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12.11.12

Hard exercise lifts testosterone levels.
[I used to jog but it was too public. Now I exercise at home. In the USSR they had a 10 minute radio program every day at 7:00 AM. This encouraged people to exercise for ten minutes in the morning. I think this is an amazing and great idea.

Alcohol diminishes testosterone.
Sex once a week lifts levels of testosterone
Bad for testosterone: cell phones and wifi  waves.

No hormones. Stop sugar.  Plastics demolish testosterone levels.





I am not in favor of testosterone therapy. I don't think it does anything. It is like vitamins. The body needs it -but it needs it in a natural way.

I know many Christians have a negative idea towards sex. This seems to me to be a good approach to some degree because when guys chase after girls the girls tend to run away. It seems a basically retrained approach is best. However just for the record let me say that I think the Christian attitude is highly based on Paul and not very much on the Torah. [In the book of Tecla, Paul basically says that anyone who has sex will not get into the kingdom of heaven]. In the Torah itself we find a different approach. Calev Ben Yefuna had two girlfriends, and he was "totally with God. " וימלא אחרי השם
Not only do we not find criticism for his several wives and two girls friends, but he is the only person in the entire  Bible that it says about him this unique phrase. On some people it says they were righteous, others it say walked with God. Other walked before God. But to be totally with God? That unique phrase is only used on Calev who was definitely having sex outside of marriage. [That is what a פילגש is. I looked up the place in the Shulchan Aruch which brings this argument between the Rambam and the Raavad and I looked at the Gra and he brings this proof to the Raavad from Calev Ben Yefuna.]

I should mention that health has been a major concern of my learning partner for some time. So before and after we learn our session of Talmud he fills me in with the latest insights.
I have not mentioned them collectively but a few  times. Let me say he got me started on beets a few years ago. I was over weight and he said to me something about vegetable juice. He had a vegetable mixer and that was his thing in those days.

Now you have to understand that he takes more care of his diet than he would normally have to do because he is in a situation  where he can't jog or take long strenuous walks. But recently I found myself in a similar kind of situation so I also am taking more of a look at diet.

At any rate, in those days the vegetable mixer was not working for me either, so I just started having a raw beet with black bread in the morning. I would do a short math session. Then I would jog. Well you can guess the weight just came off like that. Bamm!

Any questions about diet I ask my learning partner who spends a good amount of time studying this subject. But I also learned from him the idea of egg yokes. I found this surprising because in fact Ashkenazic Jews have used egg yokes as coffee creamer for about 200  years. Not just as nourishment but also that it makes one not want bad food.

When he mentioned this to me about egg yokes I told him about Arnold Schwarzenegger in some movie that puts raw eggs in a mixer when he got up in the morning. His comment was why do you think he looks like that? If you are in the USA however you want to make sure there are not anti antibiotics in the chickens from where the eggs come from. Even in areas where people grow their own food like the Ukraine  or Russia there is still a difference between eggs. Brown ones are more likely to be antibiotic free.










9.11.12

There used to be a lot of really good songs being sung on Shabat in Brooklyn, New York. I fear they are mostly being forgotten. I remember my friend at the Mir , Shelomo Berger, who had in his family tradition and really nice Yah Ribon Olam. It was almost like a small symphony. I also remember when I was at the school of Shelomo Friefeld the Yom Kipper  and Rosh HaShanah service like like a  great Beethoven Symphony. It was not that the songs [nigunim ] were more accurate, but that the songs were connected and related in the way that Mozart or Beethoven would weave a strong rigorous framework with a few basic themes. My sadness about all this being forgotten is not just one sided. It applies also to the spirit of Torah that existed then.  It was a vast enterprise to build up a moral and just society according to the Divine law.

The social "meme" was Torah. People acted by their own free will according to the dictates of God's Law. Thus you had a moral decent society as long as that lasted. What went wrong is a mystery to me. At some point the social structure which was in place to protect from dangers of the secular world became worse than the secular world.  I think a lot of its attraction was based on the idea that it gave immunity from the evils of secular society. But this protection became instead a kind of trap.

So in simple terms what was right was a joint community effort to keep the Law of God. תורת משה. What went wrong is that this ceased to be the major motivation. People began to use Torah as a means to make money and status. 

8.11.12

An argument by Ruth Marcus helps the Godel's proof of the existence of God.

An argument by Ruth Marcus helps the Godel's  proof of the existence of God. One critique is that there seems to be a contradiction in different perfections.
The argument of Marcus about moral perfections seems to overcome this objection.

