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When it comes to charity, many people think of it as being something other people do – namely, the rich. It makes sense, of course, since hardly anyone else can be expected to have the funds necessary to endow schools and hospitals.
Yet in the Jewish tradition, no matter the branch or denomination, the concept of tzedakah, literally “justice,” is commanded of all, including the poor. For to make charitable donations is prescribed as a religious duty and not one subject to personal fancy. Indeed, the very funds available for tzedakah are considered not one’s own but on loan, in fact, from the Lord. This leads to the further injunction to carefully vet all recipients to ensure that any donations made will actually work for good and not ill.

On the face of it, it may sound surprising to an outsider, as with many aspects of Judaism. But – as with many aspects of Judaism, even for an outsider – there exist profound philosophical reasons for them. For in commanding even the poor to give, the rabbinical injunction to perform acts of tzedakah in effect empowers the poor to regard themselves as capable, too.

For what can be more empowering than to give? To give means to express our power, our ability to give, and it even betters our natures – our love, our sacrifice, our character. It is not that poverty ennobles, but to bear poverty in righteousness: that is noble. As a result, in the Jewish tradition it isn’t necessary to be a successful developer like Isaac Toussie so as to give alms. For Jews, such religiously commanded contributions are not just an obligation but a right.

For poverty is not so base as when it prevents one from sharing of one’s own means. This insight into human nature is what inspires the Jewish tradition to insist that even the poor not only have the duty to share, but can actually even enjoy sharing, giving, as a right!

The recent Japanese devastation has shone a spotlight on the country’s apparently unique social structure.
Unlike many other circumstances of natural disaster elsewhere, no looting or rioting has followed to compound the misfortune — and this has greatly impressed many a non-Japanese observer.
From the patient orderly lines to the return of valuables, “yamoto-damashii,” or the Japanese spirit, has elicited admiration and further sympathy from the world.

As can be imagined, articles have made an appearance attempting to reveal the phenomenon of people who continue to be law-abiding citizens despite being deprived of not just creature comforts but everything they own and even of loved ones.
Police stations all along the coast are stuffed to capacity together with the personal household safes of persons which have washed back to land or been recovered from the rubble by rescue workers.
Then there is the seemingly suicidal heroism and self-sacrifice of many nuclear power plant employees.
Even animals have displayed yamoto-damashii: a dog made worldwide headlines for standing by another dog stuck under rubble, neglecting to leave!

Much has been written both for and against the “Japanese-spirit interpretation” of events.
On one side, people note that the country is a wealthy one, a technologically advanced one, and one that is perhaps uniquely homogenous one of many leading industrialized societies of which it is a member.
Of course household safes and other belongings have been returned or at least remaining unmolested!
It figures, argue such people, because there is no motivation to loot and riot when the country all together offers so many resources to provide succor.

Others remember that the spirit of Japan is such that rules are witnessed simply because they are rules – Japanese rules – and one is Japanese.
Safes are not broken into because that isn’t what a Japanese person does, plain and simple.
This side of the discussion notes that no matter how rich the society, individual victims continue to suffer – yet they generally do so patiently, in a manner uniquely Japanese.

DC electric motor repair is typically made for industrial gear such as generator turbines and the like, though the most basic principles are recognized to the home hobbyist and his or her electronics science kit.
Obviously, in terms of power plants and other large-scale applications, the quantitative difference becomes a qualitative one as well.
Yet there is a lot about commercial DC electric motor repair which children with an interest in fixing broken toys, even strictly mechanical ones employing no electricity, will quickly grasp, the first of which regards the very meaning of an engine, the very physical attributes of a motor.

Today’s curious, scientifically minded child can easily almost comprehend about as much of electricity as the polymath Ben Franklin ever did.
With respect to the age, most of the time, they can rather adroitely indulge in a fit of DC electric motor repair somewhat in terms of a prodigious young Anakin Skywalker in the Stars Wars prequel “The Phantom Menace.”
From exotic gravity-defying vehicles to incredibly intelligent robots, Anakin manages to fix them all.
While today’s youngsters are hardly so versatile, it’s arguable that they are commonly smarter somehow than their own parents were at comparable ages.

So is that in reality the circumstance?
Has technology itself – its presence, its use – shaped our young in ways that render them somehow more intellectually able than we ourselves had been in youth?

