad Bangalore was fortuitously just starting up!

So I managed to get in touch with them (now they've got a spiffy blog at jewishbangalore.blogspot.com ) and Mendel and Moshe immediately invited me over for a kosher meal that could have come straight from Crown Heights (ah, the oily taste of home - tasty but from a time before people understood why heart disease happens ;-)

I had a great time chatting with them, both New Yorkers - it's so nice to hang out with folks from back home, shout out to our new homegirl Jayce from Brooklyn whom we met in Cochin (great times in Cochin) - and am looking forward to sharing more meals with them and possibly a shabbos (Sabbath) before I leave.
Anyway, last night I was able to got hear Aicha which Mendel read wonderfully, and if I have the energy will return this afternoon for prayers, Israel solidarity of some sort, and breakfast.

It's nice that even in such a far place as Bangalore there's a bit of Jewish life to be found.

Retroactive Inaugural Post

2008-08-07T07:45:00.001-04:00

This is the retroactive inaugural post of my blog. I know this seems odd - my posts have been made since June '08 and it's now August.

But you see, the previous posts weren't actually made in blog form - this whole thing was an email chain until recently. So this is technically the first blog post, shechianu.

It is also the last email of the chain, or at least from the following line it is.

End of the line: recent mention of her soon-to-be launched blog by my wife, and complaint that there aren't any pictures of me on my relatively new facebook homepage by an old friend with whom I am now back in touch, have somehow combined in my mind to make me decide this email chain has gotten a bit too long and would be better off reincarnated (I am living in India after all) as a blog. Hence from here forth I proclaim that this email chain is at an end and you can now read about my/our adventures at my newly inaugurated blog http://mostlyslow.blogspot.com/

While you can of course just check the blog periodically, subscribe via RSS, and respond in the comments clickable from the blog, I have for your convenience created a private google group for which you will shortly receive an invitation [those of you who weren't part of the chain please refer to the Email Notification box at right]. Should you respond to this invite and elect to join this group, you will receive email alerts when I make new posts and as a bonus will receive email links to private picture albums which barbarians outside this group are barred from seeing!

Please send me/comment your feedback on this decision - like? dislike?

Indian Bueracracy drives me nuts!

2008-08-06T18:11:00.001-04:00

Just another tidbit for you. The system here in India is ridiculous, I've never seen half so much red tape in my life (and I worked in the National Labs for 2 summers). There doesn't seem to be any cultural capacity for connecting the dots.

Example: I talk to a phone rep who asks me a million questions to verify my identity, then make a request for an addition debit card for Linda. I'm then told, despite having verified my identity by answering every conceivable question they could ask - my name, birthday, mailing address w/ zipcode (if you leave off the zipcode it's clear you don't actually know the true mailing addres), cell phone number, debit card number, account number, employer - that I can't make this request without a "t-pin" (telephone pin). They start to say goodbye and I ask "so how do I get a t-pin". Write a letter is the response (of course it's almost impossible to make out the address and to whom I'm writing this letter is equally unclear). But why can't I request it over the phone? You don't have any transactions on your account, send a letter. But what if I did have transactions on my account? Then you could, but since you don't send a letter. How about if I wait until my deposit clears that counts as a transaction right? Yes sir, do that and call back. Any number I can call direct? No sir.Okay so I wait, call back, do the whole thing over again. I'm sorry sir you only have one transaction you need to send a letter. But what about what I was told. Only one transaction, you need to send a letter? But what if I had two? Sir? If I went to the ATM took out some money that's a transaction. If I have two transactions then I get request a t-pin, right? Yes sir, do that. Repeat and finally get a t-pin (note every time I need to go through the entire life history authentication process). And that's just to get an additional debit card on my account, which apparently costs 200 Rupees + tax and comes with a ridiculously small built in credit limit of somewhere in the range of $100 US. To change the credit limit? Guess what, I need to send a letter.

Attached please find a jpeg of one of the more useful error messages I've gotten trying to do simple things like log into my phone account - it should give you another impression of mental disconnect around here - note the phone number to call (you'll need to click on the image to do this) .

