Baby potatoes

In America, 90% of toddlers under the age of two watch more than 90 minutes of TV per day. Here's a sure fire economic initiative --- toddler TV dinners. I guess you can't begin the exposure to those car and prescription medicine commercials too early.

Dryers

Here's an anecdote for those who don't realize the extent of energy consumption in America. As this NYT piece quotes, There are 88 million dryers in America. If Americans stopped using them for 6-months, the USA would decrease its carbon emission by almost 4 percent. Growing up in Israel, I can't think of anyone I knew that had a dryer; If it weren't for the movies I wouldn't know they existed. (Anyone care to comment on the dryer-index of contemporary Israeli families?) Makes sense because the climate in Israel is laundry friendly. In America, clotheslines are endemic of poverty. Many leases forbid their use. No one, not even the dwellers of Arizona and Nevada, not even the die-hard ecologists use a clothesline.

Trains and planes

A French TGV train broke the speed record today at 547 Km/h. At their normal running speed (300 Km/h), this train would take just over an hour to get from South Station in Boston to Penn Station. No airport congestion or traffic jams, and it's infinitely more energy efficient than the number of planes it would take to haul the same amount of people. At 300 Km/h, it would take 12 minutes to get from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. At 547 km/h, the train needs 30 kilometers to come to a halt. That's half that distance.

Potatoes

This is an ideal week for buying potatoes for Passover in Israel. The IDF has forbidden crop dusting planes from taking off near the Gaza strip for fear of being shot down. It's almost organic !

Free iPod Hebrew support for windows users

This site provides free Hebrew iPod support for windows users. A blessed development given that Yeda, apple's representatives in Israel, have begun charging for this feature for those who did not buy their iPod through Yeda. I am very interested in hearing user's comments about whether the free software works.

Legal sentencing recommendation software

Researchers of AI at Bar Ilan University have written a program to generate recommendations for criminal sentencing.
Many interesting questions arise. How to scientifically evaluate the performance of such a program ? What training-set of past human-generated sentencing should be used ? If past sentencing was legally or morally flawed, wouldn't the program generalize those flaws to new sentences ? Will convicted felons be able to challenge their sentencing if their is a discrepancy between their sentencing and the software's recommendation ?

Snow in the Galilee

While Cambridge is basking in balmy unseasonable weather, Israel's vineyards in the Galilee have covered themselves in a beautiful white cloak.