Interesting Posts and Articles #166

1. Two sites that let you daven for others with your same problem, kolhamevakeish.org and davenx.torah.org. My thoughts on this phenomenon of transforming concern and prayer for others into a quasi-selfish segulah for oneself here.
   
   
2. Eruv Online discusses the reprinting of the Berlin Edition of the Behag, together with a discussion of how the Behag and various other Geonim support the requirement of 600,000 for something to be considered a public domain.
   
   
3. Bizarro on an effect of climate change typically not considered.
   
   
4. At Cross-Currents, conversion standards and the academic approach to halacha. I think it paints the academic approach with too broad a brush; but indeed they do not look always look to farfetched harmonizations to resolve conflict, something that is a typical approach in traditional methodology, in large part because the gemara often engages in just that. But not everything should be harmonized.
   
   
5. JNUL uploaded a kabbalistic work by Rabbi Zechariah Mendel, which includes a defense of Rabbi Eliezer HaKallir against Ibn Ezra's attack. See here for a description of some of the criticisms. Some interesting stuff. See here for my presentation of the first defense.
   
   
6. Another interesting work at JNUL. A perush haketuba.
   
   
7. Wired reports on the discovery of another dinosaur bird transitional fossil.
   
   
8. E-man considers whether the Rambam really believed in creation ex nihilo.
   
   
9. Lion of Zion considers more questions in shopping for a yeshiva for your child: how far do they interfere in your conduct, and the conduct of the children outside of school; and how well they will know Hebrew at the end. I don't think there is a perfect school, so this is a matter of optimization of X at the expense of Y.
   
   
10. Vos Iz Neias on kashrut developments in Israel: a supervisor shuts down the Knesset cafeteria after a cockroach is found in a plate of rice; and a new kashrut lab established after discovering worms in vegetables.
    
    
11. On parshablog: Was the Shevus Yaakov a Flat-Earther? It would seem so.