I swear I spend as much time just getting the basics for a three month stay set up as I do working on my research!

New Apartment!

2008-08-05T22:05:00.003-04:00

So we've been really busy lately with moving apartments, research (me), expanding culinary frontiers (Linda), and a variety of other stuff. I've got lots of backlogged pictures to send you, but not the time to write - and Linda is currently up in Jaipur for 2-3 weeks studying at a super-exciting aryuveda center. However, despite the busyness (in a couple of minutes, I'm heading over to the newly opened Chabad of Bangalore to meet the shlichim and have a meal ;-) I wanted to give you a quick update.

We've moved. Our old apartment was a great deal less than ideal. It was a quick walk to work and very convenient to transport and shops, but otherwise pretty bad.Our bathroom and kitchen windows faced onto a dim hallyway/airshaft that also served as a play area for children who particularly enjoyed throwing our windows open at unpredictable times to examine what must have appeared to them, some unusual fair skinned creatures. They also liked ringing our doorbell and running away. Our bedroom and living room windows on the other hand opened onto a panorama whose lower half was wall and upper gas station. We were right on a major traffic circle so there was traffic noise and police whistling at all hours, except late in the evening when the traffic cops went to sleep and were replaced by electronic sirens that rang out at random intervals. This noise prevented us from opening our windows late in the evening, the only time the air didn't smell heavy of fumes. Of course these were merely charms compared to the bathroom which increasingly stank over the weeks as a continually unfixed leak of slime from upstairs nourished two crops of mushrooms and flies. Also the power went out about half of the time, leaving us in the dark without internet. Oh and our clothes when washed always smelled musty, and the cleaning wasn't very good. See some pictures!

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Our new place is super much nicer. The only drawbacks being minor/moderate bug infestation and a worse commute - it's pretty much the exact opposite. Spotless, beautiful view of the golf course, lots of light, fresh air. I'm super happy! Pictures of the new place
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and surroundings (we are next door to the super posh Le Meridian hotel starting around $400 a night)
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Getting Caught in a Petrol Strike/Riot

2008-07-23T22:09:00.001-04:00

So awhile back I had written about our experience getting caught in a petrol stike/riot on our way to Pokhara in Nepal http://mostlyslow.blogspot.com/2008/06/another-quick-update-lin-and-i-got-to.html

The story - there has been a petroluem strike on for the last couple of days. The strikers/paid protesters (500 rupees a day to promote civil unrest for teenage thugs) have been stopping/harassing motorists on the highways and city streets. But they've been letting tourists travel around. Unfortunately for us, yesterday at noon they increased the strike level and bands of youths took over all of the highways while the police more or less left (returning sporadically). Our bus was stopped and three of the youths came on, looked to see we were all foriegners and then left us alone, same for all the other Indian and foreign motorists. The Nepalis on the road weren't so lucky. No serious injuries that I could see, but some cars got smashed pretty throughly.

Interstingly the protesters were very polite and friendly to us, saying Namaste and some of us were even offered weed "for friendship". Anyway after about 9 hours we were finally let go (10PM) but up until 1/2 hour beforehand we though we might be held through the next day - pretty insane! Thankfully we got to Pokhara without further incident, checked into our hotel, got dinner, and went to sleep. Will let you know what we do here, once we've done it ;-)"
That particular stike was regarding a pay hike the transporation workers wanted (the govt. was offering 25% and they wanted 35%) - lots of agitators were taking advantage of the lack of real clarity on whom the govt. actually was, particularly the executive power vaccuum (since the kinghad been deposed and the president had yet to be appointed, and the legislative body recently elected was the equivalent of a constitutional convention, not a parliment).

