One Israeli Creation for the Weekend
Meet ZRRO- the new Israeli Startup about to take over the world, and the next big thing you didn’t even know you need.
ZRRO is a standalone Android-based console that connects to any TV to make it smart. ZRRO comes with an amazing hover and touch controller powered by ZRRO's zTouch™ technology. So, basically, with ZRRO you can “touch” and play ALL 1,000,000 Android games and apps on your TV as if it were a huge tablet. The ZRRO Pad detects the user's hovering finger position up to 1.2 inches above the pad while the pointer on the TV responds by getting smaller on the screen as the user’s fingers approach the touchpad.
Three elements assemble ZRRO:
1. ZRRO Pad – World's first hover & touch controller that mirrors your fingers position to the TV.
2. ZRRO Box – A state of the art Android-based TV console.
3. Your TV – Any TV with an HDMI input.
ZRRO is not just for gamers, the system also enhances regular televisions with functionalities of Smart TVs. ZRRO Box supports streaming and playback on screens with up to 4K resolution. With ZRRO Box, users can watch Netflix, browse the web, and easily use all the available touch-based Android apps.
Waging Today’s Battles
We read in the Mishna about Moshe and the Jewish people’s battle with Amalek, which we will recall this Shabbat, Parsha Zachor, the Shabbat preceding Purim.
“And so it was, when Moshe raised his hand, Israel prevailed…” (Exodus 17:11). Did the hands of Moshe make or break the battle?” (Mishna Rosh Hashanah 3:8)
Could it be that Moshe’s hands had that kind of power to fight a war on behalf of the Jewish people? The question has merit. After all, wasn’t it Moshe’s hand and rod that split the sea and brought so many of the plagues?
However, if it was indeed Moshe’s hands that caused the Jewish people to win, then why did Moshe need help to keep them raised? Would he have not had enough strength knowing the importance of the matter to keep them raised himself? This is Moshe who assembled the Mishkan (tabernacle) all by himself!
So the Mishna begins to answer these questions, “Rather, this comes to tell you that whenever Israel would turn their thoughts above, and subjugate their hearts to God in heaven, they would prevail; and if not, they would fall.”
Moshe’s hands were directional aids they were not secret weapons. The Jewish people would look at Moshe and be inspired and be victorious.
But we return to a similar problem. If Moshe knew that keeping his hands up was going to provide them with the inspiration they needed to succeed in battle, how could he ever let them down? Would he have not had the strength needed to keep them up as long as possible?
The Sfas Emes answers that we have the scenario reversed. When the Jewish people in battle were focusing their hearts for the sake of heaven, and consequently they were victorious, then Moses hands were strengthened, and held high. But when the Jewish people’s hearts were not in the battle – or worse, when they were not convinced that it was God who would bring them victoriously through battle – then Moses didn’t have the strength to keep his hands raised.
In other words, the Jewish people's disposition brings strength to their leaders, which in turns allows their leaders the courage to lead and inspire.
Today we have many battles that we are waging — some of them existential threats and some of them internal spiritual battles — and all of them are rooted in this battle with Amalek.
What are we to do? We must maintain our determination and trust in God that we can be victorious, and not be swayed by indifference, self-doubt or selfishness (all maladies associated with Amalek).
This determination will inspire our leaders to take risks and lead.
May all our enemies – both internal and external – be defeated.
Shabbat Shalom and Happy Purim!
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What San Gabriel’s Padres taught William Mulholland
On a hot August day in 1816, waves of heat shimmered off of the dusty plazas and red tile roofs of the San Gabriel Mission community. The surrounding valley and foothills were brown and dry, and the nearby arroyos hadn’t run with water since March. But the town was a verdant oasis, watered by babbling brooks that ran alongside the vineyards, through the workshops, and into a 40-acre garden. These streams quenched the thirst of more than 1,700 Native American and Spanish inhabitants; of thousands of cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, horses, and mules; and of the fruits and grains that fed them.
But more than that, the water powered Southern California’s first center of industry, including a $20,000-a-year cattle hide and soap export business. So impressive was the mission that one of the first visitors from the United States to this Spanish (and later Mexican) settlement remarked that its value was equal to a mine of silver or gold.
The extensive network of waterways was no product of nature—it was shaped entirely by human hands. And as it was improved, the system provided one of the most important early examples of industrial agriculture in western North America, and contributed directly to the rise of the young city of Los Angeles. It’s a story that reminds those of us gripped by one of California’s worst droughts on record that control over water has shaped our region’s destiny for centuries.
