Applying technology to the Sabbath
The Sun is reporting that a Jewish couple are suing their landlord for not turning off a sensor-operated light during the Sabbath because it represents “work” or something. I always found the strange adaptations of millenia-old rules to be an amusing thing. I know of someone who claims to have made quite a bit of cash as a child from very orthodox Jews who would pay him - a Catholic - to turn their lights on and off.
But I reckon technology may be able to play a role here. I mean, if we want to make it so that they can go down the corridor without the light switching on, then what we need to do is to suppress their body heat so that it wouldn’t trigger the infra-red sensor which turns the light on. I did a bit of Googling for infra-red suppressants, and found that the marijuana growing community has a solution called Block IR. It’s a material that the manufacturers claim will reduce infra-red transmission by 97%. This might be just the thing for the Colemans: they could purchase some Block IR material and fashion it into an full-body suit. Then when they wish to use the corridor during Sabbath, they simply don the infra-red blocking suits. I have also heard that one can block infra-red sensors by cooling: if they could rig up long ‘arm’ device that could blast compressed air at the sensor for long enough for them to travel down the corridor.
Now, if you think this kind of techno-fix is a silly one, consider this story about observing the Sabbath in space or this story about a researcher who comes up with Sabbath technology. Dan Marans of the Zomet Institute spends his life coming up with strange gadgets to help orthodox Jews observe the Sabbath in a world that is conspiring to make age-old religious ritual rather redundant and out-of-place, and Rabbi Shmuel Veffer runs a company in Toronto, Canada, called Kosher Innovations which has produced lamps that can be used during Sabbath. You think I’m kidding? I so am not.
Personally, I think engineering time could be better spent. Us non-theists have no such strange use cases for our technology. I can’t get myself into the psyche of someone who cannot turn electrical devices on because of a judgment from God. That’s not to say that a secular Sabbath, where one cuts, for a small amount of time, the ties of e-mail, Twitter, Facebook, Blackberries and so on and does something a bit less ADHD like read a book.
