5 ms·

Beautiful and interesting stuff! I have never heard of copepods before, but have now and will have to do some more reading. > Walter once got a call from an Or

by bmitc 4y ago

Beautiful and interesting stuff! I have never heard of copepods before, but have now and will have to do some more reading. > Walter once got a call from an Orthodox Jewish organization wanting to know if there were pieces of non-kosher creatures floating in the New York City tap water. The answer was yes. Not to pick on them, but I found this illuminating on how religions present such a myopic view of life and what it means to be alive on Earth. Religions seems incapable of fitting their model over the apparent continuum of life. It was also somewhat humorous to read this.

prpl 4y ago
Without going into religion, it’s also mildly interesting for the defining veganism.
- angst_ridden 4y ago
  I've been in discussions with vegans over the 9.1x10^2 to 1.3x10^8 bacteria in the average indoor m^3 of air.
  - prpl 4y ago
    sure, but a copepod is a lot closer to a shrimp than bacteria.
  - echelon 4y ago
    Or the bacteria and fungi constantly living and dying within us. The self cells we continually turn over and instruct to die. The second order predation that balances the ecosystem that sustains us. Orcas that enjoy playing with their food. Lions that eat prey alive. Beautiful and terrifying. Our primate and hominid ancestors that ate the flesh of rival clans. I respect veganism and personal choices, but the world is a big place with lots going on that will forever escape our ability to control. That's how I frame my own decision, but I respect others' too.
    - TchoBeer 4y ago
      That is true, but factory farming is something that we decide to do. You bring up how our ancestors were cannibals, do you also eat human meat?
  - stevula 4y ago
    I guess I don’t see the relevance. Vegans eat other life forms like plants and fungi (it’s unavoidable). Their reservations are specifically about animals. Why would bacteria be an issue?
    - dekhn 4y ago
      I think a better example would be the buddhist who goes out of their way to not step on an ant, while simultaneously killing bacteria in his gut.
jrd259 4y ago
Unless he has considerable rabbinic training, Walter is not competent to judge whether the (invisible) copepods are kosher or not. The categories in the religious laws have some connection to biology but are not determined solely by physical conditions either. At the risk of over-simplifying, these laws are meant to be possible to follow. Nobody is going to decide that, henceforth, all strictly observant Jews must filter their water to remove microscopic animals.
- bmitc 4y ago
  He was being asked by a rabbi, so I’m assuming they sorted that out, and it’s not really his problem.
- teachrdan 4y ago
  Here's my favorite story about scientists judging what's kosher, starring none other than Richard Feynman: One day, two or three of the young rabbis came to me and said, "We realize that we can't study to be rabbis in the modern world without knowing something about science, so we'd like to ask you some questions." Of course there are thousands of places to find out about science, and Columbia University was right near there, but I wanted to know what kinds of questions they were interest in. They said, "Well, for instance, is electricity fire?" "No," I said, "but... what is the problem?" They said, "In the Talmud it says that you're not supposed to make fire on a Saturday, so our question is, can we use electrical things on Saturdays?" I was shocked. They weren't interested in science at all! The only way science was influencing their lives was so they might be able to interpret better the Talmud! They weren’t' interested in the world outside, in natural phenomena; they were only interested in resolving some question brought up in the Talmud. https://rabbisedley.blogspot.com/2012/08/richard-feynman-meets-rabbinical.html https://rabbisedley.blogspot.com/2012/08/richard-feynman-mee...
  - bmitc 4y ago
    While I agree with his observation here, if his narration can be assumed to be accurate, it is somewhat rich coming from Feynman who was famously dismissive of things he didn't find interesting. He saw the world from a very particular point of view.
paragonia 4y ago
[dead]
bruce511 4y ago
>> Not to pick on them, but I found this illuminating on how religions present such a myopic view of life and what it means to be alive on Earth. You fall into a trap of using a single English word to cover a multitude of different world-views. It would be as useful to say that the quote "... how people present..." Within the broad category of "religion" you have thousands of different groups, most of which would find minor, or very major, things to disagree on. Judaism is massively different to say Druidism or Buddhist. Crumbs, _within_ Judaism you have a full spectrum from Ultra Orthodox to unpracticing. I would thus caution you from viewing the world as falling into either religious or irreligious. Ultimately that classification is not meaningful.
- _a_a_a_ 4y ago
  You have AFAICS: religious atheist agnostic Is it even possible to be a religious atheist I wonder
  - enchiridion 4y ago
    For sure it is. Scientism is an example. It even has creation myths, the stories of the Big Bang and Copernicus being two examples. This idea is developed in depth by Bishop Robert Barron. Very interesting to consider.
    - _a_a_a_ 4y ago
      The guy is catholic, the wiki page of his doesn't mention Scientism, and you describe a belief in science, not any god. So I don't getcha I'm afraid.
    - dekhn 4y ago
      The big bang isn't a creation myth, it doesn't say anything about what existed beforehand, and if come up with enough evidence, the "theory" would be invalidated and replaced with one that is less inconsistent with our observations. I am not aware of- but would love to learn of- creation myths which are continuously updated as new data is available. Scientism is something that philosophers claim exists when they don't want to get in an argument with a scientist.
dang 4y ago
Please don't take HN threads into religious flamewar. This post is about as congenial as religious flamebait gets, but it's still that. Admittedly the upvotes such a post gets are a bigger problem than the post itself, but there's not much we can do about those. (This post was upvoted to the top of the thread when I saw it. I've marked it off topic now.) https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- bmitc 4y ago
  I think I'll disagree that this is off topic. What I quoted is a literal quote from the article. I wouldn't have mentioned it or caught it if it wasn't. From my perspective, the entire point of the article is the beauty and smallness of things that we are otherwise unaware of. The idea that books thousands of years old didn't anticipate, and thus don't accommodate, such is interesting. And I thought the discussion was good.
  - dang 4y ago
    "religions present such a myopic view of life and what it means to be alive on Earth" etc. is generic religious flamebait. We don't want that on HN, because it leads (in the general case) to horrible threads that are as nasty as they are predictable. I'm sure that's not your intent, but we have to go by the effects these things generally have. You may be right about connections to the article (I haven't checked) but that is not as important as preserving the ecosystem in general, which is the motive behind moderating HN this way; not arbitrarily but based on many years of experience with how these things usually go.
    - dekhn 4y ago
      I'm gonna have to disagree here, I don't think the single line from the comment passes the threshold for flamebait. The comment wasn't offtopic, and the conversation it led to was both interesting and not really a flamewar. I don't often see comments replying to dang's moderation (from people other than the ones he's moderating), and generally, I think dang's influence is beneficial, but I would like to see the moderation be more tolerant (IE, slight adjustment of thresholds around "generic flamebait").
TchoBeer 4y ago
Why does that strike you as myopic? Just the opposite, if the Rabbinate decided that they've never heard of these little bugs in the water and so they don't count, that would be myopic. The fact that this is a question which was debated a bunch in the orthodox world shows a flexibility that I think is underrated in orthodoxy. Is religion incapable of fitting their model over the continuum of life, or does it continue to adapt to new information? I'm reminded of a discussion in the talmud. A rabbi says that he heard from an Athenian scholar that there is a type of... mouse? bug? The aramaic isn't clear, some kind of little animal. Anyway, there's this creeping thing which comes to live when the sunlight hits a certain type of mud at a certain time of day. There's a whole discussion about whether these things are really "alive", vis a vis whether or not you can "kill" them on shabbat (this discussion is had elsewhere about lice, which were thought to have generated spontaneously. Jewish law has always been flexible and adaptable and shifted along with changing understanding of ourselves and our surroundings. I don't see how this anecdote suggests any differently. P.S. most (probably like 98% of) orthodox rabbis I have talked to permit drinking tap water even though it has little bugs in it, because they're too small to see with the human eye and thus are not forbidden to eat. If they were big enough, you would have to filter them, just like you have to check for bugs before you eat lettuce.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

