There are old people who use explosives. There are bold people who use explosives. But, there are no old, bold people who use explosives.

Reading Ignition! convinced me that there's more than raw intelligence to experimenting with energetic chemistry. https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0813595835/

Note to anyone that might be tempted to get this as an audiobook: Don't!

It didn't occur to me that the subject matter would be incompatible with narration, but it (IMO) just doesn't work that way. Large portions of the book have equations and heavy notation. Here's an actual passage:

> it can be simplified to cee equals bracket two aitch over em end-bracket to the one half power times bracket one minus parentheses pee e over pee cee end parentheses to the ar over cee pee power end bracket to the one half power.

Yeah, I just couldn't keep listening to that. I need to get a print copy, because the subject matter is interesting.

Reminds me of a family story about my aunt recounting a Feynman lecture to her kids. She was drawing some diagrams he'd used and they said, "Wait a minute, how do you know what these looked like? Weren't you just listening to the audio?"

She realized that Feynman's verbal explanations were so clear that she had not had any trouble visualizing the diagrams as he drew and discussed them.

My Dad: "Hey, put that dynamite back down!"

It was just in a box in the back of his truck. Looked fun.

I wince, sometimes, thinking back. But my family was a logging family, so getting blown up was just one in a long list of ways to die.