Hi everybody! I've continued the process @msh210 started of synonimizing a lot of tags with alternative spellings/transliterations. I have only been doing the special case of alternatives whose diff comes up in the first 3 letters or so.
My logic is that since the purpose is findability by searching and there is the built-in autocomplete for tags, anyone expecting an alternate spelling of some non-English word is extremely likely to recognize the version that pops up in autocomplete as a result of this effort after (maximum) 3 letters.
I am looking for books/sefarim (Hebrew or English) that discuss the different months of the Jewish year, and their overall significance in relation to:
Zodiac Signs
Tribes
Chagim
Animals
Tanach/Chazal
Jewish Philosophy/Machshava
Anything else
Any recommendations would be appreciated.
What websites are essential bookmarks on a Jew's internet browser? I am thinking broadly of resources like a place to get online texts or a particularly good blog etc...
Please include links as well as a description of the particular value of each website to the Jewish bookmark collection.
@IsaacMoses Perhaps because each respondent to the former can think of several equally good answers, while each respondent to the latter can think of one good one?
@IsaacMoses Anyway, most of the answers even to the former don't include "thoughtful prose recommendations" really: just names of books and "I've heard good things" or "I've heard a dvar torah or two... quoting this book". Some do, though, include "thoughtful prose recommendations", viz (to date) WAF's and Alex's.
@msh210 Not a bad hypothesis. Can you think of any way to induce that sort of behavior even when people can think of more than one? Perhaps when one of these comes up, we immediately edit in a boldfaced "Show your work" notice?
@IsaacMoses You're obviously talking to the wrong guy: I thought of but one answer to judaism.stackexchange.com/questions/7987 but still just wrote the book title with no prose. :-/
@msh210 Then I'm talking to the right guy. How would you have behaved if Yaakov's question had "Please explain why" or something at the bottom? What if it was boldfaced? What if it was a stern mod note saying anything without justification will be deleted?
@msh210 That said, a notice (in the body of the question, not a comment) should help, yes, I'd think. Not so much "Show your work" as "Answers should detail reasons" or the like.
By the way, @IsaacMoses, your comments on the question at meta.judaism.stackexchange.com/questions/170 ("How much good do these lists of links do..."), which you've now moved to the answer where they belonged, could be deleted... I've deleted my intervening comment there. Shall I delete yours (save you the trouble)?
@yydl An email went out. We can only guess at why some people follow through and some don't
@msh210 I think I'm going to post an answer saying that they can be OK but must clearly solicit explanation of people's recommendations rather than just lists.
@yydl Note that an overwhelming majority of our committers only committed to our proposal, meaning that they likely came in from outside the SE network, many in response to Joel's blog post and tweets. Non-SE people are probably less likely to care to hang out on an SE site.
On more technical SE sites, lots of the people came in from SO/SF/SU
@IsaacMoses Assuming all the not-only-this committers signed up for beta (a huge assumption which, actually, can't be true for Mathematics), Physics had 64% of only-this committers sign up for beta, Cooking had 46%, Skeptics 40%, and Judaism 32%.
@msh210 Clearly, there are other factors at work. In a mostly techie base population, Judaism is more of a niche topic than, e.g. cooking or math. There are probably many SE or Joel-fan Jews who committed because they think it'd be cool to have a Jewish SE, but who interact with Judaism much less frequently than the average techie interacts with, e.g. cooking or math.
@IsaacMoses True. Techieness goes with mathiness and physicsics, I think. And for some odd reason mathiness seems to go with linguisticsics. Cooking, I don't know. But you're probably quite right about "There are probably... cool to have a Jewish SE".
@msh210, I was in University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC) while I attended Ner Israel, but have since graduated. I never updated my profile on math.SE. I will iy"h be attending grad school this fall.
@jake In math? A PhD program, or master's? Where? I got my PhD in math from Washington U in '09 and am a postdoc (not in math, in statistical genetics)
I'm more used to IRC, specifically channels (that is, chat rooms) where someone greets and is greeted when he enters and bids and is bade farewell when he leaves. Those don't seem to be the case in the Teacher's Lounge or AFAICT here, at least.
@msh210 Here's up to us. I think behavior here is more drifty
... and the chat format is designed to enable one to pick up a conversation that one wasn't around for (with logs, linked replies, etc.), more so than IRC
@RebeccaChernoff "SEChatFaviconNotifier.user.js - Uses the chatroom favicon to notify you of new unread messages and @-mentions" - this is now default behavior, no?
@RebeccaChernoff I actually think the list that came out of the corresponding SO question, organized as the answer was, is quite useful as a reference.
If all answers were to be compiled in an organization that itself was informative as to what to expect by clicking on a given link it would render explanations unnecessary (though potentially beneficial).
Possible Duplicate:
Second day of Shavous
Shavuos is one Yom Tov that has nothing to do with the day of the month. It is 50 days after the first day of Pesach. Even in the times of making Rosh Chodesh via the sight of the new moon, by the time Shavuos rolled around everyone knew defina...
@msh210 I closed this as duplicate. Was that too forceful an action for a moderator: should I have instead commented that it's a duplicate and waited for at least a coupla non-moderators to close it before doing so myself?
@msh210 IMO, if you're sure that a closure is appropriate, you should do it. You're a mod because the community (or in this pro tem case, the company) trusts you to make such decisions on your own.
... if you're not sure, leave a comment or start a meta/chat discussion
@msh210 I wish there were a way to refer to a previous post (like this one does) without the "@username" at the start. "@msh210" looks a little silly in my own post.
What websites are essential bookmarks on a Jew's internet browser? I am thinking broadly of resources like a place to get online texts or a particularly good blog etc...
Please include links as well as a description of the particular value of each website to the Jewish bookmark collection.
Possible Duplicate:
Second day of Shavous
Shavuos is one Yom Tov that has nothing to do with the day of the month. It is 50 days after the first day of Pesach. Even in the times of making Rosh Chodesh via the sight of the new moon, by the time Shavuos rolled around everyone knew defina...
