The Four Questions

Daf Yomi Talmud Study

2008-07-01T20:37:00.000-07:00

I apologize greatly for the total lack of new content here at The Four Questions recently. Life has been full to overflowing, and my sporadic blogging has become even more so. We took a trip to see family last week and I hope to be able to post some info and pictures of that soon. I also plan to do some much needed picture organizing here and actually put up some new pics of the kids.

Now, on to the subject of today's post. My good friend Israel and I have decided to begin studying the Talmud with thousands of other students around the world. There is a cycle called Daf Yomi that involves reading one page of the Talmud (front and back) every day. Due to the sheer size of the Talmud, these reading cycles last 7 1/2 years. We are getting in on the current cycle about half-way through, but that's okay, since we plan to continue after the next cycle starts.

I found a few very good web pages that talk about the Talmud and how to study it, and I thought I would pass them along. First, a website called For Every Jew has a great introduction to the Talmud, with some historical information and other background info. Second, My Jewish Learning has a good description of how the Talmud has been studied for centuries. Last, I'll leave you with some thoughts from OHR Somayach on the Talmudic method, a glimpse of what the study of Talmud involves and the type of questioning I hope to become much better at.

Confronted with a statement on any subject, the Talmudic student will proceed to raise a series of questions before he satisfies himself of having understood its full meaning. If the statement is not clear enough, he will ask, 'What does the author intend to say here?' If it is too obvious, he will again ask, 'It is too plain, why then expressly say it?' If it is a statement of fact or of a concrete instance, he will then ask, 'What underlying principle does it involve?' If it is broad generalization, he will want to know exactly how much it is to include; and if it is an exception to a general rule, he will want to know how much it is to exclude. He will furthermore want to know all the circumstances under which a certain statement is true, and what qualifications are permissible.

By the way, if you live in Austin and would like to join us in our study, just let me know. Having more people is always great. Also, feel free to just drop in and join us periodically if you like.

New ANC representative

2008-05-17T22:51:00.000-07:00

I have become more involved in our local neighborhood association, the North Austin Civic Association (NACA), in the last year, my biggest contribution being a presentation I gave to the City Council opposing a zoning change to a piece of property around the corner from the duplex we lived in before buying our house. The zoning change would have impacted the whole area negatively, and was in complete contradiction to our Neighborhood Plan. Thankfully, we were successful in our attempts to have it blocked, with a 7-0 vote from the Council in our favor.

Well, I have now been asked to represent NACA at the Austin Neighborhoods Council (ANC), a position I happily accepted. I'm really looking forward to filling this role, and I'm hopeful that it will give me an opportunity to have a bigger positive impact on Austin's future development.

New Addition to the Family

2008-05-14T23:27:00.001-07:00

We are pleased to announce the latest addition to the Tallent household: Kefirah!

Kefirah (ke·fi·RAH) means “little lioness” in Hebrew. We thought that was a fitting name considering her extremely playful attitude. Everything is a toy: hands, feet, tzitzit, babies...

Many thanks to our friends Jonathan and Jessica for rescuing her from the dark, cold streets, nursing her back to health, and allowing us to give her a good home!

You can see some more cute pics of Kefirah in her photo album.

Audio Teachings

2008-04-30T15:37:00.001-07:00

I have been meaning to pass along two very good audio teachings that I think you will all enjoy. The first is one that Gil Student at Hirhurim blogged about last November. I think this one has been in an open tab in my Firefox window since then. It is a short teaching from Rabbi Hershel Schachter at Yeshiva University on "Being Normal". If I get a chance some time I will transcribe it.

The second teaching is from OU Radio; it's called Mission Not Impossible: The Kosher Jew in a Non-Kosher Milieu. It explores keeping kosher in the everyday world.

Enjoy!

Kindle on the way!

2008-04-07T19:26:00.000-07:00

Finally, after a month of waiting, my Kindle is set to ship next week. I've been anxious to get it for a while now, especially since I am doing so many more Kindle books through KindleFormatting.com. Now I can actually look at the books I do on the device instead of on the Preview only.

