Tim Bray writes about today’s atrocity:

This may sound nuts, but doing our best to just ignore them would be good. They’re not gonna cause any policy changes this way, but at least they get to control what’s on CNN & the BBC for a while; maybe if they couldn’t even do that, the strap-on bomb would be less attractive.

Dean Ing wrote a story, “Very Proper Charlies”, 25 years ago, suggesting ridiculing terrorists rather than just ignoring them. I thought it was a good idea then, and still do.

I have great sympathy for the victims of today’s attack (we’ll be in London later this month, so perhaps it’s easier to put myself in their place than it might otherwise be); I have nothing but contempt and ridicule for the assholes who think that killing innocents is an effective way of making a political point.

Tim, Korentang, and others also point out that Londoners have been targets before (by Hitler and the IRA, to name but two), so this is unfortunately not new to them.

I’ve been watching the NASA-TV coverage of Deep Impact, while also reading Susan Kitchens’s on-the-scene blog. Having both sources of information is very nice, because NASA-TV is very hard to follow at times (it was really frustrating when they were showing people celebrating and talking about the great images but not showing them). TiVo has, as always, been very handy so I could take a longer look at some of the images.

I do wish NASA-TV had a direct feed from the systems at JPL — instead, they have a camera taking a picture of images on a screen, which means that at times, the image is blocked by people wandering past (or just staying in place).