Of Haddads and hurricanes

Today's headlines: the east coast of the US is ravaged by a strong hurricane... and the residents of Sao Paolo have elected a storm god as their mayor. Evidently anxious to avoid the same thing happening to them.

Level of knowledge of Jewish history

Part of the reason I've been reading Josephus, and the historical bits of the Bible, is because it's struck me that for most Jews today, our knowledge of our own ancient history is rather poor. If it's in the Torah, or a haftarah we read, or a megillah with historical content, we're likely to know it; outside of that, our knowledge drops off rapidly. There's a whole load of Judges in the book of that name most of us have never even heard of (including me a year ago); our knowledge of the First Temple period springs between the most important kings, missing out centuries and multiple generations in between, and the period between the end of the Bible and the Hasmonean revolt is just one huge gap.

Or so I thought.

So I set to find out, plotting level of knowledge of events in Jewish history in a completely subjective fashion against time, and came up with the following, which, I must say, gave me a few surprises:

That was how I originally drew it, but then I thought no one's going to tilt their head over on the side to read all those labels, so here's a larger version rotated ninety degrees for easier viewing:

( View graph )

(It may seem as if history here ends in 1666, but actually it ended at bedtime.) There's probably data points I've missed out there, and some I've put on which I think are important, but which are not so well known (in particular non-European/Middle-Eastern history); as I said, this is subjective.

What do you think; do you agree with my assessment? And does this graph leave you with the burning (or even just slightly smouldering) desire to go away and learn more about anything I've mentioned?

*mutter*grumble* LiveJournal

I just posted to LiveJournal. It told me the server had a message for me:

Your password cannot contain symbols such as @,_, (),etc. Your password is too easy to guess. It's recommended that you change it, otherwise you risk having your journal hijacked. Please see http://www.livejournal.com/support/faqbrowse.bml?faqid=71 for LiveJournal.com's password rules, and visit http://www.livejournal.com/changepassword.bml to change your password.

This is a load of utter horseradish. Firstly, the presence of non-alphabetical symbols makes my password more difficult to figure out, not easier. Indeed, the linked password rules say:

Your LiveJournal password must meet the following requirements:
[...]

• At least 1 number or symbol.
• At least 1 character that is not a number.

So, LiveJournal get your <quack>ing act together and inform your right hand what your left hand is doing.

Also, the hell you say my password is easy to guess. It's not based on an English dictionary word or a name, a date, email address or anything similar. I reckon you're talking out of your server's posterior here.

And whilst you're at it, I have no objection to you introducing the new friends page format, but I damn well hope you're not going to disable the old one.