Getting rid of garbage

2008-03-22T21:17:00.000-07:00

I read this great Popular Science article last week about an ingenious way of disposing of garbage. A guy has developed, over the course of many years, a process called plasma gasification, which turns anything, and I mean anything except nuclear waste, into two things: a gas called syngas (mostly hydrogen and carbon monoxide), and a black glass-like material that is used in bathroom tiles and asphalt. The coolest thing is that once the process starts it can produce enough energy with the syngas to run itself and still put electricity back onto the grid. It can also consume up to 2,000 tons of waste every day. I've always said that we should ship our trash to the sun; it looks like this is much more economical.

Please Vote!

2008-03-04T00:27:00.001-08:00

Here is another reason we don't need Obama in the Oval Office.

Please go out and vote today, regardless of who you are voting for. A republic only really works when the people make a choice. Here is the League of Women Voters Voter's Guide.

Quote of the Day

2008-02-07T15:52:00.000-08:00

"Nations crumble from within when the citizenry asks of government those things which the citizenry might better provide for itself... [I] hope we have once again reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There's a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: As government expands, liberty contracts."—Ronald Reagan (link)

Speaking of Anti-Semitism

2008-01-19T23:35:00.000-08:00

Here is a nice little Anti-Semitic thread on the Ron Paul Forums, complete with quotes from Revelation saying that the Jews are not really the Jews. Note that the 9/11 Truthers come out of the woodwork and try to pin the blame for that event on the Jews, too. So much for a LOVE rEVOLution. This is one guy we really don't need in office...

Arun Gandhi, anti-Semite

2008-01-19T22:55:00.000-08:00

Arun Gandhi, grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, is an anti-Semite. I do not say that lightly, and I am not ashamed to make such a declaration.

I heard Arun speak a few years ago and went away from that talk sickened by the one-sided, ignorant approach he has on the Arab-Israeli conflict. He had recently visited Israel and "Palestine," where he told the Arabs who blow up school buses and shoot rockets at innocent civilians that their actions "could be construed as terrorism." What else could they possibly be? Then he chided Israel's leaders, saying that if the Jewish state had spent as much money providing for the social needs of its Arab neighbors as it has on its army then it would not be in this situation now. No, if Israel had done that it would no longer exist.

Skip forward to last week. Arun posted a short article at the Washington Post and Newsweek about Jews and Israel. Just so you can see what I mean, here is the article in its entirety:

Jewish identity in the past has been locked into the holocaust experience -- a German burden that the Jews have not been able to shed. It is a very good example of a community can overplay a historic experience to the point that it begins to repulse friends. The holocaust was the result of the warped mind of an individual who was able to influence his followers into doing something dreadful. But, it seems to me the Jews today not only want the Germans to feel guilty but the whole world must regret what happened to the Jews. The world did feel sorry for the episode but when an individual or a nation refuses to forgive and move on the regret turns into anger.
The Jewish identity in the future appears bleak. Any nation that remains anchored to the past is unable to move ahead and, especially a nation that believes its survival can only be ensured by weapons and bombs. In Tel Aviv in 2004 I had the opportunity to speak to some Members of Parliament and Peace activists all of whom argued that the wall and the military build-up was necessary to protect the nation and the people. In other words, I asked, you believe that you can create a snake pit -- with many deadly snakes in it -- and expect to live in the pit secure and alive? What do you mean? they countered. Well, with your superior weapons and armaments and your attitude towards your neighbors would it not be right to say that you are creating a snake pit? How can anyone live peacefully in such an atmosphere? Would it not be better to befriend those who hate you? Can you not reach out and share your technological advancement with your neighbors and build a relationship?
Apparently, in the modern world, so determined to live by the bomb, this is an alien concept. You don't befriend anyone, you dominate them. We have created a culture of violence (Israel and the Jews are the biggest players) and that Culture of Violence is eventually going to destroy humanity.

Not only does he accuse Jews as a group of overplaying the systematic murder of more than 6 million Jews in the Holocaust, he then goes on to proclaim Israel as a nation and Jews as a people "the biggest players" in the "culture of violence."

Thankfully, enough decent people have stood up and decried these horrific comments that Arun has tendered his resignation as the president of the M. K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence at the University of Rochester in New York. I only hope that the university actually accepts the invitation and does not try to smooth things over with a nice press conference. From where I sit, Arun Gandhi's words were not a slip of the pen, an unintentional oversight. They indicate his view of Jews as a people group—views that led to the Holocaust and to the myriad other attacks on Jews over the millennia.

