EZ Reads 5/31/11

A few of the couple hundred posts I've been meaning to link to... (sigh)

• Da'as Torah with the links relating to the extremely important White Institute's Conference on Sexual Abuse in the Orthodox Jewish Community: Report; recordings; press coverage (London Jewish Chronicle). I heard from someone who was at (and I believe presented) at the conference that the conference was excellent and the speakers extremely moving.
• G6 on Conformity vs. Individuality.
• Harry on The Jewish Hammer, the Chicago Bears' first-round pick Gabe Corsi.
• DA with some funny cartoons relating to Obama's statement about the 1967 borders.
• (HT: Eliyahu Fink) Touched by a Landing, one passenger's retrospective on the ElAl flight which thankfully landed safely after trouble with its landing gear.
• R' Gil - Teiku on Faith. The comments are interesting as well.
• An awesome video (play in full screen) courtesy of Popular Science (via Meryl), if you like some beautiful night sky. Wow.
• Great ad which shows what kind of physicality is required to drive in the 24-hour Le Mans race in Europe. "Breathe in or my lungs will be crushed" - pretty crazy. I've long found it interesting that race drivers are ridiculously athletic and assumed it played a role, but it's cool to see just how that's so.
  

The Power of Words

(Hat tip: Shoshana K) A brilliant ad on the power of words.

EZ Reads 2/18/11

Today's links are mostly fun as opposed to serious, so have a good time and a great Shabbos!

• R' Gil caps the symposium he's held on his blog about the ethics of brain death and organ donation with Part X and gives a closing statement. Excerpt:

  This symposium was not a dialogue. Such a conversation is extremely desirable. Until that happens, the warnings offered by many participants to proceed with respect and caution are worth heeding. ... Until we are able to listen to each other, we will never be able to talk. We did not solve this dilemma here but we can at least leave knowing where the problem lies.

• R' Moshe Grylak in Mishpacha (hat tip: Chana):

  We met in a certain shul. And this is what he reported: “What can I tell you? I’m a kollel man, I learn well; I even enjoy my learning, and I stick to a regular schedule. But I’ll be honest with you — I don’t believe in G‑d. Everything I do is just a sham.”

• Chana writes a difficult piece on Why We Cut.
• Via Diana, there are some nice pictures as CrownHeights.info highlights Cleveland's Friendship Circle which held a dinner for 120+ people for the volunteer-based organization, which works with children with special needs.
• Via Ariella, Divrei Chaim rants about ads promoting luxurious trips... to kevarim.
• Really cool: Wires transform objects from inanimate to hilarious pieces of art.
• Doghouse (cartoon) explains how to explain things to teens these days.
• Why patience matters when selling something online (Lifehacker).
• And finally, xkcd does it again in Let Go (wish I could do what he does in the scroll over text):
  

EZ Reads 2/14/11

There's a reason I'm mostly putting up links for now, and not yet writing; hopefully that will be able to be made more clear soon enough. Meanwhile, here are some interesting and enjoyable links for today - many of which are flying all over on Facebook, et al:

• The NYTimes had a nice piece on the YU Seforim sale - the schedule of which is on Josh's Parshablog here.
• The Wall Street Journal discusses the possibility of seeing a Walmart in New York City in the near future. The most fascinating part to me was the first line:

  Last year, New York City residents spent $196 million at Wal-Mart... That's a pretty remarkable sum, given that there isn't a single Wal-Mart in New York City.

  No kidding.
• A video on what the OU does that I've been meaning to link to for a while. Well done.
• Ariella of Kallah Magazine has an interesting piece on Examiner about how GroupOn's handling of the negative reaction to their Super Bowl (and other) ad(s) is both impressive and a good lesson for marriages.
• RafiG with a clip about the first African-American in the Israeli Army. The history of how he ended up there is what I found most interesting. 
• The HuffPo has a great breakdown on the potential NFL lockout and how that all came to be and how it works, and what options are available to each side. It's fascinating in terms of how one thinks about business, freedom, entertainment, and how those all intersect and interact with one another.
• A hilarious Family Feud clip on "something that gets passed around."

Patience & Advertising

(I'm sure Jon would appreciate this one.)

