leaning at the seder

Jewish law requires one to lean while eating the matza during the seder. This is done because royalty lean while eating. In our days we lean to our left on a chair during the seder. However, 2,000 years ago, during the time of the Temple, royalty actually lied on a bed on their left side when they ate. My intention is to research this more (i.e., did all societies do this?, when did it stop?, is this done anywhere in the world today? etc) and post what I find. I will also look for pictures of people leaning while eating and post what I find.

I joined Weight Watchers

Tonight I joined Weight Watchers. I was pretty impressed. First of all, in order to work there, you need to have lost substantial weight through their program. That means the people working there believe in what they are doing. It is also inspiring to meet such thin people who were once fat.
The meeting was fun and informative. I learned about the 2 plans. One is called points. Each food gets a point value and you are allotted a certain amount of points per week. The other plan is called core. You can eat as much as you need to feel full when it comes to high density low energy foods. For example, grapes are high density while raisins are low density. The high density stuff can be healthy yet filling.
The plan is not threatening. All they said this week is move more. If you do more movement you have improved.
Each week has a theme. This week's theme was how to make your enviroment diet friendly. For example, throw out the cake and cookies, soda, etc. Bring in the fruits and veggies that are actually tasty and you are setting up a food positive environment.
My goal is to lose 20 lb. I'll let you know how it goes.

searching for people on the internet

Suppose you want information about someone. You might want to find a lost relative or friend, a guy who owes you money, do a background check on a potential business partner etc. Where can you turn?
Mashable.com, a site that describes itself as providing social networking news tested 6 sites that try to help you find people. Here were some of their findings and my own ideas:
PeekYou-their information is not up to date
Wink: I actually found this site myself through Google. Mashable likes the site. Its a meta people search engine. When I tried my name it linked me to Intelisearch. But I had already searched them (and decided not to pay them $2.99 to get more information on myself). One thing I give wink credit for is it got my dads name right.
Spock- they are in beta mode. I tried my name but didn't come up.
ZoomInfo-business people name search. Now this one may be a real find! I once worked as a salesman selling shopping and garment bags to retail chains. I used to call the buyer for the company and try to establish a connection and pitch my product. Some buyers will talk to you on the phone. Others are too busy and just want you to send them a package with information and a sample. But sometimes its hard just figuring out who the buyer is. This was my case with Victorias Secrets. They were very secretive about who their buyer was. It was like "if you know your party's extension enter it now and if you don't know your party's extension please hang up." ZoomInfo has a section called ZoomExec and ZoomPowerSell. Through them I might have been able to get my answer. I think ZoomInfo should be looked at more carefully and considered as a reference resource to be used by librarians. Too bad its not free.

Bain Hazmanim is here

What is Bain Hazmanim? Yeshiva intersession. (Here I refer to students learning in yeshiva post high school. They are often called rabbinical students but that's not true because they aren't training to be rabbis. They are training to be scholarly Jews regardless of what career they may eventually pick).
Yeshivas have 3 semesters, or zmanim (times).
1 Elul zman which is the month leading up to Rosh Hashana. That semester lasts for 5 weeks until Yom Kipur. Then everyone is off for around 3 week.
2 Winter zman which run until the month of Nisan. Pesach (Passover is the 15th of Nisan). Everyone gets Nisan off.
3 Summer zman Once nisans over yeshiva starts again and runs for a little over 3 months. Sometime in mid July or early August the zman ends and everyone gets 3 weeks of summer break. Then Elul zman starts all over again.

Tonight marks the beginning of the month of Nisan. After Shabbos (the Sabbath) was over I went for a walk. Boy the streets were teeming. Many boys go to learn in Israeli yeshivas and flew home at the end of last week. I met one boy who I had tutored in Talmud for over two years. He just finished his first winter zman in Israel. He said he had really gotten into learning (i.e. started taking Talmud seriously) and had a great rebby. I was happy to hear that.
Where ever I looked there were tons of guys going to buy stuff to eat in the bagel store, pizza store, ice cream store etc. There were also a couple of cops giving out tickets to double parked cars. I guess they don't get bain hazmanim. :)

mainstream medicine

Tonight I drove my friend to Newark Airport so he could fly back home to his parents. On my way back home I was listening to NPR and I heard a surprising assertion. The show quoted a Dr. Stanley Goldfarb who said that the idea that it is healthy to drink 8 classes of water a day is a myth. You can read more about this atNPR.
The show continued on to ask, if the medical establishment is wrong about one thing, maybe they are wrong about everything.
Mishpacha Magazine, an Orthodox Jewish weekly magazine, asked the same question last week. In an article about holistic medicine they said that when the medical establishment dismisses alternative medicine, some respond by saying "look how many times doctors have been wrong in the pasdt." While the magazine doesn't give this example, the cause of ulcers is a great case in point. For years it was thought that ulcers were caused by stress. But in 1996 it was discovered that ulcers are caused by bacteria! For more info, see Bacteria, not stress, causes ulcers, research shows from CNN. (That must have given the medical establishment a lot of stress!)
How do I feel about all this? I once experienced a serious side affect from a prescription drug my doctor assured me wouldn't happen. So I enter the discussion with eyes wide open. On the other hand, we can't just ignore modern medicine. Antibiodics are often overused but they also do cure infections.
Churchill said that democracy is the worst system-except for all the rest!
The same can be said for mainstream medicine. It is flawed. But it is the system we must work with.

My friend Ploni is in town

I never have any friends stay in my house as guests. All my friends are, Thank G-d, married, busy with families etc and have no need to stay by me. But this can get lonely. That is why its nice my friend Ploni (ficticious name) is here.
I met Ploni at an online Jewish discussion board called . From there we became great friends. Its been around 4 years since we met. Since then I've graduated college, he's gone off to study in yeshivah in Jerusalem etc time flies. But every year Ploni stays by me when he comes to America.
Talking about Jerusalem, Ploni knew my rebby, Reb Elya Baruch Finkel of blessed memory. Tommorow night there will be a memorial for my rebby. There was also a big writeup about my rebby in the Yated, a major American Orthodox Jewish weekly. I will have to read it.

End of semester pileup starting

The end of semester pileup is starting! Tonight my professor gave out our last 3 assignments. After the third one I was happy to hear that there wouldn't be a fourth! :) Basically the assignments deal with information searching using indexes and the like. I actually love this stuff. I hope I can find a library job where I sit and look up information, especially history related information.