Fred Thompson, the adult's candidate

2008-01-19T22:41:00.000-08:00

Rick Moran at American Thinker wrote a great article about Fred Thompson last week. While the news media and many voters are looking for a candidate that will give them soundbites, Fred actually answers questions thoughtfully and with intention. ABC said that "he's actually treating voters like adults." That's one of the reasons I like Fred so much. He is a real guy who wants to make a difference, and he has taken the time, unlike other candidates in the field, to look at the issues and figure out the best approach to handling them. I know he does not poll well, and people are disenchanted with a guy who "just doesn't seem to want it," but I actually appreciate that about Fred, too. He is not some slick politician who set out to become president and changed his tune on policies to make that possible. He is a statesman who sees the need and humbly thinks that he might be the best person to fill that need.

I know I am in the minority here, but I highly encourage all of you to look at Fred's website, read his white papers, and follow his answers in the debates. He is spot on about the problems we are going to face in our next president's term, and his plans to address those problems are the best ones out there.

Holy StumbleUpon, Batman!

2008-01-14T20:38:00.000-08:00

Someone who uses StumbleUpon tagged my Kindle Formatting website today, and I got 282 visitors in one day! WOW! What is also great is that almost 45% of my visitors stick around for more than 30 seconds.

More Thought Crimes on Trial

2008-01-14T19:59:00.000-08:00

Well, it appears that another Canadian Journalist, Mark Steyn, is being dragged before at least two human rights councils in Canada (yes, they have more than one). His offense is this article, an excerpt from his book America Alone, which is, by the way, on my wish list. This is what happens when political correctness and willful ignorance about the threats of Islamic fundamentalism are combined with bureaucratic systems that have as much power as a real court.

Newton webserver

2008-01-14T18:33:00.000-08:00

Yes, you heard me right: an Apple Newton, the great-granddaddy of modern PDAs, serving as a website server. That's pretty cool. I doubt I could get my Palm m500 to do that.

CSS Reboot

2008-01-14T18:27:00.000-08:00

If only I had known about CSS Reboot, I might have put off my redesign for a few more months. Then again, I probably would have never actually done it...

In the months leading to a Reboot, people who want to participate in the CSS Reboot sign up and upload information about their website. During the signup process you can visit cssreboot.com to see who is planning on rebooting.
Then on Reboot Day at 18:00 GMT, all participants launch their new website redesigns. Thousands of visitors swarm to cssreboot.com to view, comment and visit their favorite new redesigns. This in turn creates a lot of buzz, many blogs write about the event and feature top redesigns in their galleries. This brings even more recognition for the participants.

Thought Crimes on Trial in Canada

2008-01-12T18:42:00.000-08:00

Ezra Levant, the conservative, Jewish editor of the Western Standard, a magazine that used to be in print in Canada but is now only online, is being investigated by the Canadian Human Rights Commission for publishing the Mohammed cartoons in his magazine in 2006. Mr. Levant does an amazing job in his defense, nailing the Canadian government to the wall for interrogating him for thought crimes and attempting to censor his freedoms. I applaud Mr. Levant in his efforts to stand up to Orwellian behavior and hope that he has success in his endeavors. I'll leave you with an excerpt from his opening statement, and I highly encourage you to watch the videos he has on YouTube and read his website.

I am here at this government interrogation under protest. It is my position that the government has no legal or moral authority to interrogate me or anyone else for publishing these words and pictures. That is a violation of my ancient and inalienable freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and in this case, religious freedom and the separation of mosque and state. It is especially perverted that a bureaucracy calling itself the Alberta human rights commission would be the government agency violating my human rights....
We have a heritage of free speech that we inherited from Great Britain that goes back to the year 1215 and the Magna Carta. We have a heritage of eight hundred years of British common law protection for speech, augmented by 250 years of common law in Canada....
For a government bureaucrat to call any publisher or anyone else to an interrogation to be quizzed about his political or religious expression is a violation of 800 years of common law, a Universal Declaration of Rights, a Bill of Rights and a Charter of Rights. This commission is applying Saudi values, not Canadian values....

Seen in a book at work

2008-01-10T14:31:00.000-08:00

How odd
Of God
To choose
The Jews.

William Norman Ewer

But not so odd
As those who choose
A Jewish God,
But spurn the Jews.

Cecil Browne, replying to William Ewer

"Palestinian" right of return?

2008-01-05T23:38:00.001-08:00

American Thinker has a great, highly documented article about the idea of a right of return for Arabs into Israel. It is definitely a must-read.

New website design!

2007-12-30T21:04:00.000-08:00

After a week's worth of hard labor, the Four Questions site re-design project is now complete! I hope you all like the new design; it comes with a few very important and very cool features:

In choosing the new color scheme I thought for a long time about what would make the site more appealing and more readable. My own eyes had trouble focusing on the words after a while, and I can only imagine what it must have been like for some of my older readers. I stuck with gray as the base color because I like it so much, and added an accent color (Web 2.0-style). Red was the logical choice, especially Lindesy informed me that my original idea of yellow made the site look like an over-boiled egg.
The menu used to be JavaScript-driven, and it periodically covered the link to my blog with a link to the company that produced the menu. The new menu is 100% CSS and XHTML. That makes it much easier to customize and gets me out from under the thumb of that menu company.
The entire site is now coded in PHP, which allows me to add and remove content from sections of the site easily. It is very modular, making it much easier to update. Hopefully that will inspire me to add content more often.
Because of the new PHP back-end, most old links and bookmarks will not work. If you have bookmarks to specific pages you will need to change the .html extension on them to .php, or try to find the page again using the Sitemap.

I have a few more things left to do on the site, but they will have to wait for now. Nothing major, mind you, just some quality-of-surfing things like a print stylesheet and a mobile stylesheet.

If you have any ideas for the site or thoughts on the new design, please drop me a line or add a comment below!

The Ugliest of Things

2007-12-29T18:06:00.000-08:00

I ran across a great quote last week, and thought it would be a great way to start off the week:

But war, in a good cause, is not the greatest evil which a nation can suffer. War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse. When a people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people. A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice—a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their free choice—is often the means of their regeneration. A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever-renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other.

This quote comes from John Stuart Mill, a liberal British philosopher who lived in the 19th century. (Source: bottom of right column)

Formatting for the Amazon Kindle

2007-12-23T16:36:00.000-08:00

The Amazon Kindle is a hot-ticket item with an open door to new book sales, and lots of people are trying to get their hand in the pot. Amazon has opened the door for anyone to produce content for the Kindle, which is a great opportunity for little-known authors and other people without connections to a big publishing house to get their content in the hands of consumers.

The only problem is that the Kindle does not read just any format of book. It uses a very basic form of HTML, not PDF or some other format. While there is a conversion tool on the Digital Text Platform website, the majority of the time books converted from Word or PDF look horrible in the Kindle. The Kindle format also has some serious limitations (like a complete lack of support for margins), so average authors and even some publishers are floundering, not knowing how to make their books readable and well-formed on the Kindle.

Since I am a professional eBook developer I have decided to take on the Kindle format for those who can't do so themselves. It appears that I am the first such Kindle eBook editor, too.

I have set up a website called KindleFormatting.com with all of the details. If you are an author or publisher looking to get into the Kindle market, please drop by and see what I can do to help you out.

IE8 passes Acid 2

2007-12-22T17:08:00.000-08:00

WOW! I never thought I would see the day... Internal builds of Internet Explorer 8 have passed the Acid2 browser standards test. IE6 was the first browser to pass the Acid1 test, but Microsoft has been beaten to the punch on Acid2 by Safari, Konqueror, and a few other minor browsers. Firefox 3 Beta 2 currently passes the test, and it will be released to the public before IE8. This is great news for developers and end users, and I hope that Microsoft continues to pursue standards compliance. Channel 9 has a great video interview with Chris Wilson and others from the IE working group about this milestone.

The Hobbit

2007-12-22T16:56:00.000-08:00

Great News! Peter Jackson has finally signed a deal to produce two movies based on J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. The director of the films has not been chosen, but apparently it will not be Jackson. Some of the Lord of the Rings cast members will be signed up to play in the new films, but none of that is set in stone yet, either.

Yasher Koach!

