Accessibility, Crazy (Event Gripping) Ideas
Mark L. Levinson writes a blog, which specializes in translating certain difficult words from Hebrew into English. Today’s word is דווקא (davka).
I was especially amused by the rant that the word entered the Hebrew language, from the Aramaic, too late to be used in the Bible.
For those who don’t have the language parsing and processing ability of serious software developers:
The title of this post means – davka the concept embodied in the word “davka” is missing from English.
Yesterday, Yediot Ahronot publicized in its “7 Days” Friday supplement an article about the sordid past of Richard Goldstone, who condemned Israel for its war law violations during the Cast Lead operation in Gaza Strip.
To his credit, Goldstone was serious about responding to the allegations made in the article. To the newspsper’s credit, they were serious about giving him the time to put together a comprehensive response. Goldstone seems to have acknowledged the right of the newspaper to investigate his past, and was serious about responding to the allegations without evasions or refusal to respond to embarrassing points.
Assuming the correctness of the facts in his response and in the declaration, which he enclosed with his response, he is not to be faulted for what he did as judge in the Apartheid regime. If Nelson Mandela and his people did not condemn Richard Goldstone, it says a lot about him.
Of course, Goldstone’s report about IDF’s behavior in Cast Lead operation is not equitable. However it is because the law, as it is applied in this case, is not equitable. Goldstone should have added to his report also recommendations for changing the relevant international law so that it is equitable also toward democratic governments having to protect their citizens from bloodthirsty terrorists.
Star Trek TNG world:
Real World:
Time has passed since the Nov. 2007 council elections (with no publicity to the results of the pilot of computerized elections), and since the Dec. 2008 Taldor fiasco.
And it turns out that in their infinite wisdom, the Israeli government decided to continue to cater to the impatient, “want to know the results right NOW!!!” segment of the electorate in future elections. Having learned from the experience of other countries, a system based upon near-field RFID tags was chosen for development and deployment.
However, according to http://www.eng.tau.ac.il/%7Eyash/evoting-relay-rfid2010.pdf, the chosen system suffers from serious vulnerabilities.
It seems that the real agenda of the politicians here, like everywhere, is still to get the populace to accept ballot systems, which allow the elections to be rigged.
At 20:00 tonight, lights are due to be turned off for an hour to raise consciousness of the environment.
Again, I’ll have to reluctantly boycott this event as I boycotted a similar event two years ago, and due to the same reasons.
Three years ago, I was in London. In subsequent years, I continued to chat and meet Susan, the sharp tongue and teasing sense of humor, and we visited each other, enriching the airlines in the process.
One Friday evening, we walked from Mike’s Place in Tel Aviv to a bus station, in which we were going to pick up “sherut” to transport us back to my home. The way was long and she got tired. We sat on a fence and two black and skinny kittens approached her and charmed her.
Few weeks later, she persuaded me to go to help Yaeli catch those kittens. By almost Douglas Adams style coincidence, at the same time, Billie went down to feed her cats and caught us in the process of stealing two of her kittens! There were some communication problems, serious misunderstandings, and lots of suspicions, but eventually things were straightened out, as Billie basically needed to find homes for two of her kittens.
Another month passed, and in Susan’s next visit to Israel, all partners and victims in crime met and enjoyed a dinner in a Chinese restaurant near Migdal Shalom in Tel Aviv. The kittens were caught, neutered and shipped off to England, to serve their 6-month long prison sentence for the crime of charming an English lady (rather than an Israeli).
Now the cats have been released from their quarantine and are starting their new lives in a Southern English home which already has 4 cats.
One of the clichés to which the Hearing World subjects us deafies countless times is the remark, by some sufferers of the so-called “noise pollution”, that we are fortunate not to suffer from the noise. Nevermind the fact that the hard of hearing are even more bothered by noise than the normally hearing.
Few days ago, I witnessed a new twist of this cliché.
Recently, I started working for another company, meaning that I have new co-workers. One day, at lunchtime, one of them remarked to me how fortunate am I, as a deaf person, to have no use for cellphones. Obviously he got tired of the constant interruptions due to cellphones.
With glee, I pulled out my cellphone and showed him that I, too, was assimilated by the culture of the cellphones…
Now he knows what he needs to know about SMS and 3G video chats.
As a trial, launched by Rachel Corrie’s parents, has been scheduled to start at March 10th, I’d like to remind exactly what big goal did Rachel pursue when she was killed by an IDF bulldozer.
In the photo, you can see a fenced park. The park had to be fenced in order to ensure that everyone who enters it gets searched for explosives, as a measure against entry of suicide bombers.
Rachel Corrie gave her life in an attempt to prevent the destruction of homes of Palestinian terrorists in Gaza Strip. As you can see from the photo, one can say that she won the effort to force Israelis to forsake open parks if they want to defend themselves against suicide bombers.
Everyone knows about guide dogs for blind people.
There are also guide dogs for deaf and deaf-blind people. Those dogs are trained to alert their masters when there are some important environmental noises.
Those who serve deaf-blind people are also trained to pick up things, which are dropped on the floor, and bring them back to their masters. This is useful since when, for example, a deaf-blind person loses his keys, he doesn’t hear the noise of their dropping on the floor and once he notices the loss, cannot easily look for them by sight.
People, who need to have such dogs trained in Israel, can contact the Ali Hope nonprofit, which specializes in such a training.
In the wake of the Rav Moti Alon scandal, I reach the conclusion that homosexual Jewish rabbis and Moslem religious leaders are in the same risk category as Catholic priests. The common difficulty, which all of them encounter is the lack of a legal (from their religion’s perspective) means to satisfy their desires.