It occurred to me yesterday that the lembas eaten by Tolkien's Elves must have an extremely high energy density and thus I'd expect it to be explosive, or at the very least dangerously flammable to be hurling around near your campfire.

So it just occurred to me to try to actually estimate the energy density of such a fictitious food and compare it with that of some known explosives – and I discovered after some googling that in fact TNT has an energy density about one quarter that of normal carbohydrate-rich food. Fascinating. So high energy density is not merely insufficient to make something explosive, but in fact it isn't even necessary. I'm surprised; my intuition said otherwise.

In other news, lots of people have commentated on the recent papal election and have said many insightful, witty and/or heartfelt things about it; but I'm faintly disappointed that I've seen not one person entitle their post ‘Episode IV: A New Pope’. There. I have nothing else particularly intelligent to say on the subject, but I didn't want that one to slip by completely unsaid.