jack

We have ordered rings. We've got most people's addresses, told almost everyone about the wedding with a pre-invitation email (a couple bounced and need to be sorted out), have a beautiful design for inviations, and are nearly ready to get them sent.

We have a venue for ceremony, and a venue for the reception, and a place for the post-wedding holiday, although we still need transport between them. We provisionally have officiants, although we've yet to plan the ceremony properly.

Rachel has clothes. We have the start of a website, although it isn't finished yet. (It will have a FAQ.) We've started trying to organise the ceilidh, although we still don't have a venue.

But we're confident that we'll have a good wedding :)

Is anyone else thinking of going to the winter beer festival this Sat (http://www.cambridgebeerfestival.com/viewnode.php?id=207)?

The steps in evolution of an X-ial:

1. I think X.
2. I am an X-thinker.
3. I am an X-ial.
4. X-ial-ism is cool.
5. I think X, but I'm not one of those freaky X-ials.

Or, in other words, to some people "atheist" means "doesn't believe in God", and to some people it means "like Richard Dawkins". These people often have conversations like:

What they say	What the other person hears
Are you atheist?	Are you a humorless religion hater?
I'm not an atheist, I just don't believe in God	I believe in God, I just don't believe in God

And then they both think the other person is an idiot. They're really cross with each other, even though they substantially agree, because they're using the same word to mean quite different things, because they've both picked up the meaning from context, or from a dictionary, and just assumed that the connotations they saw used most often were the most important part of the word.

See also "do submarines swim" (depends what you mean by 'swim'), "is ice hockey hocky, or just like hockey" (depends what you mean by 'hockey'), "are you a feminist" (etc etc). See also http://lesswrong.com/lw/nm/disguised_queries/.

The example I saw last week was a reasonably good rap video saying basically "Religion sucks. Believe in Jesus". To my ears, that just sounds bizarre. But there's apparently a significant target audience for whom the negative connotations of "religion" outweigh the "believe in supernatural" aspects.

I think, not identifying with any group ever is over the top as a response, but I can see why someone would feel like that. Certainly be cautious at thinking of yourself as the sort of person who does "X": make sure that IS who you want to be, and whether or not you buy into all the aspects of X, or only the obvious ones.

Jesus Calls His First Disciples

¹⁶As Jesus walked beside the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net into the lake, for they were fishermen. ¹⁷ "Come, follow me," Jesus said, "and I will send you out to fish for people."

I don't suppose it happened literally as its described here, but this is a lovely passage, a very moving start to the hero setting off on his adventure.

It's also worth noting (as was relevant to the Boyarin post, and as is often pointed out Christian writings) that Jesus was attracting comparatively everyday people as followers. His first disciples are fishermen; remember that if a grubby fisherman comes up to you and is the latest to claim to be the new messiah, and you didn't know who Jesus was going to be, why you might be dismissive of him when you really shouldn't be.

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Life complicated (but good); doubly much when it includes kalman information filters...

When I was talking with Liv, one thing I found surprisingly helpful was to deal a few sample hands, practice bidding them without any interfering bids from opponents, and talk through what we'd expected. That seemed useful for rapidly coming to a consensus about the most common things, without requiring either of us to guess what the other person might do differently and ask about it.

Conversely, there's the question of, if you're playing casually, but actually keeping score, how long should you go on feeling able to pause and say "ok, what's the convention for this situation"? I think it's similar to letting someone take a move back in chess, or playing with a chess clock, or accepting mild kibitzing from spectators, except that in Chess, those are practically the ONLY possible sources of interference, whereas in a partnership game with hidden information, there are millions of possible infractions. Some people say it doesn't matter if you ever progress to the point where you're playing "properly", but most people I know deliberately want to improve. Others are scared of never improving and think everyone ought to be held to club standard from the beginning.

I'm normally happy to let people go on being casual as long as they need (as long as they're not blatantly taking advantage). The rules for "what you should do when partner forgets a convention or lets something slip in their expression to avoid taking advantage" have accrued for good reason, but I think people who think they're comprehensible to complete beginners are deluding themselves. Yes, you shouldn't go to a club until you're able to cope with that, and you should recognise the sorts of things you should avoid, but the actual competition rules are as complicated as the bidding rules themselves (or more so, and more subjective), so recognise that beginners have to be taught, and aren't born knowing what it means if you say "oh, you did [bad thing X you don't understand] so the score will be [X for no reason you understand" :)

It's good to progress to the point where you DO understand what partner's bids mean, but you if you don't yet know some basic things, it's plausible to not play at all (though I think it's less fun) and it's plausible to just let people say "hang on, is that weak or strong", but I don't think getting tragic miscommunications on 80% of hands actually teaches people anything. (I think this happens when you have a beginner pair and a somewhat-better pair, and they both HOPE they can play together without a big culture clash, and don't realise that what's most helpful to one may not be as helpful to the other.)

I've played bridge sporadically for the last few years. A few times I've had a spate of going along to the university bridge club, but often I've been playing casually with friends. In fact, most people I know fall into the "learned a fair amount of it at some point, but are really rusty" category.

I learned a little bit at school and went to some lessons with the university bridge club when I was at university, but never took it up regularly at the time. The first time I played with friends it had been years since I played, and I was really nervous -- nearly shaking -- because playing badly doesn't just mean you lose, it's generally really tedious for partner and everyone else too.

Since, I've got a fair amount of practice, probably less rusty than many of my friends who play sometimes, even if they may have had more experience long-term, and just about good enough to play with a pick-up partner at the university club without horrible miscommunication. Although I'm still very diffident at suggesting how things should be done.