Marcus defines a consistent set of moral principles as one in which there is some "possible world " in which they are all obeyable. That they may conflict in the actual world is not a mark of inconsistency. As in the case of necessity of identity, there was a resistance to this interpretation of moral conflict. Her argument counts against a widely received view that systems of moral rules are inevitably inconsistent.[3]

1.11.12

I have modified version of Ayn Rand's idea

I have modified version of Ayn Rand's idea that a society follows it philosophers. I think a society also follows its religion. If the society is unjust, then you do not need to bother examining the religion.

People also have two modes of operation. Inherent character and world view. And these are warring. Sometimes bad character warps a good world view. Sometimes a bad world view warps good character. And sometimes the opposite. The Geon from Vilna has a similar idea and you certainly see this in Isaac Luria's writings in Shar Hagilgulim.

In any case Ayn Rand has a wealth of great ideas


29.10.12

Once blacks became lawyers, they made it their business to check that every corporation had an exact amount of blacks working for it, and every bank was giving loans to an exact amount of blacks.

  For people that are unaware of the problem, the failure of the banks,  was because they were forced to make toxic loans to blacks. Once blacks became lawyers, they made it their business to check that every corporation had an exact amount of blacks working for it, and every bank was giving loans to an exact amount of blacks. [Less than this exact amount would bring a law suit of discrimination and the owner would lose his business and be put into jail.] Normally, a bank manager can tell when a loan is a bad idea. He sees an unemployed black walking into his bank asking for a home loan. Normally, he would show him the door.
But because of the fear of lawsuits, he would have to give him the loan.

Normally, an employer can tell when a black person is not able to do a certain job. In such a case, he would not hire him. But then there is the real possibility of being sued for discrimination and losing his entire company. So he hires the black, and puts him in some position in which he hopes the black will not do too much damage to his firm.
You multiply the effect of this several million times, and you get  the story of the failure of the American economy.
It makes me wonder about the wisdom of the Civil War. After all the American Constitution is in its essence a contract that the Northern States were unilaterally trying to change. This is in general not how contracts work. The normal way a contract works is that after you sign on the dotted line you can't change the terms without the consent of the other party. This is clearly what the North was doing and so by definition of contract it justified the secession of the southern states.

26.10.12

A second application of the compactness theorem shows that any theory that has arbitrarily large finite models, or a single infinite model, has models of arbitrary large cardinality (this is the Upward Löwenheim–Skolem theorem).


Two years later I don't know why I wrote the above note but I think it was because I wanted to prove the consistency of the  idea of Godel that a being can have an infinity of positive traits. He uses this idea in his proof of the existence of God. And it has been criticized. I thought to answer that criticism with the Lowenheim Skolem theorem. [Say the ''s'' in Skolem as in English-- not ''sh''.][This is similar to why C^n is not used instead of C^infinity, which is the it makes no difference which manifold you use. So C^infinity is always used.]

The actual idea of Gödel's proof of the existence of God came from Anselm. People argued whether it was rigorous or not. Leibniz showed that it is. Godel put it into logical notation and thus it is easily shown by on proof checking software program computer that is is a rigorous proof. No one dares to suggest that the proof is not rigorous. Rather the critics focus on the axioms.

[Hegel held that it is a valid proof and in fact the entire system oif Hegel is all about how to get to God--the absolute- as he makes clear.]

20.10.12

I learned Books of Ethics (Musar) along with the Talmud.  This set of books  set of books were written in the middle ages and are meant to distill the basic ethics of the Talmud.

I once heard say that whenever one is asked for charity, he should always give and mot ask about who is asking. This is derived from a law in the Shulchan Aruch about Purim. It so happened that I was in a certain city playing the violin on the street. In this city there were anti Semites.
Eventually other beggars stated asking me for money as I was playing the violin. There was one German fellow who also used to ask me for money. He thought that since I was playing Mozart that I must like Germans. In fact he is wrong. I just happen to like Mozart. However since he is poor and he he was asking for money so according to this idea of always giving to a poor person I had to oblige. Once he heard his friends in the center of town scheming to rob and kill me, and warned me and  introduced me to the head of the Mafia in that area and told him to keep watch out for me. It so happened that the head of this Mafia was also of German extraction [though he spoke  only Russian].
That was the end of that problem.

After this I thought to myself of the verse cast your bread on the face of the waters and in the space of many days you will find it again.