The San Gabriel Mission’s water system developed over a 60-year period through trial and error. The first version of the system, in fact, was an utter failure. Unaccustomed to Southern California’s fickle waterways, missionaries initially placed the mission in the fertile floodplain of the San Gabriel River in 1771. After four difficult years, the padres realized that the river’s annual flooding represented as much a threat as a blessing, and they relocated the small community to high ground. Rather than bringing the mission to water, they decided to bring water to the mission.
Tapping into artesian springs more than two miles to the north, the mission’s native Gabrieleño neophytes (captive laborers) hand-excavated a series of zanjas, or ditches, bringing precious water to the growing mission town. By the second decade of the 19th century, lit by the first rays of the dawning Industrial Revolution, clever, self-taught engineers had expanded the simple trenches into a vast system of rock-lined canals, brick and plaster reservoirs, dams, and water-powered grain and sawmills.
Only the broad outlines of the San Gabriel Mission water system’s scope and function have been preserved in the inventories, letters, and histories that the mission priests and their successors left behind. Few images, and no maps, survive from the mission’s active years, and those that we have fail to capture the details of the system. The story that was passed down has its flaws, however, being heavily biased in favor of the handful of men of European descent who designed and profited from these works. So how do we know what it looked like, and how it worked? The science of archaeology specializes in filling this kind of gap by exposing and interpreting the material remains of past human activity.
On another hot fall day in 2014, a team of archaeologists cleared nearly two centuries of soil away from the stone foundations of the San Gabriel Mission water system. Time had been surprisingly kind to the site. In a historical irony, the construction of a railroad atop the ruins in 1874, while initially destructive, had preserved the heart of the water works just across the street from the iconic mission church.
Another train project made the dig possible. The construction of the Alameda Corridor-East San Gabriel Trench, a project that will lower the Union Pacific Railroad tracks below the intersecting streets, required that the tracks be temporarily shifted to the north. This displacement represented a rare opportunity to examine the long-buried foundations, which underlay the entire railroad right-of-way, directly across the street from the mission church. My team of archaeologists excavated those foundations with machines and by hand to reveal the pattern, associated artifacts, and history of the waterworks’ construction.
Project planners have long known that archaeological materials were present in the area, prompting them to hire my firm of professional archaeologists in advance of construction. We have spent years documenting the physical remains of the mission, including numerous foundations and hundreds of thousands of artifacts and food remains. This latest dig has uncovered four major iterations of the water system, from simple earthen ditches, to cobblestone-lined canals and tanks, to masonry reservoirs connected by segmented ceramic pipes, to the pinnacle of the mission’s hydraulic technology—a massive cement flume that served as the millrace and millpond for a New England-style grain mill dating to 1825. In exposing and documenting these systems, we continue to be impressed by the innovation that marked their evolution, and the increasing sophistication that they gained as they were improved. This improvement was not simply about increases in scale—with each new version of the water system, the designers got better at conserving water. They did this not by reducing their use, but by recycling the water several times before releasing it downstream. The network of canals simultaneously powered mills, flushed tanning vats, watered animals, irrigated crops, and supported cooking, bathing, and washing needs.
We preserved the most intact portion of the 1825 flume two years ago by picking it up and moving it across the street to Plaza Park and installing a self-contained plumbing system. It once again flows with cool water so that visitors can experience the look, feel, and sound of the historic waterway. Our finds in 2014, however, included the largest and least expected element of the system, representing a kind of missing link between the earliest zanjas and the late Mission period millworks.
I have been conducting archaeological research for 20 years, excavating in Arizona, New Jersey, Honduras, British Columbia, Florida, and Peru. But much of my career has focused on the early history of Los Angeles. I have learned how deeply L.A.’s roots are entwined with water issues. After making the 9-mile walk from San Gabriel to their new town site, one of the first acts of Los Angeles’ pobladores (settlers) was to create their own Zanja Madre, a “mother ditch” connecting the Los Angeles River to their houses and fields. More than a century later, a former zanjero (ditch tender) named William Mulholland took the idea pioneered by San Gabriel’s missionaries to its logical end, bringing water from the Sierra Nevada to Los Angeles in a ditch of epic proportions, the Los Angeles Aqueduct.
