How to respond to anti-Israel comments about aid to Haiti

In today’s world, no act of legitimate self-defense or good deed by Israel goes unpunished. The story of the woman from Gaza, who tried to smuggle a bomb in her person when entering Israel for medical treatment, is known. Israel is accused of committing war crimes during the Cast Iron operation, nevermind the years of war crimes committed by the other side – the Palestinians in Gaza especially after the Israeli pull out from the Gaza Strip at 2005.

The most recent twist is the accusations that Israel utilizes the medical aid to Haiti as a pretext to steal organs for transplanting.

The best response to this accusation and others related to Israeli aid to Haiti, which I saw so far, is in  http://www.rantrave.com/Rave/Israeli-Aid-to-Haiti.aspx. The writer challenges the accusers to compete with Israel and overshadow its aid efforts by efforts of their own.

Appeal to all good people who donate meals to people in need in Israel

Whenever you feed people, who could not feed themselves, please do not only shed tears on their bad fortunes.  Please do not stop at providing them with a meal.
Please ask them about the circumstances, which prevented them from being self-sufficient.

Then do something to ameliorate those circumstances.  Sometimes you can do a lot for the price of a single meal for a group of people.

I suspect that several responses will go along the following lines.

  • People past retirement age – why couldn’t they save in their retirement funds?  Probably they saved and lost the money to crooks or bad investments.
  • People with disabilities – what inaccessible places and circumstances prevented them from exercising their full earning potential?
  • Unemployed – probably need vocational training to train for an occupation with higher demand.  The expense consists of both tuition, free time for study, and stipend to live on while studying.

Some people will turn out to be lazy bums with feeble excuses – they should NOT be fed.

If you have a lot of money to donate, usually the best way to use it to help those non self-supporting people – is to make it easier for them to train for a better paying occupation.

A most brilliant political protest by means of domain hijacking

After 2nd Lebanon War at Jul-August 2006, the government of Israel set up a committee of inquiry – the Winograd Committee.  A domain has been registered in behalf of this committee – http://vaadatwino.co.il/ (the contents are in Hebrew).

Fast forward three years.  The Israeli government is trying to build a biometric database with data about all Israeli citizens, and concerned people are protesting this plan.  The strongest argument against the database is the risk of data leak, which may lead to rather adverse consequences.

To prove that the government does not know to protect its digital assets, the above domain was hijacked when its registration expired because someone in the government forgot to renew the domain registration.  The Website now contains a statement against the biometric database.

I secured a place in a biography of a prominent scientist or: The longest birthday party I ever attended

The story starts at the late 1980’s, at which time I did my M.Sc. work under Prof. Jacob Klein.  It was a strike of luck for me, as I did not set out to look for a top notch advisor, but ended up having such an advisor.

Twenty years later, as one of his former M.Sc. students, I was invited to a workshop, which was dedicated to his 60th birthday, and which was held between 21-23 June this year.  I was happy to attend it, soak some science, and meet old acquaintances.

The workshop was relatively small and intimate.  There were few tens of participants, and several of them also lectured and presented posters.  Most of them were students, collaborators or colleagues of Prof. Klein.  At the workshop’s end, people remarked about the high quality of research described in the lectures.  Scientists were also not afraid to venture forth from their zones of comfort and discuss also subjects about which they did not have all the answers.  So one could notice that some post-lecture questions were answered by “I do not know”.

Rachel Yerushalmi-Rozen, one of the workshop organizers, arranged for me full coverage of notetakers so that I could follow all lectures.  They did good enough work so that I was not bored, even though fundamental cognitive and motor limits of humans prevented them from writing down everything that was being said during the lectures.  The notetakers had to be proficient with the terminology used in the lectures, so they were students of the workshop’s organizers.

The first part of the workshop was held in Schmidt Auditorium in Weizmann Institute of Science, and when it ended, a group photo of the participants was taken.  Such group photos often end up in biographies of scientists, who participated in them.  The caliber of the workshop’s participants was such that several of them are current or future prominent scientists.

In one of the evenings we were treated to a dinner and a rare night visit in the Jerusalem Biblical Zoo (see also in the Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerusalem_Biblical_Zoo).  After the night tour, still in the zoo, Prof. Klein blew out candles on his birthday cake and we were treated to a presentation of photos of highlights of his life, so that the 3-day workshop would qualify also as a birthday party.

Trip to Petra

After having put it off for several years after the Israeli-Jordanian peace agreement, I at last made the pilgrimage trip to Petra like all good Israelis.

The one-day trip to Petra from Eilat is OK for people who can afford only to have short vacations.  You spend a full day and pay hefty border-crossing fees just to see ancient Petra for two hours.  Ancient Petra has enough stuff to keep you exploring it for hours, and several people prefer to sleep overnight in one of the hotels in the newer part of the city.

Speaking of the newer part of the city, one of the things they don’t tell you is that the city has some very steep roads.

