Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Choices choices choices.

Slackware or FreeBSD? Since I got my old HD back I am sitting here with Windows with settings and files that date back 30 months... and dying to get back to Unixdom, but thingy is: I don't want to install (k)Ubuntu, and altho' I *love* Gentoo, this machine isn't exactly that optimal for it - long compilations aren't really fun when the machine can suddenly shut down on you with no warning whatsoever.

FreeBSD might actually be what I try. The lack of a floppy drive on this machine requires some extra magic in order to install Slackware.

Also, I am rereading the beginning of Berakhot in order to find the folios I had in mind for my little Talmud feature.

EDIT: I decided to go with Slackware.

Saturday, October 07, 2006

I am not a Talmudic scholar.

I have not read very much of the Talmud, and what I have read has been snippets from translations. Well, some of the snippets correspond to 20-ish folios, so it's not like I have only seen a couple of disjunct quotes - the kind that various antisemites, various shady versions of missionaries and some antireligious people like to quote.

Anyways, the Talmud has a rather strange structure, at least to the reader acquainted with modern scholarly writing, modern prose and generally also western literature.
I have no idea, however, how it compares to moslem philosophical, theological and jurisprudential writings. They may provide a match.

To demonstrate this, one will need to devote some time, and the needed sample text would span several folios of Talmud. I have a few specific parts in mind, one of which also often is used as a so-called proof text that the Talmud is racist (if it is, at least this specific text is not, which raises the question why so many alleged racist proof texts either are not racist or do not even exist in the first place ...)

However.
My harddrive died some weeks ago, and this is a sort of impediment to my progress. Even tho' I like textmode unix (and my livecds with X on them haven't started, whereas my gentoo install cd from the fall of 2004 starts, giving me access to text-only elinks, irssi and ssh, oh, and text-based adventure games.

I just got my hands on a spare HD, so after I have installed it, done some homework assignments (pthreads and hash tables) I will get right to locating those folios of talmud, trying to provide a sensible interpretation, and showing how the logics are consistent and hang together, over a surprising span of topics.