It’s not simple speculation, idle or otherwise.
Research into how modern technology has affected children’s cognitive development makes headlines occasionally with some startling suggestion or other.
In addition, millions have been spent by private industry in the hope of gleaning some essential market insight that will bring about dramatically big profits.
And, once more, it’s arguable that kids today are subtly smarter, at least in the sense of being savvier.

So you want to be a lawyer. You understand it is going to mean a lot of studying, a lot of time spent with books – but you like reading, and figuring things out, and you enjoy words, language, and all the semantic nuances involved.

You even know that the LSAT exam for admission to law school is tough, and something to pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars for, for special prep courses, coaching classes and the like. You also realize that law school itself will be difficult as nails, at least throughout the all-too-crucial First Year.

Great. Maybe you even know that you will be forever hitting the books as a practicing lawyer, forever taking online CPE courses and their tests, one after the other, in order to maintain your standing with the professional association governing your licensure.

Super.

But are you aware that it will be pretty tough getting a high-enough-paying job as lawyer in order to repay your student loans? In reality, those online CPE courses will definitely cost some money, too.

Oh, you probably think you have that covered. You’ll graduate at the top of your class, or you’ll be accepted into an Ivy League law school and graduate none too low in the positions so as to get hired by a top corporate law firm and effortlessly recoup your investment in two to three years’ time.

And indeed, if such a thing does happen, your odds would be a lot better than those for essentially the rest of your peers, even in this economy. But “better than” does not mean “inherently good.” ’Cause you know what – globalization is coming to the legal profession too.

Yes, that’s right – outsourcing. Indeed, some of the online CPE courses available on the worldwide web were produced overseas! And though the legal profession has tried to resist it (after all, it took a whole decade for everyone to swap from WordPerfect to Microsoft Word!), it’s finally started to affect the industry.

China, China, China – what’s the big deal?
Why is everyone going on and on about China all the time?

Okay, so they own billions (or is that trillions) in American securities, currency, whatever.
And they make lotsa stuff.
Like NFL beach towels and stuff.
Yeah.
Okay.

It’s not like most people wish to work on an assembly line anyways, making trinkets and curios for Walmart.
But whatever.

All right, so it’s not merely NFL beach towels that they make.
It’s that they are also climbing up the food chain, making stuff that’s ever more high-value, such that good-paying jobs may be the next to go.
They’re hardly making textiles any more – notice that most of the clothing nowadays come from even more amazing locales – like Indonesia and Sri Lanka?

In fact, to be fair, it isn’t NFL beach towels that anyone’s upset over.
It’s the fear that aircraft manufacturing could be next!
Already the Chinese government is on record as gunning for leadership in green energy products such as wind mills and solar panels, and undoubtedly they are well on their way in direction of dominating those industries.

But does it need to be a zero-sum game?
Does China’s rise mean everyone else’s loss?
Put another way, are they simply gobbling up ever more slices of the pie – or can Chinese ascendancy grow that pie for everyone worried?

Well, speaking of the NFL, it’s interesting to compare and contrast that sporting league’s business decisions with that relating to the NBA.
Basketball keeps growing in popularity over there while years ago a structured exhibition game of American football was canceled almost at the last minute.
If this serves as any indication, it may be that being involved surpasses staying on the sidelines!

Blu-ray disc – or oftentimes spelled “Blu Ray disk” by those who enter that into the search engines – is the hottest new thing in home entertainment these past couple of years. Even regular single-layer discs provide 25GB of storage capacity, which translates into much sharper images and much better sound. Given less than five hundred lines of image available with DVDs, the 1,080 lines available with Blu-ray disc is an extraordinary development. That means more than doubling visual clarity and detail! No big deal? Well, think about how it would be if your eyesight somehow got better to the same degree – and you could see much more than twice as far away, with much more than twice the detail! It’s home entertainment meant for the 21st Century!

The greatest thing about On Off Digital World to me is how it brings back a certain time in New York. Well, the eighties, mostly. It was a time when you still needed a token for the subways, and pizza was a buck a slice and comic books about the same. It was a time before Neflix and video on demand, when, indeed, cable was just trying to take off in terms of widespread adoption. It was an innocent time, in a really — a time when family-owned and run stores like Montgomery Ward were it for electronics. That’s what today’s On Off Digital evokes.

Probably the most surprising uses of wind chimes has been as musical instruments in their own right.
This seems quite difficult at first, as typical varieties manage to consist of just tinkling cylinders, with the sound only slightly different depending on whether stone, wood, metal, or glass is used.
And so it is that [wind chimes] do indeed possess only a very limited set of musical capabilities, whether melodic or percussive, but that has not stop some ingenious musicians from deploying them into their work.
And in fact, probably the most famous uses of one has been in just about the most popular videogames of all time.