I've attached short video of the view from the back of our bus. You'll notice two youths actively smashing a car (one quickly gets pulled off) while most of the protestors, military, and victims mull around in a confused and disorganized fashion. My impression was the general confusion of all parties was due to the fact that everyone was in conflict but no one wanted to push things too far (except for the kid on top of the van with the stick - he seemed seriously imbalanced and the other thugs spent a lot of time trying to keep him in line)

Things are pretty bad in India as regards fuel as well, only this morning there were lines and a traffic jam at the gas station outside our apartment. There have also been strikes, but the rule of law is a bit stronger here and India is a much richer country, so thus far nothing near the magnitude of the Nepali problems.

Very interesting and thankfully not terribly scary (for the most part ;-).

More Pictures

2008-07-22T01:00:00.000-04:00

So Kochi was utterly fantastic, but I'll save the stories until our pictures are ready for viewing (and Linda has returned - she is still there having a blast ;-)

But here are some more new pictures from you of our older adventures. You may recall the story of our getting caught in the petrol strike, well now you can see it at
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likely, I'll send some video as well at a later date

thankfully we arrived at Pokhara safe and sound and had a wonderful time with many friends met on the trip / beforehand at the monkey temple. Our first adventure was to Devi Falls (Linda missed this as she was feeling a bit under the weather)
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heading to Kochi

2008-07-17T10:45:00.000-04:00

This weekend we will be in Kochi! For those of you who don't know, Kochi is the site of the longest continous Jewish habitation in India, and one of the oldest in the world (Rome, another Italian city, and parts of Greece, are the only sites I'm sure have been longer) starting in 72CE when refugees landed on the eastern coast of India. Only about 43 are left and the community is now dying out (an ironic result of the establishment of Israel). I'm sure we will have stories to tell on our return.

But until then enjoy some more belated pictures from Kathmadu of out time visiting the Monkey Temple and hanging out with Tevel B'Tzedek and Israeli run service organization.

For those of you who just joined, you can read/see previous posts in reverse chronological order by reading below.
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Pictures!

2008-07-16T00:28:00.000-04:00

So we've been tardy with pictures, but we've finally got around to beginning the process of organizing them and will be sending you belated pictorial updates of our trip thus far (for those of you just joining, you can read about our adventures in reverse-chronological order below). The updates will come slowly b/c it takes over an hour to upload just a couple of photos - and so you won't be overwhelmed.

The first batch is our journey to Nepal (Jet Air rocks - fantastic strictly veg meals) followed by our first days in Kathmandu.

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Dancing in Kathmandu

2008-07-04T00:32:00.001-04:00

So we've finally made it to Bangalore! We are both completely wiped out - it's taken a little while to get things in order here, but thankfully things are falling into place. I've got an extended weekend to rest up and get ready for work.

I'm completely wiped so I'm not going to tell you more about our adventures now but you may recall that a while back I mentioned the world music festival we attended where my dancing attracted a spontaneous circle of Nepali spectators/participants. So it turns out one of our friends clandestinely captured the end on video, albeit without sound, which I have attached for your amusement.

return to Kathmandu

2008-06-30T21:35:00.000-04:00

We've arrived safe & sound in Kathmandu after a VERY long day of traveling from Pokhara. Staying at hotel ganesh himal - is quite nice.Too exhausted to write more, will do so later

hanging with our new friends

2008-06-27T19:41:00.000-04:00

Yesterday and the day before were great fun. On Wed morning Lin was wiped out, so she slept while I ran errands, then we switched hotels (to a much nicer place) and she went back to sleep. I went out with our new Nepalese and Indian friends. We rented bikes and biked over to Devi Falls - a combination of cave, religious site, and waterfall. It was beautiful - almost reminded me of the ocean. After this trip we all went out to lunch (it's wonderful how seriously vegetarian dietary restrictions are taken here - everything is cooked separately!) which was great fun.

Yesterday we got up early, grabbed some lassis (yogurt shakes) and mango juice. Then went with our friends to rent a boat. We visited an island with some sort of shrine and then proceeded to cross the lake. At the other end we had a brief swim and then climbed a couple of thousand feet to the top where the World Peace Pagoda awaited us. Unfortunately some leeches attacked both Linda and I, but it turns out they aren't very fond of DEET. Our legs did get rather bloody though (it didn't hurt).

