Improvised Procrastination

You know, it's amazing how much time you can while away watching Whose Line Is It Anyway? videos on YouTube.

Pieces of the Puzzle

So, were you and I waiting by the screen to see when we would finally know whether or not the number 33 could be expressed as the sum of three cubes?

Of course you weren't -- you, O Tolerant Reader, have a life and I have an inability to math very well. Nor, I imagine, did we know that there was a search on for that number. In any event, the solution to k = x³+ y³+ z³ when k = 33 has been found: (8,866,128,975,287,528)³ + (–8,778,405,442,862,239)³ + (–2,736,111,468,807,040)³ = 33.

For some numbers, the equation solves simply. You can write 29 as 3³ + 1³ + 1³. For others, there is no solution. Any number that has either 4 or 5 as a remainder when you divide it by 9 can't be written as the sum of three cubes. So while 33 has this newly-found solution, 32 will never have one. Divide 32 by 9 and you get 27, with 5 left over.

Andrew Booker of the University of Bristol wrote the algorithm which found the number. He figured the supercomputer running it would take six months to solve the problem, but it actually took only three weeks. There only two numbers between 1 and 100 that had never been solved were 33 and 42, and now only 42 remains. Booker will train his algorithm on that next, although the search will involve even larger numbers than the quadrillions that solved for 33.

One reason to find the answers to these so-called "stubborn numbers" is because mathematicians don't really like having unsolved equations laying around. Another is that finding solutions like this can play a role in some future attempts to find proofs for k = x³+ y³+ z³, or proofs that use it.

Left as yet undiscussed is the possibility that solving this polynomial for 42 might just be the way to find three cubes that add up to everything.

Time Begins...And Never Stands Still

Thomas Boswell's great book on baseball offers his understandings of Why Time Begins on Opening Day, suggesting that for the baseball fan life and the world really are a little different thanks to their appreciation of the game and some of its unique features. The lack of a clock, the length of a season, the reality that the best hitters who ever lived miss more times than they hit...all of these have a special resonance for the game's fans.

But time never stands still, either, and today's Opening Day games, featuring all 30 Major League Baseball teams, have not a single player who was active in the majors during the 20th century. Adrian Beltre and Bartolo Colon were the last from that time. Ichiro Suzuki's 20th century time was spent playing in Japan's major leagues.

Anyway, "Play ball!"

Misdirection

Alas, in today's reprint, Calvin falls for the age-old fallacy that furious effort spent in trying to cobble together something at the deadline is the same as careful planning and directed work.

Unsqueezing

And then there was that weird day when a legislative body passed a sensible law.

The Texas State House of Representatives passed a measure onto the state Senate that would allow youngsters to have lemonade stands without fearing that law enforcement would shut them down. Two state representatives actually voted against the measure -- but as one explained in the House Journal, he had meant to vote yes. Two were absent, but one of that pair explained that had she been present, she would have voted yes. The other hasn't said anything yet but probably should pretty quickly.

That leaves exactly one legislator who voted no, and as her statement reads in the journal,

I support children selling lemonade and the spirit with which the law was written. However, I do not support removing local control and denying public health authorities the ability to protect our communities by ensuring health and safety standards are met.

She represents part of suburban Dallas and is in her first term -- and whoever may decide to run against her in 2020 has just been handed the campaign commercial of a lifetime.

Twenty Years

Although there had been shootings at schools before -- perhaps the most publicized was a 1979 San Diego attack Bob Geldof wrote about in "I Don't Like Mondays" -- April of 1999 saw what we have come to think of as the pattern by which such shootings are known today. On April 20 of that year, two seniors walked into Columbine High School and murdered 12 classmates and a teacher before turning their guns on themselves.

Columbine grabbed the national imagination like earlier shootings had not. Perhaps because it was one of the first and certainly one of the worst to happen in the era of the 24-hour news channel. Speculation and opinion that might have been limited to a neighborhood barstool rant or smeared-ink mimeograph newsletters found empty hours ready to be filled. Body-blows to the national psyche such as Waco and Oklahoma City helped ramp up the temperature of national discourse. President Bill Clinton's affair with an intern, followed by his partisan impeachment and equally partisan acquittal, didn't exactly reduce the volume.

Two years after the shooting, Christianity Today editor and writer Wendy Murray Zoba (now just Wendy Murray) published Day of Reckoning, a book which tried to examine the shooting, its immediate aftermath and the following year from a religious perspective. Zoba interviewed some students, parents and people in the town of Columbine and tried to fit together the puzzle of why and how two young men could generate so much hate for their fellow students that they wanted to kill as many of them as they could.

