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List of Special Elevator Modes

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Re: List of Special Elevator Modes

#81

Post by ars »

disruptthelaw wrote: post #51
hawk_ wrote: post #6

my personal favorite is the Sabbath mode https://elevation.fandom.com/wiki/Sabbath_service_(SHO) not to pick on a specific belief system, but it's quite interesting the lengths people go to follow the letter but not the spirit of things.

I took my gap year in israel with a religious Jewish friends. We were slight stoners back then and on sabbath in order for him to get high I’d have to light a bong in a cupboard and fill the cupboard with smoke and then swap places with him. This was multiple times per sabbath every sabbath. I also had to constantly open the fridge for him because of the automatic light. I found these rituals ridiculous (20 years lat…

He should not have done that. In general a Jew is not permitted to ask a non-Jew to do things that are forbidden to him.

Some exceptions are things necessary for normal life, that would be impossible to do in advance. A classic example is lighting a fire for heating (back when that was done with a pile of wood), and minor medical needs. (Major medical needs the Jew would violate the Shabbath and do himself.)

Getting high is not a necessity, and the fridge switch could have been taped before the Shabbath.

Re: List of Special Elevator Modes

#82

Post by hawk_ »

michaelhoffman wrote: post #18
hawk_ wrote: post #6

my personal favorite is the Sabbath mode https://elevation.fandom.com/wiki/Sabbath_service_(SHO) not to pick on a specific belief system, but it's quite interesting the lengths people go to follow the letter but not the spirit of things.

The prohibition is on doing work generally, with a specific prohibition on kindling a fire, which was quite a lot of work millennia ago. Does using a device that allows you to avoid walking up many flights of stairs really violate the spirit of a law prohibiting work on the sabbath?

if the idea is to not work then pressing a button isn't going to change anything. if the elevator is being taken to do some work, again pressing the button has nothing to do with it.

Re: List of Special Elevator Modes

#83

Post by ars »

michaelhoffman wrote: post #18
hawk_ wrote: post #6

my personal favorite is the Sabbath mode https://elevation.fandom.com/wiki/Sabbath_service_(SHO) not to pick on a specific belief system, but it's quite interesting the lengths people go to follow the letter but not the spirit of things.

The prohibition is on doing work generally, with a specific prohibition on kindling a fire, which was quite a lot of work millennia ago. Does using a device that allows you to avoid walking up many flights of stairs really violate the spirit of a law prohibiting work on the sabbath?

"Work" is a bad translation. A better translation would be "creative activity". Fire is a problem not because it's work to light, but because you are creating heat from wood.

Re: List of Special Elevator Modes

#84

Post by ars »

dmurray wrote: post #33
jackbeck wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are sects (like the ultra orthodox) who don't use Sabbath mode specifically for this reason. They say that the added weight causes the elevator's motor to work harder thereby desecrating the Sabbath.

Are they allowed to go down? Also, depending on the counterweight and the current load of the elevator, adding an extra person to it might tax the motor less even when ascending.

Generating electricity is equally forbidden.

The prohibition is not work, but rather creation. In this case creating electrical energy.

Re: List of Special Elevator Modes

#85

Post by golemiprague »

derefr wrote: post #75
chadash wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Orthodox Judaism, the letter of the law typically is the spirit of the law. Not a perfect analogy, but think of the talmud as similar to the tax code. There are things that are black, things that are white and things that are gray. If the tax code said there's a 5% sales tax on tangerines, clementines, navel oranges, lemons, and grapefruit, I'm probably not gonna volunteer to pay taxes on my Sumo Citruses, because…

> this stems from the notion that the Jewish legal rules are of divine origin, and so if something was excluded, then its absence is intentional I would like to understand the reasoning behind the belief that even legal rules of divine origin would include mention of things human culture would have had no concept of, and human language no word for, in the time the rule was made — such that the rules would be "complet…

In Jewish monotheism god is beyond time and space, probably because the concept of God tries to encompass the infinity of the universe in time and space and the lack of understanding of those things, us being humans.

Therefore when we ascribe some will to god, specifically the will for humans to follow all those rules, we believe that this god "exists" in every time and every space, past present or future.

That's why also the "spirit" of the rules doesn't matter, we don't try to understand god, all we can is to try to understand things which are in the realm of science. Spirit of the rules is something that might exist in a human moral system, not something we believe that came from a transcended entity beyond our understanding.

