This diary is dedicated to Rahm Emanuel; as nyceve said "we don't get mad, we don't bend over, we get even."
Today is V-day in Rhode Island. Of course, one cannot celebrate this without thinking of how we got to Victory in Japan, and then there is Robert Openheimer's famous quote from the Bhagavad-Gita "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds" spoken after the fateful Trinity nuclear test explosion detonated early in the morning of July 16, 1945. On the following August 6, 140,000 people were killed in the bombing of Hiroshima.
Why do I mention this? Call it a physicist's professional deformation (not contagious, unfortunately!): our Original Sin and having been trained to think about problems in terms of the order of magnitude of the relevant quantities: 100,000 fatalities, to keep the numbers simple.
Read More