Explosive events

Over the weekend, a pair of explosives went off near the endpoint of the Boston Marathon.

Also this week, a large explosion happened at a fertilizer factory in Texas. This blast had more fatalities, and apparently a larger blast radius.

(Educational note: ammonium-nitrate compounds, in truck-sized quantities, pack a big punch. Much bigger than portable quantities of black powder. But I think that's old news...)

Attacks like those in Boston are rare in the U.S. So are industrial accidents involving large amounts of explosives.

Yet they are just common enough to remind me that death and harm can come unexpectedly, and in many forms. I pray that these events don't become more common.

And old book, revisited

A couple of decades ago, I read a novel about the news business.


This novel had a TV News anchor as a central character. It includes lots of vignettes about life inside a TV News room, interactions between politicians and reporters, and the interactions between political power-brokers and low-level criminals.*

In an early scene, the anchorman sees his father preaching against abortion at a political rally. The Governor is conspicuously pro-abortion. Somehow, the event turns from a disturbance into a fight. And the TV News anchor has to watch his own father apprehended and escorted away by police while he reports the event...

Feel kind of sheepish

I had a great post planned for Easter Sunday, and I lost track of it.

Easter is a surprise ending; the kind of surprise ending that shocks and amazes. Yet it has become such a part of our culture that the surprise has died out. (This author at PJ Media does a better job than I in discussing Easter.)

I spent most of the weekend traveling (which might account for lack of sunrise-Easter blogging). One pair of grand-parents live separately, due to the stress of dealing with Grandfather's deteriorating mind. It is sad to see in action.

It is also encouraging to realize that the stories I now hear about his life are ones that he would never tell about himself. He was a minister, but tried not to bring much attention to how his ministry affected others.

Partly because of the things that other ministers of Christ's Gospel have taught to me, and partly in memory of the hope and consolation that one old minister has brought to many others...

Happy Easter.

Crime and Punishment.

It is the most-remembered execution in history. And the date that it happened isn't well known.

Except that it coincided with Passover; the religious holiday of the Jewish people.

The victim was a rabbi. He was at odds with the Sanhedrin, the religious council that governed worship in the Temple. He attracted many crowds of people. Stories of miracles followed in his wake. His teachings caused a great stir.

Were the religious leaders afraid of his popularity and his strange teaching?

Or were they afraid that he would try to turn his popularity into a popular revolt against the Roman imperial power?

Whatever the explanation, an innocent man was railroaded into a death sentence.

Strangely, the man seemed to intend to meet this end.

Even more strangely, His closest followers claimed that their lives were forever altered by what happened three days later...

Math puzzle

Eugene Volokh at the Volokh Conspiracy posts something very non-legal.

It's a challenging math question. I wish I could say that I had figured out the answer already, but I haven't. And, having seen the answer, I'm not sure I can try it without pushing my attempt towards the already-known result.

The problem is still very interesting, though it is deep in the realm of math-problems-without-an-obvious-real-world-use.

Douglas Adams (a few days late)

This past Monday marked a point when a certain insignificant planet had circled its primary star some 61 times since the date on which a particular novelist had been born.

Douglas Adams sense of humor was uniquely zany and pointed. Amusingly, I found this quote of his to be on-point for a discussion at my job a month back.

A loud clatter of gunk music flooded through the Heart of Gold cabin as Zaphod searched the sub-etha radio wave bands for news of himself. The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive--you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure, of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same program.
Zaphod waved a hand and the channel switched again.

So, when the manager was talking about the gesture-controlled radio system (for automobiles) that he had seen at the Consumer Electronics Showcase, I asked if they would require the user to sit perfectly still...

Approximate Pi Day

I'm not sure how to get an exact version of Pi Day, but 3.14 is pretty close.*

I think this approach is pretty good. Though maybe I'll find a way to bake a pie today, also.

*For people who use Month.Day notation for expressing dates. At least it's a shortened form of an official pattern. But I notice that the official pattern uses a "-" separator, not a "." separator...