Last night, we had a bright, handsome young man over for dinner. After dinner, he was calmly expressing his frustrations with different aspects of an organization he's involved with, seeking out advice as to how to best approach the various issues facing him and those around him. He noted that the largest difficulty they faced was the overall apathy of the people around them in general.

What was perhaps most interesting among the various suggestions posed by the different people still remaining were that they all had the same approach, or more accurately, all noted the same points about his planned approach:

• You will not succeed if you expect to make sweeping changes in a short period of time, and if you do expect to do so, you will only frustrate yourself to the point where you won't succeed at all.
• The best way to have the impact you desire is to bring in people just ahead of the stage you are in life who can impress upon everyone around you what aspects of life they need to be cognizant of for themselves.
• Only after people around you see how things impact them will they suddenly turn back to you to seek out help in addressing those issues.
• Most importantly, you must have the selfless idealism and understanding that whatever impact you have will not be seen until after you are long gone from the place you are now, and you have to accept that whatever changes you cause you will not see yourself.
  

What was particularly interesting was that this young man clearly "got" what everyone was saying, was able to accept it, and yet you could see the pain evident in his expression at the idea that this would be something that would only occur years down the road after he was gone. He was mature enough to accept it, he is mature enough to still move forward... but it certainly hurts. In a society of instant gratification, it is difficult for people to take a long-term approach, and it is commendable that he is likely going to push aside that pain to do what is necessary to help others down the line.

I thought it was interesting partly because of how it was a flipped version of something we went through at work this past week. Our company, on the advice of my boss, placed a large-scale advertising push that cost us a nice amount of money for one of our divisions. The manager of the division being advertised almost panicked, not sure they'd be able to handle the volume of calls. I didn't expect a lot of calls, but didn't know if they could handle the demand should they get too many. End results - Day One: 1 call. Days Two - Four: A handful. Day Five: A bunch. Total: Maybe 15-20 calls, for an entire week of not cheap ads. But as anyone in business or majoring in business will tell you, advertising is a bunch of bull - its purpose has nothing to do with business directly, but branding, image, perception, and awareness. Every vendor or person that walked into our office this week commented how they'd noticed our ads all week. A local news station wanted to run a story. Other vendors wanted to know if we'd advertise with them. The people who helped place the ads wanted to use our services themselves and recommended it to friends. When we asked our boss when he came back into town how many calls he expected on the week, he said "10". Upon hearing that we took a little more than that, he was thrilled; we'd beaten expectations. But the primary lesson of the week was that advertising is about delayed gratification. It's not that someone who sees an ad then calls up to use that service or buy that product; it's that when they're looking for a service or product, that ad they saw is what comes to mind and is the first place they look.

While people often vastly overrate the importance of experience in many areas, there are plenty of areas in which people vastly underrate it. Listen to your elders, but don't be afraid to challenge them as well - if you don't state your objections, you won't have the chance to learn where you may be making an error. I've learned more in the past four months both by teaching those around me and by questioning those above me than I have in a long time. My boss is notorious for saying "You'll see" after giving his explanation of what will happen when it flies in the face of logic as we might understand it... and has been more than vindicated each time. Perhaps most important, both applicable to business and life, never be stuck on your own opinion of something: If you take it personally, you will not be able to succeed. Fight for your opinion, but when you see that it has lost, move forward. You will eventually see better what was and was not going to work from your approach. It was heartening to see the young man at our table arguing strongly for different ideas, but understanding the flaws as they were noted. He'll go far in life.

Postscript: I thought it was ironic that the young man's major was psychology.

Postcript II: This post sounds way more serious and pompous than it is intended to be. It's supposed to be random musings on life as learned over the past couple of months, seen more clearly when flipped from the student role to co-advising role. Please read it as such. Thanks! :)

EZ Reads 7/16/09: Religious Security

Some really good posts today...

• Erachet tackles Honestly Frum's rant (mentioned yesterday) on Modern Orthodoxy by discussing Religious Security. Excerpt:

  It is a call for you to start wondering where you fall. And not to look at other people so much. Just because someone seems to be of a different camp does not mean that person is any more or less frum than you, and therefore you have no business judging anyone but yourself. If you work on your own religious observance, you will feel more religiously secure. And the more religiously secure you feel, the less you'll care about anyone "looking down" on you or "trying to change you." You'll just laugh at that because you'll have a feeling of shleimus that cannot be breached. Not by something so silly as someone else being too judgmental of you.