As Los Angeles looks to the future, the thirst of its growing population remains to be satisfied. In both Los Angeles and her predecessor, San Gabriel, bringing water to the people was only half of the equation. The other half – seeking new ways to conserve the water – was the key innovation upon which this great city was first built, and will be built again.
John Dietler is the lead archeologist for the Alameda Corridor-East Construction Authority and the California cultural and paleontological resources program director at SWCA Environmental Consultants. He is a graduate of UCLA. He wrote this for Thinking L.A., a partnership of UCLA and Zócalo Public Square.
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Consuming Peanuts in Infancy Can Help Prevent Peanut Allergies
Food allergies are commonly misunderstood, so please bear with me while I first explain what food allergies are and are not. Various foods can cause all sorts of unpleasant effects. Most of these are not allergies. Allergies are only reactions caused by a specific antibody (called IgE) that results in hives, trouble breathing, or a life-threatening condition called anaphylaxis. So, if yogurt gives you diarrhea, that’s not an allergy. It might be lactose intolerance. If coffee gives you palpitations, you’re not allergic to coffee; you’re having a side-effect from the caffeine. Ditto chocolate worsening your heartburn; not an allergy.
Of all foods that cause allergic reactions, peanut allergies are the leading cause of anaphylaxis and death, and the prevalence of peanut allergies in the US has grown fivefold in the last 13 years, from 0.4% in 1997 to more than 2% in 2010. This increasing prevalence of a potentially life-threatening allergy has caused some schools to ban peanut products and has caused some airlines to stop offering peanuts in their snacks.
Believing that repeated exposure in infancy of allergy-causing foods leads to allergies, health officials in the UK in 1998 and in the US in 2000 published guidelines recommending the exclusion of foods likely to cause allergies from the diets of infants at high risk of developing allergies. But subsequent studies failed to show that elimination prevented the development of allergies, so the recommendations were withdrawn in 2008. Since then, pediatricians have had no solid evidence on which to base recommendations, until now.
” target=”_blank”>Exposing infants to peanuts causes big reduction in peanut allergy, study shows (The Washington Post)
” target=”_blank”>About-Face on Preventing Peanut Allergies (Wall Street Journal)
” target=”_blank”>Randomized Trial of Peanut Consumption in Infants at Risk for Peanut Allergy (NEJM article)
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Purim: ‘Shake it Off’ with Temple Ahavat Shalom
Temple Ahavat Shalom in Northridge invites you to shake it off … and come to its annual Purim shpiel on March 4 and Purim Carnival on March 8. For more information, go to www.tasnorthridge.org.
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The Jewish Response to a Cheap Dress
Did you see blue-and-black, or were you in the white-and-gold camp? Was your family as polarized as mine?
I can't help it. I am a Jewish doctor. What seems to be a trivial, yet highly popular discussion on social media about the true colors of this $70 dress, keeps me up at night wondering. If there are fifty shades of grey, there are even more hues to this story.
I am fascinated that my daughter and I can look at the same thing and be absolutely convinced that the other is wrong. We are very close genetically, and yet we see differently. We are all aware of color blindness, and yet the discussion over this dress broke the internet. Medicine is filled with examples of genetic varieties that affect how we process sensory input. For example, not everyone suffers from the unpleasant smell of the urine after eating asparagus; your genetic makeup determines whether your urine has the odor and whether you can actually smell it.
How we process information is vital.This orientation affects all of life.
Does God exist or are you an atheist? Is the cup half full or half empty? Are you a Republican or a Democrat? There may be genetic basis for how we experience life and form beliefs.
This week, we read the story of Esther, the sexy Persian queen who becomes the savior of the Jews, by transforming from a caterpillar into a butterfly when she puts on a special robe. Through concealment of her true self, she uncovers a heroine. The cloth transforms us. Our clothes influence how people see us, and how we see ourselves. A black suit sends out an entirely different message than a red miniskirt- specially when the accompanying stilettos have a red bottom.
We need to respect each other's opinions, point of views and diversity. We are marvelous creatures and to remain narrow is to put on blindfolds. A prism takes natural light and breaks it up into the colors of the rainbow. Each of us has a function and a way of seeing the truth which leads to a world whose whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Only God knows what's in our hearts beneath the Tallit- the prayer-shawls which are commanded to be marked unequivocally with blue-and-white stripes.
The proper Jewish response to this cheap dress puzzle is to see past what meets the eye and find the hidden fabrics of our lives.
#TheDress
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