Like many secular examinations of the shooting, Zoba considers the rise of violent entertainment in society and relative ease with which the two acquired guns. Given some access to some of the shooters' online journals and such, she sees how some of the original narrative -- two friends bullied so far they snapped -- started to fray. As more of the journals and videos the pair made came to light, some experts suggested one was probably a sociopath and the other depressive and apathetic.

Zoba unpacks some of the narratives that were important to the shooting at the time, such as whether or not student Cassie Bernall was indeed the one asked about her belief in God before being shot. Another chapter dealt with a man from another state who felt moved to bring crosses to the school site to memorialize the dead students and teacher. Initially he had 15, which included the two shooters. But one victim's father consistently tore down any display that included 15 of any kind of memorial, even at one church of which he wasn't a member.

Day of Reckoning adds a little to the Columbine conversation, asking questions about whether or not the perfect surfaces of the affluent suburb had an emptiness of spirit that contributed to the poison in the hearts of the shooters. Murray conducted most of her interviews only about a year after the shooting, when there were still lawsuits and questions thick in the air. Several of the people she talks to are guarded about what they say because of it, and many might still have been weathering their own storms.

Perhaps because of a sensitivity to the still-grieving community, perhaps because Murray felt unwilling to push too far the people who spoke with her, Reckoning doesn't feel as cohesive today as it did in its time. Murray's a competent writer but does much better in the shorter magazine format -- given room to say more she doesn't do as well in holding focus as she does with smaller word counts. Still, reading it offers some powerful contrasts with today.

For one, everything was so much slower in 1999. Today folks offer opinions about such an event while the ambulances are still en route to the ER -- and given that most of these opinions are on Twitter they're neither educated, informed or worth the time. But even the pushiest indictment of "gun culture," Michael Moore's carefully assembled package of half-truth Bowling for Columbine, didn't come out until 2002.

Other things have changed as well. When the Broward County Sheriff's Office was criticized for its poor response to the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, the standard which its officers failed to meet was one that was put in place after Columbine -- enter, seek out and engage the shooter, reduce civilian casualties as much as possible. Some remained the same; Murray outlines just how many missteps Colorado law enforcement officials made during the post-shooting investigation in dealing with the media and release of information. No one was as self-aggrandizing as suspended Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel, but several people revealed they'd been promoted past their competence level. Then, as now, school officials struggled with how religious they could be in the days following the massacre. Many of the tributes and memorial gifts left at the fence now surrounding the school were crosses and Bible verses, and they were supposed to be cautious about such signs and displays.

Murray hints at the idea that a culture with a reduced spirituality and connection with the divine makes a Petri dish for people to bring forth evil. But she leaves it at more of a hint level than anything else which may be wisest in the end. Because saying, "A society that paid more attention to God and less to its own violent amusement would be less likely to have a Columbine" is a non-starter. Where it's simple, it's not true but where it's true, it's not at all simple. Murray's book, like the massacre itself, seems a part of a past day, and as the Columbine class of '99 winds down their 30s we get reminders now and again that though we live in a different world than the one which brought us the tragedy of April 20, 1999, we still find some of the same problems.

A Random Group of Short Items

-- Author George R. R. Martin weighed in with an opinion about the hit movie Captain Marvel, which he liked quite a bit. He's also a big fan of the character, saying she could "eat Iron Man for lunch and have Thor for dessert, with a side of Dr. Strange." Now, could she finish Martin's ever-expanding, never-ending, A Song of Ice and Fire? Probably not -- but having Thanos finger-snap half of its 1.7 million words away would probably have us a lot closer to finishing than Martin ever will be.

-- In anticipation of the upcoming release of Avengers: Endgame, CableTV.com is running a contest. The winner will watch all 20 Marvel movies released to date, live-tweet about it and meet with some of its folks to talk about the experience. These are Marvel Studios movies, only, of course. None of the Sony Spider-Man movies, the pre-merger Fox X-Men movies or Fantastic Four flicks. My counter-offer: CableTV.com gives me $200, I watch The Avengers, Spider-Man: Homecoming, Dr. Strange and The Black Panther, we all pretend Guardians of the Galaxy 3 has a reason to exist and then Marvel Studios leaves us alone until it's taken enough time to write a movie that's more plot than hole.

-- Today I Found Out: The Queen of England could not legally be prosecuted for a crime committed while she was Queen, so she is immune from the consequences of her actions like British monarchs before her.
Oliver Cromwell: Hold my beer.

-- Since Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation seems not to have uncovered any concrete evidence of collusion between President Trump's 2016 campaign and the Russian government, there will be some fallout among different groups and people depending on what they wanted to see come from that investigation. Tyler Cowen outlines some of those winners and losers here, but he concludes with this very welcome idea:

The biggest winner of course is the United States of America.  It seems, after all, that we did not have a president, or even presidential staff, who colluded with the Russians.  Maybe you wanted Trump to go down on this one, but that is most of all big reason to celebrate.