That’s right, in a videogame.
Koji Kondo is a long-time music director at Nintendo, responsible for scoring some of the company’s biggest hits, standard-setting bestsellers such as Super Mario Bros. as well as the Legend of Zelda.
In the sequel Super Mario World, wind chimes figure rather conspicuously in the theme for the “Vanilla Dome” game level (or “world,” in the parlance of the Mario games).

Chimes have also been featured in the works of musicians as diverse as modern composer Oliver Messiaen and rock guitarist David Sitek.
Perhaps what’s most surprising about their use is the fact that there are already a handful of chime-like instruments available – the mark tree is even sometimes mistaken for one!

Tubular bells are another such instrument which can be often mistaken for wind chimes.
Yet these kinds of misconceptions by casual observers can be simply forgiven, given that one cylinder can only so different from another, even when on an altogether different instrument – and, arguably, none of this class of instruments look very different!

Tubular bells, however, are much more widely used out of all the chime-like instruments.
The theme for the popular animated television series “Futurama” is played with tubular bells, as was that during area of the closing credits for the renowned children’s television show “Sesame Street” in the 1980s.

Community backing will always be a basic necessity for the survival and prosperity of hospitals and medical schools. Even smaller facilities such as those dedicated purely to research requires a large helping of such backing, especially in the form of philanthropic dollars. Typically, benefactors are helpful to more than just one organization, as is the case with Isaac Toussie and family when it comes to the top two leading lights of New York in healthcare education and practice, Weill Cornell Medical College and the North Shore-LIJ network of hospitals and research centers.

Weill Cornell is named after its two single most important contributors, Ezra Cornell, a founder of Western Union, and Sanford I. Weill, the onetime chief of Citigroup, Incorporated. As one of the most selective such institutions in the country, it admits only about a hundred hopefuls out of the nearly six thousand that apply each year. Furthermore, it was the first to admit women right alongside the men and first to operate overseas, just outside of the capital of Qatar, Doha. Many a notable graduate has boosted the school’s reputation over the years, doctors like C. Everett Koop, U.S. Surgeon General; Robert C. Atkins of Atkins Diet fame; Nobel Prize winner Robert W. Holley; and Henry Heimlich of Heimlich Maneuver fame. The North Shore-LIJ Health System is the second largest healthcare network in the country as measured by the number of beds and the largest in New York State based on patient revenue. It serves over seven million people a year through more than forty-two thousand employees – the single largest employer on Long Island and ninth largest largest in the City of New York.

These two institutions owe much of their success to vigorous community support, whether in the form of charitable contributions from prominent businessmen and women or non-monetary offerings such as time and expertise by local volunteers such as those from civic or religious organizations. Indeed, despite a budget in the multiple between them, Weill Cornell and North Shore-LIJ will always depend on the support of the host communities they serve.

Due to out fast-paced society, fast-paced because new discoveries are being made all the time which ends up in things change regularly, even personal fitness trainers need to take CPE courses in order to stay in good standing professionally.
As a former personal trainer myself, I must say, however, that the typical trainer may still not be as well-informed as such accreditations may wish to suggest.

Those employed by chain gyms, which is the majority of those today, are often kids for whom personal training is a gig they happen to have come upon.
At something like New York Sports Club (NYSC), they wear the red tee shirts that say “here to help you.”
Now some are, obviously, quite knowledgeable and rather interested in the subject, but for most it is just a job that appeared to fit nicely with a relaxed interest in sports.

The certification exam they take is genuine and rigorous enough for any employing a multiple-choice format, yet it’s really nothing more than a memory test and actually indicates no real expertise.
The needed CPE courses run generally along the same lines, regurgitating facts by rote.
Truth be told, these trainers do not know anything that could not be gained by anyone who logs online.

Of course, one may say the same of any occupation – but when it comes to physical fitness, the very nature of the discipline permits for no small amount of misinformation and outright quackery.
The explanation for this is really quite simple: no one truly knows.

Yes its true.
I’m a former personal fitness trainer and the only one who can tell the absolute truth: no one really knows.
Unless he or she is God or was there at the creation of Adam and Eve, no one really knows.
Hence, all the personal trainer CPE courses in the world isn’t going to make up for this plain but shocking truth – “the human body is centuries prior to medical science,” as Doctor Sir Roger Bannister said.