Three deaths

Pragmatism Refreshed bids a fond adieu to editor and critic John Leonard, novelist Michael Crichton, and Mexico's minister of the interior, Juan Camilo Mourino.

These men have little in common other than they have all happened to die in recent days. Still, each had his moment in the sun, and it is worth our while to bid them all farewell, sic transit gloria mundi. That phrase roughly translates into English thus: "Poor Gloria, she's always in the bus station."

For Minister Mourino's untimely demise, I refer you to the news story here.

For a photo of Michael Crichton with a random fan at an autograph signing the Star-Tribune has the story.

And for hearts-and-flowers for John leonard's tenure as editor of The New York Times Books Review, I refer you to SLATE.

Cheers to each, and have a fine voyage to wherever you're going.

Uncontrolled Growth

Our "thought for the day" comes from Michael Crichton, and from the novel that made him famous, The Andromeda Strain (1969).

"The mathematics of uncontrolled growth are frightening. A single cell of the bacterium E. coli would, under ideal circumstances, divide every twenty minutes. That is not particularly disturbing until you think about it, but the fact is that bacteria multiply geometrically: one becomes two, two become four, four become eight, and so on. In this way it can be shown that in a single day, one cell of E. coli could produce a super-colony equal in size and weight to the entire planet Earth."

The mathematics of geometrical progression is what famously freaked out the Reverend Malthus, too.