Re: List of Special Elevator Modes

#86

Post by svat »

Donald Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming has, in its first volume, a lengthy section on simulating an elevator. It is a single regular elevator (nothing "special" going on as in the post here), but even so, as he tries to make things precise, you realize how much detail is involved, and get some appreciation for the task of programming.

It occupies about 15 pages (plus several pages of exercises and solutions). Knuth started working on TAOCP when he was a PhD student at Caltech:

> The program developed below simulates the elevator system in the Mathematics building of the California Institute of Technology. The results of such a simulation will perhaps be of use only to people who make reasonably frequent visits to Caltech; and even for them, it may be simpler just to try using the elevator several times instead of writing a computer program. […]

> The algorithm we will now study may not reflect the elevator’s true principles of operation, but it is believed to be the simplest set of rules that explain all the phenomena observed during several hours of experimentation by the author during the writing of this section. […]

> The elevator system described above is quite complicated by comparison with other algorithms we have seen in this book, but the choice of a real-life system is more typical of a simulation problem than any cooked-up “textbook example” would ever be.

It ends with:

> It is hoped that some reader will learn as much about simulation from the example above as the author learned about elevators while the example was being prepared.

And one of the exercises adds:

> It is perhaps significant to note that although the author had used the elevator system for years and thought he knew it well, it wasn’t until he attempted to write this section that he realized there were quite a few facts about the elevator’s system of choosing directions that he did not know. He went back to experiment with the elevator six separate times, each time believing he had finally achieved a complete understanding of its modus operandi. (Now he is reluctant to ride it for fear that some new facet of its operation will appear, contradicting the algorithms given.) We often fail to realize how little we know about a thing until we attempt to simulate it on a computer.

Re: List of Special Elevator Modes

#87

Post by asciimov »

chadash wrote: post #69
asciimov wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So my Jewish friends could technically eat a cheese burger, as long as the cheese was placed on the burger after cooking? Would they have to wait till the burger cools down so that it doesn't melt the cheese? (Here I am concerned about carryover heating/cooking being considered cooking by law.) I am endlessly fascinated by religious laws and their implications/consequences.

> So my Jewish friends could technically eat a cheese burger, as long as the cheese was placed on the burger after cooking? No they can't, but this would be a violation of a rabbinical law (the rabbis forbade eating them together as a safeguard), which is less serious than a biblical law violation. > Would they have to wait till the burger cools down so that it doesn't melt the cheese? (Here I am concerned about carr…

Thanks for your answer. It sounds like most things involving religion, complicated.

Re: List of Special Elevator Modes

#88

Post by 908B64B197 »

hawk_ wrote: post #6

my personal favorite is the Sabbath mode https://elevation.fandom.com/wiki/Sabbath_service_(SHO) not to pick on a specific belief system, but it's quite interesting the lengths people go to follow the letter but not the spirit of things.

You'll enjoy this then (when Richard Feynman encountered something similar):

https://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/ev3gy/excerpt_from...

Re: List of Special Elevator Modes

#89

Post by jdmichal »

rossdavidh wrote: post #27
jdmichal wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember seeing an elevator once that lit up both the up and down arrows when arriving if it didn't have a set destination yet. I called it Schroedinger's elevator -- neither going up or down until observed to move.

Were you alive or dead when you noticed this?

I was on vacation. So more alive than typical, but dead to those who usually see me around.

Re: List of Special Elevator Modes

#90

Post by el_nahual »

hawk_ wrote: post #6

my personal favorite is the Sabbath mode https://elevation.fandom.com/wiki/Sabbath_service_(SHO) not to pick on a specific belief system, but it's quite interesting the lengths people go to follow the letter but not the spirit of things.

There are a few sibling comments explain this by saying that, since the law is divine, so are the loopholes. That doesn't tell the whole story.

A big chunk of judaism has always centered about cultural preservation. In a way, the careful crafting of ridiculous loopholes is a stronger indicator about caring that the law exists --ie, presereving the culture-- than blindly following it. And so it's allowed and celebrated.

("What happens when a culture that is built on the notion of being an opressed people finds itself in a position of dominance" is an interesting question and left as an exercise to the reader.)

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