Anyway the trip up and down was exhausting so we hung out at the summit for awhile and had some Dal Bhat (rice, lentils, and potatos) the official staple (and only) dish of Nepal - they don't really have much in the way of cuisine around here. Afterwards Linda and I took a nap at the hotel and then met a Spanish couple (the husband is the current director of the Cervantes Institute in Dehli and a Professor of Sanskrit) for dinner. Finally home and a major lightning storm, but we slept soundly!

Today's just been chilling out. Shabbat should be restful - there's actually a veg indian restaraunt with a hebrew sign in front (almost every tourist shop/restaruant has one claiming the wonderfulness of the place and inviting Israeli tourists) that not only recommends the food, but also noted that "for the religious you can eat here on the sabbath and pay after the sabbath" so it looks like we will be well fed this shabbat :-)

Shabbat Shalom

to Pokhara

2008-06-25T13:37:00.000-04:00

Another quick update:

Lin and I got to Pokhara late last night. We had taken a tourist bus from Kathmandu in the morning, but ended up having an adventure.The story - there has been a petroluem strike on for the last couple of days. The strikers/paid protesters (500 rupees a day to promote civil unrest for teenage thugs) have been stopping/harassing motorists on the highways and city streets. But they've been letting tourists travel around. Unfortunately for us, yesterday at noon they increased the strike level and bands of youths took over all of the highways while the police more or less left (returning sporadically). Our bus was stopped and three of the youths came on, looked to see we were all foriegners and then left us alone, same for all the other Indian and foreign motorists. The Nepalis on the road weren't so lucky. No serious injuries that I could see, but some cars got smashed pretty throughly. Interstingly the protesters were very polite and friendly to us, saying Namaste and some of us were even offered weed "for friendship". Anyway after about 9 hours we were finally let go (10PM) but up until 1/2 hour beforehand we though we might be held through the next day - pretty insane! Thankfully we got to Pokhara without further incident, checked into our hotel, got dinner, and went to sleep. Will let you know what we do here, once we've done it ;-)

Adventures in Kathmandu

2008-06-23T12:19:00.001-04:00

The past two days have been crazy! Yesterday was wandering around the city and then spending the evening at this Israel volunteer group - Tevel B'tzedek, more details later.

Today we went to the monkey temple where we saw a monkey attempt to steal a woman's shawl. Afterwards we went to a slum for the inaguration of a clean water tank given by tevel b'tzedek and the Israeli consulate. Very eye opening.

Tomorrow early we head to Pokhara for some trekking and R&R. So don't worry if the next update takes awhile '-) Linda will probably send an additional update shortly.Make sure to cc Linda on any replies!

Shabbat in Kathmandu

2008-06-22T11:00:00.000-04:00

Shabbat in Kathmandu was really nice. We went to Chabad for both meals (strange that our first food here tasted like it was straight from Brooklyn) - was very pleasant. Met up with my friend Danielle (met her while she was a waitress at Blossom) and her boyfriend Ariel. In the late afternoon we wandered the city, went to a world music festival taking place in the street and a circle of Nepalis ended up gathering around to watch me dance - surreal. After shabbat we went out to dinner at an Indian restaurant and caught a musical performance and drinks. Super fun. Pictures will come when we get someplace with the speed to upload photos.
Today we will shop and chill in Thamel and around Kathmandu. Tonight we will be at Tevel B'Tzedek the ngo Danielle is volunteering with. Monday we will probably volunteer on an environmental awareness river tour with Nepali children and Tuesday we may head to Pokhara for trekking....

left NY for points East

2008-06-20T21:07:00.000-04:00

Finally made it to Kathmandu - it's a really crazy place. I won't write long since we need to grab some food and get over to chabad. We overnighted in the Dehli airport and flew out at 6:30 to Kathmandu but couldn't land b/c of clouds, so we went back to Dehli and then returned to Kathmandu. All in all we were in transit 36 hours. But we are glad to be here, its a real trip, in all senses!