A Note on Strong Blocking Sets and Higgledy-Piggledy Sets of Lines

This paper studies strong blocking sets in the $N$-dimensional finite projective space $\mathrm{PG}(N,q)$. We first show that certain unions of blocking sets cannot form strong blocking sets, which leads to a new lower bound on the size of a strong blocking set in $\mathrm{PG}(N,q)$. Our second main result shows that, for $q>\frac{2}{\ln(2)}(N+1)$, there exists a subset of $2N-2$ lines of a Desarguesian line spread in $\mathrm{PG}(N,q)$, $N$ odd, in higgledy-piggledy arrangement; thus giving rise to a strong blocking set of size $(2N-2)(q+1)$.