by bmitc 4y ago

prpl 4y ago

Without going into religion, it’s also mildly interesting for the defining veganism.

angst_ridden 4y ago
I've been in discussions with vegans over the 9.1x10^2 to 1.3x10^8 bacteria in the average indoor m^3 of air.
- prpl 4y ago
  sure, but a copepod is a lot closer to a shrimp than bacteria.
- echelon 4y ago
  Or the bacteria and fungi constantly living and dying within us. The self cells we continually turn over and instruct to die. The second order predation that balances the ecosystem that sustains us. Orcas that enjoy playing with their food. Lions that eat prey alive. Beautiful and terrifying. Our primate and hominid ancestors that ate the flesh of rival clans. I respect veganism and personal choices, but the world is a big place with lots going on that will forever escape our ability to control. That's how I frame my own decision, but I respect others' too.
  - TchoBeer 4y ago
    That is true, but factory farming is something that we decide to do. You bring up how our ancestors were cannibals, do you also eat human meat?
- stevula 4y ago
  I guess I don’t see the relevance. Vegans eat other life forms like plants and fungi (it’s unavoidable). Their reservations are specifically about animals. Why would bacteria be an issue?
  - dekhn 4y ago
    I think a better example would be the buddhist who goes out of their way to not step on an ant, while simultaneously killing bacteria in his gut.

jrd259 4y ago

Unless he has considerable rabbinic training, Walter is not competent to judge whether the (invisible) copepods are kosher or not. The categories in the religious laws have some connection to biology but are not determined solely by physical conditions either. At the risk of over-simplifying, these laws are meant to be possible to follow. Nobody is going to decide that, henceforth, all strictly observant Jews must filter their water to remove microscopic animals.