• Great analogy by Treppenwitz in weighing the question of who is responsible when someone gets hurt in a "dangerous area".
  
• Interesting post by R' Gil on papal infallibility and Da'as Torah.

  When did papal infallibility become a binding dogma? While it had been discussed and invoked for centuries, it became official Catholic dogma in 1870. Similarly, while ideas similar to Da'as Torah had been discussed prior, the main establishment of Da'as Torah as a binding dogma -- at least in those groups that accept it -- was in the mid- to late nineteenth century.

• RafiG points out the homepage of the 18th Maccabiah Games.
• Mark Frankel with a very good introduction to learning Gemara at BeyondBT.
• Seen in a few places, links to this piece about a Madoff victim who is giving $5 million to cover the employees' 401(k)s. What a kiddush Hashem.
• Cool ad for HP (and it didn't even win!).
• Mayam Bialik (Blossom) asks Jew in the City about how Orthodox women are regarded. Interesting.
• Trailer for No Impact Man on A Negative Benefit, about a guy who has his family have absolutely no carbon footprint for a year. Strange but cute and funny, sort of. Definitely thought-provoking.
• On a similar note (via Freakonomics), you can sell (or give) your old cells to CycledCells, which either reuses parts or gives away phones to people in third world countries.
  

Enjoy!

Support Volunteer Medics in Israel

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This is an ad that I am happy to put on this blog* as it is so incredibly important. As some of you already know, our good friend (and SerandEz contributor and editor) Jameel of the Muqata is a volunteer medic for United Hatzalah of Israel. The work they do is amazing, and the current crisis created by Hamas rockets raining down in Israel is stretching their capabilities even further. The current range of Hamas rockets is now 40km, which covers an incredible chunk of the country and its inhabitants, meaning Hatzalah must be ready in countless places at once to help who knows how many victims, ranging from shock to serious trauma.

Hatzalah in Israel is many cuts above what even the best volunteer medics in the United States do. These volunteers are not only stopping their work or their dinner, they aren't just rushing out on their kids' storytime, and they aren't just being woken up in the middle of the night. They're doing so and rushing to assist people who have been in terror attacks. They're rushing into the middle of war zones, into situations where they may be fired on, into places which no sane person would wish to be in at all - and they're doing so voluntarily, to help those who are in need. They're not paid for their work - they simply believe in serving a greater purpose.

As we all know, even their 1,000 volunteers can't make things free. Ambulances cost money. Medical supplies cost money. Personal armour to protect these medics cost money (and terrorists don't differentiate between medics and anyone else). Fuel, equipment, communication systems - they all cost money.

Saving lives costs money. Please, help save a life.

* (It may be a bit of a tricky transaction, so this is bli neder...)

SerandEz intend on donating half the proceeds of this ad to Hatzalah, which is received from people going through this ad to (hopefully) donate.

Wanna Go To Israel?

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WebAds, which helps keep this blog afloat (er, pays a small percentage of my internet bill each month?), has a couple of ads going on now that may be of particular interest to some of the readers of this blog, so... here are the basics. Click through for details:

• SIACH is a one-year post-high school program in Israel (in Jerusalem) that is rather different from most. Run by R' David Harbater (Orthodox), it is both co-ed and pluralistic, catering to students from all backgrounds: Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, unaffiliated... geared primarily towards the intellectual student with an open mind and lots of questions. The structure of the program is discussion and debate (hence: Siach) on any and all issues that can involve Judaism. They aren't trying to be mekarev students and make them religious, just give them an incredibly strong foundation in Judaism, and the tools to work with to apply them to their lives. Besides the education side, there are plenty of tiyulim (trips) and the like. Registration is now, and it is filling up, so people who are interested should register now, or ask for more information by clicking here.
• Nefesh B'Nefesh has a December 29th flight geared primarily toward singles who wish to make aliyah with other singles and still has some spaces available. It is a chartered NbN flight, and those interested should contact Nefesh B'Nefesh.
  

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