​Are You a Gambler?

 he purpose of this blog is to get the gears turning at the Shabbat table. Please print and share...

Here's a classic logical-thinking question for your table, from the authors of Thinking Fast and Slow (link in the image):

Imagine you must choose between on of the following:

A: A 100% chance of losing $3,000.
B. An 80% chance of losing $4,000, and a 20% chance of losing nothing.

Next, imagine you must choose between:

C: A 100% chance of winning $3,000.
D: An 80% chance of winning $4,000, and a 20% chance of winning nothing.

When this question is posed to thousands of people, over 90 percent of people choose B over A, but only 80 percent choose C over D. Why?

Finally, try this one at your table:

When does gambling become investing, and vice-versa?


Shabbat Shalom

PS - Do you have a favorite logical thinking puzzle? Please send it my way.

 

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Iggies Anyone?

The purpose of this blog is to create a legacy at the Shabbat table. Please print and share...

Mazal tov to Goldy and Moshe on your 1st anniversary!
Mazal tov to Dovid Schwartz on becoming bar mitzvah this week!
Wishing Hinda Chana bat Sarah a refuah sheleima.

Here's a trivia question to break the ice at your Shabbat table:

Why are nachos called nachos?

I assume that most people reading this or hearing it read to them have eaten or even continue to eat nachos.

But I'm guessing that 1 in a 1,000 nachos-eaters has no clue why they are called nachos.

Before you go running to the OED, try seeing what kinds of answers you can get from the table.

Is nacho Spanish for melted cheese?
Or perhaps its a backwards Anglicized Spanish neologism based on the American, "munch", like "munchos"?

The answer is rather delicious.

In 1943, Ignacio “Nacho” Anaya was working at Club Victoria in the border town of Piedras Negras, Mexico, when a group of American military wives from Eagle Pass, Texas came in, famished after a day of shopping. Anaya's was the maître d, but the cook was nowhere to be found. They asked him for "something different this time." They were regular customers and Nacho wanted to please them. Anaya ducked into the kitchen, looked around and found some fresh tortillas, chees and jalapeños.... It was a hit and became a regular on their menu, under the name Nacho's Especiales - Nacho's Special. 

I suppose now that they've become rather ubiquitous, what most of us eat today are just nachos ordinariales. (The full history is somewhat longer and more interesting than the present summary.) 

Nacho's Nacho's Especiales were so especiales and became so populares that the city of Piedras Negras established a 3-day Nacho's Festival every November on Nacho's yahrzeit.

Now, there probably isn't a corner of the USA where you couldn't find someone eating a plate of nachos. What a legacy.

But would the proper spelling for them be "Nacho's"?

(By the way, Iggy is also a nickname for Ignatio. Imagine that had been Mr. Anaya's nickname.)

Question for your table: If you could invent something to make people's lives better that will forever be called by your name, what would it be?

Speaking of creativity, our daughter Goldy in Jerusalem told me the other day the secret of how Israel is vaccinating so many people so fast.

Every time someone gets a shot, a small amount of the vaccine remains in the tube.

Rather than discard these, the Israeli nurses are collecting those leftovers. When they have enough leftovers to make a full dose, they find someone not on the A-list (typically a young person) and give them this "leftover" shot.

That's very resourceful of them.

But in my humble opinion, that's not their real secret.

They're real secret is that to a Jewish heart, every life is precious.

When you have that attitude, it's amazing how you can find ways to help people not only survive but thrive.


Shabbat Shalom

PS - Do you have an amazing nachos recipe? Please send it my way, and we'll run it through the Seinfeld test kitchen on Saturday night.
 

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Are You on the Other Side?

The purpose of this email is to bridge gaps at the Shabbat table. Please print and share...
Happy birthday shoutout to Jorun in SF!

The night after her Civics midterm this week, our 9th-grader and I enjoyed a live civics lesson on the radio. 

In case you missed the Congressional debate, it alternated between each side, pro- and con- on whether or not to impeach.

It was interesting to watch Devorah's reactions to the speakers. 

Regardless of which side you're on, you have to admit that every congressperson spoke with great passion, clarity and certainty about the justness of their position.

Several speakers used the expression, "my friend so-and-so on the other side of the aisle" or "my colleagues on the other side of the aisle."

This got me thinking — why is it that Democrats and Republicans sit segregated like that?

Would mixing them up — for instance, seating them alphabetically — improve their ability to compromise?

It reminded me of the first day of my first job out of college.

I was hired to teach in a public school in rural Mississippi. 

The first day was a staff day at the elementary school. I walked in with all of the other teachers at 8:30 and entered the library for the meetings.

But there I faced my first great dilemma as a teacher. 