bmitc 4y ago
He was being asked by a rabbi, so I’m assuming they sorted that out, and it’s not really his problem.
teachrdan 4y ago
Here's my favorite story about scientists judging what's kosher, starring none other than Richard Feynman: One day, two or three of the young rabbis came to me and said, "We realize that we can't study to be rabbis in the modern world without knowing something about science, so we'd like to ask you some questions." Of course there are thousands of places to find out about science, and Columbia University was right near there, but I wanted to know what kinds of questions they were interest in. They said, "Well, for instance, is electricity fire?" "No," I said, "but... what is the problem?" They said, "In the Talmud it says that you're not supposed to make fire on a Saturday, so our question is, can we use electrical things on Saturdays?" I was shocked. They weren't interested in science at all! The only way science was influencing their lives was so they might be able to interpret better the Talmud! They weren’t' interested in the world outside, in natural phenomena; they were only interested in resolving some question brought up in the Talmud. https://rabbisedley.blogspot.com/2012/08/richard-feynman-meets-rabbinical.html https://rabbisedley.blogspot.com/2012/08/richard-feynman-mee...
- bmitc 4y ago
  While I agree with his observation here, if his narration can be assumed to be accurate, it is somewhat rich coming from Feynman who was famously dismissive of things he didn't find interesting. He saw the world from a very particular point of view.

paragonia 4y ago

[dead]

bruce511 4y ago

>> Not to pick on them, but I found this illuminating on how religions present such a myopic view of life and what it means to be alive on Earth. You fall into a trap of using a single English word to cover a multitude of different world-views. It would be as useful to say that the quote "... how people present..." Within the broad category of "religion" you have thousands of different groups, most of which would find minor, or very major, things to disagree on. Judaism is massively different to say Druidism or Buddhist. Crumbs, _within_ Judaism you have a full spectrum from Ultra Orthodox to unpracticing. I would thus caution you from viewing the world as falling into either religious or irreligious. Ultimately that classification is not meaningful.

_a_a_a_ 4y ago
You have AFAICS: religious atheist agnostic Is it even possible to be a religious atheist I wonder
- enchiridion 4y ago
  For sure it is. Scientism is an example. It even has creation myths, the stories of the Big Bang and Copernicus being two examples. This idea is developed in depth by Bishop Robert Barron. Very interesting to consider.
  - _a_a_a_ 4y ago
    The guy is catholic, the wiki page of his doesn't mention Scientism, and you describe a belief in science, not any god. So I don't getcha I'm afraid.
  - dekhn 4y ago
    The big bang isn't a creation myth, it doesn't say anything about what existed beforehand, and if come up with enough evidence, the "theory" would be invalidated and replaced with one that is less inconsistent with our observations. I am not aware of- but would love to learn of- creation myths which are continuously updated as new data is available. Scientism is something that philosophers claim exists when they don't want to get in an argument with a scientist.

dang 4y ago

Please don't take HN threads into religious flamewar. This post is about as congenial as religious flamebait gets, but it's still that. Admittedly the upvotes such a post gets are a bigger problem than the post itself, but there's not much we can do about those. (This post was upvoted to the top of the thread when I saw it. I've marked it off topic now.) https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

bmitc 4y ago
I think I'll disagree that this is off topic. What I quoted is a literal quote from the article. I wouldn't have mentioned it or caught it if it wasn't. From my perspective, the entire point of the article is the beauty and smallness of things that we are otherwise unaware of. The idea that books thousands of years old didn't anticipate, and thus don't accommodate, such is interesting. And I thought the discussion was good.
- dang 4y ago
  "religions present such a myopic view of life and what it means to be alive on Earth" etc. is generic religious flamebait. We don't want that on HN, because it leads (in the general case) to horrible threads that are as nasty as they are predictable. I'm sure that's not your intent, but we have to go by the effects these things generally have. You may be right about connections to the article (I haven't checked) but that is not as important as preserving the ecosystem in general, which is the motive behind moderating HN this way; not arbitrarily but based on many years of experience with how these things usually go.
  - dekhn 4y ago
    I'm gonna have to disagree here, I don't think the single line from the comment passes the threshold for flamebait. The comment wasn't offtopic, and the conversation it led to was both interesting and not really a flamewar. I don't often see comments replying to dang's moderation (from people other than the ones he's moderating), and generally, I think dang's influence is beneficial, but I would like to see the moderation be more tolerant (IE, slight adjustment of thresholds around "generic flamebait").

TchoBeer 4y ago

Why does that strike you as myopic? Just the opposite, if the Rabbinate decided that they've never heard of these little bugs in the water and so they don't count, that would be myopic. The fact that this is a question which was debated a bunch in the orthodox world shows a flexibility that I think is underrated in orthodoxy. Is religion incapable of fitting their model over the continuum of life, or does it continue to adapt to new information? I'm reminded of a discussion in the talmud. A rabbi says that he heard from an Athenian scholar that there is a type of... mouse? bug? The aramaic isn't clear, some kind of little animal. Anyway, there's this creeping thing which comes to live when the sunlight hits a certain type of mud at a certain time of day. There's a whole discussion about whether these things are really "alive", vis a vis whether or not you can "kill" them on shabbat (this discussion is had elsewhere about lice, which were thought to have generated spontaneously. Jewish law has always been flexible and adaptable and shifted along with changing understanding of ourselves and our surroundings. I don't see how this anecdote suggests any differently. P.S. most (probably like 98% of) orthodox rabbis I have talked to permit drinking tap water even though it has little bugs in it, because they're too small to see with the human eye and thus are not forbidden to eat. If they were big enough, you would have to filter them, just like you have to check for bugs before you eat lettuce.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]