THE JEWISH DIETARY LAWS AND THEIR FOUNDATION

While food and drug law has made its greatest contributions to the health and welfare of society over the past two centuries, it is indisputable that the history of this body of law is much older than two hundred years.1 Soon after man realized he needed to eat, he recognized a need to establish rules and regulations governing the sale, preparation and handling of food. Perhaps the oldest documented set of food laws are the Jewish dietary laws, also known by the Hebrew term, kashrut, from which the word "kosher" is derived. Unlike most laws related to food, which are enacted by society through government or other rule-making bodies, Jewish dietary laws are believed to be conceptualizations of divine will that were expressed to Moses at Mount Sinai and transcribed in the Old Testament.2 Intellectual curiosity and an interest in the evolution of food and drug law compel both Jews and Gentiles to study the Jewish dietary laws. For observant Jews, however, Jewish dietary laws possess unique significance. Kashrut is one of the pillars of Jewish religious life and virtually every aspect of eating and preparing food implicates some Jewish dietary law. While the First Amendment prevents any governmental enforcement of religious law, for those who are strict practitioners of the Jewish religion, the observance of Jewish dietary laws is every bit as important and compelling as is the observance of secular law. Despite the important role Jewish dietary laws play in the lives of many, few give much thought to the foundations of and rationales for kashruz. After describing the Jewish dietary laws and their origin, this paper will present and analyze some Judaic and secular scholarly attempts at explaining the underpinnings of these laws. The Pentateuch does not explicitly explain the reasons for the laws, which has made this issue a popular topic for debate among Biblical scholars. While the arguments these scholars make for their positions are logical and often convincing, it is important to remember that an accepted principle of jurisprudence and legal philosophy is that "unless a code of law itself states the underlying idea of a law, any theory about that idea remains conjecture

Revisiting Mary Massey’s Bonnet Brigades

Accepted manuscrip

Reflections on Charlottesville

Historical context surrounding the confrontation in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August, 2017, regarding confederate monuments.Accepted manuscrip

Broken symmetries and pattern formation in two-frequency forced Faraday waves

We exploit the presence of approximate (broken) symmetries to obtain general scaling laws governing the process of pattern formation in weakly damped Faraday waves. Specifically, we consider a two-frequency forcing function and trace the effects of time translation, time reversal and Hamiltonian structure for three illustrative examples: hexagons, two-mode superlattices, and two-mode rhomboids. By means of explicit parameter symmetries, we show how the size of various three-wave resonant interactions depends on the frequency ratio m:n and on the relative temporal phase of the two driving terms. These symmetry-based predictions are verified for numerically calculated coefficients, and help explain the results of recent experiments.Comment: 4 pages, 6 figure

Study protocol: Delayed intervention randomised controlled trial within the Medical Research Council (MRC) Framework to assess the effectiveness of a new palliative care service

Background: Palliative care has been proposed to help meet the needs of patients who suffer progressive non-cancer conditions but there have been few evaluations of service development initiatives. We report here a novel protocol for the evaluation of a new palliative care service in this context. Methods/Design: Using the MRC Framework for the Evaluation of Complex Interventions we modelled a new palliative care and neurology service for patients severely affected by Multiple Sclerosis (MS). We conducted qualitative interviews with patients, families and staff, plus a literature review to model and pilot the service. Then we designed a delayed intervention randomised controlled trial to test its effectiveness as part of phase II of the MRC framework. Inclusion criteria for the trial were patients identified by referring clinicians as having unresolved symptoms or psychological concerns. Referrers were advised to use a score of greater than 8 on the Expanded Disability Scale was a benchmark. Consenting patients newly referred to the new service were randomised to either receive the palliative care service immediately (fast-track) or after a 12-week wait (standard best practice). Face to face interviews were conducted at baseline (before intervention), and at 4–6, 10–12 (before intervention for the standard-practice group), 16– 18 and 22–24 weeks with patients and their carers using standard questionnaires to assess symptoms, palliative care outcomes, function, service use and open comments. Ethics committee approval was granted separately for the qualitative phase and then for the trial. Discussion: We publish the protocol trial here, to allow methods to be reviewed in advance of publication of the results. The MRC Framework for the Evaluation of Complex Interventions was helpful in both the design of the service, methods for evaluation in convincing staff and the ethics committee to accept the trial. The research will provide valuable information on the effects of palliative care among non-cancer patients and a method to evaluate palliative care in this context

Quantum-degenerate mixture of fermionic lithium and bosonic rubidium gases

We report on the observation of sympathetic cooling of a cloud of fermionic 6-Li atoms which are thermally coupled to evaporatively cooled bosonic 87-Rb. Using this technique we obtain a mixture of quantum-degenerate gases, where the Rb cloud is colder than the critical temperature for Bose-Einstein condensation and the Li cloud colder than the Fermi temperature. From measurements of the thermalization velocity we estimate the interspecies s-wave triplet scattering length |a_s|=20_{-6}^{+9} a_B. We found that the presence of residual rubidium atoms in the |2,1> and the |1,-1> Zeeman substates gives rise to important losses due to inelastic collisions.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure