Best thoughts to your family, Theo.

And thanks for the ~ma for my friends, y'all. S's wife just posted to say that they're all doing OK, just taking things slowly, and labor has not started yet. Now that I know everything is OK and she hasn't been laboring for two days, I'm kind of hoping the baby holds off until tomorrow so it can share my birthday!

This is the problem with modern technology wrt having babies! A similar thing happened with my coworker -- we heard she was going to the hospital, and then nothing for like 4 days! Yeah, we got in touch and found out she had had the baby days earlier, just hadn't let us know. I'd rather just hear nothing until "here's the baby!"

Does anyone still need a dead man's trigger on a suicide bomber's vest explained to them anymore?

I wouldn't think so. At least I can think of several occasions on shows like Law & Order when they said the bomber had a dead man's trigger without further explanation.

Whine - for the first time this weekend, I finally got to just sit down and relax. Of course, that is when a first class headache decided to set in. No fair.

I couldn't say I actually know what a dead man's trigger is, but I don't think it usually matters in context?

Thinking for a second, is it something where it detonates if the person falls down or something?

Does anyone still need a dead man's trigger on a suicide bomber's vest explained to them anymore?

Is that -- if the suicide bomber is killed before he can detonate his bomb, it detonates anyway? (I hadn't heard the term before, but it seems self-explanatory.)

It's usually a spring-loaded, hand-held detonator--like a grenade after you pull the pin--that has to be held, or pressure maintained on the trigger, to prevent detonation. The bomber dies, the pressure is released, and boom.

It's designed to discourage people from shooting the bomber.

It's precisely what it appears to sound like, but it hadn't occurred to me that people wouldn't know, and would be deducing it from the sentence.

It's derived from the railway, where the trains were designed to stop if the engineer controlling them died, IIRC.

They have them for boats, too. There's a ring that slips over the ignition on one end of a cord, the other end clips onto the driver's clothing or life vest. If the driver goes overboard, the cord pulls the ignition. It acts as a kill-switch. There's one on my treadmill. I never use it, though. Perhaps I should?

It's derived from the railway, where the trains were designed to stop if the engineer controlling them died, IIRC.

Oh yeah! The dead man's brake, I think it was called.