When planning the trip to Petra, S. and me inquired and found that the logistics (low frequency public transportation and border opening hours) make it mandatory to join a guided tour if we want to accomplish it in a single day.  We registered for the tour operated by Desert Eco Tours, even though it was a bit more expensive than tours organized by other operators.  It was indeed well-organized – we got across the border in the morning without undue waiting in queues.

A view of the Petra Treasury from angle not usually found in tour books and brochures:

View into Petra Treasury

Unequivocal Palestinian Victory

The following is an adaptation of the English translation of a talkback, which I wrote in response to an article in Ira Abramov’s blog (written in Hebrew), which commented on the results of the elections held in Israel at 2009 February 10, whose results showed the decline of the Israeli Left.

I do not think that the Israeli Left lost the elections due to leadership failures, divisiveness or other nonsense.

I think that it was a victory of the Palestinians in their war against the Israeli Left, pure and simple.

  • After Rabin’s murder at November 1995, there was widespread support for Shimon Peres (who advocated the same pro-Palestinian policy, which caused Yigal Amir to murder Rabin). Until the elections were at last held at 1996, the support passed to Bibi Netanyahu and he won landslide victory in the elctions. Who helped him? All those Palestinian terrorists, who exploded busses during the months between murder and elections.
  • One of the consequences of the Al-Aqsa intifada, which started at 2000, and which included terror attacks committed by suicide bombers almost every day, was that several people from the Israeli Left felt that they no longer have a partner in the other side, and withdrew support for policy of appeasement toward the Palestinians.
  • The third round of the war between the Palestinians and the Israeli Left was held during the years from the Disengagement until now. The By continuing to launch missiles from Gaza Strip into Israel, the Palestinians provided ammunition to those forces in the Israeli Right, who opposed the Disengagement and demonstrated and blocked roads in an attempt to stop the Disengagement.

After such battles, which ended with unequivocal victory of the Palestinians, why does anyone still wonder that the Israeli Left lost its influence over Israeli politics?

Very Annoying Spam

This particular spam E-mail is very annoying to me. It is annoying because it appears to have come from a political party, which I otherwise would have considered voting for in the coming 10 February 2009 elections in Israel. And now I cannot consider voting for them, due to my policy of zero tolerance of spam.

It is an appeal to vote for the party of the people with disabilities (מפלגת הנכים) in those elections.

The first time I got the E-mail, I thought it was sent to me because I am in some mailing list of people with disabilities. The second time, it was sent to an E-mail address which is not publicly known and which I never use for subscribing to mailing lists.

It was also sent from a gmail account, rather than from the party’s own domain.

I sent spam complaint E-mails to both my E-mail provider and the real party’s E-mail address, as publicized in their Web site.

Double-charging of bank charges in Bank Discount

Today I went to Bank Discount, where I have a checking account, to pay my municipal tax (“arnona”) bill. In the far past, such transactions bore no bank charges, as the municipality in question reimbursed the bank for its transaction expenses.

Today I found that this year, payments to the municipality are not exempt from bank charges.

I further found that, contrary to past practice, I was charged twice. Once for the bill payment itself. Once for the act of withdrawing money from my bank account.

The municipal tax bill was not that small, so the total bank charges amounted to about 0.3% – not worth fighting over in the form of letter writing, making an appointment with the branch manager for a calm (but prolonged) argument, etc.

This is like one of the Soddom stories – how they screwed a brickmaker by having each Soddomite take just one brick from his workshop. Too small for a lawsuit, but nevertheless he got bankrupted, without any reasonable legal recourse.

Not having the time or justification to pursue the matter via the proper channels, I balanced things out by shouting at the branch manager for about 5 seconds in the presence of other people.

Web 2.0 Best Practices

Suppose you have been contacted by someone with a great Web 2.0 idea and he wants you to join his startup.
You need to know whether he knows what he is talking about.
The following checklist may help you tell the clueful apart from clueless.
I hope people will be able to contribute advice concerning each item in the checklist as well as more items I missed.

  1. Dealing with bad content:
    • Spam
    • Trolling
    • Off-topic user-contributed content
  2. Vandalism (and in general, content backup/restore).
  3. Legal:
    • Acceptable use guidelines
    • Copyright violations and other issues
  4. Content ownership/lockdown policies – will a contributor be able to export his contributions into file/s in his own PC?
  5. How will the network effect be overcome (if another Web 2.0 site already exists serving the same need, how to get people to use your Web site instead of the other site, if they already have stuff).
  6. Business model (i.e. how to actually get people to pay for the stuff).
  7. Scaling with demand (nowadays, thanks to cloud computing services availability, the required scaling is not that of servers but that of customer service personnel and maybe other critical resources).
  8. Are there standards (such as XML schema) relevant to the kind of content to be served by the site?

The hospital which demands that its surgeons operate in non-sterile theaters, with inadequate equipment and without enough help

If what Alan Carter says in his The Programmers’ Stone blog is right, then the way our society treats software developers is like requiring surgeons to operate in non-sterile theaters, with inadequate equipment and without enough help from other doctors and nurses.