And I've intermittently thought about the best ways of playing with not-complete-novice-but-not-played-for-years people. There seems (to me) to be an unfortunate tendency for everyone with some amount of experience to spontaneously offer helpful advice to anyone who seems to need it, which unfortunately, for the recipient, often feels like "everyone yelling at me". It's hard to avoid, because every piece of advice is helpful, so it's hard to not say it, even if there's little point giving more information than someone can absorb at once.

The previous weekend with Liv's family, and this Sunday at Naath's, things were surprisingly productive: I think people played fairly well, and more to the point, people seemed to improve by talking to each other with a minimum of feeling awful for not being perfect...

I think one problem is that people often get presented with heuristics without actually understanding the reasoning behind them, which is understandable when you're trying to teach someone quickly, but if you get things like "bidding stayman over an opponent's 1NT instead of partner's" it's a clear sign that you've not really explained to someone what they're doing.

( Conventions )

OK, I mentioned this is passing in the last post, but talking to Liv clarified it a bit. Have I got this right?

I think (?) that the traditional view of Mark 7, Mark is supposed to be describing Jesus as making a _new_ declaration. "You know all that Kosher stuff, don't worry about it. Being a good person is more important." In fact, it explictly says "(In saying this, Jesus declared all foods 'clean')".

However, I think (?) that the brackets were added by the translator, who didn't necessarily know much about 25AD Jewish laws and customs. Is that right?

If so, I'm mildly shocked. I mean, I know that the bible has been passed down and interpreted before it was written down, but I'm used to thinking of what we have now as fairly fixed, and the best record of what Jesus (probably) said. But no, people just went ahead and added stuff :(

However, I think if I've got this right, that parable makes more sense interpreted with a knowledge of the difference between Kashrut (dietary laws) and cleanliness. Eating non-Kosher food was a restriction on what you could _do_, but it didn't put you into a special state of uncleanliness. Kosher was what _everyone_ did.

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1. It is traditional eat oily foods (latkes, doughnuts, etc) and possibly cheese, for (separate) complicated apocryphal reasons. Latkes are fried potato cakes, typically made with (widely varying combinations of), potato, onion and egg, grated, mixed and fried[1].

2. It happens some time between late november and late december, lasting eight days.

3. It traditionally commemorates a revolt against attempts to change or suppress various Jewish practices (although many people point out the actual history isn't simple) but either way its polite not to try to police other people's religious practices especially at Hannukkah.

4. The most common spellings are "Hanukkah" and "Chanukah". Because it's originally transliterated from Hebrew, so there's no "right" spelling. Either is probably fine, although it's probably wise to pick one or the other. I asked Liv and she said that there could be many spellings of the original Hebrew and she didn't know off the top of her head which, and as far as she knew there were no lurking connotations of either of the common spellings, but there was probably a trans-atlantic difference. But I can't remember which.

5. A menorah is a seven-branched candlabrum which was used in the temple in Jerusalem and before, and often used as a symbol of Judaism and/or Israel. But as with many complicated rules, isn't actually really USED at the moment, since there isn't a temple any more. After the revolt was successful and the (second) temple was recaptured and rededicated, there is an apocryphal miracle where they didn't have enough oil to keep the menorah alight, but what they thought was one day's supply lasted a whole eight days until more could be brought in. Thus, Hannukkah is celebrated by lighting eight candles over eight days. These are often but not necessarily placed in a candlabrum which resembles a traditional menorah, which is either simply called a Menorah, or to avoid confusion, a Hanukiah.

6. The menorah should be placed where it can best be seen from the street (in order to make a _public_ celebration?). Usually people place them in windowsills, and if they live a long way from the street, just accept it's not perfect, but if you have a choice, it should be somewhere visible.

7. The candles should not be used for anything. In fact, the most likely thing you will use the candles for accidentally are (a) seeing and (b) lighting the other candles, so tradition dictates that you also light a nineth helper candle, and you can use that to light the others, and to see by. If you accidentally walk into a darkened room with a lit menorah, you should 8/9 shut your eyes so you're only using the light from the helper candle, not the others[2].

8. I don't know much about Hanukkah traditions for families, but apparently there's an exceptionally boring and pointless zero-sum form of gambling forced onto small children, where you give them some number of treats, and encourage them to bet them against a shared pot based on the result of a traditional spinner, and repeat until they figure out that the best way of winning gambling is to be the house, not the punter.

9. Bonus fact. Hanukkah doesn't have very much in common with Christmas. They both have little twinkly lights, a tradition of annoying party games, are more cultural than religious. But Passover is a lot more like the the Christmas "big family get-together with a big meal and little bits of history story" aspect. Hanukkah is perhaps more like shrove tuesday (theologically questionable oily foods), November the fifth (lots of solstice fire with a questionable link to historical political events) or July fourteenth (lots of fire and celebration, but tinged with rembrance of triumph over tyranny).

Footnotes

[1] Helpful tip! Don't grate the egg. Also, don't slavishly follow Jewish recipes described second hand on the internet by English atheists, and if you do, definitely don't admit in public that you tried to grate an egg, made a mess, and hurt your fingers.

[2] I made this bit up. Also, note that you light one candle the first night, two the second night, etc, so on the first night you can keep your eyes half-open, etc. And when I say you light eight candles over eight nights, I mean they light one more each night, but then leave them to burn down, lighting thirty-six plus eight helpers over the whole period.

[3] I considered claiming the facts were "top" or "interesting", but decided against it :)