2007-12-12T21:03:00.000-08:00

A friend told me this evening about YashaNet's decision in Sivan 5767 (May 2007) to remove the directory of Messianic Congregations from their website. Here is the reason they give for that change:

We are no longer providing the messianic congregations listing. The decision was not an easy one for us. We've taken this step because the overwhelming number of groups calling themselves "messianic" are mired in a christian approach and interpretation of Torah that is inconsistent with its teachings as found in Judaism since Moses' time and before.

Wow! That's amazing and extremely refreshing. It is not often that a Messianic website takes such a straightforward approach to Messianic Judaism, with clear conviction that we are a branch of Judaism, not a Christian denomination. Great job, guys, and keep up the good work!

Vista Annoyances

2007-12-04T21:55:00.000-08:00

I purchased a Hewlett-Packard laptop last November and ran into some major issues with it not long afterwards. After working my way through tech support and finally being placed with the highest level of support available, and after having the machine sent in three times to be repaired, HP finally decided to give me a replacement. Thankfully the replacement machine is much nicer than the original one, and I have been pretty happy with it. There are still some weird quirks that are annoying, but I have learned to deal with them and find work-arounds.

The thing that I did not like the most about the replacement computer is that it runs Windows Vista. I tried my best to get them to let me have XP instead, but according to the tech support person HP has stopped making drivers for XP for new hardware. Vista was the only option available. So, after getting the laptop and oohing at Aero, I started to notice some annoyances and issues with the new OS. Here, for your reading pleasure, is my list of top Winows Vista annoyances:

The Automatic Discovery of Folder Type setting is not well implemented and not easy to change. It would be great if you could at least choose manually what template to use in a specific folder, overriding Vista's choice. A drop-down like the Views drop-down would be prefect. For now, I have disabled it with this great little command tool.
Related to that, if I set a view setting on a window (Tile, Details, List, etc.), I expect it to stick, not for it to be overridden by Vista.
Also, in Windows Explorer: in all the previous versions of Windows, in details view, clicking on the details to the right of the file name did not select the file. This change in Vista is annoying, especially when you want to move a file between two Explorer windows and the destination window has a lot of folders in it. Instead of the file being dropped in the main folder, it gets dropped in whatever folder you happen to be hovering over the details of. The only ways around this are to make the window wider, creating whitespace on the right side next to the details, or to be very careful to drop the file in between folders, which is tricky to do sometimes.
The default color of a selected file in Windows Explorer is too washed out, and it is also not configurable, even in a non-Aero environment. I liked the previous Windows coloring (dark blue), which is very easy to see.
One of the best utilities I had on my XP machine was Folder Size, a little tool that adds a column to the Details view in Windows Explorer that has the size of folders, not just files. The program does not work in Vista because Microsoft removed the IColumnProvider API. Regardless of that, this should be a default feature in Windows Explorer. Seeing the size of every resource in a directory is important.
When I drag a file to an open application window to open it there Windows Explorer takes a long time to respond afterwards (20 seconds sometimes), not letting me select another file until it finishes thinking. I suspect this is an indexing issue, but whatever else it is, it is annoying.
UAC is annoying for a power user like myself. I understand the security measures and agree that they are important, but when I am logged on as an administrator I do not want my every action questioned twice. I wish Vista would make a differentiation between actions resulting from a user activity and those not. That way, if I double-click on an installation program or try to open a Command prompt with Admin access I don't have to confirm twice that I really do want to do that. I have ended up turning off UAC because it was reducing my productivity too much and making me want to shoot my computer.
Networking is still not improved over XP. If I put my computer into Sleep mode and take it from the office to home, or vice versa, I invariably have to reset the IP address manually to make it connect to the Internet again. Using the built-in "diagnostic" tool in IE7 does not always work, and sometimes the tool responds that it can't fix the problem at all—when all it needs is a refreshed IP address. (On a related note, why was the command changed from "ipconfig /release" to "ipconfig/release" (with no space) in Vista? It makes no sense to change a DOS command, and it took me weeks to figure out why the command was not working.)

Those are the things that come to my mind right now. Again, overall my experience has been okay, but these issues all add up and give Vista a bad aftertaste. I am actively considering witching to XP again, if I can get drivers for my machine.