6How shall I come before Yahweh, and bow myself before the exalted God? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? 7Will Yahweh be pleased with thousands of rams? With tens of thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my disobedience? The fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? 8He has shown you, O man, what is good. What does Yahweh require of you, but to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?
The people in this passage keep asking what grand offering could possibly satisfy God, and the answer strips all that away. What is wanted is ordinary and close at hand: treating others fairly, loving kindness, and walking humbly. It is a good reminder on a Monday morning that faithfulness is mostly made of small, daily choices rather than dramatic gestures. The measure of a day may be how honestly and gently we dealt with the people in front of us.
As weapons rebound from a hard surface, and solid substances hurt those who strike them, so also no insult can make a really great mind sensible of its presence, being weaker than that against which it is aimed. How far more glorious is it to throw back all wrongs and insults from oneself, like one wearing armour of proof against all weapons, for revenge is an admission that we have been hurt. That cannot be a great mind which is disturbed by injury. He who has hurt you must be either stronger or weaker than yourself. If he be weaker, spare him: if he be stronger, spare yourself.
Aubrey Stewart, 1889
Seneca was a Roman statesman, playwright and Stoic thinker who served as tutor and adviser to the emperor Nero. He wrote On Anger in three books for his elder brother Novatus. The Latin text has been copied by hand and printed ever since, and this English version is from Aubrey Stewart's 1889 Minor Dialogues.
Seneca turns the usual idea of strength upside down. The person who snaps back at every slight is the one who has been moved by it. The person who can let a rude remark, a cutting email or a careless word bounce off has shown the steadier kind of power. His closing rule is practical. If the other person is weaker, mercy costs you nothing. If they are stronger, a fight only hurts you, so in both cases you are better off keeping your temper.
PracticeToday, when someone slights or irritates you, wait one full breath and ask whether this person is weaker or stronger than you. Then choose to spare them or spare yourself, and say nothing sharp. Tonight, note once in a sentence what the restraint saved you.
A routine lab check on French uranium in 1972 showed that a nuclear chain reaction had run on its own in Gabon about two billion years ago.
In the summer of 1972, technicians at a French uranium enrichment plant at Pierrelatte ran a routine comparison of uranium samples. Natural uranium is almost always 0.72 percent uranium-235, the fissile isotope. This is true in terrestrial rock, in meteorites and in lunar samples. But a batch from the Oklo mine in Gabon came in at about 0.60 percent. That is roughly a sixth of the U-235 missing.
The French Atomic Energy Commission went looking for the missing atoms. Some samples were far more depleted than the first, with U-235 as low as 0.29 percent. The ores also held neodymium whose isotope mix did not match natural neodymium. That mix could only be explained if the neodymium had been made by splitting uranium. On 25 September 1972 the commission announced the answer: a nuclear reactor had operated at Oklo, with no one building it.
The physics had been worked out in advance. U-235 decays faster than U-238, so in the distant past uranium was richer in it, around 3 percent or more two billion years ago. That is close to the fuel in a modern light-water reactor. Add a rich ore seam flooded with groundwater, which slows neutrons enough to keep fission going, and a chain reaction can start. Paul Kuroda had predicted this in 1956.
The reactors regulated themselves. As the reaction heated the rock, the water boiled off and the reaction faded. When the rock cooled, water returned and the cycle restarted. Sixteen reaction zones are known, and they ran on and off for a few hundred thousand years at an average of perhaps 100 kilowatts. That is about the power of a few dozen kettles. Waste-disposal researchers still study the site. It shows how fission products stayed put in the ground for nearly two billion years.
RememberTwo billion years ago, groundwater and uranium-rich rock in Gabon formed natural nuclear reactors that ran on and off for hundreds of thousands of years, and they were found only because a lab noticed a small discrepancy in a routine check.
Read nextRichard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb