I'm here in Providence at Eric and Kate's, preparing to whip up a technology project for the New Year's Eve party.
I wish there were a lawful way to transport model rocket igniters by air, especially in carry-on baggage on airplanes. The TSA forbids model rocket igniters while permitting the equally flammable matches. A model rocket igniter is essentially a match that uses an externally-supplied electric current instead of friction to provide the heat for ignition. If only smokers used them to light cigarettes, they would certainly be allowed on aircraft.
One rare pleasure of visiting Eric and Kate is getting to drink Moxie again. "It's the drink that they serve that will build up your nerve."
I got my highest-ever-scoring Scrabble play this evening, or at least as far as I can recall. I played ALBEDOS on a triple word score, and the S turned the pre-existing word QUAD into SQUAD. Including the 50-point bonus, I scored 104 points. (The albedo of an object like a planet is the proportion of the light falling on it that it reflects; the planets in our solar system have a variety of different albedos.)
While thinking about new year's resolutions, I came across this passage:
Do not say that repentance is not necessary except for serious transgressions such as illicit sexual relations, robbery and theft.
Just as a person must repent of acts such as these, he is required to examine his bad traits and turn away from such negative characteristics as anger, hostility, jealousy, the tendency to ridicule, pursuit of material possessions and honor, and gluttony. A person must repent of each of these. These offenses are more difficult to deal with than the other ones because such traits affect our actions at all times, and it is difficult for a person to refrain from such habitual behavior.
Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Laws of Repentance, 7.3
(Thanks to USCJ. There are lots of other translations of this floating around that give slightly different senses to what Maimonides was trying to convey. And whatever he meant to convey, I don't mean to say that the concept of repentance that Maimonides had in mind when he wrote this -- I suspect he called it teshuva, though I don't happen to have the Mishneh Torah around in Hebrew -- is easily accessible to me in translation at such a great distance.)
