About the Owner and Editor of This Web Site

Photo
Resume

Nathaniel Segal is Jewish and was born in Chicago, Illinois, on the 13th of MarCheshvan * 5712 (1951).  He is called up to the Torah by the name Nesanel ben Yitzchak HaLevi.

Having grown up in Northfield Township, a suburb of Chicago in Cook County, he graduated from the Township High School (1969) near the top of his class.  After studying Urban Planning for two years at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, he started to study Geography during his junior year at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel.  He left the university to pursue intense Jewish studies at the Lubavitch * Yeshivah * (seminary), Ohr Tmimim * in Kfar Chabad,* Israel.

Nathaniel Segal is still enrolled part-time as an undergraduate student at the University of Missouri - Kansas City to finish the requirements for a Bachelor of Liberal Arts degree (no major area of study).  However, he hasn't taken any courses since 2011.  He then found part-time work through 2016.

Mr. Segal has worked for a number of businesses as a computer programmer/analyst in business applications on IBM AS/400 machines.  Working with HTML has been a hobby — but Nathaniel is now developing the code for this Web Site on his own, using SeaMonkey * first to rough in the structure of pages.

Nathaniel lived in the West Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago.  His son graduated from the two-year high school program of Lubavitch Mesivta * of Chicago, then graduated from the pre-rabbinical program (high school level) of Yeshivah Gedolah * of Miami Beach (Florida).  His son has now received ordination (s'micha *) from Kollel Tiferes Menachem – West Coast Rabbinical Seminary sponsored by Chabad West Coast of Los Angeles, California.

Mr. Segal's son is married and is himself the father of three sons and a daughter.  The first son — and Nathaniel's first grandchild — was born in April 2007.  The second boy was born in October 2008.  Granddaughter Shterna Sorah was born in January 2010.

Grandson Shimon Dovber Hirsch was born on Lag BaOmer 2016.

Nathaniel's son has worked in several fields and has settled into supporting his young family while his wife works full-time as a mother and homemaker.

After Nathaniel's mother passed away in April 1999, he moved into his family's original home in Northfield Township, Illinois, which his parents had bought directly from the developer of the subdivision in late 1954.  Nathaniel's father and sisters agreed to sell the house in August 2004.  After moving nearby, but actually in neighboring Lake County, Illinois, Nathaniel lived for ten years in Shawnee Mission, Kansas, near his son's family.  Since March 2019, Nathaniel has lived in Phoenix, Arizona.

Mr. Segal's mother had been a Registered Dietician.  His father was a CPA, a partner in his own firm in Chicago.  He passed away in March 2006 in an assisted living facility in Scottsdale, Arizona, where he had retired after losing his wife in 1999.  Having been a veteran of World War II, he passed away at the age of eighty-seven.  Nathaniel's father had participated in the D-Day Invasion and then spent nine months as a German prisoner-of-war after the Battle of the Bulge.

Nathaniel Segal is completing a monograph on Jewish chronology from the end of the Jewish exile in Babylonia through Alexander's military descent into and conquest of the Biblical Persian (Achaemenid *) Empire.  Persian ascendancy was roughly fifty years – only one long generation of memory – rather than the conventional two hundred some years – roughly four or five generations of social memory.

See the link for Ancient Persian (Achaemenid) History on Nathaniel's Web Site.  You will find his thesis that the Greek chronicler Thucydides lived before Herodotus the historian.  Accordingly, the Peloponnesian War — during which Thucydides lived and wrote his chronicle — preceded Herodotus' Histories and the founding of the Achaemenid Empire.  This is a revelation to students of ancient Greek history and literature.  Herodotus is supposed to have flourished and died some time before Thucydides lived and before the Peloponnesian War was fought.  "Not only have academics refused to examine the conventional time line, but I doubt that they would be open to a presentation of this radical revision of both Greek history and the writing sequence of ancient Greek literature."

We could still call Herodotus the "father of history."  Thucydides, who lived before him rather than after him (according to Nathaniel's thesis), was the "father of journaling and journalism" according to this thesis.

Nathaniel is also interested in horticulture and ecology.  He had pursued continuing education in the Naturalist Certificate program of the Morton Arboretum in association with the Chicago Botanic Garden and the Field Museum of Natural History — all located in the Chicago area.

While living in northeastern Illinois, Nathaniel was helping beautify the landscaping of an edge of a small park that belongs to a local Park District.  He was also helping to restore this park's woodland into a diversified, self-sustaining tract of Northeastern Illinois Savanna/Woodland.

Pronunciation / Notes / Comments:

MarCheshvan - mahr KHESH vahn; the eighth month of the Jewish calendar; begins in late September or early October; usually begins on the first new moon after the autumnal equinox; also called Cheshvan.

Lubavitch - loo BAH vitch

Yeshivah - yeh SHIV uh

Tmimim - tih MEE meem

Kfar Chabad - ka FAHR khah BAHD

Mashpiya - mahsh PEE uh

Hadar Hatorah - hah DAHR hah TOH ruh

Agudas Chassidei - ah GOO dahs khah SEE day [Union of Hassidim]

SeaMonkey - SeaMonkey is a freeware Internet browser and a WYSIWYG composer of HTML that the Mozilla Foundation – www.mozilla.org – has developed.  Firefox is Mozilla's stand-alone browser and is related to SeaMonkey.

I do not recommend using SeaMonkey to compose web pages unless the user is proficient in HTML.  After I have roughed in the text and structure of a web page and its text using SeaMonkey, I "clean up" and tweak the HTML code directly by using an ordinary text editor such as Microsoft ® Notepad.  A consideration in cleaning up is that SeaMonkey generates HTML 4.01, although the browser accurately interprets all HTML that is being used as I write this, August 2013.  SeaMonkey (version 2.23) is improved over previous releases — it produces cleaner HTML than earlier releases did, but it uses tags that are being deprecated for HTML 5.  Regardless, SeaMonkey does not help at all with developing style sheets, even inline style statements.  Furthermore, composer pages do not show JavaScript ^TM document objects.

(I am not happy that that HTML tags are being deprecated.  Some tags keep HTML simple.  What's wrong with simple?  "If it isn't broke, don't fix it."  KISS — "Keep it simple, stupid."  The designers of HTML 5 seem to believe dogmatically that syntax [text] and presentational style are separate with no middle ground.  For example, they ignore the long-established conventions that the names of books and ships are italicized in standard written English.  I call this a "syntactical style," a middle ground.

(HTML 5 seems to be moving away from being a hyper-text markup language to becoming a hyper-presentational markup language.  What do businesses seem to want?  To present non-verbal experiences.  What do academics, for example, want?  To display and easily disseminate text [also with a full panoply of multimedia], which has been the mainstay of conveying information.  Let us users choose whether and when we want to use web pages to convey information and whether and when we want web pages to be non-verbal experiences.)

Mesivta - mih SIV tuh

Yeshivah Gedolah - yeh SHIV uh guh DOHL luh

S'micha - sih MEE khuh

Achaemenid - uh KEEM uh nid  /  uh KEM uh nid  /  uh ky MEN id