The room was divided into two sides, with a row of short bookshelves-on-wheels down the middle.

On the left side sat all of the black teachers, on the right side, all of the white teachers.

Here I was, a white Jewish guy from the West coast, raised by colorblind parents. If I sat with the white folks, I'd be participating in the segregation. If I sat with the black folks, I might be making some kind of scene.

Question for your table: What would you do?

By the way, that scene repeated itself every day of the school year — in the lunchroom, the black and white teachers sat a separate tables. Again I ask (for your table) — Where would you sit?

And maybe to bring this home, a 3rd question for your table: All the grand-standing not withstanding, how might it affect the culture of Congress if they were seated alphabetically or randomly, rather than by party?

(In case you were wondering, the question has been studied by social scientists, but remains far from conclusive.)


Shabbat Shalom


PS - In the mood for some more WOWs this weekend? Here's a short and a long.

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Are We Spinning Out of Control?

The purpose of this email is to spin some conversation at the Shabbat table. Please print and share...

Happy 1st Anniversary to Goldy and Moshe Yitzchok in Jerusalem and happy birthday shoutout to Marc in HI! 

In memory of (and our deepest condolences to the family of) Pinchas (Sidney) Fenyes, who passed away last Shabbat.

Ever feel like your head is spinning?

You may think that it's a reaction to current events, but that spinning-out-of-control feeling may be due to the following item that you probably missed:

Our Planet Earth is speeding up.

That's right, the Earth is spinning (AKA rotating) faster and faster. 

As we speak (so to speak).

Before anyone panics, let's clarify - the amount of increase is pretty small: a day is now 1.8 milliseconds shorter than it's supposed to be

That's not enough to send anyone airborne just yet.

In other words, the number of seconds in a day is supposed to be 24 hours x 60 minutes x 60 seconds = 86,400. But on July 19, 2020, the Earth completed its rotation in 86,399.0000014602 seconds.

In other words, we were robbed of 1.4602 milliseconds.

But it is a surprise, because until now the drag of the moon and tides seemed to be slowing us down bit by bit.

The reason we know all this — the reason we need to know this — is because our communications and navigation satellites all depend on such precision to keep them in their proper orbits.

And as any high school Physics student can tell you, for a spinning object to increase in speed without an external force and without an increase in mass, something must be causing its mass to shift toward the center. 

That something could be geological (i.e., earthquakes) or possibly the massive arctic ice melt. 

But here's where it gets truly fascinating.

Earth hitting the gas may actually cause a decrease in catastrophic earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. It's actually all extremely complex but it's uplifting to know that this tiny average acceleration may in fact be good for us.

Or at least anyone near a fault line or downwind from a volcano.

(And it's also comforting to know that we've been here before.)

(And please note that I said "average" acceleration because the precise speed changes literally every day.)

So now you're ready for this week's questions for your table:

1. If it takes melting a few glaciers to reduce earthquakes, is it worth it?

2. More broadly: in the long run, when all is said and done, what matters more: the ends or the means?

3. If you answer the means - do the ends ever justify the means?

4. If you answer the ends - do the ends ever not justify the means?

5. When a person feels like life's spinning out of control, what should they do?

Shabbat Shalom

PS - Continuing for a 3rd week, here are two more captivating WOWs: short and long.

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A Smashing Success?

The purpose of this blog is to break open great conversation at the Shabbat table. Please print and share...

 

Go ahead, call me johnny-come-lately, but this is a new one for me.

When escape rooms first appeared, the idea appealed to me personally — a challenging puzzle to solve, an opportunity to build group solidarity, etc. Surely worth the $5-10 per person fee.

This week our son's NCSY group went to a very different sort of activity room that has popped up here and everywhere and that is evidently thriving, possibly even more than the escape rooms.

I refer, of course, to the smash room, AKA rage room, AKA wreck room, AKA destructotherapy, which has evidently been trending globally for about 3 years.

I think I get the pleasure; I was a kid once. I remember using fire crackers to blow up Star Wars action figures. There's some kind of joy in destroying something of purported value.

But I hadn't known that people will pay so much money to smash things. 

Not only will some people pay for the pleasure of smashing, enough people are paying to keep several of these businesses open locally. 

This phenomenon suggests several questions for your table:

1. Do you suppose the Pandemic has improved or hurt the wreckroom business?
2. If you could choose one thing to smash/wreck/destroy with a sledge hammer (or baseball bat), what would it be?
3. How much would you pay for that experience?
4. Is there the same pleasure in destroying something natural, or is it only fun when it's manmade?


Shabbat Shalom

PS - For those who enjoyed last week's video shorts, here are two more of my favorites: short and long.
 

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